Pachin.

  The clasp knobs clicked shut, and the rigid after-echo inverted behind her ears. It twisted into an ugly, high frequency that raked her inner ear—right through her sense of balance. The sound bent out of shape.

  The clockmaker’s shop—those frozen gears—hazed apart, dissolving the way old film burns when it catches too much heat. Charred frames peeled away in fluttering scraps and fell. What remained was a dazzling, merciless white.

  No sky. No ground.

  A corridor paved end to end with sterile, inorganic white sand—so white there was nowhere for shadows to live. Even when she exhaled, no dampness lingered, as if breath itself couldn’t stick.

  But—

  The instant her eyes accepted that landscape, Yurie’s brain threw a violent error.

  “—gh… ah—cough!”

  The world was folded. Physically.

  The vertical axis had been shoved over by an invisible giant hand—precisely forty-five degrees. What should have been a level hallway had become a cliff-steep slope, and the white sand, unable to bear its own weight, kept collapsing soundlessly down the slant.

  The sand was running.

  The ground moved on its own.

  “…What is this—?! The ground— it’s running…!”

  Yurie clawed at the slope, digging her nails into the sand and fighting to keep her center of gravity stitched together. Every time she tried to take a step, the entire world tried to fling her toward an “edge” that shouldn’t exist. Pillars, horizon—everything was locked at a wrong angle, feeding her brain a constant, false signal:

  You are falling.

  Nausea surged up like her stomach was trying to turn itself inside out.

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  (I’m falling. Falling. I’m not falling—I'm falling. My inner ear is betraying me!)

  “Oh, come on! You’ve got to be kidding me! Gravity—gravity—who authorized this?!”

  A few steps ahead, gold fur kicked violently through the white sand.

  Mermi.

  Against the insane incline, she drove the claws of all four paws deep, brute-forcing her own “vertical” into existence. Kak-kak, kak-kak—dry, staccato clicks as sand burst into dust.

  But no matter how fiercely she held her pride, the bug in the laws of physics was merciless. Legs that should have planted with easy elegance tangled as if drunk, slipping in directions they had no right to slide.

  Walking straight—just that single shred of order—was rejected here like a sin.

  “Mermi—your legs…! Something’s wrong! Why can’t you stand?!”

  “What do you think whining at the ground will do?!” Mermi snapped. “Lie to your senses—lie to your center of gravity, Yuri!”

  “Yuri”—Mermi’s clipped nickname for Yurie—landed like a slap.

  She sniffed hard and twisted her sliding body back upright by force. Mud-laced sand clung to her golden coat in ugly stains.

  She wasn’t wobbling because she was weak.

  She was wobbling because her nobility was openly rebelling against this world’s warped rule—forty-five degrees—and crashing head-on into it.

  “Look!” Mermi jerked her chin. “The one sitting there all smug is the landlord of this defective house!”

  Where she pointed—

  “…What… is that. …Vertical?”

  At the edge of Yurie’s crawling, grit-in-her-teeth vision, the anomaly stabbed in.

  At the far end of the flowing, collapsing corridor of white sand stood something impossibly straight: a perfect vertical line, enthroned as if it were mocking the very concept of gravity.

  A figure buried beneath layers upon layers of massive veils, not moving so much as a breath.

  The High Priestess.

  Against a slope cut at forty-five degrees, she stood at a perfect ninety. In any sane world, that posture would have meant tumbling into the abyss the instant she tried it.

  But the pure white cloth that wrapped her did not stream diagonally. It did not whip in any wind. It didn’t even acknowledge the slant.

  It was as if only the space around her had been cut out and sealed into a “still box,” detached from this broken world.

  Her veils obeyed gravity the way they were supposed to—hanging straight down with insulting correctness.

  Two figures below—filthy with sand-dust, nails splitting as they clung to the incline in desperation.

  From behind her veils, the High Priestess ignored them with an intellect so steady it did not tremble once.

  “It’s not fair…”

  The words leaked out of Yurie’s throat on a shake.

  “Only you get to stand so straight, sit so clean…! The ground is this warped and you’re saying you can’t even see it?! Acting like you’re the only one who’s right—just sitting there in silence, watching!”

  The High Priestess did not answer.

  In the hell of forty-five degrees, her “perfect vertical” was not salvation.

  It was a cold refusal—a posture that would not share even one millimeter of the collapse happening at her feet.