The kitchen of the Seoul Academy of Culinary Arts was a cathedral of stainless steel and suppressed anxiety.
It was 10:42 AM, and for Min-Seo, it was the closest thing to a sanctuary she had ever known.
At twenty-eight, she was a decade older than most of her peers. While they were worrying about social media aesthetics, Min-Seo was focusing on the physics of a sauce.
She stood at Station Four, her whisk moving in a blurred figure-eight. Beneath her hand, the egg yolks and lemon juice were transitioning from a liquid state into a delicate, pale-yellow emulsion.
"Steady, Min," Chef Park murmured, passing behind her.
He didn't stop to look; he didn't have to.
He could hear the thickness of the sauce by the sound of the whisk against the copper bowl.
"Don't let the heat climb. A broken sauce is a broken soul."
Min-Seo didn't blink.
She was focused on the mise en place—the French philosophy of everything in its place.
Order was why she was here.
Two years ago, she had been a lead surgeon at a high-volume veterinary trauma center.
She had spent six years in the "Scream Room," as the techs called it—a place of jagged bone, panicked animals, and the heavy, metallic scent of blood that never quite left her skin.
The burnout hadn't been a sudden snap; it had been a slow erosion of her spirit.
The final straw hadn't been a grand tragedy, but a preventable one.
A three-year-old Jindo had been brought in, skeletal and suffering from a systemic infection that had turned its blood to water.
The owners had "forgotten" to provide basic care for months, then expected Min-Seo to perform a miracle in an hour.
When the dog's heart finally gave up on the table, the owners hadn't cried for the pet; they had shouted at Min-Seo about the bill.
She had put the clipboard down, walked into the locker room, and realized she couldn't look at another living thing with the hope of fixing it.
She needed something that stayed where she put it.
She needed ingredients that didn't have heartbeats.
She had traded the stethoscope for the chef's knife.
She had traded the unpredictable cruelty of neglectful owners for the controlled, delicious chemistry of the kitchen.
Cooking was her hobby, her therapy, and now, her second act.
Then, the sound of the city changed.
It wasn't a bang.
It was a long, collective hush.
Min-Seo felt it in the soles of her feet before she heard it.
The constant thrum of Seoul—the distant roar of the Han River traffic, the subway hum, the chatter of the sidewalk—simply evaporated.
In its place came a heavy, pressurized silence that made her ears pop.
"Chef?" a student at the fish station asked, his voice cracking.
Through the wide, reinforced glass of the academy's atrium, Min-Seo saw a bus drift across four lanes of traffic.
It didn't crash.It simply rolled to a stop against a curb, its engine idling with a lonely, mechanical rattle.
The driver didn't get out.
He just sat there, his forehead pressed against the steering wheel, staring at the dashboard.
The pedestrians on the sidewalk stopped mid-stride.
A woman in a business suit froze with one foot lifted, like a statue in a game of freeze-tag.
They weren't dead.
They were still.