Ficorpio
Chapter 1
Something strange happened to me.
It started without warning. One day, people in the residential compound began dying—one after another.
New funeral wreaths appeared downstairs every day, and the entire building took on a gloomy, oppressive air. The homeowners’ association chat, once full of friendly conversation, descended into chaos. People cursed, hurled insults, and sent frantic voice messages like they’d lost their minds.
The property managers were clearly at a loss. They kept insisting that the deaths were nothing more than a coincidence.
But if it was a coincidence, why had it started on the second day after she moved in?
I’d recently started dating a new girlfriend.
Her name was Chloe, and she was much younger than me. On the second day of our relationship, she asked to move in with me.
Maybe she simply couldn’t afford the rent anymore. Maybe she hated sharing a place with roommates.
Surely it wasn’t because she loved me.
Naturally, I agreed.
Chloe might have been young, but she was remarkably skilled at all the things adults were supposed to know how to do.
In the kitchen, she was the perfect homemaker, turning out hearty regional dishes and soups with ease.
In front of a camera, she became an anime-style beauty, equally good at dark lolita looks and elaborate cosplay.
And in bed…
She was wild.
So wild that, for a while, I wondered whether she’d altered her identity card and made herself ten years younger. Otherwise, there was no way she could be that good.
Good enough to make me feel that dying afterward would be worth it.
All in all, as a girlfriend, she was almost a perfect match for every man’s ideal type.
Almost perfect in every situation.
There was just one thing that made her different from ordinary people.
She could abruptly change from a gentle little kitten into a cold-blooded queen.
She could go from sweetly compliant to utterly unreasonable without warning.
She could turn the tender paradise that had sent me soaring into a nightmarish rag doll that left me terrified.
One second. One blink. One instant.
It was much later that I learned people had a name for her condition: a yandere.
I didn’t know the folk terminology.
I had always called it Dissociative Identity Disorder—DID, for short.
Chloe was an exceptional subject for observing DID.
I was ecstatic.
I was a researcher specializing in Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Research into DID had begun late in this country, and almost no one knew much about it.
It was too mysterious, too far beyond the frontier, too far beyond humanity’s understanding of itself. A black hole in the crown of medicine—and yet it radiated the light of a star.
Among the countless subjects available for study, I had fallen in love with DID at first sight.
Chapter 2
To me, DID mattered more than life itself. It outweighed everything in the universe. I was meant to be the one who conquered that light.
But researching DID came with countless obstacles. The greatest was the lack of subjects.
Many hospitals had no specialized diagnostic protocols, so countless patients with DID were misdiagnosed with other conditions.
Milder cases were labeled schizophrenia. Severe cases were diagnosed as depression. Those with physical symptoms were treated as epileptics. Silence was mistaken for bipolar disorder.
And anyone whose symptoms couldn’t be forced into the category of a recognized illness was simply dismissed as someone “pretending to be mentally ill.”
There were also the people too ashamed to speak of it, too afraid to go to a hospital. People who didn’t even know they were sick in the first place.
DID waited in silence, hidden in the deepest unexplored territory of the human soul.
I wanted to find it.
Chloe was my key to that territory.
There were four identities living inside her body.
A nine-year-old girl—obedient, well behaved, and perceptive, but lonely.
An eighteen-year-old young woman—clever, dedicated, and hardworking, but domineering.
A twenty-five-year-old homemaker—gentle, capable, and attentive, but insecure.
And one more identity I wasn’t certain about.
Or rather, one I couldn’t make sense of.
The origins of DID were almost always connected to psychological trauma in childhood.
Repeated trauma. Severe trauma. Trauma the child had no way to escape.
In other words, every identity in a patient with DID was shaped by something they had personally lived through in the past.
I couldn’t imagine what kind of past had created Chloe’s fourth identity.
Her identity card stated that she was only twenty-five.
And yet there was a thirty-five-year-old woman living inside her body.
A woman who appeared only at a particular moment.
A sex worker.
I never told Chloe about my research, or how much I already knew.
An observer shouldn’t influence the subject.
To her, I was only an ordinary college professor: talented, with a flexible schedule. A man who loved her deeply, cared about everything that concerned her, and would spare no expense for her.
Most of the time, Chloe was eighteen.
She had her own interests, her own ambitions, her own way of falling in love.
And her own pet.
When she moved in, she brought a glass terrarium with her.
Inside was a snake.
It was white, marked with irregular patches of pink. About a foot long and slender, it looked almost unreal, like a pale eel molded from plaster.
Chloe called her Lady.
Lady lived in the terrarium among stones, a little cave, soil, and grass. Coiled at the mouth of the cave, she barely moved.
“She’s still hibernating,” Chloe told me. “She should wake up soon.”
It was my first time being that close to a snake, and I found it strangely uncomfortable.
Not fear. Not disgust. Just an indefinable unease.
Chapter 3
But Chloe clearly adored Lady, and I adored Chloe. I figured I could get used to it.
As long as the snake stayed quietly in her terrarium. As long as she didn’t crawl around, interfere with my work, or bite anyone.
That night, after her shower, Chloe lay on my bed and told me she felt happy.
My pulse quickened. Desire and anticipation stirred inside me.
I waited.
And waited.
Then Chloe fell asleep.
Disappointed, I turned off the light and tried to calm the restless ache in my body. There would be other chances, I told myself.
In the darkness, Chloe silently sat up again.
“Oh, for God’s sake. Are you even a man?”
I had nearly drifted off. Her words jolted me awake.
“Do I seriously have to make the first move?”
She rolled out of bed and felt around inside the wardrobe. Her dark silhouette shifted for a moment.
Then the bedside lamp clicked on.
My blood rushed hot through my veins.
She had changed into black lingerie and fishnet stockings. Biting lightly at her lower lip, she sat beside me and pulled her hair back with an elastic.
“I’m in my safe window. Lucky you.”
I stared at her.
“What are you looking at? Take it off.”
I threw back the covers and pulled off my pajamas.
“What exactly are you taking off?” Her sudden question left me at a loss.
“Mine.”
“Yours? Men like tearing things off, don’t they?”
Nervous and bewildered, I obeyed her instructions.
We didn’t stop until dawn. By then, I was completely exhausted, while she looked perfectly content.
Leaning on the wall, I made my way to the bathroom for a shower. My head was spinning, and without realizing it, I found myself standing in front of the glass terrarium.
It was empty.
Lady was gone.
I slept until noon.
Chloe was bustling around the kitchen in an apron, with the dining table covered in dishes.
“You’re awake.”
She poked her head out and gave me a sweet smile. Her snow-white neck was exposed, her collarbones faintly visible. She looked as gentle as a lamb.
“Just one more soup, and it’ll be ready. Go sit down for a bit.”
Still groggy, I lowered myself into a chair at the table. Then I caught sight of the glass terrarium from the corner of my eye.
Lady.
“Chloe, about last night…”
The words had barely left my mouth when I saw Lady lift her head inside the terrarium.
“About what?” Chloe asked, ladle in hand. Then she seemed to understand. “Oh, moving yesterday was exhausting, so I went to bed early. I’ll make it up to you tonight.”
The memories of each identity were separate—isolated from one another. It was a classic symptom of Dissociative Identity Disorder.
She couldn’t remember what had happened between us last night. Or perhaps the Chloe I’d been with last night simply hadn’t been this Chloe.
“I was talking about Lady…”
The moment I said the name, Lady climbed onto the rock and coiled herself into a neat circle.
But she hadn’t been gone?