Blood.
Blood stained the white snow blanketing the cold pavement and the sky. Snow petals fell from the sky onto irises, unmoving. There, lying on the pavement, was Yuki. She tried to take a breath, but her chest was a slab of stone, too heavy to lift. Her strength was quietly sapped from her body, fading into nothingness.
Tears began to form in her eyes, warmth trickling over her cold skin. A blur of a life flashed behind them, but then, as if something snapped, her mind went blank. Her breath hitched as she noticed the gap in her thoughts.
Then, the silence was interrupted by a single footstep. She used all her will to turn her head. The steps grew closer, and closer.
"H—" The word grated in her throat. It died without a single syllable leaving her voice box. Each letter was a gasp she struggled to spit out.
She felt even weaker now. Each drop of blood spilling out was another tick on the clock for her. Her own life was slipping away, fading into the void. Coldness crept up her body; death began to tighten its grasp under her skin.
Without mercy, it took, and everything turned black.
———
[Welcome, Lost Soul Yuki!]
Yuki gasped.
Her eyes widened. Her hands flung out, expecting the impact of cold snow, finding only coarse, dry sand. Her body jerked upright, panic hammering into her unbeating heart.
"What?" The word was a dry rasp. The words felt alien, a language that didn't exist in her head. Yet she understood them perfectly, as if it wasn't her mouth that spoke, but her very soul.
Her mouth trembled as disbelief flooded her. She turned, her head darting around.
Around her was nothing but an expanse of desert. A monochrome landscape of sunless white sky and grey, endless sand. Where the horizon was merely the gradient of the white sky dissolving into the grey.
Her mind screamed. She was not supposed to be here. Yet she did not know where "there" was either. Her mind was blank, empty.
She tried to stand; her body groaned and stretched, as if it had only begun to move for the first time. As she finally stood, a head-splitting headache sent her back to the ground.
Her ears stung with an unnatural static. Her brain felt like it was being sanded down like stone. A quiet scream tore from her mouth. Her fingers gripped the sand, as individual grains dug under her nails, drawing blood.
It happened in an instant, yet to her, it felt like hours of pure torture. As the pain subsided, her body convulsed before she fell to the sand.
"W- Who..." The words fell from her mouth. "Who am I?" She clenched her teeth as the headache finally faded and the ringing in her ears grew quieter.
"This is a dream," a faint part of her mind spoke. But she knew all too well that this was reality. Her body twitched, her nerves finally coming back to her.
She stood up, thankfully. The headache didn't return. She let out a sigh of relief. A tiny victory. But in this vast emptiness, it mattered the most.
"I need to get out," she spoke into the air. And so she walked, for miles and miles.
But the desert didn't end. It didn't even seem to have an end. For every mile she walked, the horizon only revealed more. Dunes, white sky, and sand.
That damn, endless, gray sand.
Her feet sank slightly into the sand with each step. Each step the same. A cycle of steps that seemed to have no end.
As she walked, she continued to notice things. Things that made no sense yet held the same common theme. Absence. Absence of smell, absence of noise, absence of everything except her own existence. The sky held no sun nor moon, the celestial bodies that dictate exploration. There was also a severe lack of shadow, except directly beneath her.
"It can't be endless," she thought. But doubt filled her, as the horizon only promised more sand. Still, she walked on, for doing nothing was the death of her.
Time passed. Hours, days, weeks? She didn't know. She couldn't count. The concept of numbers itself didn't exist in her mind. It was occupied by a single, absolute purpose. Walk.
Later, as she walked, her mind wandered. If she escaped, where would she go after this? She had no idea who she even was. But it was merely something she used to fill her time. Something to accompany her in this lonely desert. Rage, worry, sadness. She would use everything just to not lose her mind here.
"Oh, and you."
[Welcome, Lost Soul Yuki!]
A transparent, two-dimensional box hovered in front of her, bearing only that welcoming message. It was the only color in this monotone space—well, not really. It was black. So the realm was still monochromatic.
"System." A distant thought went through her head, whispering to her mind.
"Press it," the voice spoke. Finally, she realized who the voice belongs to. That sense of faint familiarity was unmistakable.
It was her own. Guiding her.
Yuki hesitantly lifted a finger. Then, a she pressed the box. But her digit passed right through it. She tried again, a mental image began to form in her head. Something began building up inside her.
"Open!" She screamed. Her voice echoed in the vast desert. But her system stays unchanging. She gritted her teeth.
"Henshin!"
"Profile!"
"Kame—"
She had tried every conceivable methods. She had posed, tried different words. Yet nothing worked. The system box stood in front of her, unmoving.
She kicked the sand in frustration. Sand flew off. And a tiny hole create a speck among the perfect dunes. She kicked it again, finding a weird sense of satisfaction. But even that, isn't fixing anything.
Yuki brushed off the sand sticking to her hand. She didn't even know how it got there in the first place when only her feet had been touching the ground.
"More walking it is," she grunted, as her feet carried her through the barren desert. She tried to count again, somehow, not knowing how to count was what frustrated her the most. And it wasn't that she didn't know how to count, but every time she did, it came out as gibberish.
As if numbers didn't exist in this realm. But of course they did! Look, she had arms, and of course every human had—
"How many arms am I supposed to have again?" She looked at the stump of her right shoulder... "Oh, I'm missing one." She looked back along her trail of footsteps and saw it.
A severed arm lying on the sand several hundred meters away.
Her gaze shifted from the arm to the severed stump on her body. She wanted to scream, but the feeling died as soon as it appeared.
"Sand... Am I... Am I turning into sand?"
There was no one to answer her. After all, in this desert, there was only her, the box,
and that damn, gray sand.
Yuki tried to pick up her severed arm, but the moment she touched it, it crumbled into sand, rolling down the dune to become one with the desert.
She watched as the sand rolled down, a sight unlike any she could recall. It intrigued her that the sand was now her hand. And so she kept walking.
"Did I miss something? Why do I feel like I missed something?" Her mind churned, but nothing explained her unease. So she left her arm behind and continued her journey.
It had been several hours—or days? Maybe only minutes—but she was now stuck in a predicament. She couldn't walk. She didn't know why at first, but she figured it out when she realized her feet had fallen off. Thankfully, she had felt them crumble after a misstep. They, too, turned to sand when she touched them.
"No matter, I can just crawl." And so she crawled. Hours turned into days, but she never counted; she couldn't even if she wanted to.
She only had one arm now. And so she dragged her body slowly across the sand. When she reached the top of a dune, she would simply roll down and repeat the process.
"Something's missing. I just don't know what." Yuki talked to herself, a habit born from prolonged solitude. Her brain turned, its cogs spinning slowly, but nothing came out. So she just lay there on the sand, limbless.
The system box hovered above her, blocking the white sky. She sighed and read the words a thousand times.
Well, she didn't know the words; they didn't look like any writing she could remember—not that she remembered anything. But she could still read them. Perfectly, in fact. As if the meaning was projected directly into her mind.
She kept focusing on the system box. It was the only thing accompanying her in this desolate landscape.
Well, aside from those damn, gray sands that her body was disintegrating into.
"Who's Yuki, though?" she asked. Was that her name? Or someone else's? Logically, the name had to be hers. It was displayed for her alone.
She sighed. Bored.
Weirdly, she had always been bored before as well. But at the very least, she could walk to appease her own boredom. But then, she wondered. Why couldn't she walk right now?
"Oh yeah... I'm missing my..."
Yuki looked at the stumps on her body. Something in her brain snapped, as if she had just woken up from a long, endless dream.
The blood-curdling scream came just after.