Haneul's first piece of fan mail was not from a fan.
It arrived as a physical envelope, which was suspicious enough—most people messaged or left comments on her stream channel. The nurse on afternoon shift handed it to her with a shrug.
"Someone dropped it at the front desk," the nurse said. "No sender listed. Just your name."
"Definitely not ominous at all," Haneul muttered.
She waited until the nurse left, then turned on her tablet's camera and propped it up, recording.
"If this is a curse, we're getting it on video," she said, ripping the flap.
Inside was a single sheet of heavy paper with neat handwriting.
Ryu Haneul,
You don't know me, but I know a little about you. Someone in our circles saw your scan results. You are very special, and you are not safe where you are.
Hospitals are vulnerable. Corporations are greedy. The Tower Research Institute is arrogant. They will all fight over what's inside you.
We, on the other hand, understand. The System is a flawed god. It needs to be guided back to its proper form. Shards like yours are the keys.
If you want protection—real protection, from people who see you as more than data—come to the address below tomorrow at dusk. We can talk about what you really are. No obligations.
We only ask that you don't mention this invitation to your current "observers." They like hiding things too much.
—A Friend of the Root
At the bottom was an address in Gray-3, near the edge of Tower Seventeen's shadow. A warehouse district.
Haneul stared at the letter for a long moment.
Then she burst out laughing.
"Oh wow," she said to the empty room. "They really went with 'mysterious benefactor.' Zero points for creativity."
She snapped a photo and sent it to Kael and Mira in a group thread titled "Root Cult Bingo".
Look what came in the actual mail like it's the previous century, she wrote. Friend of the Root says hi.
Kael responded almost instantly.
That is so aggressively a trap it's almost insulting.
Mira took a bit longer.
Good. That means they underestimate you.
Do not go. Do not reply. Do not leave the room without telling one of us first.
Haneul rolled her eyes even as she typed.
Relax, I'm not walking my amateur-fragment-host self into a cult warehouse on a Tuesday.
A beat.
Then a second message:
…but you two are absolutely going, right?
Kael's reply popped up.
Obviously.
Mira's overlaid his, curt.
We'll investigate. You stay put.
Haneul leaned back, smiling grimly at the ceiling.
"Congratulations, shard," she murmured. "You're popular."
She felt a faint stirring in her chest, like static before a storm.
[FRAGMENT: CORE_INTENT_ROUTINE_SHARD.]
[STATUS: DORMANT (ALERT LEVEL +1).]
"Yeah," she said softly. "Me too."
Kael met Mira in a narrow alley one block from the listed address.
He'd left Joon out of this one—explaining "probable cult recruitment meeting, please bring snacks" felt like a bridge too far. Instead he'd worn his "don't look at me" hoodie and left his Hunter tag tucked away.
Mira had ditched her gray coat for darker clothes and a cap, blending into the industrial shadows more than he did.
"You sure about this?" he asked.
"No," she said. "But we can't ignore it. If they know enough to write that letter, they know too much."
He checked his UI.
[DEBUG SENSE: ACTIVE.]
The warehouse district glowed with bugs and flags; more importantly, he scanned for any Root-shard resonance.
There.
A faint wrongness near the address—a subtle echo similar to Haneul's scan, but diluted and… off.
"Someone with a fragment was here recently," he said quietly. "Not like Haneul's. Smaller. Or more damaged."
Mira's jaw tightened.
"Could be a host," she said. "Could be artifact residue. Could be bait."
They moved closer, sticking to shadows.
The building itself was unmarked. One of dozens of squat concrete structures with metal roll-up doors. A single side entrance had a worn keypad and a discreet camera.
Debug Sense painted the camera's flags: motion detection, facial recognition, low-tier System tie-in for "security event" triggers.
It had a minor bug.
[DESCRIPTION: TIMESTAMP DRIFT (−0.8 SEC).]
Kael couldn't resist.
He nudged the drift a bit further out—just enough that its motion log would be slightly misaligned with actual events. A small obfuscation.
[LOCAL PATCH APPLIED.]
Mira glanced at him.
"Analyst," she said.
"Can't help it," he said.
She led the physical approach, flattened against the wall below the camera's field. Kael followed, heart hammering.
He could feel the shard echo stronger now, through his link, like static in the air.
He touched the door with Debug Sense.
[OBJECT: SIDE_DOOR_17-WH-12.]
[LOCK_FLAG: SIMPLE.]
[ALARM_FLAG: TRIGGER_ON_FORCED_ENTRY = TRUE.]
He wasn't going to brute-force it. He wasn't suicidal.
He checked for bugs.
[MINOR BUG: ALARM_TEST_MODE FLAG NEVER FULLY CLEARED.]
[STATUS: PRESENT.]
He smiled thinly.
"That's sloppy," he murmured.
He used Local Patch to toggle the test flag on fully for 60 seconds.
[ALARM_MODE: TEST.]
[REAL ALERTS: LOGGED BUT NOT FORWARDED.]
"Now if we ping it, their system thinks it's a drill," he said.
Mira didn't praise him. Just nodded.
"On three," she said. "We go in quiet. If there's anyone with a shard in there, I want to see them before they see us."
He swallowed.
"Three," he agreed.
He opened the door.
Inside, the "warehouse" was more like a makeshift chapel.
Folding chairs. A low platform. Banners with abstract symbols that meant nothing to most people but screamed "we misread the System UI" to anyone with enough experience: stylized Root icons, Tower silhouettes, a human figure haloed in pixels.
And smell. Incense, old dust, too many bodies in a place with bad ventilation.
Debug Sense tagged a dozen lingering "user presence" flags—people had been here recently, but not right this second.
"No one home," Kael whispered.
"Not physically," Mira said.
At the far end of the room, built on a repurposed crate, stood a weird, cobbled-together machine. Part old server rack, part soul scanner, part idol. Cables snaked from it into the floor, up the walls, feeding off whatever infrastructure they'd jacked.
It hummed.
Kael's whole body prickled.
[OBJECT: UNREGISTERED DEVICE – "ROOT ICON."]
[CONNECTION: UNAUTHORIZED SOUL-STRUCTURE INTERFACE.]
[FRAGMENT RESONANCE: PRESENT.]
[STATUS: ACTIVE (IDLE).]
"Oh, good," he said faintly. "They built a fake god modem."
Mira's lips tightened.
"We've seen similar rigs," she said. "Most cults can't get official devices, so they hack together their own. Dangerous for everyone involved."
Kael stepped closer, ignoring the way his heartbeat sped up as the resonance intensified.
There was a shard in there.
Or pieces of one.
[FRAGMENT_SOURCE: UNKNOWN.]
[TYPE: CORE_INTENT_ROUTINE (DAMAGED).]
[INTEGRITY: 12%.]
"Someone pulled a shard out of a host," he whispered. "Or found one that shook loose."
He saw it in the overlay: a jagged fragment of the same structure he'd seen in Haneul's scan, but cracked, edges frayed.
"Or it was left behind when a host died," Mira said softly. "Leaving residue."
The thought made his stomach twist.
He opened the device's logs.
Most were garbage—chants recorded as data, desperate attempts to send "prayers" as malformed queries.
One entry stood out, tagged differently.
[ENTRY: MESSAGE_DRAFT_001 – TO: FRAGMENT_HOST_RYU_HANEUL.]
[AUTHOR: USER "SPEAKER_GRAYROOT."]
He opened it.
Little shard-sister,
We felt you wake. Your presence shivers the worth functions like a breeze in brittle grass. You are not the first. Others carried pieces before you. Most were wasted by those who feared what they did not understand.
We have… inherited some of their remnants.
The System will always choose itself over you. Its watchers—TRI, guild engineers, doctors—will choose their models over your pain. We will not.
Come to us and we will help you learn to speak in the tongue the Root remembers. Together we can make the Towers kneel.
The rest devolved into more grandiose rhetoric.
Kael closed it with a grimace.
"'Little shard-sister,'" he muttered. "Gross."
Mira's eyes narrowed.
"Speaker Grayroot," she repeated. "We've heard that handle on encrypted channels. Mid-level cult leader. Too careful to show their face on any traceable stream."
Kael rested his hand lightly on the cobbled-together device.
The shard inside pulsed weakly in response.
[FRAGMENT: DAMAGED.]
[STATE: CONFUSED / HOSTILE / SEEKING.]
He recoiled.
"That's not like Haneul's," he said. "Hers is… blurry, but coherent. This one feels like an animal that's been kicked too many times."
"Can you tell if it's connected to her?" Mira asked.
He probed as gently as he could.
Very faint, almost lost in noise, a connection thread blinked: a resonance path that had pinged her shard recently.
"They pinged her during the scan," he said. "Or right after. Used the same System channels."
Mira swore under her breath.
"So the Institute's report didn't just go to us," she said. "Or someone inside forwarded it. Great."
Kael stared at the machine.
"Can we… unplug this thing?" he asked. "Or patch it into a wall socket and hope it blows a fuse?"
"Smashing cult idols is cathartic," Mira said. "But we might learn more if we don't spook them yet."
"They already sent a creepy letter," Kael said. "I'm sufficiently spooked."
He checked the shard's flags.
[FRAGMENT_TAG: LOST_CHILD.]
[ASSOCIATED_HOSTS: REDACTED.]
[SYSTEM_ATTITUDE: AMBIGUOUS.]
"Lost child," he muttered. "Even the System labels it like a stray."
"Then maybe we should keep it away from people who think 'lost child' means 'sacrifice,'" Mira said.
He made a face.
"I hate cult logistics," he said. "Give me kobolds any day."
He hesitated.
"We could… mask the resonance," he said slowly. "Not delete it. Just make it harder for them to use it as a beacon."
Mira considered.
"Without touching its core?" she asked.
"I can nudge flags on its interface," he said. "Lower its broadcast strength, scramble its 'favorite frequency.' Treat it like a bugged tower node."
She nodded.
"Do it," she said. "If they notice, they'll blame their own hardware first."
He opened Local Patch on the device's network flags.
[FLAG: BROADCAST_INTENSITY = 1.0]
[FLAG: RESONANCE_HARMONICS = OPTIMIZED.]
He dropped intensity to 0.3 and kicked harmonics slightly off "optimal"—still functional locally, but less of a beacon.
[LOCAL PATCH APPLIED.]
The shard's presence faded to a duller throb.
[FRAGMENT: STILL DAMAGED.]
[RANGE: REDUCED.]
"Good enough," he said. "They can still pray at it, but it's not shouting back as loud."
"Small win," Mira said.
Kael had one more impulse he couldn't stop.
He opened the device's descriptive tags and changed one line.
[DEVICE_LABEL: 'ROOT THRONE' → 'FRAGMENT CAGE.']
It was petty.
It made him feel better anyway.
They slipped back out, leaving everything physically intact.
In his log view, a new entry appeared under Inheritance.
[NEW DATA: OTHER SHARD STATES OBSERVED – DAMAGED.]
[RISK ESTIMATE: SHARD ABUSE – HIGH.]
Kael thought of Haneul, safe in a bed for now, fan mail in her drawer.
"Yeah," he said softly. "We're not letting anyone cage hers."
Outside, the Tower loomed over the district, humming.
Inside the System, shards whispered, the corpse-brain muttered, and somewhere in the middle, a bug-labeled E-rank and his sister tried to change a few words in the margins.