Prologue: Lights and Neon's
What feels like a lifetime ago, the Shadow Light Bar had been more than a centerpiece in an ex‑vibrant city where life once pulsed through every alleyway and love thrived like wildflowers in the cracks of the pavement. Before the decay, before the whispers, before the ghosts learned to speak—there had been the Lunar Light Bar.
Back then, the city revolved around it. It wasn’t just a bar; it was the heartbeat. The pulse. The reason the streets stayed warm even in the dead of winter.
By day, it hid behind the façade of a dusty little bookstore—crooked shelves, yellowed pages, a bell that chimed like a sigh. But everyone who mattered knew the truth. The bookstore was only a front, a veil meant to shield the bar from the eyes of those who prayed for its downfall. Those who feared what thrived in the dark. Those who wanted the city sanitized, purified, stripped of its magic and its monsters.
And yet the Lunar Light Bar endured.
It stood for decades, even as the neon signs flickered out and were relit, even as the city’s glory dimmed and its shadows grew teeth. Inside those hidden walls, the damned could have a drink without judgment. They could laugh, they could argue, they could exist without being hunted or cast out. It was the closest thing to home many of them ever had.
The owner—whose name was spoken only in rumors—was a legend in their own right. A puppeteer of fate. A deal‑maker. A match‑lighter whose flames never died, like the eternal lantern burning at the headstone of a forgotten god. They kept the bar alive through storms, raids, curses, and wars of silence. The light never faded.
Not until that day.
The day the bar was raided. The day the Lunar Light Bar died—and the Shadow Light Bar was born.
When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, the city held its breath. The bar’s walls were scorched, its secrets scattered, its magic twisted into something colder, older. A place where the past lived in the present, where ghosts walked freely, where unfinished stories clung to the air like fog. The Shadow Light Bar became a crossroads for the living and the dead, a sanctuary with its own agenda.
But no one truly knows what happened that day.
No bodies. No survivors. No answers.
Only a single letter left behind on the counter, ink still wet as though written by a hand that wasn’t entirely mortal:
“Welcome the Prince of Shadows, Jung‑min. And let the Shadow Light Bar rise.”
