At 3:07 AM, Yeji peeled the medical tape from her arm, slid the IV needle out of the vein, and pressed a cotton ball to the bead of blood that followed.
The needle went back on the tray. The monitors she left connected — pulling the pulse oximeter off her finger would trigger an alarm at the nurse's station, but she could work around that. She clipped it to the bedsheet instead, bunched to approximate the width of a finger. Not perfect. It would read low. But the night nurse was monitoring sixteen rooms, and a slightly anomalous O2 reading on a stable patient wouldn't pull her off rounds for at least thirty minutes.
Thirty minutes. She'd work with that.
Hospital slippers. No grip on the linoleum. She shuffled to the door and cracked it open. The fifth floor hallway stretched in both directions — fluorescent panels on half-power for the overnight shift, casting everything in that sickly yellow that made healthy people look jaundiced and sick people look dead. The nurse's station was forty meters to the right, positioned at the hallway's T-junction where two corridors met. One nurse on duty, her back to the hall, her screen glowing blue.
"Left," Minwoo murmured from behind her. His spectral form was so dim that she could only see him when she looked directly at him, and even then he was more suggestion than shape — a blue outline, the ghost of a ghost. "Stairwell's to the left. I scouted while you were pretending to sleep."
"You scouted the hospital."
"I'm a dead man in a building. What else am I going to do?"
She went left. The stairwell was at the hall's far end, past a supply closet and a locked medication room. The door had a push-bar that clunked when she opened it, the sound absurdly loud in the overnight quiet. She froze. Counted to five. No footsteps. No call from the nurse's station.
Down.
The stairs were concrete, each step cold through the thin soles of her slippers. Fourth floor — general surgery recovery. Third floor — imaging and diagnostics. Second floor — administration, dark and locked. First floor — lobby, emergency entrance, the ambient noise of a hospital that never fully slept.
Basement.
The stairwell ended at a heavy fire door with a placard that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY — MORTUARY AND PATHOLOGY. The door was locked. Keycard access. Yeji stared at it.
"Locked," she said.
"Yeah." Minwoo drifted through the door — literally through it, his spectral body passing through the steel like it wasn't there — and she heard his voice from the other side, muffled. "There's a keypad on this side too. Hold on."
A pause. Then: "There's a four-digit code scratched into the wall next to the pad. Someone got tired of looking it up."
"What is it?"
"7734. If you turn it upside down it spells hell. Mortuary humor."
She punched in the code. The lock clicked. The door opened onto a short hallway, cooler than the stairwell, the air carrying something she recognized from her one and only visit to a pathology lab during undergrad — formaldehyde and refrigerant and the sterile emptiness of spaces designed to hold bodies.
The morgue was at the hallway's end. Another door, this one unlocked. She pushed it open.
Steel. The room was mostly steel — drawers in the walls, four columns of three, each with a handle and a label slot. An examination table in the center, bolted to the floor, drainage channels running to a sink. Overhead lights, currently off; the room was lit by emergency strips along the baseboards, giving everything a low, orange cast. Cold. Not freezing — the refrigeration was in the drawers themselves — but cold enough that Yeji's bare arms prickled.
A clipboard hung by the door. She checked it. Four drawers occupied:
*Drawer 2A: Lee Dongwook, C-rank, COD: hemorrhagic shock during surgery. TOD: 19:42.*
*Drawer 3A: Han Junseong, B-rank, COD: mana overload during dungeon clear. TOD: 14:15.*
*Drawer 1B: Kim Yeonhee, D-rank, COD: monster laceration. TOD: 22:08.*
*Drawer 3B: Park Seojin, C-rank, COD: cardiac arrest post-dungeon. TOD: 06:30.*
Four hunters. Dead within the last thirty-six hours. Four names on a clipboard in a basement that smelled like chemicals and cold.
Yeji closed her eyes and let [Requiem] open.
Two voices. Not four — two. The other two drawers were silent, their occupants either at peace or too recently dead to have formed coherent spirits. Or already too degraded to hear. She didn't know the rules yet. There weren't rules. There was just this: a twenty-two-year-old woman standing barefoot in a hospital morgue at 3 AM, listening.
The louder voice came from Drawer 2A.
*...Jiyeon? Jiyeon, can you hear me? I'm in here. Something's wrong. I can't see. I can't move. The surgery — they said the surgery was routine. They said I'd be fine. Why am I in the dark?*
Lee Dongwook. C-rank. Dead since 7:42 PM. Eight hours, and he was already coherent enough to call for his wife.
The fainter voice — Drawer 3B — was different. Older. Already starting to fragment. *...the dungeon was... I shouldn't have... the numbers didn't...* Loops forming. Consciousness starting to compress into its final obsessions. Park Seojin had been dead since yesterday morning. A full day. Already degrading.
Yeji approached Drawer 2A. The steel was cold under her palm — colder than dungeon stone, industrial cold, the refrigerant working to preserve tissue that would never breathe again. Through the metal, Dongwook's voice was clearer. Not embedded in architecture like the dungeon spirits. Not pressed into stone by mana saturation. This was different. He was still attached to his body. Tethered to the corpse in the drawer by a connection she could sense with [Requiem] — a cord of consciousness linking the dead mind to the dead flesh, thin and taut, vibrating with the strain of a soul trying to animate meat that wouldn't respond.
"Mr. Lee," she said.
The voice stopped.
Then, cautious: *Who's there? Are you a nurse? I can't see you. Something's wrong with my eyes.*
"My name is Ahn Yeji. I'm not a nurse. I'm a hunter."
*A hunter?* Confusion. Not the angry confusion of Miran or the degraded confusion of Jaehyun. Something fresher. Rawer. The confusion of a man who'd walked into a hospital expecting to walk out. *What are you doing in my room? Where's my wife? She was supposed to be here when I woke up.*
Yeji's hand stayed on the drawer. The cold seeped into her bones. She should have brought a jacket. She should have brought a lot of things she didn't have.
"Mr. Lee, I need to ask you something. What's the last thing you remember?"
*The surgery. I was going into surgery. The raid — we cleared a B-rank gate in Songpa, but one of the golems got me in the side. The healers patched it on-site but the internal bleeding didn't stop, so the team leader called for evac. I woke up in the ambulance. The paramedic said I was going to be fine. He said it three times. "You're going to be fine, you're going to be fine, you're going to be fine." Then they put the mask on and I was in the operating room and the anesthesiologist asked me to count back from ten.*
"How far did you get?"
*Seven. I think. Maybe six. And then it was dark. And I was here. In the dark. I can't move. I can't see. I tried calling for the nurses but no one—*
He stopped.
*Why am I in the dark?*
Yeji bit the inside of her cheek. The taste of copper grounded her. She'd done grief counseling practicum for a semester. She'd sat across from bereaved parents, newly diagnosed patients, people on the edge of the kind of despair that had sharp edges. She'd been trained to deliver bad news — the pacing, the language, the balance between honesty and compassion, the way you let the patient arrive at the truth through their own logic rather than dropping it on them like a stone.
None of that training had prepared her for this. A cold morgue. A steel drawer. A voice in a corpse. A man who didn't know he was dead.
"Mr. Lee, the surgery didn't go the way the doctors expected."
Silence. Three seconds. Four.
*What do you mean?*
"There were complications. The bleeding was more extensive than the initial scans showed."
*But the paramedic said— He said I was going to be fine. He said it three times.*
"He was wrong."
*No.* Not anger. Not yet. The flat, automatic negation of a mind rejecting data it wasn't equipped to process. *No, check again. Look at my chart. The surgery was routine. They do this kind of thing all the time. They—*
"Mr. Lee. Dongwook." She pressed her forehead against the cold steel. A posture no counselor would recommend — too intimate, too involved, a breach of professional distance that every textbook warned against. She did it anyway because textbooks were written for offices with chairs and tissues and the option of a follow-up appointment, and she was in a morgue talking to a drawer. "The surgery didn't work. The doctors couldn't stop the bleeding. You died at 7:42 PM."
The silence was the worst sound she'd ever heard. Not because it was empty but because it was full — full of a man's mind processing a single fact that rewrote everything, that took every assumption about the future and put a line through it. The wife waiting. The dinner he'd promised. The baby.
*No.*
"I'm sorry."
*Check again. Please. I can hear my heart. I can hear it beating.*
He couldn't. He was hearing the memory of a heartbeat, the phantom pulse that consciousness maintained because it had never existed without one. The same way amputees felt absent limbs.
"That's a memory," Yeji said. Gentle. As gentle as she could make it. "Your body isn't beating anymore. But your consciousness is still here. That's why I can hear you."
*I don't understand. If I'm dead— Dead people don't think. Dead people don't talk. The System says souls disperse and—*
"The System is wrong."
Another silence. Longer. The refrigeration unit hummed beneath the drawer, doing its job, keeping flesh cold, indifferent to the conversation happening above it.
*Jiyeon.* His voice had changed. Smaller. The bravado of denial crumbling, leaving something underneath that couldn't be argued with. *Jiyeon doesn't know. She's waiting for me. I told her I'd be home by eight. She made samgyetang because it's supposed to be good for the baby. She's seven months. Did I— Did someone tell her?*
"I don't know. But yes, someone would have contacted her. The hospital notifies next of kin."
*She's alone.* Not a question. A realization. The kind that took root and grew. *She's seven months pregnant and she's alone because I said one more job. One more raid. Just this one. The money's good and we need it for the baby's room and I said just this one and she asked me not to go and I said—*
His voice broke. Not cracked — broke. The moment when knowing and understanding finally collapse into the same thing.
*I said I'd be home for dinner.*
Yeji slid down the drawer front and sat on the morgue floor. The tile was freezing through her hospital pants. She didn't move.
"Tell me about her," she said.
*What?*
"Jiyeon. Tell me about her."
*Why?*
"Because you want to. And because I'm here."
He told her.
Not about the death. Not about the raid or the golem or the surgery that failed. About the wife. About Jiyeon — a veterinarian who specialized in large animals, who'd met Dongwook at a farm dungeon where she'd been treating a horse that had wandered too close to the gate. About how she laughed with her whole body, how she burned rice every single time but insisted on cooking anyway, how she'd pressed his hand to her stomach at five months and the baby had kicked so hard his palm ached for an hour.
About the apartment they'd just signed a lease on. About the crib he'd assembled wrong twice before watching a YouTube tutorial. About the name they'd picked — Minjun if it was a boy, Minji if it was a girl — and the argument they'd had about the baby's room color because he wanted green and she wanted yellow and they'd compromised on both and the room looked terrible but they loved it anyway.
He talked for forty-three minutes. Yeji sat on the floor and listened. Not as a counselor. Not as a summoner. As a person. The only person who could hear him, in the dark, in the cold, in the place where his body was being stored until someone decided what to do with it.
Minwoo stood by the door. He hadn't moved since they entered the morgue. His spectral form was barely a glow in the baseboard light — a dim blue outline, a dead man watching a living woman comfort a newly dead man. His hand was on his sword hilt. Not because there was anything to fight. Because he didn't know what else to do with it.
At 4:12 AM, Dongwook went quiet.
*I can't covenant with you,* he said. She hadn't offered. He'd figured it out from context — from the way [Requiem] pulsed between them, from the options that hadn't appeared because she hadn't triggered them, from the absence of the choice that Minwoo and Nari had been given. *Your ability — it works differently when we're still in our bodies. I can feel it. You can hear me but you can't pull me out.*
He was right. She'd been sensing it the entire time — the tether between his consciousness and his corpse was too strong. In the dungeon, spirits had been separated from their bodies by the dungeon's mana absorption process. Flesh dissolved, consciousness remained. Here, the body was intact. The spirit was still anchored to it, bound by the biological assumption that brain and self were inseparable.
"I could try," she said. "If you want. I could try to—"
*Don't.* Firm. Not angry — decided. *Even if it worked, I wouldn't want to walk around as a ghost while my wife is carrying our baby. What would that do to her? Showing up as a blue light, telling her I'm still here? That's not comfort. That's a haunting.*
"Then what do you want?"
The longest pause of the night. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere above them, the hospital machinery murmured its perpetual lullaby.
*Tell Jiyeon the samgyetang was a good idea. She always second-guesses her cooking. Tell her it would have been perfect.*
"I will."
*And the baby's room. Tell her yellow was the right call. I was wrong about the green.*
"Okay."
*And—* His voice was thinning. Not degrading, not the way Jaehyun had — more like a flame burning down to the wick. The consciousness choosing, slowly and deliberately, to let go. Not because the regret was resolved — it wasn't, it couldn't be, not fully — but because he'd said what he needed to say and there was a kind of peace in having been heard. *Tell her I'm sorry about dinner.*
"I'll tell her."
*Good.* A pause. *Are you going to stay?*
"Until you're done."
*I think I might be done now.* The voice was barely audible. A whisper in a drawer. *It's warm. Where I'm going. Or where I think I'm going. I didn't expect warm.*
Yeji pressed her hand flat against the steel. The cold had numbed her fingers but she could still feel it — the tether loosening, the consciousness detaching from the body beneath, the slow release of a soul that had held on long enough to say goodbye.
"It's warm," she said. "That's good."
Drawer 2A went quiet. The presence behind the steel faded — not violently, not with the dissolution of Kim Jaehyun or the violent refusal of Choi Miran. Gently. The way breath faded from a mirror.
Lee Dongwook, C-rank, thirty-one years old, father of an unborn child, had passed on. Not because the System said so. Not because a counselor had resolved his regret. Because a woman had sat on a cold floor in her slippers and listened to him talk about his wife's cooking until he was ready to go.
Yeji sat on the floor of the morgue with her hand on an empty drawer and her hospital pants soaked from the condensation on the tiles and cried. Quietly. Controlled, brief — the pressure release of someone who dealt in other people's grief and understood the importance of not carrying it past its useful life.
She stopped after two minutes. Wiped her face. Stood.
The other voice — Drawer 3B — was still looping. *...the numbers didn't... the dungeon was... I shouldn't have...* Degrading. Park Seojin. Dead since yesterday morning. She could hear him losing coherence in real time, the loops shortening, the words blurring.
She pressed her hand to his drawer. "Mr. Park. My name is Ahn Yeji. Can you hear me?"
*...who... yes? The numbers... I made a mistake with the...*
"I hear you. I'm here."
But she couldn't reach him. The degradation was too far along, the consciousness too fragmented to engage. She talked to him anyway — his name, the date, that someone was listening — and the voice looped on, each cycle less coherent than the last, and she stood there with her hand on the steel knowing that by morning he'd be gone the way Jaehyun had been gone.
Two deaths in one night. One she'd been able to help. One she hadn't.
The door behind her opened.
"Ma'am." A security guard. Middle-aged, thick around the middle, a flashlight in one hand and a ring of keys in the other. Not hostile — confused. "This area is restricted. How did you get in here?"
"The door code." No point lying about it. "I'm a patient on the fifth floor."
"A patient in the morgue at—" He checked his watch. "Four thirty in the morning?"
"I knew one of them."
The guard looked at her. Hospital gown. Bare feet in slippers. Puffy eyes. Dried blood still flaking from the edges of her nostrils. She looked exactly like what she was — a sick woman who'd dragged herself out of bed to be near the dead.
"I'll walk you back upstairs," he said. Not unkindly.
---
Room 517. The monitors were still beeping. The pulse oximeter on the bunched bedsheet read 88%, low enough that the night nurse had probably noted it but not low enough to trigger a Code Blue. Yeji clipped it back onto her finger, reinserted the IV — badly, the vein was bruised and the needle went in crooked, but the drip resumed — and sat on the edge of the bed.
Minwoo materialized in the corner chair.
"It's not just dungeons," Yeji said. She was too tired for preambles. "Dongwook was attached to his body. In a normal hospital. No dungeon mana, no gate, no System architecture. Just a dead man in a drawer who didn't know he was dead."
"I know."
"Every hunter who dies with unresolved regrets. Every single one. In dungeons, in hospitals, in—" She stopped. The scale. She could feel it expanding in her head, the problem growing from *one dungeon* to *all dungeons* to *everywhere*, and she didn't have the cognitive space to hold it. Not tonight. "I can't save them all, Minwoo."
"No," he said. "You can't."
"Three spirit slots. That's all I have. Three. And there are thousands—"
"Yeji." His voice was low. The dad voice, but different. Not the reassuring version. The honest one. "You sat on that floor for an hour and listened to a dead man talk about his wife. You couldn't summon him, couldn't covenant him, couldn't fight for him. All you could do was be there. And he let go." A pause. "That's not nothing. That's not a failure. That's the thing you are."
"A grief counselor."
"The only one who can talk to the dead." He leaned forward. The chair didn't creak. "You're not going to fix this with three spirit slots. You're going to fix this by being the person who shows up at 3 AM in hospital slippers because someone is scared in the dark. The summoning — the army, the power — that's the tool. This is the mission."
She looked at him. The fading spectral light. The stocky build. The kind eyes that had spent seven months in a wall and hadn't lost their kindness.
"Since when do you give speeches?"
"Since my daughter was six and scared of thunderstorms. You get good at talking in the dark." He settled back. "Get some sleep, kid. You've got a wife to find tomorrow. Jiyeon. The one with the samgyetang."
"And a daughter."
"What?"
"Song Somin. I promised to find her. Don't think I forgot."
His jaw worked. The throat-clearing thing. The subject change that didn't come this time — just a nod, quick and rough, the acknowledgment of a man who didn't trust his voice.
Yeji lay back. The pillow still smelled like detergent. The IV dripped. The monitors beeped.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She picked it up.
One new message. Unknown number. No contact name, no caller ID, just ten digits she didn't recognize.
*We know what you can do. We need to talk.*
She stared at the screen. The fluorescent light reflected off the cracked glass, splitting the message into fractured copies.
"Minwoo."
"I see it."
She set the phone face-down and did not sleep for a very long time.
