October, 1347. Vilnius—a port city often blanketed in Baltic fog.
A cobbler named Andreas was jolted awake at five in the morning by the sudden pealing of church bells. When he saw the sky outside his window stained as red as blood, he was seized by a terrifying thought: perhaps this wasn't dawn at all, but the fires of hell.
Then the middle of the sky began to split open, slowly, like a festering wound, and from the fissure a dark crimson light gushed forth like a waterfall. The candle flame that had lit his room was swallowed by that unearthly light and snuffed out, turning the room ashen dark. In that instant, the wind died completely, and a wave of hot air with a metallic tang flooded the alley outside.
Sssssk—
When Andreas felt an unfamiliar sensation brush against his ankle, he looked down—only to see a living red fog slowly crawling up over his foot. He tried to scream, but it was as if he had inhaled a mouthful of burning embers; his lungs seared, and his breath was cut off. He collapsed to the floor, never to move again.
From the neighbors' windows came screams of "Maria!" and "God!", but they swiftly fell silent. Soon, people who dashed out into the street fared no better—one by one, they withered like rag dolls drained of all moisture, crumpling lifelessly against the walls.
In just a few days, the red fog spread from the Frankish Kingdom to Burgundy, then continued across the Adriatic Sea. Countless clergymen lit incense and marched in procession through the streets, but the tongue of the fog swallowed their prayers.
By the time three months had passed, twenty-five million people—half the population of Europe—lay dead, their bodies dried into mummified husks. People came to call this calamity by two words.
"The Red Death."
On a deep night in December, when despair seemed never-ending—
a pure white comet appeared, cutting across the sky between the Big Dipper and the moon. The comet cleaved the heavens with a low, wailing roar, and the cloud of stardust coiled around its tail spread out in silvery trails, like holy oil anointing the sky.
In that moment, time itself seemed to slow, until at last the comet's light collided with the gaping crack in the sky. The impact rang out as a razor-sharp sound wave—like a glass goblet shattering—and it shook the earth to its core.
Amid the exploding light, the red fog was torn apart and flung into the air like strips of living flesh and shards of broken glass. The fragments throbbed red, then crystallized into glittering glass splinters that scattered in all directions. One of those fragments fell among the bodies strewn in the streets, spiraling in midair like a rose seed before it vanished.
When the storm of light finally subsided, the world sank into profound silence. The bell atop the church steeple gave a last rusty clatter and then fell still, and the survivors who opened their eyes found that the fog that had shrouded them—and the crack in the sky—were completely gone. From that day on, people recorded this disaster in their chronicles as "The Day of the Red Fog."
But someone had seen it. Someone saw that the scattered shards of fog, as if possessing a will of their own, turned in midair and drifted eastward under the faint starlight. Among them, one particularly dense, dark red mass writhed like a snake, slithering across continents and oceans.
That fragment crossed the Eurasian steppe, swept over the desert sands of the Silk Road, and skimmed across the eastern sea, until it finally arrived beneath the skies of the Korean Peninsula.
North of the Taebaek Mountains, deep within the crater of Mount Baekdu—when a fissure in the black basalt yawned open as if the mountain itself were breathing, the red fog seeped in like water, leaving no trace as it disappeared into the darkness.
Five hundred years passed.
The villagers living on the slopes of Mount Baekdu feared the sea of red fog that blanketed their fields each dawn, calling it "the dragon's breath." Yet not one of them knew the truth: deep beneath the earth, in the darkness, a crimson heartbeat was pulsing, waiting for the day it would once again shroud the world.
And now, today, that ancient legend is on the verge of awakening once again.