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Klein seemed to have fallen into a vast nightmare.
The stage had burned down, and all the actors had turned into devils and monsters in an instant, scrambling to kill one another, flesh flying and blood spilling everywhere. They had terrified not only the audience below the stage, but also the playwright reading the script backstage.
His vision blurred, and Utopia flashed before his eyes, engulfed in raging flames.
He felt as though he, too, were burning. Sometimes he was abandoned in a burning house, watching from a bystander's perspective as his corpse sizzled and oozed fat, giving off a nauseating roasted aroma. Sometimes his entire body was on fire, and he rolled desperately on the ground in excruciating pain.
The thick smoke choked him until he could not breathe. He had suffocated, his heart had stopped beating, and the flames had scorched his throat.
The tendons in his hands were severed, his eyes gouged out. Countless times, he felt the chill of a cold blade piercing his chest, abdomen, limbs, and even his throat. His organs spilled onto the ground and piled up with other people's. He saw countless versions of himself already dead, or being killed by himself.
Pain.
He saw himself holding a machete, hacking forcefully, again and again, at something that had once been human. Then he saw a flash of fire before him, and someone shot him down, sending an agonizing pain through his abdomen. He saw himself futilely pressing one hand against his abdomen while waving the other desperately, as though begging his attacker for mercy. But the other person still raised a knife and approached him with blood-red eyes.
How did this happen?
What followed the surging malice was actually pain. This was probably what it felt like to suffer something more