The rooftop felt pretty quiet up there.
Minjae leaned on the railing, you know, his blazer still kinda damp from that earlier drizzle. Water drops stuck to the fabric like they didn't want to leave. The city spread out in front of him, looking like some moving constellation. Office windows lit up in those steady grids, traffic lights blinking red and green, neon lights throwing broken colors into puddles way down below.
It seemed ordinary. Steady. Like a big living thing breathing on its own beat.
Down there, everything kept going. Deadlines piling up, reports getting passed around, quiet commutes running on tracks of routine. Up above, clouds hung low and dark, heavy with another storm coming. The air had that sharp smell of steel mixed with rain, metallic and biting.
Minjae shut his eyes. Not because he was tired, he never let himself do that. But to listen. He wanted the quiet spots between all the noise layers. The silence under the traffic hum and light flickers. Not real peace. Just emptiness. The stuff that goes unsaid. The things nobody notices.
No voice came on the wind. No image scratched out from memories. No gut feeling flared up from old scales and fire.
But still.
Something nudged at the edge of his thoughts, gentle like.
Not a message. Not a call even.
Just presence. Basically.
A pattern without any real point, coming together right at the border of what he could recognize. Like a small ripple in water before a stone hits it.
For weeks now, too many little threads, each one harmless by itself, started curving toward the same spot. A mountain ridge in some old journal, marked with an ancient symbol. A company that got dissolved, named after an alias he buried in a training sim way back. Financial records popping up again, ones he had shut down himself. Unrelated stuff. But not exactly unconnected.
"It's not a warning," he said low, his voice getting lost in the wind. "It's driftwood. Driftwood on a tide I never meant to stir up."
The breeze went by, whispering nothing but the scent of wet asphalt and rain far off.
Downstairs, in some far corner of the building, the last meeting wrapped up quiet like.
Rennor closed the folder in front of him, the type with no labels at all. Across the table, senior guys did the same. None of them showed up on company lists. They wouldn't appear in any reports either. Their power worked in the shadows, not out in the open.
"No anomalies. No trail. Everything folds up nice and neat," one guy said, his voice dry like old paper.
"He's made something that wipes footprints as they happen," another muttered, eyes tired while he stared at the empty folder, like it might spill secrets anyway.
"Or we're digging in the wrong dirt."
Rennor's eyes went to the diagram on the wall. Interlocked companies, patents that got dropped, training sims rerouted, accounts feeding into each other until who owned what was just an illusion. A map of hiding on purpose.
He tapped his pen on the paper, steady, no rush.
"He's not invisible," Rennor said. "We just haven't figured out how to look sideways yet."
One of them frowned. So we pause.
Rennor shut the folder calm and stood up.
"Yeah. Let the shadow think we've lost interest."
And if the shadow's already watching us.
Rennor's face didn't change. His words came out final.
"Then he'll see we've decided there's nothing there."
Minjae took the long way home walking, preferring those narrow streets' hush over the subway noise. The pavement shone under the mist, catching bits of light from shop signs and car headlights. Water gathered in the gutters, carrying scraps of paper, wrappers, bits of lives nobody paid attention to.
His apartment sat in between two worlds. Close enough to his parents' area to drop by easy, close enough to the office to get there each morning without hassle. But it fit with neither. That's why he picked it.
It was space. Orbit. Family didn't own him fully, work didn't either. He circled around centers that others couldn't spot.
By the time he got to his door, rain had turned to a thick mist, beading on his hair and collar. The lock clicked open, door swung in, and quiet hit him like an old friend.
Inside, the place was simple. Bare walls, straight lines, nothing fancy. Keys dropped on the entry table. His wet coat slipped off his shoulders.
On the shelf by the window, half manuals mixed with odd forgotten things, sat the travel journal. The one from that back-alley shop. The one he hadn't touched since buying it that night.
Or at least that's what he thought.
Tonight, a page had a mark on it.
Minjae frowned. He didn't recall putting a bookmark there. Didn't remember opening the book at all.
He pulled it out careful and flipped to the marked page.
The chapter lacked a title. Just a drawing.
That jagged mountain range again, same as before. But now, what was under it had changed. Faint lines ran beneath the ridge, like chambers, veins, a maze twisting out like a heartbeat flipped inside out.
Under the drawing, in ink so faded it was ghostly almost, a line of text stretched out.
These caverns do not echo because they never forgot what was spoken first.
He read it once.
Twice.
Again.
The handwriting differed from the book's rest. More slanted, older. Its rhythm felt from another language, another time, even if the words got copied into his own.
Minjae turned more pages. The travel stories were gone. Instead, fragments. Notes on places not on any maps, coastlines shifting like memory tides, buildings that disappeared and came back based on the hour.
One part talked about a doorway in some Mongolian monastery ruins. A doorway that showed not the sky overhead, but a whole other sky. One with stars no one could map.
None of it added up.
And yet.
Something inside him moved. Not recognition. Not a memory.
An ache.
The ache of something almost remembered.
He shut the book slow and put it down, handling it like glass. His reflection showed in the dark window, shadowed by rain running down outside.
Is it starting, he whispered.
The apartment stayed silent. Just the steady rain patter on the glass answered.
Outside, the storm built up again. Inside, the walls kept quiet.
And somewhere, way under the city's concrete and steel, something in the ground listened.
Not waking.
Not speaking.
But waiting.