At the end of the emergency ward hallway, under dimmed lights, a secret meeting began.

Following the arrival of the 19-year-old female patient and the strange smile-like symbol on her wrist, Haim realized:

“This is beyond me. I can’t face this alone.”

The door was locked, the lights deliberately low, all electronic devices turned off. Notes were to be handwritten only.

The participants were:

• Director of Emergency Medicine, Yoon Jung-min
• Resident, Park Do-yoon
• Nurse, Yoon Ji
• Professor of Addiction Medicine, Moon Tae-ho
• Professor of Psychiatry, Lee Seo-jin

All summoned off the record—bypassing official hospital procedures.

Haim sat silently at the head of the table. His hands trembled slightly, eyes fixed on a distant void. He looked like a man who had seen this moment coming.

Yoon Jung-min broke the silence.

“Dr. Haim, what is your diagnosis of the situation?”

Haim drew a deep breath and raised his head.

“Psycholinguistic infection—to be precise, a narrative addiction response.”

Everyone furrowed their brows at the unfamiliar term.

Professor Moon asked:

“Narrative addiction? You mean… addiction to a story itself?”

Haim nodded.

“Yes. Years ago, I worked with a government research institute studying therapeutic methods using narrative structures. When the experiment reached Phase Two, some subjects became so immersed in specific stories that they lost the boundary between fiction and reality.”

Park Do-yoon interjected:

“Wasn’t there a subject who went missing during that trial?”

Haim briefly looked away.

“Yes. A 19-year-old female. The final participant. She kept whispering ‘The 901st Night’ and said, ‘Scheherazade is gone,’ before vanishing. This current patient, Seorin—she has the same surname. There is a connection, I believe.”

Nurse Yoon Ji spoke in a trembling voice.

“Then… are you saying this isn’t just a drug incident?”

Haim quietly opened a notebook. Scrawled inside were the following terms:

• Propagating structure
• Repeating imagery
• Fading memory
• Emotionally detached smiles
• Stories without narrators

He continued:

“Toxid is merely a catalyst. The true infection is the story itself— Especially incomplete narratives like ‘The 901st Night.’ These kinds of open-ended stories generate obsessive engagement.”

Professor Lee raised an eyebrow.

“Couldn’t this be explained as a kind of mass hysteria or shared delusion?”

Haim firmly shook his head.

“No. This is not mere emotional contagion. This is a system. A deliberately engineered narrative infection. Like an algorithm crafted by AI, it gradually molds the subconscious into predetermined patterns.”

Just then, in the midst of the darkened room, a wall-mounted monitor suddenly lit up. All devices had supposedly been disabled.

A voice emerged:

"Stories choose their narrators.
And... the narrator is you."

Everyone turned their heads. Haim held his breath. Yoon Jung-min immediately stood and manually cut power to the monitor.

“Was that… a hack?”

Park murmured:

“That wasn’t random. It means someone—or something—is animating the story itself.”

Haim slowly spoke:

“I call this… the Awakening of the Narrative.”

A heavy silence fell.

Nurse Yoon Ji broke it.

“But how do we stop it? If we become the narrator… wouldn’t we be infected too?”

Haim stared ahead.

“That’s why we must analyze the narrative. We can’t be passive consumers anymore. We must read the structure, predict the ending, and become the only ones capable of derailing the story.”

Just then, the emergency call bell rang again.

Footsteps raced down the hall. A nurse flung the door open.

“The patient, Seorin—she started mumbling again. She said: ‘Begin the next story.’ Then smiled. Her eyes were closed, but… the smile moved.”

Haim rose from his seat.

“The narrative has moved on from being a shadow of the past. Someone is rewriting it in real-time. And we’re caught inside it.”

He made a calm but urgent declaration:

“We begin full investigation. I will unseal the experimental records. We must dissect the structure of The 901st Night.”

At that moment, the lights flickered off, then on again.

A laptop on the table powered itself up.

A file opened—no one had touched it.

File Name: “The Final Night of 1001 Days – Blueprint”

Everyone held their breath.

Haim felt the cold edge of fate drawing near.

The story was no longer dormant.

It was moving…

Toward its final, carefully crafted conclusion.