The old address led to a modest five-story office building on a quiet Itaewon side street. The ground floor housed a small electronics shop, the upper windows were shut and dark. The number from the archive was for the third floor.
Jin-woo slipped quietly through the slightly ajar main door, past a broken elevator, and up stairs coated in thick dust. The air was stale, smelling of old paper and rusting metal. On the third-floor door, where the "Society" should have been, there was no nameplate. Just a faint discoloration on the paint where one had once been.
He pushed the door, and it opened with a ghostly creak. The inside was as he imagined: an abandoned shell.
A single large room, almost empty. Slants of streetlight leaking through grimy windows cut lines in the dust that coated everything. Empty filing shelves lined the walls. In the corner, a filing cabinet lay on its side, its drawers open and void. The place had been swept clean.
But Jin-woo wasn't looking for big things. He was looking for shards. The small things that get forgotten.
He knelt and began carefully sweeping dust from the floor with his hand. He felt under the edges of shelves. Nothing. Then, under the toppled cabinet, he noticed something: a patch of dust that looked less thick, as if a rectangular object had lain there and been recently dragged away.
And beside that patch, a small, rolled-up piece of paper.
He picked it up delicately. It was a torn fragment from an old training manual, a schematic diagram of a fighting stance from the rare Indonesian art of "Silat Serim." The drawing was precise, with marginal notes in tiny, dense handwriting.
But the paper wasn't the only clue. On its back, there was a symbol.
Not exactly the same as the one on Kim's bracelet, but from the same family. It depicted a figure in a fighting pose, but with a broken circle above its head, like a shattered crown or halo.
A faulty memory? A symbol of fracture?
It felt as if this small piece had been left deliberately, or dropped in a hurried evacuation.
Then, Jin-woo looked at a far wall. At first it seemed blank, but as the light angle shifted, he saw scratches. Not random. A series of short and long lines, organized in groups.
Simple Morse code.
His mind, trained in precise observation, decoded it quickly:
.-- .- .-. -. .. -. --. --..-- / -. --- - / .- .-.. --- -. .
(WARNING, NOT ALONE)
Warning. Not alone.
Jin-woo's heart flipped. He spun around, scanning the room's shadows. No one. But the message was clear: someone else had been here and left this warning. But for whom? Was it a warning from within, from a former society member trying to alert truth-seekers? Or was it bait, left by hunters to lure curious prey like him?
At that moment, he heard a faint sound from the building's lower floor. The soft, deliberate creak of the main door opening and then closing.
He truly was not alone now.
He looked around desperately. No exits except the door he came from and the grimy window overlooking a narrow back alley.