The rain began as a whisper on the windows.
Yi Ji-Hyuk didn't look up. He sat still in the half-dark of his rooftop room, eyes fixed on the blood crystal he'd taken from the cultist the night before. Even cracked, it still pulsed softly. A dying heartbeat from another world.
He'd spent hours analyzing its structure. It wasn't just a spell anchor — it was a resonance seed. Something more dangerous. It didn't just open a portal.
It linked them.
That meant the other rifts weren't isolated events. They were connected, timed, sequenced like notes in a summoning chant.
One opening made the next easier.
And if enough opened at once…
The veil would fall.
Ji-Hyuk finally stood. He wasn't just chasing fragments anymore. He was walking into a pattern. And at the center of that pattern was a dead man — Vernox, a name even Berafe had once whispered with fear.
He needed answers — not from cultists or cursed artifacts, but from someone who'd survived longer than he had.
There was one.
An exile. A recluse who had walked away from Berafe's final war and hadn't been seen since.
Ji-Hyuk remembered her name like a splinter: Maeryn the Still. Once a high-sorceress of the Mind Sea. A woman with no allegiance but her own.
She had vanished during the Collapse — fled through the void between realms.
If she was here, on Earth, she would be hiding.
He knew exactly where.
The old temple on Gwanak Mountain had stood abandoned for decades.
Locals avoided it — they said voices came from the trees. Said lanterns floated in the fog when no one should be there.
Ji-Hyuk climbed in silence, each footstep sure, quiet. He passed wards layered across the trail — not modern charms, but dream-weaving traps designed to twist the minds of intruders.
They didn't touch him.
He reached the peak before nightfall.
And saw her waiting.
Maeryn had changed little. Hair white as starlight. Eyes too large for a human skull. Robes like drifting smoke, woven from nightmare threads. She sat on a stone slab at the edge of a collapsed shrine, legs crossed, unmoving.
"Ji-Hyuk," she said without surprise. "I wondered when you'd come."
He didn't ask how she knew.
He simply nodded. "Vernox is alive."
She didn't blink. "Yes."
"You knew?"
"I suspected."
He stepped closer. "Why didn't you act?"
"Because I no longer pretend to be a shield," she said quietly. "I saw what shielding cost you."
Silence fell between them.
Then Ji-Hyuk pulled the cracked blood crystal from his coat and placed it on the stone beside her.
"Tell me what you see."
Maeryn studied it for a long moment, then exhaled — not fear, but resignation.
"This is not just a resonance seed," she said. "This is a marker. Each one creates a path in the weave of the veil. Once seven are planted…"
"…the Door opens," Ji-Hyuk finished.
She nodded.
"How many have already been placed?"
Maeryn turned her face slightly. "Six."
The word fell like a blade.
Ji-Hyuk felt his stomach twist. "That's not possible. I've stopped three—"
"There were more," she said. "Not in Seoul. Not even in this country."
He stepped back. "They've already completed the chain."
"One anchor remains," she said. "And Vernox will not risk placing it himself. He'll send someone who doesn't even know what they are."
Ji-Hyuk clenched his fists. "Min-Soo."
Back in the city, thunder rolled over the skyline.
Ji-Hyuk didn't stop for stairs or roads. He blurred across rooftops, moving like a shadow behind the wind. His breath came slow, measured. But inside, panic clawed at him.
He'd told himself the boy wasn't important.
But that was a lie.
Min-Soo was young. Curious. Vulnerable. And if Vernox had marked him — if the rituals he'd performed had left an imprint — then the boy might be the final piece without even knowing it.
He burst through the door of Yeonho's shop.
The old man turned in alarm. "What is it?"
"Where is he?"
"Still in the back—"
Ji-Hyuk was already moving.
He threw open the storage room.
Min-Soo lay unconscious. Not dead — but glowing. A soft red shimmer surrounded his body. His chest rose and fell in slow, unnatural rhythm.
And beside him on the floor, drawn in his own hand — a seventh spiral.
A final mark.
"Vernox used him as the vessel," Ji-Hyuk growled. "This was the plan all along."
Yeonho stood frozen. "Can we stop it?"
Ji-Hyuk didn't answer right away.
He knelt beside the boy and placed a hand on his chest. "There's one chance."
"What?"
"Find the original Door. The true gate. The one all the others echo. If I can reach it before Vernox does, I can collapse the entire sequence."
Yeonho looked grim. "And if you fail?"
Ji-Hyuk stood.
"Then Earth becomes the second Berafe."
That night, as the sky cracked with lightning, Ji-Hyuk traced the signature of the spirals.
Each one pulsed on a different frequency — and if he aligned them correctly, he could triangulate the origin.
A single name appeared in his mind.
A place that had always drawn the cursed, the broken, the forgotten.
Nokcheon Landfill.
A ruined wasteland on the edge of Seoul.
It was there the Door would open.
And there, he would be waiting.
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