The ground beneath my feet was firm.
It was dirt.
I blinked.
The wind blew.
From far away came something like birdsong. It smelled of grass. There was a sky, too.
“Oh...”
The word slipped out unconsciously.
The place where I stood looked like an ordinary field.
Not quite a city, not quite the countryside—some ambiguous outskirts scenery.
An empty lot where weeds grew sparsely, low hills in the distance, silhouettes resembling telephone poles, the faint sound of machinery from somewhere.
‘Earth... right?’
I drew in a breath.
It didn’t hurt.
I wasn’t submerged in water, my ears didn’t feel like they were about to burst, and my stomach wasn’t turning inside out. My skin wasn’t being cut, and I didn’t feel like someone was looking down at me from beyond glass.
For the first time... truly the first time, it didn’t feel like I was going to die the moment I entered.
I took another step.
Crunch.
The dirt shifted under my foot.
It was real.
“It’s normal, isn’t it?”
I muttered in a voice that was half-disbelieving.
The Dimensional Archive was quiet, too. There were no warnings.
That made it even stranger.
I slowly looked around.
It looked like Earth. It looked so much like Earth that it felt fake instead. Like a background that had been arranged just a little too neatly, like the first area of a game map.
I couldn’t pinpoint it exactly.
Then, suddenly, I felt something odd.
The brightness.
The scenery was perfectly fine, but the direction of the light was strange. It looked like afternoon sunlight, but the shadows were somehow ambiguous.
I narrowed my eyes and slowly raised my head.
I looked at the sky.
And froze where I stood.
There were clouds.
There was a sky.
But above it, there was something else.
At first, it looked like a massive black band. I thought the night sky had been layered over the daytime sky.
It wasn’t. Fuck, that wasn’t it.
It was the curved surface of something beyond the sky. It was so huge that I had mistaken it for the sky at first.
An absurdly enormous black curve.
Inside it, points like stars were embedded.
They weren’t stars. They were planets.
Things that looked like Earth.
Red ones, blue ones, ones cracked halfway through, dark ones.
They were so distant, and so huge, that at first my brain refused to understand. It took me a few seconds to realize that the sky above me wasn’t a real sky, but the inner wall of something far larger.
Cold sweat trickled down the back of my neck.
“......Insane.”
Only then did everything begin to look distorted.
The wind.
The smell of grass.
The dirt.
The birdsong.
None of it felt real anymore. It all felt like an environmental recreation inside one section of a breeding pen.
I held my breath and looked farther up into the sky.
And I saw something move.
Beyond the black sky—more precisely, beyond that enormous curved surface—something slowly passed by.
A single shadow.
At first, I thought it was a cloud. But the moment that shadow passed, one of the Earth-like planets embedded in the sky shook with terrifying ease.
Far too easily.
Truly, like a toy brushed by a fingertip.
The next moment, the planet’s surface split apart.
A distant point cracked open, and soon red lines spread across it. It looked as though the seas were boiling, and something like continents were being torn apart. Lights that might have been civilization, or cities, went out all at once.
I couldn’t say a word.
That was a world.
A planet that, to someone, must have been history, life, sky, and sea.
A red window tore its way up through the center of my vision.
[Highest-Level Danger Warning!!!]
Reactions confirmed from ultra-massive entities and civilization-devouring-class beings that the user is incapable of responding to within the current dimension.
[Assessment]
Continued observation is not recommended.
[Additional Warning]
The user’s current scale qualifies as a microscopic specimen by the ecological standards of this dimension.
[Recommendation!!!]
Return immediately!!!
The sentences were short. They were short, but strangely, that made them feel faster.
Only then did my mind snap back into place.
Fight.
Hide.
Endure.
I couldn’t even think of things like that.
Here, those ideas themselves didn’t hold. Even the very moment I looked up at that sky, it felt like to someone, I was no more than a speck of dust inside a breeding pen.
“...This is crazy.”
Only those words came out, my lips barely moving.
I immediately thought of returning. I shoved myself toward the rift that had opened in midair.
At that instant, the sky folded first. The blue daytime sky, the black curved surface, the planets embedded in it, the enormous shadow passing far away—all of it curled inward layer by layer like paper.
The dirt ground I stood on flattened along with it.
The next moment.
I returned with one hand braced against the floor of my studio apartment.
“Hah...... hah......”
My breathing was fine. I hadn’t vomited water, my ears were fine, and my cheek hadn’t been cut.
And yet, for some reason, it took a long time before I could speak.
I just sat there.
Blankly.
The room was the same as ever, the bed was the same, the clothes I’d tossed off were the same.
But the sky I had seen just moments ago was not something I could possibly just brush off.
It had looked like Earth. That made it even more chilling.
A world that let me breathe like Earth, let me walk around normally, and only at the very end, the moment I looked up at the sky, told me I was inside a breeding pen.
I dragged a hand down my face.
“...This is seriously fucked.”
Records appeared at the edge of my vision.
[Record Updated]
Reality Time: 2026-03-26 20:05:53
Dimension Entry
Black Universe Breeding Pen-9648
[Record Updated]
Local Status: Unknown
Location: Earth-Like Surface Zone
Environmental Scan Initiated
[Record Updated]
Local Status: Unknown
Ultra-Wide-Area Breeding Structure Observed
[Record Updated]
Local Status: Unknown
Civilization-Scale Extinction Scene Confirmed
User Survival Concept Incompatible
[Record Updated]
Reality Time: 2026-03-26 20:05:53
Reality Return
Earth-0300
[Record Updated]
Dimension Recommended for Immediate Return
Coordinates Saved
Black Universe Breeding Pen-9648
Even after reading those sentences, I remained silent for a long while.
Then, slowly, I opened the basic screen again.
───────────────
Dimensional Archive
User: Baek Siyun
Reality: Earth-0300
Until Next Update: 22:11:00
[Dimensions] [Abilities] [Records] [Settings]
───────────────
I stared blankly at the number, then muttered in a low voice.
“So it really isn’t real-world time... only the Archive’s time is running separately.”
The moment that thought ended, the five places I had seen so far surged up all at once.
Human Ranch.
Glass Beach.
Flesh Tome Corridor.
Atlantis.
Black Universe Breeding Pen.
It wasn’t just the scenery that remained. The sensations remained, too.
The sting of my cheek cut by glass, the nausea that had carried over from the Flesh Tome Corridor, the crushing pressure of Atlantis, the cold sweat from the moment I looked up at the sky of the Black Universe Breeding Pen.
All of it rose up at once.
In the end, I clutched my head with both hands.
My fingers dug into my hair. I used so much force that my scalp pulled taut. It hurt, but I didn’t want to let go. I felt like I had to hold on to something.
“Hah...”
My breath trembled.
“Hah, fuck...”
I couldn’t endure it anymore.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!!! Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!!!”
I screamed until it felt like my throat would tear.
The walls of the studio apartment rang.
My own voice struck my ears again.
It didn’t end with one scream. More screams burst out, squeezed from me until my breath split apart.
“Aaagh!!! Ah, fuck!!! Aaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!!!”
If someone heard me, they’d think I was insane. But I really felt like I was going insane.
‘Why am I seeing this? Why did something like this appear for me, of all people? This really does seem like mental illness, doesn’t it? I don’t even know if this is an ability or a curse, an opportunity or some fucking bullshit, so why do you keep opening the damn doors, seriously!’
My hands gripped my hair even harder.
‘Ah, I feel like I’m going to cry.’
The corners of my eyes were already hot.
Then.
A blue window popped up in the center of my vision.
[Passive Level Increased]
I stared at it with my breath half gone.
[Biological Adaptation Lv.2 (36.17%)]
[Aging Suppression Lv.2 (05.41%)]
[Mental Protection Lv.2 (61.96%)]
[Confirm]
I froze like that.
“...Huh?”
For someone who had just been screaming while trying to tear his own hair out, my voice came out far too bewildered.
“What did I even do?”
That was genuinely the first thought that came to mind.
What did I do for this to go up?
I hadn’t fought, hadn’t cleared anything like a quest, hadn’t killed a monster. I’d just gone into insanely dangerous worlds, failed to even get anything useful out of them, and ran like hell.
I stared blankly at the window, then narrowed my eyes again.
Mental Protection had the highest value. Next was Biological Adaptation, and the lowest was Aging Suppression.
“Is this... reflecting what I went through?”
When I thought about it, it wasn’t that strange.
The thing that had been shaken the most so far was my mind.
I’d vomited in the Flesh Tome Corridor, and after leaving the Black Universe Breeding Pen, I had screamed while tearing at my hair.
Next was my body.
Since I’d thrown myself into all sorts of alien environments, it wasn’t strange for Biological Adaptation to rise along with it.
It also made sense that only Aging Suppression was especially low. I hadn’t endured for very long yet; it had been more like short, intense bursts of nearly dying.
It was plausible...?
It felt strange.
‘Not bad. Honestly? It’s kind of nice? Heueung.’
Lv.2.
Only one number had gone up, but for some reason, it comforted me.
Like a very cheap consolation that told me everything I had seen so far hadn’t been completely pointless.
Since I at least had this, the scream just now felt a little less pathetic.
I slowly pressed confirm.
The window disappeared.
It grew quiet.
And in that quiet, my mood sank back to the floor.
“Hah......”
A long, drawn-out sigh.
What could I do just because my level went up?
Could I go back into the Human Ranch right now and survive? Could I run around cheerfully on the Glass Beach? Could I look at the Flesh Tome Corridor with a sane mind? Could I endure the deep sea of Atlantis? Could I look at the sky of the Black Universe Breeding Pen and not get scared?
‘No, you can’t... can you? You’re an idiot.’
Even if I was level 2 now, I was still me.
Scary things were still fucking scary, things that felt like they would kill me really did feel like they would kill me, and my head had already been shaken hard once... no, several times.
‘I no longer have the courage to look at the remaining dimensions, teacher...’
Now, what was left was Astrania, Earth-0382, Nameless-8224, Paradise Exile Zone-6915...?
My hand wouldn’t move.
I slumped down on the edge of the bed and picked up my phone. I wanted to cut off my thoughts. Anything, I wanted to look at anything. Seriously, anything.
So I turned on Shorts.
What the algorithm threw at me was a cleaning meme Short with a strangely addictive quality.
A crappy character with a crappy expression kept shouting about how great wet-mopping was.
I watched it with a blank face.
Next video.
Another similar meme.
Next video.
A remix of that same music from before.
Again.
Shorts that made wet-mopping sound like some kind of festival kept passing by one after another.
Pfft.
I almost laughed.
For now, I silently pressed the “like” and “save” buttons.
A guy who had just returned after seeing a universe-scale breeding pen was now sitting on his bed, repeatedly watching cleaning meme Shorts.
The situation was so pathetic that, if anything, it made me feel a little more alive.
I stared blankly at them over and over.
Watched, then watched again. Swiped away, then stopped again. I repeated it meaninglessly.
My head emptied. No, it didn’t completely empty; it felt more like some cheap music had been laid over my fear and made it pause for a moment.
The emotions that had been bristling sharply just moments ago were pressed down a little.
I didn’t know whether that was fortunate or miserable, but either way, I could breathe a little.
I slowly looked down at my phone.
At the edge of my vision, the list of dimensions still floated vertically.
The name of the next dimension to go to.
Astrania-1337.
I looked at it for a long while.
“......As if it’ll be normal.”
I muttered to myself.
It didn’t seem likely.
Everything so far had been insane, so there was no way this one would be normal. If anything, it might be the most cunning one, the one that pretended to be the most normal.
It might be a world that let me breathe, let me walk around normally, then suddenly made me look up at the sky.
At this point, it was only natural that suspicion came first.
‘But... it’s not like I can just not look, right?’
I slowly rose to my feet. My legs felt a little heavy. Even the short distance to the dimensional gate felt long.
Then I focused my will on the name Astrania.
A vertical door opened.
I frowned.
“Just try pulling some shit again.”
This time, I didn’t go in for a long while and only glared at the dimensional gate.
The Glass Beach had been beautiful at first, and the Black Universe Breeding Pen had looked like Earth at first.
I could no longer trust first impressions.
I reached out and brushed the air just inside the threshold.
Nothing happened.
I put only the tip of my foot in first.
Still, nothing happened.
One step... then another.
‘B-but, Sensei... please, just this once...!’