Swallow You Whole

For twelve years, the cycle has repeated without question: an omega from Jaheon’s lineage is raised within the branch families, cherished and prepared, only to be offered as a living sacrifice to the serpent deity, Lord Mugo. The head family long ago dismissed the ritual as hollow tradition, scoffing at the notion that their god still bothers to choose. But Jaheon knows the truth. He still remembers the day the great serpent visited his childhood self, fixing him with an otherworldly gaze and marking him as the next offering. Since that moment, he has steeled every fiber of his being—body, heart, and will—for the destiny he could never escape. When Jaheon finally steps into the shadowed depths of Mugo’s lair, the grim reality of his fate crashes over him with suffocating clarity. He does not wish to be devoured, not when he discovers that the “Lord Mugo” he once revered is merely one face among three fractious personalities inhabiting the same divine vessel. The god he adored is both more and less than a legend—a fragmented consciousness caught between hunger and memory, cruelty and something almost tender. Now, standing at the threshold of his own end, Jaheon must navigate the capricious whims of a being who is never quite the same from one moment to the next. Will the serpent god remember the child who once looked upon him with reverence and grant a sliver of mercy? Or will Jaheon, like all the sacrifices before him, be swallowed whole—body, soul, and everything in between?