The pawnshop smelled like old money and bad decisions.
Moo-Hyun stood outside it for forty seconds, reading the sign twice, then a third time. Artex Premium Artifact Exchange. By Appointment Only. Below that, in smaller text: Walk-ins accommodated at management's discretion.
He had not made an appointment. He was accommodating himself at his own discretion. He pushed the door open.
The interior was the kind of clean that required staff. White display cases ran the length of both walls, each one lit from below with the precise, calculated warmth of a jewelry boutique that understood its clientele had money and liked to be reminded of it. The artifacts inside ranged from rings and pendants to what appeared to be a folded piece of cloth that had its own humidity-controlled case and a price tag Moo-Hyun could not read from the doorway.
There were no other customers. There was no visible staff.
Then a door behind the main counter opened, and Oh Ji-Hyun walked out.
[SYSTEM: Desire Analysis active. Target: Oh Ji-Hyun. Primary motivation: acquisition. Secondary motivation: assessment. Structural vulnerability: none currently accessible. Combat classification: non-threatening.]
Moo-Hyun filed that information away and focused on not limping visibly, which he failed at immediately.
She was taller than he had expected. Dark hair pulled back with the specific effortlessness that took considerable effort to achieve. A white blazer over a silk blouse the color of champagne. She looked like she managed a high-end gallery, or possibly owned one, and she was smiling at him with the particular warmth of someone who had decided, in the three seconds since he walked in, exactly what category he belonged to.
"Welcome," she said. Her voice was pleasant. Even. "We don't usually see walk-ins before noon."
"I have something to sell."
"Most people who walk in here do." She came around the counter without hurry, hands clasped in front of her, and stopped two meters away. Her eyes went to his jacket pocket, where the ring sat wrapped in a convenience store receipt because he had not owned anything better to wrap it in. "May I ask what you're bringing us?"
He pulled it out and set it on the counter between them.
She looked at it. Nothing in her expression changed, which was itself a kind of change. The smile stayed exactly where it was, but the quality behind it shifted, the way a camera shifts when it refocuses on something closer.
She picked up a small device from behind the counter and held it near the ring without touching it.
The device chimed once.
She set it down. She looked at him properly for the first time, the way people look at something they are recalibrating their understanding of.
"Grade A Spatial Ring," she said. "Fifty cubic meters of verified internal storage. Pre-Cataclysm manufacture, based on the resonance signature." A brief pause. "Where did you get this?"
"Gate Spawn drop. Street-level incident in Mapo-gu this morning. It was under the rubble."
"Gate Spawn drops at street level are typically Grade F or G." She said it pleasantly, without accusation. "A Grade A artifact from that source would be statistically extraordinary."
"It was an extraordinary morning."
She looked at him for another moment. Then the smile widened, slightly, in a direction he could not quite name.
"I'll need to run a full provenance scan," she said. "Standard procedure for anything above Grade C. It takes about twenty minutes. There's coffee in the waiting area." She gestured toward a set of chairs near the window. "I'm Oh Ji-Hyun, by the way. I own the shop."
"Jeon Moo-Hyun."
"Mr. Jeon." She picked up the ring with two fingers and carried it toward the back. "Make yourself comfortable."
He sat. His foot throbbed. He drank the coffee, which was genuinely excellent, and spent nineteen minutes reading the price tags on the display cases nearest to him. By the time Oh Ji-Hyun returned, he had revised his understanding of what wealthy meant three times in succession.
She set a printed document on the table in front of him along with the ring.
"Provenance is clean," she said, sitting across from him with the ease of someone who had conducted ten thousand of these conversations and found them all mildly interesting. "No reported theft registry matches, no guild claim flags." She folded her hands on the table. "I can offer you two hundred and eighty million won."
Moo-Hyun looked at the document. "The market value is three hundred and forty million."
"The market value accounts for private sale between registered parties. My margin covers authentication, insurance, and resale infrastructure." She tilted her head. "It's a fair offer, Mr. Jeon."
"It's a sixty-million-won gap."
"It is." She smiled. "Most sellers take it anyway because they need the liquidity quickly and don't have another buyer."
"Do I look like I need liquidity quickly?"
She glanced at his jacket, which had pavement dust on the left sleeve and a small tear at the cuff from the morning's events. She glanced at the convenience store receipt he had left on the table. She looked back at him with an expression that managed to be diplomatic.
"A little," she said.
[SYSTEM: Current thought detected.]
[Rendering in 3... 2... 1...]
"She's not wrong but I'm not going to admit that out loud."
The silence that followed was brief and complete.
Oh Ji-Hyun blinked once. Her smile did not move. Something behind her eyes, however, shifted with the quality of a lock mechanism engaging.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Did you just..."
"System ability," Moo-Hyun said, with the flat tone of a man who had made peace with nothing but was pretending otherwise. "It vocalizes my thoughts. I have no control over it. I would appreciate it if we both agreed to treat it as ambient noise."
A pause.
"That sounds," Oh Ji-Hyun said carefully, "like an extraordinarily inconvenient ability."
"Top five worst mornings of my life and I died in one of them."
Another pause, longer. She looked at him with an expression he could not categorize, which was new. Most people's expressions he could categorize.
"Three hundred and ten million," she said. "That's my ceiling."
"Three hundred and twenty."
"Three hundred and fifteen, and I give you my direct line for future sales. No appointment required, no standard commission on the first three transactions."
He thought about it. The system, mercifully, did not vocalize his thoughts for the duration of those four seconds, which he chose to interpret as a small act of institutional grace.
"Done," he said.
She produced a contract. It was pre-formatted, which meant she had written the revised number in by hand in the margin, which meant she had anticipated the negotiation reaching approximately this point, which meant she was considerably better at this than she had allowed him to see.
He signed it. She countersigned it. She handed him a card, matte black with silver text. Her name, a phone number, nothing else.
"Cash transfer within the hour," she said, standing. "Standard processing time." She picked up the ring and held it for a moment, turning it in the light. "May I ask you something, Mr. Jeon?"
"You can ask."
"You're not registered as a Hunter. I ran your name during the provenance scan." She said it without apology, the way people state operational facts. "No guild affiliation, no rank record, no combat history on file. And yet you survived a street-level Gate Spawn encounter with a C-Rank entity and walked out with a Grade A artifact." She set the ring down gently in its case. "That's an unusual combination of circumstances."
"Unusual morning," he said again.
She smiled. This one was different from the previous ones, smaller and more specific.
"You said that already." She walked him toward the door. "I hope your next unusual morning brings you something equally interesting to sell, Mr. Jeon."
He stepped out into the street. The door closed behind him with a soft, expensive click.
He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, card in hand, foot aching, three hundred and fifteen million won in transit to a bank account he needed to open before the transfer arrived.
[SYSTEM: Observation logged. Oh Ji-Hyun ran a background check on you during a routine provenance scan. This is not standard procedure for a first-time anonymous walk-in seller.]
Moo-Hyun looked back at the shop window. The glass was tinted. He could not see inside.
He put the card in his pocket and started walking.
Behind the tinted glass, Oh Ji-Hyun stood at her counter, holding the Grade A Spatial Ring up to the light, turning it slowly between two fingers.
She was still smiling.