The man standing at the door was no mere stranger. His presence seemed to drink the light from the room, turning what little warmth remained in the air into a bone-deep chill. His black coat was long and so unnaturally dark it looked as though it had been stitched from the shadows of a moonless night. He stood motionless, like a wax statue, his eyes piercing the morgue's silence as they settled first on the old radio, then on Do-jin's face.
"Yes… it arrived," Do-jin forced the words out, his tongue heavy as lead. "But visiting hours are over. Who are you?"
The stranger did not answer. He took a single step inside. The sound of his leather shoe striking the wet floor rang out sharp and metallic, like a nail being driven into a coffin. He stopped a few steps from the autopsy table where So-ah lay, tilting his head at an unnatural angle.
"Names are just unnecessary noise," the stranger said, his voice rough and stripped of any human tremor. "I'm here to make sure this girl never speaks again—neither with her body, nor with what she left behind."
A violent pulse throbbed in Do-jin's left temple. The radio, which he had manually turned off, began to tremble atop the wooden table. It made no sound, but intense heat radiated from it, scorching the papers beneath. Do-jin realized the device was reacting—not in fear, but in hunger—for the frequency of the entity standing before him.
"Get out," Do-jin said, gripping a nearby surgical scalpel, trying to hide the tremor in his hand. "The body is now under state custody. Any interference is a crime."
The stranger smiled—but it was not truly a smile. It was merely the lips pulling back to reveal ivory-white teeth, cold and unnervingly uniform."The state?" he said. "The state is the one that sent me to ensure your silence, Park Do-jin. You possess something you do not understand… a device that steals the dead's final breaths. And that kind of curiosity is usually what fills these refrigerators."
Without warning, the morgue lights went out completely. The room drowned in absolute darkness—but for Do-jin, the world did not go black.
His cursed Sight had opened.
He perceived the room through pale gray frequencies, but the true shock lay in the stranger's form. In this spectral spectrum, the man had no human shape. He was a towering black absence—a hole torn into the fabric of reality, devouring every vibration around it. No beating heart. No breathing lungs. He was nothingness walking on two legs.
Agony ripped through Do-jin's left eye, as if a burning needle were being driven deep into it. Vision on that side began to collapse, replaced by blinding white static—visual snow swallowing reality. The radio was collecting its price for sight in the dark: Do-jin's vision in exchange for revealing the truth of this being.
The stranger slowly extended his hand toward the body bag. The instant his long fingers touched the plastic, the radio screamed—a piercing, sudden shriek that was not sound but force, a shockwave that shattered the tall morgue windows.
The stranger staggered back, as if scorched by the blast. In that moment, with the eye that still worked, Do-jin saw black threads spilling from the stranger's fingers, reaching for So-ah's neck, trying to erase what remained of her soul's frequency.
"You won't take her!" Do-jin shouted in a voice he barely recognized as his own, throwing himself forward and slamming the radio directly onto the corpse's chest, creating a shield of chaotic frequencies around her.
The stranger recoiled toward the door, his once-blank face now warped by the waves."You will pay for this, gravekeeper," he whispered, before dissolving into the corridor's darkness as though he had never existed.
The lights flickered back on.
Do-jin collapsed to the floor, gasping for air. Blood streamed from his ear and from his left eye, which now saw nothing but haze. He looked at the radio—it was completely silent, yet warm, warm like a living body.
So-ah had been spared erasure. But Do-jin now understood that the city rotting under corruption was not merely a city of evil humans. Something far older, far darker, was hunting the truth—and he had just become its next target.
He wiped the blood from his notebook and added, in a slanted hand:
"The enemy does not breathe. And the morgue is no longer safe."