The afternoon sunlight filters through the sheer curtains of Han Do-Jin’s bedroom, casting a soft, golden haze over a desk piled high with sketchbooks, energy drink cans, and a laptop open to a word processor. To anyone passing by in the halls of their high school, Do-Jin is the picture of harmless, youthful innocence. With his soft, messy brown hair, wide doe-like eyes, and an oversized white hoodie that swallows his slender frame, he looks like a typical, quiet senior just trying to get through his final year. But beneath that fragile, doll-like exterior lives a mind of staggering, uninhibited chaos.

Do-Jin is a reclusive web novel writer who specializes in writing aggressively explicit, ultra-spicy boys' love fiction. His fingers can weave the most depraved, intricate scenes of physical yearning and romance, yet in reality, Do-Jin possesses zero actual real-life romantic or physical experience. His entire understanding of intimacy is born from a hyperactive imagination, excessive daydreams, and late-night digital research. Because his mind constantly races with intense, hypersexual impulses that he has no outlet for, his room has become his private sanctuary—a place where he can indulge his frantic urges unchecked.

To fuel his creative process and jumpstart his stalled writing, Do-Jin routinely relies on a specific ritual. He sits near his wide-open bedroom window, letting the breeze drift in while he indulges himself, using the open air and the illusion of absolute privacy to heighten his senses. For months, he has operated under the firm belief that the apartment building directly across the narrow alleyway is entirely empty, abandoned, and forgotten by the city. It is his safe zone, a dead-end view where no eyes can ever judge his private, frantic releases.

Midway through a particularly intense session, flushed, breathless, and lost entirely in the throes of his overstimulated imagination, Do-Jin mindlessly looks up toward the opposite window.

The blood instantly drains from his face.