Starting as a Manga Editor-Chapter 13: Unknown (1)

Li Xue looked up again, staring at Tang Yao. Her slender, fair fingers were gripping the manuscript so tightly that her knuckles had turned white.
But Tang Yao wasn’t even looking at her—she was casually scrolling on her phone, clearly bored.
Probably thought Li Xue was reading too slowly.
“……”
Li Xue swallowed gently. She glanced at Tang Yao’s beautiful profile, then back down at the panel showing those two head balloons… kissing.
She looked back and forth between them a couple more times—still couldn’t figure out what the hell the connection was.
Just like she had no clue why head balloons were even showing up in the story.
But.
Even without a clear cause, she felt afraid.
A fear that came from nowhere—maybe because of the hyper-realistic art style, maybe because of the twisted plot.
Either way, the foreboding buildup had fully erupted when those head balloons appeared.
That dark, eerie, ambiguous atmosphere had completely wrapped her up—and drawn her in.
Sure, in her head she was screaming “What the h*ll is this twist?!”
But deep down, she was desperate to know what came next.
So seriously—what the h*ll is this?!
Li Xue took a breath, calmed herself down a little, and flipped to the next page.
She had to know what happened next.
In the manga—
After witnessing that horrific scene, Ko ran like mad to the police station and explained everything. A few officers went with her to the woods—but found nothing. They told her she must’ve been dreaming.
The place was empty. The head balloon was gone.
A hallucination?
Li Xue read this page and let out a small breath of relief… So, maybe Tang Yao was just using grotesque imagery to reflect the character’s mental state.
After all, she really didn’t seem like someone who’d draw this kind of manga.
As bold as it had been so far—it was still just that: bold.
Yeah…
Li Xue wasn’t sure whether she felt disappointed or relieved as she turned to the next page.
In the story, it was the next day. On the way home from school, Ko was telling her friends about the creepy incident from the night before.
Of course, none of them believed her. They all thought she’d been dreaming.
And while the group was talking—
At some point, a few dark specks had appeared in the clear blue sky…
One of the girls pointed up and said they looked like balloons.
Hearing that, Ko suddenly looked up—and saw them getting closer.
They were balloons…
1, 2, 3, 4!
Four in total.
Except—they weren’t ordinary balloons.
They were… head balloons!
Those swollen, floating heads matched the four of them exactly—same faces, same features. But now, balloonified, their expressions were twisted and grimacing, and instead of bodies, their necks dangled nooses…
Nooses made for hanging.
The four head balloons rushed toward the girls, the ropes beneath them aiming straight for their throats—ready to slip over and tighten.
All four of them screamed in terror. Two of them didn’t dodge fast enough and were snatched mid-air by balloons bearing their own faces—and were hanged on the spot.
Li Xue: “!!!!!”
Her hands froze mid-turn. She sat up straight and took a deep breath, forcing down the emotional rollercoaster inside her—and then kept flipping.
In the chaos, Ko and the only other surviving classmate bolted into an alley.
The head balloons, being massive, couldn’t enter right away.
But they hovered at the entrance, staring them down.
Just then, someone living on the second floor of the alley heard the screams. He opened the window, spotted the head balloons, shouted in terror, and rushed back inside.
A moment later—he returned with a crossbow.
Thunk!
The bolt hit one of the head balloons.
Pssshhh—
With the hiss of leaking air, the balloon with a human face let out a piercing shriek and began to deflate—fast. The whole head withered like a real balloon being popped.
Ko stared in shock, then slowly exhaled in relief. Like she’d been freed. She turned to her remaining friend and said, “Thank goodness, that balloon’s out of air.”
But.
There was no reply.
She turned.
Her last remaining classmate—her head was deflating too.
Just like the balloon.
The skin caved in, the muscles shrank away, the bones dissolved. The once-lively face collapsed like a rubber mask—wrinkled and grotesque.
“！！！！！！！！！”
Li Xue gripped the manuscript again, eyes blown wide as she stared at the image of the collapsing human head—and suddenly felt sick to her stomach.
At that moment—
She finally understood why this manga used a realistic art style!
The characters looked too normal. And because they looked so normal, when their heads deflated like balloons, the horror hit ten times harder.
The more normal, the more real. And when that realness broke—it shattered everything.
The impact.
The fear.
The visceral horror.
It was unmatched.
Li Xue stared at that powerful panel, heart pounding wildly. She sat there stunned for a whole minute before finally flipping the next page.
And the worst was still coming.
In the manga—
Ko, devastated by her friend’s death, ran home in a panic.
On the way, she saw countless head balloons slowly rising into the sky—her own, her parents’, her younger brother Yousuke’s, her teachers’, her neighbors’… They filled the sky.
With the realistic art style—
The sky was filled with human heads. Every one of them had no body, just a noose dangling underneath.
It was a terrifying, overwhelming visual spectacle—a horror parade born from one initial incident, now spiraling out of control.
The plot went completely insane—full speed ahead.
Chaos consumed the world of the manga. Ko finally made it home, but her family was just as panicked. The whole town was helpless.
TV anchors gave emergency broadcasts—only to be hanged by their own head balloons mid-sentence.
And back at Ko’s house, things were falling apart too. Her dad still insisted on going to work, thinking if he just protected his neck, he’d be fine. But the moment he stepped outside—his neck and arms were snatched by a balloon and lifted into the sky.
Next was her little brother. With no food left and no one willing to go outside, it was only a matter of time before they starved.
So Yousuke grabbed a sharp umbrella and declared that if a balloon came near, he’d stab it—and walked out.
He too encountered his own head balloon.
Finally, Ko’s mother—unable to bear waiting anymore for her husband and son—ran out the door in desperation. And never came back.
More and more people were being hanged. The world was overrun with swollen, floating heads.
It wasn’t collapsing.
It had already collapsed.
And then—the manga circled back to the beginning.
Knock knock knock.
Someone was knocking on the window.
Ko was curled in the corner of her room, trembling. Cold sweat poured down her terrified face.
She lived on the second floor… the only thing that could knock was a head balloon.
Her parents hadn’t returned. Her brother hadn’t come back from looking for food. She didn’t know what happened to any of them—whether they escaped or were caught…
Now she was alone.
She sat, exhausted, hiding beside her desk, listening to the knocking and calling from outside, on the brink of insanity…
No one was coming to save her.
And then—suddenly, she heard her brother’s voice outside.
Yousuke said he found food and urged her to open the window quickly.
Starving, terrified, mentally broken—Ko clung to that voice like it was her last hope and rushed to the window.
But she still had one last thread of sanity. She didn’t open it right away.
She looked carefully.
A skinny shadow appeared faintly on the other side of the glass… It really didn’t look like a head balloon. It really looked like her brother…
Feeling like she’d been pardoned from death, Ko opened the window immediately.
But—
What appeared before her was her brother’s corpse.
His body was strung up in front of the window, impaled by the umbrella he’d taken with him. The metal spokes were lodged deep in his gut, his tongue lolling out, a brutal death.
And around his neck—was a noose. The rope extended upward…
To a head balloon.
It was Yousuke’s.
He was floating his own body like a puppet. Staring at his sister, he said:
“Sis, thanks for opening the window…”
Beside him, Ko’s own head balloon grinned wickedly.
And the noose tied to its bottom came flying toward her.
…The end.
“……”
The story ended abruptly. No resolution. No answers. It was up to the reader’s imagination.
A perfectly timed blank space—strangely thought-provoking.
The entire story had no cause, no conclusion, no explanation of the future.
It was never about using grotesque imagery to show mental states.
It was a full-blown horror story.
A terrifying carnival of fear.
Li Xue’s lips parted slightly. She stared blankly at the final panel, then her entire body shuddered violently, as if she had fallen into an abyss of unknown terror.