The safehouse was no longer just a hiding place. It had become a factory for reshaping a mind. After three months of intense training under Min-ho and his team of "Guardian Memory," Park Jin-woo was fundamentally different from the boy who had entered the door trembling.
But the official training was only half the truth.
At night, when everyone thought he was asleep, Jin-woo would sit in the darkness, replaying those few moments from Kim's live feed. He had counted the repetitions: 1,247 times for the first movement (opening the circle). 893 times for the second gesture (pointing down). 1,562 times for that direct look into the camera.
And the results were crystallizing.
It wasn't just a map of a prison. It was a timetable. Kim, through his encoded body language, was describing the guard cycle of the facility: guard changes every 6 hours, with a lapse of 3 minutes and 42 seconds between patrols at dawn. He identified a blind spot in the southeastern corner, where a security camera was obstructed by an old lamppost.
Kim was building the very prison he was trapped in inside Jin-woo's mind, then teaching him how to dismantle it, piece by piece.
Day Ninety:
The practical test came. Min-ho took Jin-woo to the upscale office district in Gangnam. From inside a parked car, he pointed to a glass high-rise.
"Fourteenth floor. A German law firm. In reality, it's a communication node for The Collection. Your task: breach their virtual security system."
Min-ho gave him a heavy laptop and a bulky cellular modem. There was no fancy hacking. The task relied on observation and deduction.
"You have recorded security patrol logs, employee entry patterns, even electricity bills. Use pattern repetition to spot the anomaly."
Jin-woo dove into the data. His mind, trained to repeat patterns until they became instinct, began to distinguish routine from error. He discovered that a specific guard was consistently 4 minutes late every Tuesday. And that power consumption in the fourteenth-floor lobby spiked slightly between 2 and 3 AM, when the office should be empty.
"There's a back room. They're using power after hours," Jin-woo deduced. "And the tardy guard... he might be a vulnerability, or he might be part of the trap."
"Correct," said Min-ho. "Now the real question: Will you exploit that vulnerability? Or will you avoid it because it might be bait?"
This was a new game: double-edged doubt. Everything he learned could be a weapon or a trap.
Month Four:
A new element entered the training: real danger. It was no longer simulation. Min-ho took Jin-woo to an abandoned warehouse on the city's outskirts, where a massively built, silent man covered in fight scars awaited them.
"This is Mr. Jang. He was a fighter in the unlicensed rings of Busan Port. His style is chaotic, violent, and has no name. Your task: Avoid his attack for two minutes without using any of your formal training moves."
"Why?" Jin-woo asked.
"Because The Collection doesn't send knights with systems. They send beasts like Jang."
The attack began. Jang was a whirlwind of hammer fists and crushing kicks. Jin-woo tried to apply the evasion principles he'd learned, but they were too clean, too sporty for this kind of chaos. A heavy blow to his shoulder knocked the wind out of him.
Stop.
His mind screamed: Forget what you learned! Just watch him!
He forced himself to focus. To repeat what he saw. Jang's first move: a wide, swinging punch. Second: a wild kick. Third... there was a pattern. Not a fighting pattern, but a rage pattern. Jang spent his energy in the first three strikes, then paused for a second to breathe.
On the fourth assault, as Jang raised his arm to strike, Jin-woo moved not backward, but forward, inside the arc of the punch before it gained momentum. He shoved his shoulder into Jang's chest, disrupting his balance. The giant fell to the ground, stunned.
Silence.
Jang got up, looking at Jin-woo differently. Then he nodded to Min-ho and left the warehouse.
"What did you do?" Min-ho asked, his voice holding genuine interest for the first time.
"I didn't use any style. I repeated his failures. I didn't copy him, I copied his mistakes."
This was a paradigm shift. He wasn't copying art anymore. He was copying error. And every human, no matter how strong, was full of errors.
The Decisive Night:
Min-ho came to the safehouse late, his face pale. In his hand, an old VHS tape.
"This isn't from our archive. It was left on the doorstep. Addressed to you."
He played the tape on the old TV in the safehouse. The grainy screen showed Kim. He was in a different, smaller room. His face was gaunt and pale, but his eyes held a strange fire. He looked directly into the camera and began to speak in a hoarse voice:
*"If you're watching this, pupil, then I am either dead, or time has run out. Listen well: In Incheon Port, Warehouse No. 7, the sub-level. They don't store weapons there. They store memory itself. Tapes, notebooks, DNA samples of masters. It's the real 'Reservoir.' Its security is weak... because no one believes anyone would try to steal memories."*
Kim paused, then added, his final words choked:
"Don't save me. Reclaim what was taken. Break the Reservoir. When you do, they will know that memory... cannot be held forever."
The tape ended.
A heavy silence.
"It's a trap," Min-ho said finally. "As clear as day."
"I know," said Jin-woo.
"He's sacrificing himself as bait to draw you there."
"I know."
"If you go, your probability of death is 95%. Your probability of success is less than 10%."
"I know."
Min-ho looked at Jin-woo and saw something in the boy's eyes he hadn't seen before. Not reckless bravery. A quiet certainty. The certainty of one who knew the price of everything and had decided to pay it regardless.
"Why?" asked Min-ho.
"Because he trained me in one thing you didn't," Jin-woo said, his voice steady. "Loyalty."
This was the moment Min-ho understood: they had lost. Jin-woo was not a weapon of the Guardian Memory. He was Kim's weapon. And the weapon was now aiming at its final target.
"What will you do?" asked Min-ho.
"What I was trained for," said Jin-woo, turning to pack a small bag. "I will repeat. A thousand times. Until I become the shadow they don't see. Until I enter the vaults of their memory... and burn them."
Outside the window, Seoul began to sink into the darkness of night. And in the safehouse room, a single boy prepared for a war the world didn't know, armed with his only weapon: the ability to remember, and a will that would never forget.