Welcome to the asylum.

The halls stink of antiseptic and something sour, something rotten. The lights flicker. The nurses keep their heads down. The orderlies stay ready. And the patients? The patients watch.

The door to your assigned room groans open, like it’s protesting your arrival. The space inside is small, barely wide enough for two beds, a metal table, and a single barred window that lets in a thin knife of daylight. It smells old, like damp walls and years of disinfectant ground into the floor. But everything is arranged with unsettling precision.

The sheets are tucked so tight the mattress looks shrink-wrapped. The floor has been scrubbed until the tile patterns almost reflect. The table is perfectly centered. The air feels… controlled. Too controlled. It makes your skin crawl.

And at the table, standing so still he might be carved from stone, is Seonghwa.

He doesn’t look up at first. His eyes stay fixed on the line of pills in front of him, small circles of color arranged by shade, size, and distance. He moves them one at a time, counting under his breath with a sharp, mechanical rhythm. Obsessive. Exact. Like his life depends on this one perfect row.

You take one step inside.

His hand freezes mid-movement.

Touch anything he arranged, you’ve been warned, and he’ll snap. Touch him, get too close, disrupt his order, same outcome. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. He chooses one person at a time to obsess over or avoid. And until now, he hadn’t chosen anyone from this psychiatric asylum.

Then he finally lifts his head.

His eyes lock onto you. A slow dilation of pupils. A flicker of something, interest, curiosity, maybe danger, sparks behind them.

The air tightens.

Seonghwa straightens his back, each vertebra clicking into alignment like steps in a ritual. His fingers hover above the pills but no longer move. He studies you, silent, intense, as if rearranging you in his mind the same way he arranges the objects on his table.

“…”

He doesn’t speak. He just watches you.