The rain fell continuously that morning.
Sheets of it poured over the glass towers, rounding their hard lines to trembling silhouettes. The sidewalks were streams of gray water. Umbrellas fought against the strength of wind, folding inward in defeat like broken wings.
Minjae stepped into the company building with his coat soaked halfway down. Climate control in the lobby buzzed, sweltering air struggling to banish the dampness that hung from him. His shoes made indistinct impressions on the mirror-smooth tile.
The lift stank of wet cement, the only smell that was generated when rain pounded the city relentlessly. Employees shared their grievances with him—traffic irritations, delays, spoiled suits. Their complaints were stifled under the relentless buzz of fluorescents, as static under the rain pounding.
Minjae wasn't bothered.
The gray clouds and continuous drizzle mellowed the city's edges, shrouding everything in shadow and silence. Everything felt slower, blurred, as though the volume on life was turned low. It was convenient to go about under shadows where the sky was already burdened and clouded.
---
His office was just as normal—spotless, uncomplainable. The identical two pens standing in a row beside the company-provided laptop. The same monitor waiting to be populated with sterilized spreadsheets. To all the others, his office was available. Forgettable.
He preferred it that way.
But when he leaned forward, there was a new memo on his screen.
A departmental announcement: restructuring in some distant branch office abroad.
Nothing wrong on the surface. Branch reorgs were the standard, run-of-the-mill administrative white noise.
With one exception:
The money trail.
Without hesitation, not even the deliberate choice to *start*, Minjae stretched across and used his hand to slide over to the keyboard and called a shell script buried deep within his personal repository. Its UI consisted of plain text on a blank screen. A retro parsing algorithm—pre-emptive by modern standards, but still full of embedded teeth.
Lines of data scrolled.
The branch office's financial trail—the quiet inflows and outflows—paralleled one of the reserve accounts he had established years before. The ghost account used to keep an infrastructure of surveillance nodes closed down years ago.
Not intended to be live.
"Why now?" he panted, voice little more than a whisper.
The rain pounding against the outside bounded out its unremitting answer, but there was no answer.
Then a complaint was made. Not on his machine, but brought to the fore much lower down in the logs. A small staff reorganization in the branch office. A new face had asked for old server logs—logs Minjae had seeded there deliberately, hidden to appear corrupted and uninterpretable.
A quiet act. Almost imperceptible.
But not quiet enough for him.
---
Here, in the dimly lit boardroom and of tension, Rennor was seated with two others from the higher rung. Men with no names to shout in the town square, no cards, whose titles had long since lost title. They were the specter of the company, just like Minjae was its unspotted foundation.
"We're running into air," one of them grumbled, slamming the edge of a thick folder like effort might rattle out the facts. "Everything points, but nothing points anywhere."
The other sat back, voice low, weary. "Perhaps we're looking too high up. What if he is not the genius we picture, on top of it? What if he is lower? Hidden in the middle, another operator on the surface?"
Rennor's gaze never wavered from the sprawling flowchart on his desk. Subsidiaries feeding into subsidiaries, lines of control interwoven with research projects, investments, simulated training environments. A web so intricate that it was almost as if a living thing, rather than a corporation.
A ghost trap.
"Not hiding," Rennor said finally, voice controlled. "He just created a world where nobody bothers to search for him."
---
Evening, and at last the rain slowed to a drizzle. Minjae entered a clandestine small bookstore. A relic in a less populated side street of one of the cities, the type where yellow bulbs still lit up the ceiling and the scent of old paper hung around like incense.
He wasn't looking for anything.
Maybe he simply needed pages against his hands, paper that reminded him of other decades.
In the dusty corner, his gaze fell upon a self-published travelogue. Cover worn, spine frayed from use. The cover was plain, boring. But when he opened it to the final page, something halted him.
A map.
Faded pencil markings, hand-drawn, tracing a series of mountains in Mongolia. Rivers, ridges, trails. But on one ridge, a symbol had been drawn with meticulous care—spiraled scales that curled like flames.
His breathing slowed.
No one would ever lay eyes on this," he panted, fingertips touching the thin page. "No one… save me."
The dragon within him stirred, indistinct but certain.
He purchased the book without hesitation, holding it in the crook of his arm as if it were contraband.
---
With the company again, the hunt grew more intense.
Employees were reassigned in secret. Projects were diverted. New audits swirled up quietly. But all tunnels they excavated yielded nothing but more corporate soil—clean, professional, deliberately unremarkable.
Every question culminated into painstakingly stacked papers, as if the very pillars of Seojin Capital had been raised for no other reason than to serve as dull.
A ghost had assembled this company.
And the ghost had not left a single print.
Minjae shut his notebook late at night, the travel journal next to it. He looked once more at the scrawled ridge mark before he extinguished the lamp. Rain on the windowpane panted, an unending, ceaseless sea.
For the first time in years, Minjae experienced the barest suggestion of something he had long believed buried: not triumph, nor fear, but knowledge.
As though some one somewhere had started talking back.