The child's arrival left the Director torn and fractured. He had always been obsessed with questions related to death, yet he rarely stopped to think about what life truly was.
No matter where a person went, they were walking toward death — so the Director had once believed that by measuring the length of death, one could uncover the meaning of life.
His unusual upbringing had turned him into a monster. The curse had burrowed into every nerve and blood vessel of his being. Yet even so, when he faced his own child, that ugly, scar-covered heart of his still pounded wildly.
Every time he looked at his child, two voices would surface in his mind.
One voice told him the child was a gift from death itself.
The other voice insisted the child was the continuation of life.
The Director could not convince himself of either. The argument in his head grew louder and louder, seriously undermining his disguise.
Having tasted the sweetness of wearing human skin, the Director never wanted to be seen as a monster again. He strained to conceal his condition, and the result was that he became even more divided.
He couldn't reconcile the two sides — not just about his child, but about everything. Whenever he tried to think about anything, opposing thoughts would begin warring in his mind.
For instance, on the question of how to treat himself: one voice told him he should accept treatment, admit that he was a patient, that he was the monster others whispered about.
The other voice, however, goaded him into killing his own child, resolving the conflict at its root.
The Director's behavior grew increasingly peculiar. By day, he wore a white coat and treated the suffering and the desperate. By night, he returned home, changed into a hospital gown, locked himself in his room, and spoke to his reflection in the mirror.
Gradually, his wife noticed something was wrong. And it was then that the most agonizing contradiction arose.
The voice representing his humanity told him the best course of action was to come clean to his family, admit he was sick, and seek proper treatment. The potential cost of doing so, however, would be the destruction of everything he had built.
He knew his wife very well. He knew she loved the charming, widely renowned doctor with a brilliant future ahead of him. The moment he confessed his illness, both his career and his family would likely crumble.
The other voice in his head kept tempting him, whispering that he shouldn't care what those people thought — this was already a diseased world, and all he had to do was keep hiding, just as before. If humanity brought him nothing but confusion and pain, then why not snuff out that last shred of it?
If he wanted to be human, everything he had now might be lost.
If he continued being a monster, he could actually have happiness and joy.
The Director made no choice. His soul grew ever more polarized, until one day the seed of the curse took root and blossomed into a black flower upon his heart.
That night he had a dream. In it, he lay in bed wearing a hospital gown, while another version of himself in a white coat stood before the bedroom mirror.
The same face — one was the patient, the other the doctor.
The Director in the hospital gown represented the last vestiges of his humanity and reason. The Director standing before the mirror had been completely devoured by curse and malice.
Good and evil had nothing to do with strength. In the dream, the patient representing humanity was being "treated" by the doctor brimming with malice and curse.
The most tragic part was this: as humanity was gradually "cured," evil would come to occupy the Director's body entirely.
The Director had the same dream, over and over, ceaselessly.
The split in his mind deepened. Slowly, his soul was torn in two as well.
He could no longer tell dream from reality. He didn't know whether he was lying in a bed in the real world or in a bed within the dream. In any case, he could always see that version of himself in the white coat, brimming with malice.
Gradually, he began to wonder — had another version of himself appeared in the real world too?
From thought to consciousness, from soul to body, the Director realized he seemed to have split into two people.
Both were him, yet they were completely opposed.
One was evil, the other good. One had committed unspeakable atrocities, the other was consumed with guilt and punished himself endlessly. One was drowning in despair, believing himself to be the god of this diseased world; the other craved happiness and longed to live as an ordinary person.
The white-coated Director, the embodiment of curse, imprisoned the hospital-gowned Director, the embodiment of humanity, inside the nightmare. He did not destroy his humanity — he simply stripped it away entirely.
Left with nothing but negative emotions and malice, the white-coated Director became a true monster wearing human skin.
The evil within him was no longer restrained. The curse's flower bloomed at the depths of his heart, releasing tendrils of black mist.
The white-coated Director didn't know what the black mist represented. It was his first time seeing that mist filled with despair and death in the waking world.
Without the restraints of humanity, the white-coated Director's day-to-day behavior left no cracks in his disguise. He was a demon masquerading as a human.
He was composed entirely of malice and curse, yet he had forged himself into the very image of compassion and reason.
Patients who didn't know the truth believed he was a benevolent healer. His colleagues thought he was an outstanding leader. His wife saw him as a perfect husband.
The white-coated Director only dropped his mask in front of his newborn child. The appearance of life was the root cause of the Director's fracture, and the white-coated Director — made entirely of curse — was intensely curious about the child as well.
He began subjecting his own child to "treatments" and "experiments." His biological son became his first true patient.
Through constant experimentation, the Director discovered the existence of the black mist. It was born in the deepest recesses of nightmares, spreading through the human heart. Its essence consisted of the memories people were most unwilling to face — forged from forgotten pain and despair.
The discovery of the black mist sent the white-coated Director into a frenzy of delight. He felt as though he had touched the true face of the world.
He had assumed this was a unique ability of the curse's seed — that only he could see the black mist, and only he could serve as its conduit.
But in subsequent experiments, when he placed his child into the black mist, that innocent life — blank as a sheet of paper — became twisted and grotesque under its influence. A curse's seed was planted in that newborn heart, and it too began to emanate black mist.
Only then did the Director slowly realize that everyone harbored some amount of black mist within them. With the right method, anyone could become a conduit for it.
The white-coated Director began secretly harvesting the black mist. He reveled in spreading misfortune and despair, reveling in the experience of being treated as a savior.
The one who caused the pain was him. The one who eased the pain was also him. And the one who ultimately sent his patients to their doom — that was him too.
This life went on for a very long time, until his child slowly grew up and became a deformed monster.
The child, who didn't know how to hide, nearly exposed the Director's secret. To continue lurking in the shadows, the Director killed his own child with his own hands. But before taking his son's life, he sent the boy's consciousness into the black mist deep within his heart.
He had always been curious about what the source of the black mist looked like.
Using the monster he had nurtured, the Director gazed into the deepest depths of the nightmare and saw a vast ocean of black mist.