The morning sunlight sifted softly through the blinds of the conference room, painting faint lines across the table. Minjae sat with his reports open, posture steady, expression unreadable. The quarterly projections flickered across the projector screen, but his attention drifted again and again to the flare he had witnessed days ago.
Not the light.
The feeling.
That brief pulse beneath his skin—like something waking. Like a whisper pressed against the edges of his consciousness.
He tried to focus on the meeting, on the numbers and the polite commentary exchanged across the table. But the memory intruded anyway, trailing behind his thoughts like smoke.
A vibration broke through his reverie.
His secured phone—a device disconnected from all company networks—buzzed once.
A new message.
Unknown source.
Clean encryption.
Same channel as before.
Check file #47 in secure drop. Possible correlation with aberrant data.
He blinked slowly, thumb brushing over the screen. He expected another piece of useless speculation or a recycled rumor—but the sender never wasted time. Whoever they were, they had consistently pointed him toward anomalies that aligned eerily well with his own findings.
He inhaled quietly and decrypted the file.
A provincial town. A cluster of people experiencing sudden bursts of strength, short-lived telekinetic shoves, and energy spikes. Witnesses described a sensation like being "pushed from the inside," a phrase he'd seen too many times now.
Minjae leaned back, brows knitting.
Vitalia surges.
A primitive echo of power.
Human life force, raw and unstable—nothing like the refined flows dragons once wielded, but unmistakably related.
He checked timestamps, geographic coordinates, environmental shifts.
Each time, they aligned disturbingly close to the ambient fluctuations he recorded during his own rune trials.
Coincidence?
No.
Pressure.
Resonance.
Leakage.
"Not good," he murmured.
Whatever he was awakening—whatever he was testing—might already be bleeding into the world in small, unstable waves.
A voice cut into the conference room.
"Minjae-ssi, your input on the projections?"
He exhaled softly, straightened, and spoke calm and clear.
"Scenario B is the safest long-term route. But we'll need to study competitor patterns over the next quarter before finalizing."
A few nods. A few notes scribbled.
The attention moved on.
But Minjae felt the weight settle again in his chest, quiet and persistent.
---
Hours later, after the meeting disbanded, Seori approached him by the tall windows. Sunlight angled over her shoulder, catching the faint worry in her eyes.
She held a stack of personnel files, but she didn't look at them.
She looked at him.
"I heard about your late nights again," she said softly. "You can't keep doing this. You'll burn out."
Her tone was gentle, but there was an edge beneath it.
Something unspoken.
"I'm fine," Minjae replied. "Just finishing some personal research."
"Personal research," she repeated, unconvinced. "Every time you say that, you come to work looking like you haven't slept."
He gave a faint, apologetic smile.
"I appreciate the concern. Truly. But there's something I need to understand first."
Her brows drew together, as if she could see the heaviness in him without knowing its shape.
"Whatever it is," she said quietly, "you don't have to deal with it alone."
He looked at her—really looked—and felt a sting of guilt.
Not because he didn't trust her.
But because trusting her too much might unravel everything he'd kept hidden across lifetimes.
Still, he nodded.
"Thank you, Seori."
She didn't push further. She just waited a second longer, then returned to her desk—though she glanced back twice.
---
In the break room, Yura was battling the coffee machine, tapping her pen against her notebook in a rhythm too quick to be casual. When she noticed him walk in, her eyes flicked to his face, then narrowed with amusement.
"You're doing that thing again," she said. "The one where your brain is five floors underground while your body is here pretending to drink coffee."
He grabbed a paper cup.
"Just thinking."
"About anomalies?" she teased. "Patterns? Mysteries? The usual?"
"A bit of everything."
Yura smirked. "You know, curiosity killed the cat."
"Good thing I'm not a cat."
She snorted. "Noted. If you end up collapsing during the strategic session tomorrow, I'll say 'I told you so' very quietly."
He allowed a faint grin.
"I'll keep that in mind."
Her expression softened just enough to betray her worry before she masked it again with her playful facade. She watched him leave the break room, her gaze lingering longer than she meant it to.
---
Later that night—long after the company lights dimmed and the city noise softened beneath the hum of street lamps—Minjae drove to the secluded lab hidden far from downtown. The facility didn't appear in any company documentation. It didn't belong to his division. It didn't exist on a map.
And yet, it existed for him.
Purchased years ago under a forgotten shell name.
Buried in transactions no auditor would trace.
The retinal scan accepted him.
The locks unlatched in quiet succession.
Inside, the air was cool and still. The faint chalk scars of previous experiments remained etched in memory even after he'd cleaned them. The equipment blinked in neat rows, waiting.
He set down his bag and opened the file from earlier.
Vitalia surges.
Human will as catalyst.
Unstable bursts triggered by emotional extremes.
He compared graphs, matching the spikes in the incident report to the faint irregularities in his own rune activation logs.
The pattern was subtle. Almost unnoticeable.
But not to him.
"It's resonating," he murmured. "Indirectly. But undeniably."
The idea sent a cold ripple down his spine.
If humans were reacting to his experiments—even weakly—then the boundary between observation and influence was thinner than he'd assumed.
He rolled up his sleeves.
No time to hesitate.
He prepared a new setup: heart-rate monitors, EEG patches, heat sensors.
A fresh rune etched with careful, practiced strokes—the same one he'd recreated for "Veran," but refined. Angles perfected. Lines smoothed. He stayed faithful to its original form—one he had once carved into stone centuries ago.
He breathed out, keeping his mind steady.
Focused, but not forced.
He placed his hand against the chalk.
And let himself remember.
Not the glory.
Not the power.
But the moment he lost everything he once was.
The moment he chose to fall.
The moment he became Minjae.
A tension built behind his ribs—not panic, but a tightness shaped by memory and quiet grief.
His fingers trembled—just slightly.
The rune responded.
A faint glow.
Soft.
Unsteady.
He leaned closer.
The shimmer held—thin as spider silk—before collapsing into darkness again.
Still progress.
But exhaustion hit him with a sudden, hollow weight. His knees weakened, and he sank back into the chair, chest rising rapidly.
"Not… enough," he whispered. "But close."
He wiped sweat from his brow and stared at the silent table.
Human will.
Emotional pressure.
Unresolved intent.
It wasn't the rune waiting for him.
It was something inside him waiting to be honest.
He sat in the dim lab for a long moment, letting his heartbeat slow.
The city lights outside blinked like distant stars.
A question lingered—one he wasn't ready to say aloud:
What if the missing variable… is the part of me I've been trying to forget?
He closed his journal, stood slowly, and shut down the lab one switch at a time.
Tomorrow he would return to the office.
He would sit through the strategic session, listen to Yuri's quiet questions, Seori's soft worry, Yura's pointed teasing.
He would play the part of Minjae.
But tonight—
in the silence, in the fading echo of runes and memory—
he felt the edges of something ancient shift inside him.
Not awakening.
Not yet.
But listening.
Waiting for him to stop pretending.