"It's about what's underneath us."
Yeji didn't move. The metal chair. The bolted table. The man across from her with his glasses off and his face rearranged into someone real and his eleven minutes bleeding away in a room where the cameras saw nothing and the walls heard everything and the fragment beneath the foundation hummed in a frequency that Nari had called wrong.
She waited. The psychology training — three semesters of forensic assessment, two years of grief counseling theory — told her that the person who spoke first after a revelation lost control of the conversation. Seo Jinhyuk had made his opening. Now it was his job to fill the silence.
He filled it.
"Bureau Central was built in 1987. Government land acquisition. Standard high-rise construction with sub-level reinforcement for classified operations." His hands stayed flat on the table. Visible. The gesture of a man who'd learned that visible hands made people listen to words instead of watching for weapons. "What the construction team didn't know — what nobody outside the Harvest's successors knew — was that the site was selected specifically because of what's in the bedrock. A fragment. Smaller than the ones in the guardian sites, but older. Much older. The guardian containment architecture wasn't built to hold it. It was already there when the First Architecture was constructed around the other fragments. A piece that predated the prison."
*His cortisol is spiking,* Eunsoo reported inside the bond. Clinical. Monitoring. *Not from deception. From recall. He is telling this from memory. The physiological markers are consistent with someone recounting traumatic knowledge, not fabricating narrative.*
Yeji filed that. Didn't trust it. Cortisol responses could be trained. Intelligence operatives rehearsed emotional delivery the way actors rehearsed lines.
"The dampening field," she said. Flat. Not a question.
Jinhyuk's eyes narrowed — not suspicion but recognition. The look of someone encountering competence in a place where he'd expected resistance.
"You noticed."
"The building's dampening field is stronger than standard Bureau suppression. Dual-purpose. Hunter suppression on top. Containment on the bottom. The field feeds energy downward."
"Not feeds. The fragment feeds on it. The dampening field was designed to suppress mana output from detained hunters. The fragment's proximity warps that function. It converts the suppressed energy into something it can metabolize. Forty years of detained hunters being processed through this building. Forty years of mana being dampened — pushed down, compressed, redirected into the bedrock." He paused. His jaw tight. "The fragment has been eating for four decades."
*Yeji,* Nari said. Small. Urgent. The child ghost had been listening through the bond, hearing what [Requiem] carried from the room's acoustic space into the channel's perceptual network. *That's what I felt. The eating. The sound underneath. It's not just humming. It's chewing.*
Yeji kept her face still. Her attention split between the man at the table and the child spirit's report and Eunsoo's biometric monitoring and the clock that none of them could see but all of them felt — eleven minutes, minus however many had already passed.
"How big."
Not a question. A demand.
Jinhyuk's hands shifted on the table. The first fidget. The first crack in the controlled body language.
"When the building was constructed, the fragment occupied approximately four cubic meters of bedrock. Standard dormant fragment dimensions." He looked at his hands. At the table. At the space between his folded fingers where something invisible weighed more than the metal surface. "Current estimated volume is thirty-one cubic meters. The growth rate has been accelerating. The fragment has consumed enough mana energy over forty years to increase its mass by nearly eight hundred percent."
Thirty-one cubic meters. A room-sized piece of something that existed between dimensions, fed on the compressed mana of every hunter the Bureau had ever detained, growing in the dark beneath the building where Korea's awakened management infrastructure operated.
"And nobody noticed."
"The right people noticed." His voice dropped. Not softer — heavier. The weight of complicity carried in the throat. "The Harvest's successors are embedded in the Foundation's infrastructure. Three generations of operatives, passed down through family lines and institutional positions. When the Bureau selected this site, the Harvest's people were in the room. When the dampening field was designed, the Harvest's engineers wrote the specifications. The fragment wasn't an accident. It was cultivated."
The word sat between them. Cultivated. The agricultural language of something tended and fed and grown for harvest.
"Phase Two," Yeji said.
"Extraction. The fragment has reached a density threshold that makes extraction viable. The energy stored inside thirty-one cubic meters of grown fragment — it's significant. Significant enough to power the infrastructure the Harvest's descendants have been building." His eyes moved to the door. The locked door. The door that someone outside had secured for this conversation. "Building 7. Incheon. The extraction equipment. Three months of installation. Military-grade mana conduits, resonance amplifiers, containment vessels rated for fragment-density energy. They've built a pipeline from this building's foundation to a warehouse forty kilometers away. A physical pipeline. Buried. Running through Seoul's utility infrastructure under a classified Foundation construction permit."
Building 7. The warehouse Hayeon had identified. Six times normal power consumption. Military supply shipments. Not preparation. Completion. The extraction system was already built.
"When."
"Soon. The timeline accelerated when you appeared. The fragment responds to [Requiem] — the same way the guardians respond. Your presence in this building isn't just proximity. It's stimulation. The fragment has been growing faster since you arrived. Your channel broadcasts the maintenance frequency even through the dampeners, even through Yuna's field—"
Yeji went still.
Very still.
The kind of stillness that preceded the thing she did instead of exploding. The iron will holding the rage behind a wall of clinical control while the psychology training cataloged the micro-expression that crossed Jinhyuk's face — the fractional widening of the eyes, the intake of breath that came half a beat too late.
He knew about Yuna.
He knew her spirit's name. Her spirit's ability. The dampening field that Yuna was running inside the bond to protect the splinter's calibration. Information that no Bureau equipment could detect. Information that existed only inside Yeji's [Requiem] bond.
"How do you know that name."
Not a question. The temperature in the room didn't change. The lights didn't flicker. Nothing moved except the space behind Yeji's eyes where four spirits felt her anger through the bond and responded — Minwoo tensing, Eunsoo's monitoring sharpening, Nari pulling back, Yuna's dampening field stuttering for a fraction of a second before steadying.
Jinhyuk closed his eyes. The gesture of a man who'd said more than he intended and was calculating whether to lie or to pay the cost of truth.
"I can hear them."
Three words. The room's fluorescent light buzzed. The camera's dead eye stared. The dampening field pressed against Yeji's wrists and the cuffs hummed their suppression frequency and beneath it all, beneath the building, beneath the concrete and the sub-levels and the rock, the fragment chewed.
"Not like you do. Not clearly. Not as voices." He opened his eyes. The exhaustion that lived behind the professional mask was fully present now — deep, structural, the kind that sleep didn't fix because it wasn't physical. "I told you my channel is a researcher's channel. Calibrated for analysis. The harmonic the waystation detected in me — the one your [Requiem] registered as secondhand — it's not an accident. I've spent eighteen years studying the maintenance frequency. In that time, my channel adapted. Evolved a minor resonance. Not [Requiem]. Nothing close. But enough to detect spirits when they're concentrated. Four spirits bound to a single host, inside a suppression field, within three meters of my position." He spread his hands. "I feel them the way you feel a bass note through a wall. Vibration without definition. But I've learned to read the vibrations. Yuna's dampening produces a specific interference pattern. I recognized it."
*He's telling the truth,* Eunsoo said. *His channel architecture is consistent with prolonged exposure adaptation. The secondary harmonic is real. It's vestigial — a fraction of a fraction of [Requiem] capability. He can detect presence. He cannot commune. He cannot summon. He is a microphone that picks up background noise, not a conductor who leads the orchestra.*
*I don't like him,* Nari said. Definitive. The child ghost's moral compass operating on the binary that adult complexity couldn't override. *He feels like two people in one skin. The outside one talks nice. The inside one is scared of something bigger than us.*
Yeji looked at the man across the table. The forgettable face without its glasses. The grey temples. The hands that stayed visible because he'd learned to make people listen instead of watch.
"You framed me."
"Yes."
"You dismantled my support network. Suspended Yoon. Burned the safe houses. Filed a directive that classified me as a threat."
"Yes."
"You brought me here."
"Yes."
No deflection. No justification. Just the word, delivered three times with the same flat weight.
"Why."
Jinhyuk leaned forward. The table between them was bolted to the floor and the floor was concrete and the concrete sat on sub-levels that sat on bedrock that contained a fragment that had been eating for forty years. The architecture of their conversation mirrored the architecture of the building — surface structures supported by something hidden and growing.
"Because you're the only person on this continent who can stabilize the fragment when the extraction begins. The waystation calibration would have been ideal — a fully operational keeper with a maintained resonator. But forty-two percent is enough for stabilization. Not repair. Not calibration. Just stabilization. Holding the fragment's frequency steady while the extraction pulls its accumulated energy. Without stabilization, the extraction destabilizes the fragment's containment. The bedrock fractures. The fragment's energy releases uncontrolled into the Seoul metropolitan area."
"A dungeon break."
"Worse than a dungeon break. A fragment release. The energy differential between a dormant fragment and a grown fragment — thirty-one cubic meters, four decades of accumulated mana — the detonation equivalent is roughly—" He stopped. Changed approach. The researcher abandoning numbers for the thing numbers described. "Yongsan district ceases to exist. The surrounding three kilometers of Seoul sustain structural damage consistent with a magnitude 7 earthquake. Casualties in the hundreds of thousands. And that's the physical damage. The mana contamination from a fragment release at this density would create a permanent dead zone. No awakened activity. No healing. No dungeon management. Central Seoul becomes a crater that kills anyone with a channel who steps inside it."
The room hummed. The dampening field. The cuffs. The fluorescent light. The fragment beneath them all, chewing in the dark.
"You brought me into the building that sits on top of a bomb."
"I brought you into the building because you're the only person who can keep the bomb from going off." His voice cracked. Not dramatic — a hairline fracture in composure, the kind that people who maintained control for years developed at the fault lines. "I've been trying to slow the extraction timeline. Eighteen years inside the Harvest's infrastructure, feeding them bad data, delaying the equipment installation, sabotaging the conduit calibration. I bought months. Years, maybe. But they're ready now. The equipment is installed. The pipeline is operational. The extraction begins within seventy-two hours."
Seventy-two hours. The same window as her detention clock. The same timeframe that the Bureau's own procedural framework provided.
"That's not a coincidence."
"No. The extraction was scheduled to coincide with your detention. While you're in custody, the Bureau's attention is focused on you. The investigation. The directive. The jurisdictional challenge your lawyer filed. Every Bureau resource pointing at the person of interest while the real operation happens underground."
The misdirection was elegant. Cruel and elegant and built with the craftsmanship of someone who understood institutional behavior the way architects understood load-bearing walls. The Bureau would spend seventy-two hours investigating Yeji while the Harvest extracted a fragment from beneath the Bureau's own building.
"And you need me to stabilize the extraction you spent eighteen years trying to prevent."
Something moved behind his eyes. The fear that Nari had identified — the thing bigger than them, the thing inside the skin that the outside skin was scared of.
"I failed." Two words. Delivered without drama. The diagnosis of a man who'd completed the autopsy on his own career. "Eighteen years of delay tactics. It wasn't enough. The extraction is happening whether I stop it or not. The question is whether it happens controlled or uncontrolled. Whether you stabilize the fragment's release or whether Yongsan district disappears."
*Seven minutes have passed since he entered,* Eunsoo noted. *Four minutes remain on his monitoring loop.*
Yeji bit the inside of her cheek. The familiar gesture. The pain grounding the rage and the calculation and the impossible choice into something physical and manageable.
"Who are you really."
Not his name. Not his title. The real question — the one that psychology training taught you to ask when the patient's presented identity and actual identity occupied different spaces.
Jinhyuk's hands curled on the table. Fists. Not aggressive — protective. The body language of someone holding something fragile inside their grip.
"I was a researcher. Genuine. The Foundation recruited me out of KAIST twenty-three years ago. Fragment studies. The cutting edge of dimensional energy research." The words came out like objects placed on the table — deliberate, heavy, arranged. "I discovered the Harvest's infrastructure by accident. A classified file that wasn't classified deeply enough. I saw what they were building. What they'd been building for generations. And I made a choice."
"Infiltration."
"Controlled opposition. I built a persona that the Harvest's people would trust — a researcher ambitious enough to want access, pragmatic enough to follow orders, forgettable enough to avoid scrutiny. Seo Jinhyuk. The name is real. Everything else is constructed." He looked at her. The raw look. The exhaustion. "I've been alone inside this for eighteen years. No handler. No agency backing me. Just a man with a researcher's channel and a conviction that someone needed to be in the room when the Harvest's descendants made their moves."
*His cortisol pattern just shifted,* Eunsoo said. *The baseline fear is constant but the acute stress increased when he said 'alone.' The word carries biographical weight. This is not rehearsed delivery. This is a man describing his own psychological damage.*
Or a man who'd practiced describing his psychological damage until the delivery mimicked reality. Yeji's training couldn't distinguish between authentic trauma and masterful performance at this resolution. Not through a table. Not through cuffs. Not at forty-two percent with a degrading splinter and four spirits straining to read a man who existed in the space between ally and enemy.
"What do you need from me."
Practical. Clinical. The grief counselor's voice — the one that cut through emotion to function because function was what kept people alive.
"Stay in custody. Don't resist. Don't escape. When the extraction begins — you'll feel it through the splinter, through [Requiem] — I need you to project the maintenance frequency into the bedrock. Stabilize the fragment's output while the extraction draws the accumulated energy. Think of it as holding a wound closed while the surgeon works."
"While the surgeon steals from the patient."
"While the surgeon takes what was never supposed to be there." His voice was tight. "The accumulated energy isn't natural. It's forty years of stolen mana compressed into fragment architecture. Removing it doesn't harm the fragment — it returns it to dormant baseline. The fragment shrinks. The containment stabilizes. The threat to Seoul is eliminated."
"And the Harvest gets what it wants."
"The Harvest gets the energy. Yes. The alternative is the energy stays in the fragment, the fragment keeps growing, and eventually the containment fails regardless. No extraction needed. Just time. The fragment reaches critical mass within eighteen months. At that point, nothing stabilizes it."
The math. The ugly, structural math of choosing between two kinds of wrong.
"Three minutes," Yeji said.
Jinhyuk stiffened. Then nodded. He'd lost track. She hadn't.
He stood. Retrieved his glasses from the table. Put them on. The forgettable face reassembled — the wire frames creating the barrier between eyes and world, the features settling back into the shape of nobody in particular.
"The extraction equipment activates remotely. From Building 7. The pipeline carries the energy from here to Incheon in real time. You won't see equipment in the building. You'll feel it." He moved to the door. Paused with his hand raised to knock — the signal for whoever waited outside to unlock. "When the fragment starts, your spirits will feel it before you do. The child especially. She's sensitive to the frequency."
He'd named Nari's sensitivity without being told. The secondhand harmonic. The researcher's adapted channel reading the bond's composition through wall-thick vibrations.
"Dr. Seo."
He stopped.
"If this is a manipulation — if you're the Harvest and you're using me to make the extraction possible instead of preventing the damage—"
"Then you'll have stabilized a theft and the Harvest wins." He didn't turn around. "That's the risk. The other risk is you don't stabilize, the extraction triggers an uncontrolled release, and a quarter million people die." He knocked. Twice. The electronic lock clicked. "I've lived inside that calculation for eighteen years. Welcome to it."
The door opened. Closed. The lock engaged. The monitoring loop had seconds left before it reset, and Seo Jinhyuk's footsteps retreated down the corridor with the measured pace of a man who'd delivered his worst truth and was walking back into the lie that protected him.
---
Silence. The kind that government buildings produced at midnight — not absence of sound but presence of systems. The dampening field's hum. The ventilation's whisper. The camera's red eye, recording again, the loop reset, the last eleven minutes erased from the official record.
*Report,* Yeji said into the bond. The summoner's voice.
Eunsoo first. Always Eunsoo first, because clinical assessment preceded tactical planning the way diagnosis preceded treatment.
*His physiological profile throughout the conversation was consistent with truthful disclosure under extreme stress. Cortisol elevated but stable — chronic exposure, not acute fabrication. Heart rate increased at three points: when he mentioned being alone, when he described the extraction timeline, and when you asked who he really was. The increases were consistent with emotional recall, not deception management.* A pause. The healer's clinical distance warring with the clinical conclusion. *I cannot confirm his claims with independent data. But his body believes what he told you. Whether his body and the truth align is a question I cannot answer with biometrics alone.*
*Minwoo.*
The ghost tank took a beat. The dad-joke register absent. The voice that replaced it was the one Minwoo used in dungeons when the corridors narrowed and the assessment was grim and the party needed truth instead of comfort.
*Kid, I've seen people lie about everything. Their names, their jobs, their families. The one thing most people can't fake is being tired. That man is tired the way people get tired when they've been carrying something alone for too long. Doesn't mean he's right. Doesn't mean he's good. But he's been doing something hard for a long time, and it's eaten him up.* The ghost tank paused. *Also — he knew about Yuna. Knew her name. Knew her ability. That's either the most impressive intelligence operation I've ever encountered or the simplest explanation: he can actually hear us. And if he can hear us, he's been living next to spirits for years without anyone to talk to about it. That's a specific kind of lonely that I—* He trailed off. Cleared his throat. Changed the subject. *Tactically, his story is consistent with the intelligence Hayeon provided. Building 7. The equipment. The timeline. Multiple independent sources pointing at the same operation.*
*Nari.*
The child ghost was quiet. Unusual quiet. The seven-year-old processing something that lived outside her vocabulary but inside her perception.
*He's not lying,* Nari said. Slow. Choosing words carefully, the way children did when the thing they'd felt was bigger than the words they owned. *But he's not telling all of it either. Like when grownups say "everything is fine" and they mean the big things are fine but the small things are broken. He told you the big truth. But there's a small truth inside it that he kept. Something about why he really needs you. Not the city. Not the bomb. Something smaller. Something his.*
Yeji sat with that. Nari's perception. The gut instinct that operated below analysis, below cortisol readings and biometric assessment. The child ghost felt the shape of people the way other children felt the temperature of rooms — instinctively, without the vocabulary to explain the mechanism, but with accuracy that adult complexity couldn't replicate.
Something smaller. Something his.
*Yuna.*
The youngest spirit's voice came quiet. The D-rank healer who spoke least and observed most.
*The dampening field changed while he was talking. Not the Bureau's field — something underneath. The fragment. When he mentioned the extraction, the fragment's frequency shifted. Upward. Faster. Like it was... listening.* Yuna's dampening adjusted as she spoke, the field recalibrating to account for something that was shifting beneath her perception's floor. *I've been holding the splinter's calibration steady. But the fragment is pulling at it now. Not hard. Not like the guardian attacks. Gentle. Like it's trying to harmonize. Like it wants to match the splinter's frequency.*
*Eunsoo. Confirm.*
*Confirmed. The fragment's resonance has increased by 0.3 hertz since Seo Jinhyuk left the room. The increase correlates with — I don't have a clinical explanation. The fragment is responding to your channel's presence. The splinter acts as a bridge. The waystation's partial calibration tuned the splinter toward the maintenance frequency, and the fragment recognizes that frequency as something familiar. Something related.*
Related. The fragment beneath the building and the fragments in the guardian containment architecture — siblings. Pieces of the same catastrophe. The First Architecture had been built to contain the guardian fragments, but this one had been here before the prison. An older piece. A precursor.
And it was reaching for the splinter in Yeji's channel the way a hand reached for a hand in the dark.
*41.9%,* Eunsoo added. *The fragment's increased activity is accelerating the dampening field's degradation of your channel. At the current rate, the splinter's calibration collapses in fourteen hours, not eighteen. The fragment's attention is making things worse.*
Yeji closed her eyes. The metal chair beneath her. The bolted table in front of her. The cuffs around her wrists, humming suppression into a channel that was being pulled from below and compressed from above and degraded from within.
Forty-one point nine percent. Fourteen hours until the calibration collapsed. Seventy-two hours on the detention clock. Seventy-two hours until the extraction. Three windows, three countdowns, and she sat in the intersection of all three with four ghosts in her head and a fragment beneath her feet and a man's confession cooling in the room's filtered air.
She thought about the waystation. The stone depression. The maintenance frequency sustained by builders dead for millennia. The calibration that needed sixty percent and had gotten forty-three and had paused with the patience of something that measured time in centuries rather than hours.
She thought about Jihoon. Somewhere in this building. Detained. His sword confiscated. The B-rank swordsman reduced to a man in a room, the same as her. His party leader's instinct calculating options from inside walls he couldn't cut through.
She thought about Hayeon's three instructions. Don't let them transfer you. Im is the lever. Survive the clock.
She thought about Seo Jinhyuk's face without its glasses. The exhaustion. The fear. Nari's assessment: something smaller, something his.
*I need options,* she said into the bond. Not a request. The operational voice. The summoner coordinating her assets in a dungeon that looked like a government building and felt like a trap and sat on top of something that was reaching for her through the rock.
*Option one,* Eunsoo said. *Cooperate with Seo Jinhyuk's request. Allow the extraction to proceed. Stabilize the fragment. Accept that the Harvest obtains the energy but Seoul survives. Risk: you are trusting a man who framed you. If the stabilization fails or if his account is false, you may be facilitating the very disaster he claims to prevent.*
*Option two,* Minwoo said. *Refuse. Let the extraction happen without stabilization. Seo said the result is an uncontrolled release. A quarter million casualties. Not really an option. More like a number he gave you so option one looks generous.*
*Option three,* Nari said. *Find the small truth. The thing he kept. Figure out why he really needs you, not why he said he needs you. Then decide.*
Yeji opened her eyes.
The camera's red light. The room's institutional grey. The night pressing against the building from outside, and the fragment pressing against the building from below, and somewhere between the two pressures, a woman with forty-one percent of her capacity and four ghosts and a choice that wasn't really a choice sitting in a chair bolted to the floor.
Option three.
She reached through the bond. Past Eunsoo's clinical monitoring. Past Minwoo's tactical assessment. Past Nari's instinctive perception. Down to the channel itself — the forty-one-point-nine percent of capacity that the dampening field hadn't crushed and the splinter hadn't consumed and the cuffs hadn't suppressed.
She pushed her awareness downward.
Through the floor. Through the sub-level's concrete. Through the reinforcement and the infrastructure and the buried systems of a building designed to contain awakened individuals. Down. The [Requiem] perception extending — not summoning, not communing, just listening. The maintenance frequency in her channel acting as a carrier wave, the partially calibrated splinter vibrating in the direction of the thing that recognized it.
She found the edge.
Not a wall. Not the push that Nari had described. Something more like a membrane — a boundary between the building's constructed infrastructure and the fragment's presence in the bedrock. The boundary was thin. Thinner than it should have been, if Seo Jinhyuk's timeline was correct. The fragment had been growing, and its growth had eroded the boundary between occupied space and fragment space from below.
Through the membrane, she heard it.
Not words. Fragments didn't speak. But the frequency carried information the way a heartbeat carried health data — rhythm, strength, regularity, the vibration patterns that Eunsoo could read as diagnosis and that Yeji's [Requiem] read as something closer to emotion.
Hunger. Loneliness. Recognition.
The fragment knew she was there. Not the way the guardians knew — the guardians were infrastructure, engineered, purposeful. The fragment was something rawer. Something that had existed in the bedrock before the First Architecture had been built, before the guardians were installed, before the keepers were chosen. Something that had been alone in the dark beneath Korea for longer than human civilization had occupied the surface above it.
And it was reaching for her. Not to attack. Not to consume. The way Nari reached for Yeji through the bond when the dark was too dark and the silence was too silent and the seven-year-old needed to know that someone was there.
The fragment was reaching for a keeper the way a patient reached for a doctor. The way the dying reached for the living.
The frequency shifted.
Subtle. A quarter-tone adjustment that moved the fragment's resonance closer to the maintenance wavelength — closer to the splinter in Yeji's channel, closer to the waystation's calibration, closer to the frequency that the keepers had used for millennia to maintain the containment architecture.
The fragment was trying to tune itself to her.
*Yeji,* Eunsoo said. Sharp. *Your channel capacity just dropped to 41.6%. The fragment's harmonization attempt is drawing energy from your channel through the splinter. You need to disengage.*
She pulled back. The membrane closed behind her perception like water filling a handprint. The fragment's frequency dimmed — not disappearing but retreating, returning to the baseline hum that Nari had sensed through the building's floors. Still there. Still reaching. But no longer touching.
41.6%. The cost of listening. Three-tenths of a percent for thirty seconds of contact.
Yeji sat in the chair. The cuffs. The camera. The night.
The fragment beneath Bureau Central wasn't a bomb. It wasn't a weapon. It wasn't the threat that Seo Jinhyuk had described — or not only that.
It was a patient.
And the Harvest's extraction wasn't surgery. It was butchery.
Something moved through the bond — not from her spirits but from below. Through the rock, through the concrete, through the suppression and the dampening and the institutional architecture designed to keep things contained. A tremor. Felt in the bones. The fragment settling after its reach, adjusting its frequency, holding the new pitch that was a quarter-tone closer to the maintenance wavelength.
Holding it. The way the waystation held the calibration. Patiently. As if it had been waiting for a keeper to listen, and now that one had, it could wait a little longer.
Somewhere beneath the building, in thirty-one cubic meters of ancient stone, the oldest piece of another world hummed a note that only Yeji could hear, and the note said: *don't leave.*
