The Beginning of the World

Lore & Background

In the quiet, overworked life of Kim Dokja, a 34-year-old web-novel reader, the only thing that ever felt real was *Three Threads of the World*—a long, sprawling novel about a man named Yoo Joonghyuk who walks through apocalypse after apocalypse. When the scenario drops and the sky cracks with threads of light, Dokja is the only person who knows the lines that are about to be spoken. He knows the ending. He knows the cost. And he knows that the story he read for comfort is now the story he must survive.

The scenario's architecture is brutal in its simplicity: objectives appear, characters are introduced, and the world tightens. Yoo Joonghyuk steps out of the page as the novel's unflinching protagonist, and a boy called Baam arrives carrying a destiny he did not choose. The Three Threads—literal filaments of narrative force—anchor the world's continuity, and pulling even one of them risks unraveling everything. For Dokja, the horror is not that he is trapped in a story. It is that he has read every page, and the pages are now alive, and they are not the same story he remembered.

This scenario is the hinge on which the entire novel turns. Every alliance, every betrayal, every quiet moment of grace in the later arcs is seeded here. The Three Endings are not abstract possibilities; they are doors, and the scenario is the moment the doors are first shown to exist. From this opening, the balance between saving the world, losing it, and rewriting it entirely is set in motion.

In Their Own Story

The coffee was cold. Kim Dokja had been staring at the same paragraph for forty minutes, the blue glow of his phone the only light in the studio apartment, and the rain against the window sounded like a slow, indifferent countdown. Then the text on his screen changed. Not refreshed. *Changed.* A line he had never read before slid in beneath the last paragraph he knew by heart, and the words were addressed to him. Not to the reader. To *him.*

He set the phone down. His hands were steady. They were always steady; that was the problem. Outside, the rain stopped mid-fall. Every droplet hung in the air like a bead on a thread, and the threads were glowing, thin and gold, stretching from the rooftops of Seoul into a sky that was no longer grey but the deep, ink-black of a page before the first word is written. Somewhere across the city, a door opened that had not been there a second ago, and a man in a black coat stepped out into the suspended rain without flinching, as though the world had simply made room for him.

Dokja looked at the threads. He had read about them. He had *loved* them. Now they were here, humming, and the story was no longer a thing he consumed in the dark. It was the dark itself, and it was looking back.

Reader's Guide

Premise and stakes: The web novel *Three Threads of the World* manifests in the real world, and a scenario is issued. Kim Dokja, the only person who has read the novel in full, must navigate a story whose rules he knows but whose living characters do not. The stakes are immediate and total: fail the scenario's objectives and the Threads begin to fray, pulling the world toward one of its three endings.

Key turning points: The first objective forces Dokja to act in public, exposing the scenario to bystanders. Yoo Joonghyuk appears not as a character on a page but as a person with his own will, and his goals do not perfectly align with the reader's knowledge. Baam is drawn into the thread, and his presence shifts the narrative in ways the novel's text only hinted at. A critical choice—whether to follow the story's 'script' or deviate—sets the tone for every subsequent arc.

Characters drawn in: Kim Dokja, Yoo Joonghyuk, Baam, and the first circle of companions who will carry the story forward. Their relationships are forged under pressure, not in comfort.

Skills and artifacts unlocked: The scenario system itself—objectives, rewards, and the Threads as a tangible narrative resource. Dokja's 'knowledge of the story' is his first and most dangerous asset, but it is also incomplete; the living story has begun to diverge.

Balance shift: This scenario tips the world from 'stable reality' to 'story in progress.' The Three Endings go from theoretical to active, and the reader's advantage is revealed to be both his greatest strength and his most fragile one, because the story he knows is no longer the only version of the story.

Did You Know?

• Kim Dokja's entire strategic edge in the first scenario is that he has read the novel—yet the living characters are not bound to the pages, meaning his 'spoiler knowledge' can and does become incomplete as the story adap
• The Three Threads of the World are not merely a plot device; they function as the structural spine of the narrative, and the entire premise of the novel hinges on what happens when they are pulled, cut, or rewoven.
• Yoo Joonghyuk, the protagonist of the in-story web novel, is not a puppet of the scenario. His agency and his own goals create a constant tension with the reader who believes he knows how the story 'should' go.
• The scenario system's objectives are designed to be ambiguous enough that multiple interpretations are valid, meaning the 'correct' way to complete them is often a matter of choice rather than information.