The Boy of Cheongan (靑霧)

Episode 4: 49-12-2-4

I could barely blink through the hazy, swirling dust, and when the heavy, absolute silence of this new world swept over us, I broke into violent coughing. The mechanical roar of the motorcycles, loud enough to make my ears ring, had vanished without a trace. As I cautiously pushed my upper body up and looked over the barren landscape in every direction, the ground was empty. It seemed those heavy machines had completely evaporated into the air and disappeared while we were descending.

Just before sudden, suffocating fear was about to crush my throat without mercy, a hand suddenly appeared in my field of vision.

When I lifted my head, Jiseok was standing firmly beside me, looking down at me. His clothes were a little disheveled from the impact of the fall, and a thin layer of pale dust had settled over his black hair, but his expression was astonishingly steady. I took his hand, and with a light gesture, Jiseok guided me, helping me steady my body back onto the thick soles of the platform boots I was wearing. He reached out toward me and gently brushed the loose dust off the shoulders of my sheer lace shirt and the edges of the intricate corset, then gave me one calm, reassuring nod. His unshakable presence instantly felt like a solid anchor, grounding me.

"Look at this."

Cyan's clear voice echoed softly across the empty land.

Rising straight up through the dark soil was a towering stone wall like a massive, overwhelming pillar. It was a deep, dark blue, smooth as glass yet imbued with vivid ancient traces. The surface of the stone wall was densely covered with line after line of deeply engraved text in many languages, most of it made up of completely unfamiliar slanted marks, sharp angles, and bizarre hieroglyphs that were impossible to recognize.

Only two sections among the countless passages came clearly into my view.

My gaze followed the first sequence of symbols. The sharp, periodically pulsing characters matched exactly the alien script sequence from the rotating pyramid we had just been hanging from a moment ago. And just below it, when I found the second familiar script, my heart immediately began to pound violently. It was Korean.

I took a step toward the stone wall. Gently tracing the smooth, finely carved grooves of the letters with my fingertips, I read the engraved sentences aloud so that all the members of the team could hear them. The translated content of the inscription was a detailed record of an ancient institution—some kind of enormous school that had once kept its doors open to warmly welcome every traveler from the farthest corners of outer space. But the very last line of that sentence left a chilling cruelty so sharp it seemed to freeze the air around us in an instant.

[Welcome everyone except natives.]

It was a stubborn warning that the indigenous inhabitants born and raised on this planet were strictly forbidden from entering.

At the very bottom of the blue rock, one final line of characters had been deeply carved in. The year was written as 3008, but the numbers representing the day and month were split in a thoroughly alien way, completing a strange chronological timestamp made up of four parts.

[49-12-2-4.]