Han Junho is seventeen years old. He lives alone in a single room on the commercial edge of Seolmun — a city whose name means threshold — pays his own rent, works a part-time job that has just closed without warning, and calculates, each month, whether the numbers will hold until the future his parents promised him becomes the present he can finally live in. He is not remarkable by any measure the world has developed for measuring such things. He moves through Seolmun with the specific invisibility of someone who has learned, through necessity rather than choice, not to draw attention. He reads. He plans. He continues.

Then the gates open.

Across Seolmun, dimensional gates tear through ordinary space and release beings from other worlds into the streets — beings displaced mid-transit through connections that have begun, without warning or explanation, to collapse. The human response organizes with the specific efficiency of a civilization that has no framework for what is happening and builds one anyway: factions, rankings, a system that classifies the awakened and deploys them against what the catastrophe is producing. The system is thorough. It is well-intentioned. When it attempts to classify Han Junho, it produces no result. He is designated Unregistered and set aside.

What the system cannot measure, it cannot see. What it cannot see is this: the gates opening across Seolmun are not the catastrophe. They are the symptom. The catastrophe itself is a process — vast, indifferent, traveling through the dimensional connections between every planet in every universe that has ever existed — and it has been consuming worlds for longer than Seolmun has existed to be consumed. Every universe has fallen to it. Every version of this story has ended the same way.

Every version except this one. So far.

Somewhere above the story, something is watching. It has been watching since before the first word was set down. It knows what Junho does not know — what he is, what is positioned against him, how many times this has been attempted, and how many times it has failed. It knows what kind of reader you are. It knows whether you are cheering for him or not. And it knows, in the specific way of something that has witnessed every version of this story across every universe where it was attempted, that what happens next depends not only on Junho — but on what you bring to the pages that follow.



THE LAST EXISTENCE is a story about the last surviving universe, the last version of one boy, and the last attempt at something that has never yet succeeded.

It is also, depending on what kind of reader you are, something else entirely.

You are already part of it.

Turn the page.

The narrator is aware of this. It has been aware since before the first word was set down — aware that somewhere beyond the page, a reader exists. Present. Holding whatever you are holding. Thinking whatever you are thinking.


The narrator does not yet know what you want from the next several hundred pages. It will come to know.


For now, there is a city. There is a boy in it whose name is Han Junho. He is seventeen years old and he has been surviving, quietly and with very little complaint, for longer than surviving should have been required of him.


Prologue