Morning came wrapped in the kind of fog that made the city look like it hadn't fully decided to wake up.Inside Luma Group's headquarters, deadlines hummed, printers groaned, and coffee machines hissed like annoyed dragons.
Yoon Ha-rin stared at her laptop screen, pretending to read the quarterly report while her mind was twelve minutes and one whisper away from sanity.
Every tick she didn't hear felt louder than the ones she had.
"Why are you blinking at the screen like it owes you an apology?"
Ha-rin jumped. Na-eun, her best friend and full-time chaos machine, leaned over her desk with a grin.
"Didn't sleep," Ha-rin mumbled.
Na-eun raised a brow. "Please tell me it's because of romance and not ghosts again."
Ha-rin froze. "Again?"
Na-eun laughed. "You talk in your sleep, you know? Last week during our team trip, you said, 'Time is breathing!' I thought it was some new meditation trend."
Ha-rin dropped her face into her hands. "I hate my life."
"Then get a new one," Na-eun said brightly. "Preferably one that comes with a CEO boyfriend who doesn't schedule meetings at 8 a.m."
"Director Kang is not my boyfriend," Ha-rin said too quickly.
Na-eun smirked. "Sure. And I'm not gossiping about that to the whole floor."
Ha-rin glared. "Na-eun—"
But Na-eun was already sashaying away, calling over her shoulder, "Better fix your hair! He's walking this way!"
Ha-rin whipped around—and there he was.
Kang Jae-hyun. Crisp suit. Unreadable eyes. Coffee in one hand, calm chaos in the other.
He stopped by her desk, voice low. "Meeting room. Two minutes."
Her pulse jumped. "I—uh—yes, Director."
Na-eun mouthed a dramatic "good luck, Mrs. Time Traveler."
Inside the meeting room, the blinds were closed.Jae-hyun set his tablet down and spoke without preamble.
"I checked the server logs from last night."
Ha-rin frowned. "For what?"
"The message you received."
She blinked. "You traced it?"
"Of course I did. You think I'd sleep knowing someone texted you about the ticking?"
She opened her mouth to argue, then shut it. "Okay, fair."
He tapped the screen, showing a scrolling code trace."The message came from an encrypted relay—no number, no sender ID. But here's the strange part."
He zoomed in on a string of characters.
Ha-rin leaned closer, squinting. "What am I looking at?"
He pointed. "This."
It was an image file buried inside the code—a faint black-and-white outline of something circular.A clock face.The hands pointed to 12:12.
Her throat went dry. "So someone knows."
Jae-hyun looked at her. "Or something."
Before she could respond, the lights flickered.Once. Twice.The projector blinked on by itself.
Na-eun's voice crackled through the intercom. "Director Kang, are you two running some ghost PowerPoint again? The whole floor's screens are glitching!"
Ha-rin and Jae-hyun exchanged a look.
He said, deadpan, "Tell IT to reboot the system."
Na-eun replied, "We tried. The clocks on everyone's monitors reset themselves to—"She paused."—okay, this is creepy—12:12."
A cold shiver ran down Ha-rin's spine. "It's spreading."
Jae-hyun pressed his fingers to his temples. "If it's in the network, it's not just superstition—it's data-level interference."
"You're saying time travel via Wi-Fi?"
"Wouldn't be the weirdest thing we've lived through."
She almost laughed, but her nerves turned it into a hiccup.
The projector flashed again.Now, instead of code, it displayed a sentence in distorted letters:
THE WATCH WAS NEVER BROKEN. IT WAS WAITING.
Ha-rin's breath caught. "Who's doing this?"
Jae-hyun's gaze softened as he looked at her. "Whoever—or whatever—it is, it's tied to us. It always has been."
Then, faintly, from the speaker, came a sound.
Tick.Tick.Tick.
But beneath the ticking, another sound emerged—like static, shaped into words.
"Find the second echo."
And then—silence.
For a long time, neither of them moved.
Finally, Ha-rin exhaled shakily. "We should tell someone."
"Who?" he asked. "IT? A priest? NASA?"
Despite everything, she laughed. The tension cracked just enough for her to breathe.
He smiled, small but real. "There's the laugh I've been waiting for."
Her heart fluttered—an inconvenient reflex at the edge of an existential crisis.
As they left the room, Na-eun waved her tablet dramatically."Hey! Did you guys see this? The system auto-downloaded a new project file called Echo_2.0 on everyone's desktop. Must be an update glitch."
Jae-hyun froze.Ha-rin whispered, "Echo…?"
Na-eun shrugged. "Yeah, weird. File won't open though. Keeps saying 'Locked until both signatures align.' Whatever that means."
Jae-hyun and Ha-rin looked at each other, realization dawning.
Both signatures.Like their names on the last sketch at Aureum-ri.
That night, long after the office emptied, they sat together in the glow of her monitor, the mysterious file waiting silently on the screen.
Jae-hyun reached for the keyboard."Ready?"
Ha-rin's pulse raced. "Not even remotely."
He smiled. "Good. Wouldn't be us otherwise."
They placed their hands over the mouse together and clicked.
The screen flickered—then filled with a new image.A map.Marked with one glowing word:
ECHO 2 — SEOUL.
And at the bottom corner, faintly etched in silver font:
Time only moves forward when hearts remember.