Though the house's interior was less chaotic than the tumult outside, the scene remained hauntingly surreal. Faded traces of the original beige walls peeked out beneath a cascade of luminescent, golden liquid. A young man with silver hair, a pale complexion, and a slender frame of about five feet eight lay sprawled on the floor. His clothes were stained with blood and streaked with the same mysterious golden substance that tinted the walls and floor.
Strikingly, golden rain poured inside—not through holes in the ceiling, but as if summoned from nowhere. Where it touched a piece of furniture or a wall, it left behind a fleeting gilded sheen, almost slipping past without lingering. Yet when the droplets met living matter—be it the young man or even the fruits and vegetables on the table—they behaved differently. The tiny drops pierced flesh like corrosive needles, marking everything they touched with an unsettling, golden hue. Although the young man had fainted long ago, he winced with each drop that fell, a torturous event repeating roughly every thirty seconds.
Time had lost meaning since the rain's arrival—a phenomenon that had seemingly lulled every living creature into a perpetual sleep. Now, the young man resembled a statue forged from gold and blood, his earlier expressions of pain quieted into stillness. Then, all at once, his eyes snapped open, and the rain ceased. Across the world, other beings stirred: each emitted a shimmering golden aura and was bathed in a reddish-gold hue.
Yet he remained an enigma. His eyes, though, matched neither the golden radiance nor the mundane—one moment blue, they now glowed with a deep, unsettling purple. He radiated no aura at all. Even as blood still marred him from head to toe, the luminous golden sheen had completely vanished from his body. At that moment, the young man, stained with blood and marked by eerie purple eyes, looked nothing short of monstrous.
Bob, the young man, though, was now awake, lacked both the courage and the physical strength to stand up. He was certain now that he would not make it out alive. It was now that a loud, deafening sound echoed throughout the world. Even though he felt he would never be able to make it out alive, the young man felt his injuries were recovering. Moments later, the young man felt his body completely recovered, apart from the blood loss, and he felt that his body was now completely fine. Even the scar he got from the visit to the current site of his company's new project. Though his house looked fine otherwise, he found that every piece of furniture, the walls, and even the floor and the ceiling were now completely golden. The state outside looked even more chaotic, with the sky as Bob looked out from the window completely blood red and the Earth gold. He saw some people lying outside on the street, covered in blood, just like him, but he found no one awake. Looking around, he spotted the first awake being in the form of a cat, which, for some reason to him, seemed to be emitting a strange reddish gold aura. The aura was not visible, but for some reason he could not explain, he just felt that aura.
The first tangible manifestation of this eerie phenomenon emerged with the cat opening its eyes, its pupils blazing red against a halo of gold. Soon, the others on the street began to transform as well; as they awakened, their eyes mirrored that same disconcerting red and gold luminescence. For a fleeting moment, Bob hoped the strange aura was merely a residual aftereffect of the rain—a harmless echo of nature's fury. However, this hope vanished the instant he saw their faces: utterly expressionless, not displaying the typical human shock or sorrow but a vacant emptiness beyond comprehension. Petrified by the ghastly scene, he listened in horror as another thunderous sound shattered the air, igniting a frenzy. In a shocking outbreak of despair, the people outside began to mutilate themselves and lunge at one another.
The cat he saw earlier now seemed to have grown by three times, and the same sort of changes seemed to be taking place in other people as well. The cat jumped up and attacked what once seemed to be the figure of a young girl, but now seemed to be a ferocious monster with a body larger than three meters and nails and hair as long as several inches. The cat bit the girl's neck and ripped her head off as a large, blurry figure soon smashed a bat at the cat, making the place where the cat was moments before into a bloodied patch on the now broken road. Bob, looking outside at these people, trembled; his body shook with fear of himself turning into one such monster and doing God knows what.