The East Wing was a graveyard of silence, until the ink began to drip.
Ji-yeol pulled a silver pocket watch from his coat, but it didn't track hours or minutes. The dial was a shifting gradient of colors representing "Memory Density." Right now, the needle was twitching deep into the violet—the color of a core trauma.
He knelt on the cold stone floor, his fingers tracing a stray red thread that snaked across the tiles like a living vein. To anyone else, it was just a string. To Ji-yeol, it pulsed with the rhythmic thrum of a fading heartbeat. He leaned in, his nose inches from the floor.
The smell hit him instantly: the cloying sweetness of a first kiss buried under the metallic tang of a sudden betrayal.
"Who were you?" he whispered to the empty air.
He reached into his leather satchel and withdrew a vial of Clearance Fluid. With the precision of a surgeon, he dropped a single bead onto the thread. The string hissed, turning into a plume of white smoke that momentarily took the shape of a child's bicycle before dissolving into nothingness.
Ji-yeol winced. A sharp, stinging pain flared in the back of his mind-the cost of the "Stitching" art. Somewhere in his own hollowed-out history, the memory of how a summer rain felt against his skin vanished, traded away to stabilize the local reality.
This was his life: a constant exchange of his own substance to keep the world from blurring.
He stood up, his legs feeling slightly heavier, more like lead than bone. He looked at his reflection in a nearby blank frame. His eyes were dark, tired, and increasingly flecked with gold—the sign of Ink Poisoning.
He wasn't just a Scribe; he was becoming a canvas. And if he didn't solve the mystery of the murder he was destined to commit, he would eventually be painted into a corner he could never walk out of.
A shadow stretched long across the floor, not belonging to any pillar or statue. It was thick, viscous, and moved with a jagged, frame-by-frame jitter.
Ji-yeol didn't run. He reached for his suitcase and clicked the brass locks open.