Song Jin-hyuk woke up on an unfamiliar island, the sun burning his eyes and the smell of salt in the air, his mind a blank slate. He had no idea who he was, where he came from, or why he was there. Stumbling along the shore, he found a small guesthouse, its paint peeling and windows dark, yet inviting in a strange way. Inside, a family greeted him, polite, almost unnervingly so, and offered him shelter. Something about them felt off, but Jin-hyuk couldn’t place it.
The family consisted of a calm, measured father; a prim, obsessive mother; their son Minu, physically imposing yet timid; the eldest daughter Romi, bold and attention-seeking; the sharp-tongued, small-eyed child Yumi; and a quiet, wary employee named Jin Tae-hee. Though everyone seemed ordinary at first, Jin-hyuk’s instincts screamed danger. He was cautious, yet impulsive, sometimes questioning the family aloud when their behavior strayed into the uncanny. On the first night, he cleaned the kitchen, only to secretly pocket a knife.
The family’s behavior unnerved him. Minu, the seemingly meek son, once lunged at him with a sickle during a misunderstanding. Jin-hyuk, unnervingly bold, stared the man down and demanded an apology, a calm command in the face of imminent death. He began noticing patterns: hidden cameras, cryptic messages on laptops, and the family’s odd obsession with weapons and control. He even broke into Tae-hee’s room and glimpsed coded phrases he couldn’t yet decipher, which would later reveal themselves as instructions for killing each family member.
As the days passed, fragments of memory began to surface. He recalled a name: Song Jin-hyuk. A life erased. And with the shards of memory came the horrifying realization of his true nature. In his past, he had been a troubled boy, raised by a cruel father, Song Young-chul, who punished and humiliated him. His mother died when he was young, leaving him alone with a father obsessed with appearances and power. Sent away to a pig farm due to his worsening delusions, he met a boy named Jinu, the son of the farmer. Initially friends, Jin-hyuk’s paranoia grew until he believed Jinu mocked him. In a violent explosion of fear and rage, he pushed Jinu, who fell onto a bolt, dying instantly. That was his first murder.
Jin-hyuk’s amnesia had shielded him from this truth, but as his mind cleared, his personality shifted. The foolish, naïve man who had stumbled onto the island transformed into a calculating, dangerous predator. He realized that the family’s bizarre behaviors mirrored his own trauma, projections of his fears and delusions, and that to survive, or perhaps to satisfy an inner compulsion, he had to eliminate them.
He began methodically killing the family, learning that each could only be killed in a specific way. He started with the father, using a shotgun first, then finally an iron pipe, watching censored photographs of the corpse resolve and triggering headaches laced with fragmented memories. He forced the mother to watch as he executed the rest, killing her with a laptop. Minu, first killed incorrectly and resurrected, was finally killed with a chain, his body twisting in Jin-hyuk’s hands. Romi, who had flirted with him in fleeting moments of reality, was impaled on a mailbox stake. Yumi, the sharp-tongued child, was shot with a dart in the forehead, her cruel words amplified in Jin-hyuk’s mind until her death.
Throughout, Jin-hyuk’s delusions twisted reality. Romi’s manipulative behavior, the family’s violence, the omnipresent observers... all were projections of his fractured mind. Even the island itself, isolated and mountainous, seemed designed to trap him, reflecting the prison of his own psyche. Some events were real: Romi had flirted with him, Yumi had hurled insults at her sister, and Minu had been annoyed by Jin-hyuk’s closeness to Romi. Yet in Jin-hyuk’s mind, they became threats, conspiracies, monsters to be slain.
Jin Tae-hee’s presence was another distortion. In Jin-hyuk’s hallucinations, Tae-hee was a manipulative overseer, a shadowy figure controlling the island and punishing him for past sins. In reality, Tae-hee was the father of Jinu, the boy Jin-hyuk had killed in childhood, living quietly in seclusion and surviving his loss with grief and repentance, planning a careful return to life.
By the story’s climax, Jin-hyuk had killed every member of the virtual family. He understood the full scope of his delusions, the origins of his paranoia, and the horrifying truth of his actions. His first murder, the pigsty, the phantom squeals, the distorted memories of Romi and Yumi, and the obsessions with weapons were all tied to childhood trauma, untreated mental illness, and the warped reconstruction of reality in his mind.
The world outside his delusion remained unaware of the intricate horror of his inner world. Elderly observers in a nursing home discussed him in whispers, divided between sympathy and condemnation. Jin-hyuk remained a man both victim and perpetrator, haunted by memory, trauma, and the consequences of his actions. In the end, the line between reality and hallucination blurred completely: the island, the family, and even Jin-hyuk himself were all fragments of a mind shaped by violence, paranoia, and delusion.
