The second day was just the same: the wide sweep of entry cards, the muted electronic tinkle of elevator bells, and the slow awakening of vacant workstations as workers clomped in with coffee cups and half-spoken chat. Seojin Capital Solutions outside resembled a slick machine—the every-day pattern so effortless it might have had a symphony composed to accompany it.
But to Yoo Minjae, the rhythm was too scripted. Every tap of the keys, every elegant laugh, every shuffle of papers like actors back on their marks, waiting to cue the director. He complied, but the performance was fake, a theater of work for something much duller.
Spend most of the morning going over a vendor report—already audited, already certified. Redundant task. What bothered him was not the figures but the template.
The column headings were in an old format. Ancient. Obsolete. One that he himself had created on his first weeks at Seojin. None of the existing employees should have any access to it. And the team which used to use it? Long dispersed.
Not coincidentally. Not randomly.
Interest piqued with the bite of a blade exposed. He dipped into the system logs, looking for sources. The file had been sent through an off-site contractor in Reykjavik—a dormant logistics subsidiary, one of the redundant nodes he had set up years before. Unused to be, never to be used once more. But something had brought it to life.
His heart rate decreased, not increased. When death whispered, dragons listened.
He rose, moved to the printer area. Whir of machinery and gentle whorl of paper provided him with something concrete, something he could feel. Ink on paper was not so readily erased.
The lights in the corridor burned like two spears off polished floor, and as he turned the curve, he almost bumped into Rennor.
The man's steps were slow, calculated, his very presence taking up the space of the narrow hallway as if by design.
"Morning," Rennor stated, voice flat—too flat.
"Morning," Minjae returned, voice steady.
They met, step firm, silence between them. Neither looked away, but neither felt the crushing weight of what was not spoken. Two men, both feeling today had a different undertow beneath the mundane.
By midday, office gossip had bulled to its usual midday buzz. Minjae melted, getting lost among the staff before disappearing down a stairway employees rarely saw. The subfloor archive wing was sterile and softly hummed from recycled air. No one on staff cared to read dusty conglomerations, and terminals stretched out like skeletons of bygone ages.
He opened an unofficial cold storage drive—protected from incompetence and breaking. Behind encrypted partitions, between wiped ledgers and stamped accounts, he discovered something he hadn't left there: a folder by the name of MN-V3/Reflex.
The acronyms were his. His and his alone. A signature he had never given to anyone else alive.
It had one file. Text. No metadata. No author. No trace.
The mirror knows what shadowed it. But not why.
He shut it slowly, hand tightened though his chest groaned under the burden of awareness. This was not watching. This was stalking.
Something wasn't just looking. Someone was following.
Far away in a glass-walled conference room pushed back by blinds and subdued lighting, Rennor sat intent on a probe report glowing dimly on the screen. His aide leaned forward, voice whispery, guarded.
"Ping showed once," she said. "Then the signal wrapped around itself."
His fingers floated over the touchpad, eyes squinting. "And what did it hit?"
"A resting development partition. Encryption too ancient for anyone still working here."
He hesitated. He took a breath, measured. "Old enough to date back even to our first simulation build?"
"Maybe."
The furrow between his brows increased. So the ghost makes tracks after all.
"Then he's not running," Rennor breathed. "He's measuring."
That evening, the rain murmured repetitive beats against the windows of Minjae's apartment, scattering each drop the unplanned city lights into shattered halos. Shadows twisted and bent in the dim light of his desk lamp.
He stood still, staring out into the night across the glass, but his gaze was turned in.
The broken ring came in memory unbidden. Not a scheme, not a document on a computer, but a mark burned into his heart: a circle of shattered stone, fire-scorched runes on its face.
Elandryss.
The name came as a half-remembered breeze, strange and yet his own. Shards of an alien world tore him in troubled dreams, and would not be kept hidden.
He jerked the drawer open, dragged out a frayed notebook—his hidden chronicle of truth. The paper had the scent of ink and age. He scanned over fragmented sequences, shattered drawings, pieces of runes that would not fit into place. And there, folded in the back, contained the symbol: the broken ring, drawn by his own hand in an instant of fatal clarity.
"A reflection," he grunted. "Or a warning.".
His fingers lay across the page, not flipping it, not struggling with it. The notebook was heavier than paper had any right to be, heavy as two worlds weight compressing down through cracks in it.
He shut it, shoving it back into the drawer with soft finality.
Rain pattering outside went on beating, ticking as a countdown timer to some inevitable future. The world outside the window. sparkled in the darkness, unaware of the storm it dreadingly sensed was already agitated—here, in the quiet of a man's apartment.