"Am I in hell?" Jin thought as his eyes opened for the first time since staring down the barrel of a gun.

  Couldn't be, he told himself.

  It wasn't hot enough.

  In fact, the room was cold.

  Cold and dark.

  Darkness filled almost everything.

  Barely visible slabs of old, wet concrete made up the walls, moss crawling across them like the room itself was infested, slowly being swallowed.

  On the opposite end of the room, south of Jin, a table sat alone.

  It was the only thing he could make out with any clarity.

  It looked deliberate.

  Books covered it.

  Old books, with symbols and patterns pressed into their covers.

  Symbols Jin had never seen before.

  Even what he figured had to be words, circling the designs, looked unlike any language he'd ever encountered.

  Great.

  Not only did he probably look hideous now from being shot in the face, but he was most likely being sold off in some foreign country he'd never heard of for chump change.

  Human trafficking.

  He was sure his boss was capable of it.

  Survival mode kicked in before the fear could settle.

  The room stayed dark, but the table stayed visible, mostly because stones were scattered across it.

  Oval-cut, almost like diamonds.

  But they didn't shine like any stone Jin had ever seen.

  They pulsed.

  They radiated heat and light in slow waves, like they were breathing.

  And for some reason Jin couldn't explain, something in his soul pulled him toward them.

  Hard.

  Like a starving man staring at the most beautiful buffet in the world.

  His eyes started to glaze over.

  Desire rose in his chest.

  Then greed took over, thick and sudden.

  The stones called to him like they had been waiting for this exact moment.

  Jin gritted his teeth.

  A couple of heavy breaths escaped his mouth.

  His eyes shut.

  Then opened again, slowly.

  When they fully opened, the sharpness was back.

  He focused.

  Instincts had kept him alive through more situations than he could count, and right now they were screaming.

  One wrong move could mean his death.

  So he forced himself to stay calm and did the only thing that made sense.

  He observed.

  He waited.

  He wanted as much information as possible before making a decision.

  His eyes adjusted a little more to the darkness.

  The floor around him came into view.

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  A pattern.

  Faint traces of something bright red formed a semi-arch a few feet in front of him.

  Jin turned his neck.

  Not a semi-arch.

  A circle.

  An intricate circle surrounding him, filled with small patterns inside it—lines, marks, and shapes too deliberate to be random decoration.

  Jin leaned forward to get a closer look.

  The moment his body approached the circle, pain erupted out of his chest.

  Not normal pain.

  Piercing.

  All-consuming.

  Sweat burst across his forehead.

  His breathing turned heavy and strained like he'd just sprinted for miles.

  His eyes started to glaze over again as something pulled at him violently, like the circle had become a mouth and his body had become food.

  He felt himself being sucked in.

  He felt himself slipping.

  Close to blacking out.

  But he had only moved his torso.

  Only leaned forward.

  That meant a few seconds still existed before whatever this red circle was fully consumed him.

  It wasn't much time, but it was enough.

  Jin gritted his teeth so hard it felt like they might crack.

  He balled his fists so tight blood quickly accumulated under his fingernails.

  With everything he had, he fought the pull, dragged himself backward, and forced his body upright.

  Back to the exact position he'd been in when he first opened his eyes.

  He didn't move after that.

  Minutes passed.

  No thought.

  No plan.

  No words.

  Sweat dripped down every inch of his body, soaking his clothes.

  His hands shook with a heavy, uncontrollable tremor.

  Jin was scared.

  Jin, who had been in shootouts since the age of thirteen, was nothing short of terrified.

  He was used to the looming fear of death.

  He had learned how to cope with it.

  How to accept it.

  But the fear crawling through him now wasn't the fear of death.

  For Jin, it was worse.

  It was the fear of the unknown.

  Jin's ultimate goal was absolute power, and that goal stemmed from something simple and ugly:

  His need for control.

  Not just over himself.

  Over everything around him.

  He thrived on plans.

  On understanding his choices before making the best one.

  But here?

  Nothing made sense.

  Those enticing crystals, placed perfectly in view as the first thing he'd notice when he woke up, weren't a gift.

  They weren't coincidence.

  They were bait.

  A trap meant to lure him forward and feed him to the red circle.

  Someone wanted to hurt him.

  That part wasn't new.

  But what truly pushed his fear past anything he'd felt before was even worse.

  There wasn't even a place to start.

  No clues.

  No reference.

  No rules.

  No way to figure out how to get out.

  That first thought he'd had when he woke up resurfaced, only much more prominent now.

  Yeah.

  I must be in hell, Jin thought.

  Eventually, his breathing steadied.

  His chest rose and fell slow.

  His eyes closed, and his body became still.

  Sitting in the exact same spot he'd first woken in, he almost looked peaceful.

  Like he was meditating on a lazy Sunday morning.

  Surprisingly, his mind matched it.

  Jin was calm now.

  Unfaltering.

  Resolved to do nothing.

  What else could he do?

  If whoever wanted him dead wanted it done quickly, then so be it.

  There was only so much he could do here.

  But Jin needed control over something, and he was determined to do whatever it took to at least see the face of whoever put him here.

  So if someone wanted to kill him quickly, they would have to do it themselves.

  He wasn't going to voluntarily step into that red circle of pain.

  Not for anything.

  Not even for those crystals.

  No matter how enticing they were.

  No matter how much his soul reacted to them.

  Even the thought that his refusal might be ruining someone's plan—forcing them to adjust, wasting their time—was enough to give him peace.

  So he sat there.

  And waited.

  Time passed.

  How much, he had no way to tell.

  But it passed.

  Hunger proved it.

  His stomach growled loud in the silence, loud enough to sound like thunder in that dead room.

  Muscles cramped.

  Soreness settled deep into his body.

  Sitting without moving became its own slow torture.

  More time passed.

  Jin had long since given up trying to count the seconds.

  The only thing that stayed clear in the room were those damn crystals.

  What a stupid trap, Jin thought, sneering.

  Did whoever was torturing him really think they could make him do whatever they wanted just by putting beautiful, shiny crystals in front of him—

  Crystals radiating the kind of heat that felt like a long, warm hug from someone he missed dearly.

  The thoughts suddenly appeared in his mind before he could stop them.

  The crystals might be worth the pain.

  Why couldn't he just grab them?

  I wonder if my mom would like these.

  Hundreds of thoughts like that crawled into his mind.

  His body leaned forward.

  His instincts screamed.

  He jerked back on reflex, like something inside him had slapped him awake.

  Fear crawled back in, slow and cold.

  There had been a reason he closed his eyes earlier.

  Temptation.

  But boredom had rotted his patience.

  The longer he sat in darkness with nothing to see, nothing to distract his deafeningly silent mind, the more arrogance crept in.

  He started to believe that just knowing it was a trap would make him immune to it.

  He was deathly wrong.

  Arrogance would get him killed.

  So Jin closed his eyes again.

  And this time, they stayed closed.

  He sat there while his mind gnawed at itself, bored to the point of madness.

  The pain in his stomach and muscles became the only thing that felt real.

  Pain became the only refuge from the emptiness.

  And just when it felt like he truly was going to wither away, a sound cut through the silence.

  A single sentence.

  Another living creature's voice.

  The sweetest noise Jin had ever heard.

  His eyes snapped open.

  Something stood in front of him, just outside the red circle.

  Something grotesque.

  Intimidating.

  Uncanny.

  Not quite human.

  A figure that didn't belong in any normal world Jin had ever known.

  It spoke one sentence.

  "You accursed other-worldly demon… are you a lunatic? You would really rather starve yourself to death than submit to me?"

  Those were the first words Jin's master ever said to him in this life.

  Neither of them knew it at the time, but those words would drastically change the fate of the world they lived in.

  Whether that was for better or worse, no one could truly say.