The rune glowed. Not faintly. Not erratically. It held.
A thin column of breath escaped Minjae without him realizing, as if some deeper part of him paused to listen. The light wasn't harsh—just steady, threaded with a quiet certainty that shouldn't have been possible. The glow concentrated at the core sigil, deepening into a shade usually seen only after layered activation.
Aethra stabilized first, forming a crystalline lattice across the inner node. The pattern tightened with a precision that felt… deliberate. Familiar. Almost like recognition. Then Vitalia Surge unfurled across the lattice, branching outward like veins from something alive.
He hadn't spoken a word.
He hadn't touched the interface.
No command. No gesture.
Just alignment—mind, intent, memory. A silent synchronization.
A vibration ran through the control rings. Not sound—sensation. A quiet, pulsing thrum that wasn't mechanical. Not electrical. Something else.
A 'heartbeat'.
For one instant—too fast for his human senses but unmistakable to whatever lay beneath them—the rune 'answered him'.
The room remained unchanged. Cooling systems hummed. Status lights blinked. Nothing dramatic. Yet Minjae's chest tightened with a strange, ancient familiarity.
Recognition.
Acceptance.
A quiet 'I hear you'.
He ensured his face stayed expressionless, even though no one was there to see. Old habits. Old instincts. He reached toward the next array, more careful than before. His hand stayed steady, but inside him something stirred—slow, curling, as if waking from a long sleep.
The interface responded cleanly. No flicker. No deviation. Predictable. Rational. Exactly as his revised model said it should behave.
He should've been satisfied.
Instead, his vision blurred around the edges.
He stumbled. Only half a step, but enough for him to brace the table.
A breath hitched—not from fatigue. Not from strain.
Emotion.
Raw. Sudden. Unfiltered.
A tug beneath his thoughts, beneath the human mask he lived in. A pull so abrupt it nearly broke the mental discipline he'd kept flawless for years.
Not his emotion.
Something like—
Grief.
Or longing.
A whisper of both, mixed in a way that made no sense.
It vanished as quickly as it had surged, leaving a hollow coolness in its wake.
Minjae waited, letting the quiet return to his pulse. Only when he was sure the sensation wasn't returning did he flick the array offline. He didn't add a log entry. Not yet. He didn't want the words to exist anywhere but in his mind.
He left the lab without looking back.
---
One floor above the central break area, the unused conference room smelled faintly of old coffee and the stale air of forgotten meetings. No one used the space anymore—except one person.
Renner leaned back in his chair, scrolling through two different monitors. His foot tapped against the leg of the table in an uneven rhythm—barely audible but persistent. His eyes shifted between datasets with the kind of focus that made interns panic.
He wasn't looking at numbers this time.
He was looking at 'patterns'.
And at a single image: Minjae standing outside the company during break. Hood up. Head down. Winter haze turning him into a faint silhouette.
A meme someone made. Nothing special.
Except the comment beneath it.
"He's not some rich kid from above.
He's someone who climbed up from below."
People joked. They always joked.
Renner didn't.
Not because of Minjae personally—he barely interacted with him. But because the phrasing echoed something from an old file he once tried to compile. A file that got dismissed, ignored, quietly buried.
His final line had been almost identical:
"Not someone above.
Someone buried beneath."
Back then he didn't understand why he wrote it. Some instinct. A pattern he couldn't articulate. A thread he couldn't follow.
Now, he was starting to.
---
When Minjae returned to his desk later that afternoon, his posture looked the same as always—straight but relaxed, expression unreadable. Interns whispered that he looked like someone who never slept and never needed to. Experienced analysts claimed he was just a quiet prodigy who hated noise.
None of them were wrong. None of them were right.
The earlier pulse still lingered faintly in his nerves. He buried the sensation beneath the calm routine of work: two trend reports, one quarterly projection, one merger‑impact simulation. Numbers behaved. People did not. He preferred numbers.
He finished the first report when someone tapped lightly on the edge of the desk beside him.
"Want to trade reports?" Seori asked.
Minjae looked up.
She wore that effortless half‑smile she always had when trying to sound casual but actually needing something. She held her tablet forward. "Mine's too clean. Makes me paranoid."
He exchanged his with hers.
"That means yours is probably more accurate," Minjae said.
"Or I'm missing the mess," she muttered.
Their fingers brushed—barely a second.
But it was enough for him to feel the faintest ripple. Not magic. Not supernatural. Just human warmth. Familiar. Grounding.
She blinked once, almost as if registering something she didn't expect, then moved away with a small, quiet nod.
Minjae watched her leave, not because he was distracted, but because something about the exchange felt strangely… steadying. It wasn't complicated. It wasn't dramatic. It was just a moment.
And the memory of the rune's glow pulsed faintly in him.
---
Later that night, when the building emptied, Minjae returned to the lab. He preferred the silence—no footsteps, no muffled conversations, no accidental shifts in his focus.
The array sat dormant.
He opened his notebook and revised his margin notes:
"Rune-array now exhibits consistent response under emotional static.
Unknown if influence is internal or environmental."
He tapped the pen once, then added a smaller line:
"Possible link between unguarded emotion and resonance."
He hesitated only for a breath before adding the final line:
"Begin testing intentionally."
The words settled heavily. Intention meant risk. Not of discovery—he could hide that. But of awakening something he'd spent his entire human life suppressing.
He closed the notebook.
He didn't sense Renner digging three floors above. Didn't know the man was combing through decade-old alumni grant records—names buried, awards fabricated, donations routed through shell groups.
Minjae's name sat nestled among them.
Most people would've shrugged and called it luck.
Renner didn't believe in luck.
And for the first time in years, the pattern was taking shape.