Ji-Hoon emerged from the wrecked tunnel just before sunrise.
The sky over Seoul was fractured again. Lines of warning code bled faintly through the clouds like veins—system alerts still rippling through the air. Civilians didn't notice them. Players did. Especially the awakened.
His interface buzzed, but not with a message.
✦ [You are now Blacklisted.]
✦ [All official Edenfall resources have revoked access.]
✦ [You are considered a Priority Rogue Asset.]
✦ [Your location may be tracked by any player ranked A or above.]
Ji-Hoon closed the alert.
He didn't stop walking.
["You realize what this means, right?" Luma asked. Her tone wasn't sharp. It was heavy. "You're fair game. Anyone who hunts you gets system rewards. Some of them will come just for the notoriety."]
"Let them."
He pulled the cloak tighter. It didn't make him invisible—but it bent the rules just enough. Enough to slip through crowded streets like a ghost, just another shadow lost in the early morning haze.
He was moving toward District 9.
Not because it was safe.
Because that's where she was.
Park Nari.
Former developer. Supposedly dead. One of the few who helped build Edenfall's earliest combat engines. Ryu trusted her once. Enough to leave a trace of her signature in the inheritance line Ji-Hoon triggered back in Chapter Zero.
She'd been hiding under a fake name.
Not anymore.
["You think she knows what they did to Kaeri?"]
"I think she helped build the coffin they put her in."
He didn't sound angry. He sounded like someone who had finally stopped asking questions and started hunting for answers.
He reached the edge of a system wall.
A thin glowing strip in the air—barely noticeable, unless you were looking. But past it, reality changed. It wasn't just a visual effect. The world bent.
Ji-Hoon stepped through.
District 9 flickered into shape. Half-coded buildings. Broken tech overlays. A place where debugging had failed and time skipped in fragments. People still lived here—outcasts, ghost-class users, the kinds of players who never got support patches.
A small girl watched him from a second-story window.
Her eyes flickered with interface light.
Not scared.
Recognizing.
["Ji-Hoon," Luma said suddenly. "Someone's tracing you. Just started. B-rank skill—Signal Leash. You've got maybe twenty seconds before they pinpoint you."]
He didn't stop.
Instead, he ducked into a shattered café.
The counter was long gone, but the back wall still hummed faintly with old dev code—some kind of local patch buffer. He triggered a cloak override and vanished just as the tracer entered.
A man in a long red coat stepped into view.
White gloves. Monocle interface. The kind of elegance that reeked of arrogance.
"Well, well. The Recode Ghost," the man said aloud. "I was hoping we could talk before you ended up on the bounty boards."
Ji-Hoon said nothing.
But the man turned.
Right toward him.
"You're not the only one who can see broken code."
✦ [Skill Detected: Reality Vein – Unique Class Signature]
Ji-Hoon dropped the illusion and moved.
So did the man.
They clashed in a burst of fractal light—code flaring off invisible weapons, system warnings flashing overhead. Ji-Hoon ducked under a fan-blade sweep of compressed data, retaliated with a low lunge and injected Phantom Thread—
—but the man caught it.
Midair.
"Too slow," he said calmly, as if bored. "You still think like a player. Not a function."
Ji-Hoon backed off, eyes narrowing.
"Who are you?"
The man smiled faintly.
"Someone who wants you alive, for now. Someone who knows what Ryu built—and what he buried."
He tossed something forward.
A data key.
It hit the ground between them and unfolded like origami, revealing a holographic map. Not of Seoul.
Of a floating city. Surrounded by firewall rings. Label: VANTH_01.
And above it, a name Ji-Hoon hadn't seen since the first gate broke open:
[KAERI HAN – ACTIVE]
Then the man was gone.
No sound. No light.
Just vanished.
Ji-Hoon stood alone again in the ruins.
["That city," Luma said. "It's not supposed to exist anymore. It was the original system core. The Eden prototype."]
Ji-Hoon stared at the map.
Kaeri wasn't in a cell.
She was running something.
And he was running out of time.