"Eight to ten years," Eunsoo said. "Based on the integration depth and the degree of substrate adaptation around the splinter's edges. The channel tissue has grown into the splinter's architecture the way bone grows around a surgical implant. That kind of biological integration requires years."
Yeji sat at the kitchen table with Hayeon's laptop open in front of her and Eunsoo's voice in the bond and the two stabilization broadcasts humming their constant background drain. It was 10 AM on Wednesday. Jihoon's surgery was tomorrow. The Foundation was burning evidence. Five subjects waited in fragments. And Yeji was trying to figure out when someone had put a piece of the System inside her.
"Eight to ten years puts the placement between age twelve and fourteen," Hayeon said. She'd been typing since Yeji had told her about the splinter's reaction to Kang Dohyun. The analyst's fingers on the keyboard had the speed of someone who'd found a thread and was pulling. "What happened to you between twelve and fourteen?"
"Nothing."
"Think harder."
"I'm thinking." She pressed her knuckles together. The bone contact. "I grew up in Gwangju. Normal family. My father works at a shipping company. My mother teaches elementary school. No hunters. No dungeon exposure. No—" She stopped.
Hayeon looked up from the laptop.
"The screening," Yeji said.
"What screening?"
"When I was thirteen. The universal mana sensitivity screening. The government mandated it after the second Busan break — every student in the public school system got tested. They sent a mobile clinic to our school. We lined up in the gymnasium and they pricked our fingers and held a crystal to the blood and wrote down numbers." She was seeing it as she spoke. The gymnasium. The plastic chairs. The woman in the lab coat who'd smiled at her and said *good, you can go back to class* and hadn't explained what the numbers meant. "I never saw the results. My parents never mentioned it. I assumed I was normal."
"Who ran the screening?"
"A clinic. Mobile. They came to every school in the district over two weeks."
Hayeon's fingers on the keyboard. The specific rhythm of an analyst cross-referencing something against a database she already had open. "The National Awakened Sensitivity Screening Initiative. Implemented 2017 in response to the second Busan break. Administered by the Ministry of Health in partnership with—" She stopped typing.
Yeji waited.
"In partnership with the Korean Foundation for Awakened Research," Hayeon said. "The Foundation designed the screening protocols. The mobile clinics were operated by Foundation-affiliated medical staff. The screening data was stored in a Foundation-managed database under the cooperation agreement's public health clause."
The Foundation. The same Foundation. The screening that tested every thirteen-year-old in the country for mana sensitivity was designed and operated by the organization that would later build the RSIP.
"How many students were screened?" Yeji asked.
"Nationwide, approximately 2.3 million between 2017 and 2020." Hayeon pulled up another document. "The program was discontinued in 2020 due to budget reallocation. The screening data was archived in the Foundation's research database."
2.3 million students. A national database of mana sensitivity profiles, all of them between twelve and fourteen years old. All of them tested by Foundation staff. All of them generating data that went into a Foundation-managed system.
*Eunsoo,* Yeji said into the bond. *The screening at my school. Could that have been when the splinter was placed?*
*The screening involved a blood sample and a crystal-contact test. The crystal-contact test requires physical proximity between a mana-reactive crystal and the subject's mana channel entry point — typically the fingertip or the wrist.* The healer's clinical processing. *If the crystal used in the test contained a micro-fragment — a splinter-sized piece of System architecture embedded within a standard screening crystal — the contact test would provide the delivery mechanism. The splinter would enter through the channel entry point during the test and embed in the substrate. The subject wouldn't feel it. At that size, the integration would be painless and undetectable by any standard diagnostic.*
A crystal held to a child's finger. A splinter smaller than a grain of sand. Entry through the mana channel's natural opening. Painless. Invisible. A thirteen-year-old girl goes back to class and doesn't know that something is growing inside her channel the way a seed grows inside soil.
"They weren't just screening," Yeji said.
"No." Hayeon's voice was flat. Not the analyst's professional flat. The flat of someone who'd just understood the scale. "If the screening crystals contained embedded splinters, and if those splinters were selectively deployed based on the sensitivity readings—"
"They were planting."
"They were planting. The screening identified which children had compatible mana channel profiles. The crystal test delivered the splinter to those children. The splinter embeds, grows, adapts to the channel architecture over years. And when the child eventually awakens — triggered by emotional stress, physical trauma, dungeon exposure, whatever activates the latent mana system—"
"The ability that grows around the splinter is shaped by it."
Boyeon's soup pot sat cold on the stove. The apartment's heating system cycled through its morning routine.
"[Requiem] didn't just happen," Yeji said. "It grew around a System component that was put in me when I was thirteen. The grief counseling internship didn't create the ability. It activated a seed that was already there. The emotional intensity, the proximity to grief and loss and death — those were the conditions the seed needed. The water and sunlight."
*Yeji.* Eunsoo's voice. Careful. *I need to tell you something about the splinter's functional architecture that I hadn't fully mapped until Kang Dohyun's visit triggered the recognition response.*
*Tell me.*
*The splinter isn't passive. It has active components. Frequency receivers that are tuned to the System's administrative protocols. The recognition response to Kang Dohyun wasn't just the splinter acknowledging his presence — it was the splinter reporting. Transmitting a status update. Location, operational state, substrate integration level.* A pause that had the quality of someone choosing their words because the words were going to hurt. *The splinter has been reporting your status to the System since it was placed. Your location. Your ability development. Your bond connections. Everything [Requiem] does, the splinter sees, because the splinter is the foundation that [Requiem] is built on.*
A tracking device. A monitoring system. The thing she'd been carrying for nine years wasn't just a seed. It was a transponder. The System had known where she was and what she could do from the moment the splinter had been placed in a gymnasium in Gwangju when she was thirteen years old.
"Hayeon." Her voice sounded strange to her. Distant, like hearing herself on a recording. "The screening database. The 2.3 million profiles. Is it still accessible?"
"The Foundation's servers are under HOC subpoena authority. But the data purge order—" Hayeon's eyes moved. Calculating. "The screening database is separate from the RSIP research archives. It's a public health dataset. If the Foundation's purge targeted the RSIP files specifically, the screening database may still be intact. But if they realized the connection between the screening program and the splinter placement—"
"They'd burn it first."
"They'd burn it first." Hayeon closed the laptop. Opened it again. "I need Taeyoung. The Bureau's forensic data team can pull the screening database before the Foundation's purge reaches it, if it hasn't already. HOC subpoena covers it."
She was on the phone before Yeji answered.
---
*Eunsoo,* Yeji said. *Can the splinter be removed?*
She asked it knowing the answer. She asked it because she needed to hear it said.
*No.* The healer's voice, as direct as she'd ever heard it. *The splinter is the substrate. Not embedded in it — fused with it. The channel tissue has incorporated the splinter's architecture into its own structure over nine years of continuous adaptation. Removing the splinter would require removing the substrate itself, which would destroy the channel's ability to carry mana. [Requiem] would cease to function. All current bonds would sever. The stabilization broadcasts to Songpa and Suwon would terminate. And the severed bonds, for Yerin and Lee Soyeon specifically—*
*They'd dissolve.*
*Their reconstitution is dependent on the bond's organizational structure. Without the bond, they return to their pre-bond state. For Yerin, that means the fragment. For Soyeon, that means dissolution.*
So the splinter stayed. The System's seed, the ability's foundation, the transponder that had been reporting her location and her development to whoever was listening on the other end of the administrative protocol. It stayed because removing it would kill the bonds, and the bonds were people.
She was built on a thing she hadn't chosen. Her ability ran on a component she hadn't consented to. And there was no version of her that existed without it.
In the bond, the spirits were processing. Minwoo's roughened presence had gone very still. He was angry. Minwoo expressed anger through stillness rather than volume. Nari's worried brightness. Yuna's dampening field, steady, the quiet worker absorbing the emotional turbulence the way she always absorbed turbulence. Yerin, listening. Saying nothing.
Then Lee Soyeon spoke.
*Were we screened too?*
The question cut through the bond's processing like a blade.
*The subjects,* Soyeon said. Her voice clearer than it had been two days ago, the consciousness continuing to organize itself around Yeji's bond structure. *The ones the Foundation put into fragments. Were we screened? Were we given splinters?*
Yeji hadn't thought of it. The immediate, obvious question that she hadn't asked because she'd been too occupied with the revelation about herself. But Soyeon had been thinking about the others since yesterday, since asking whether they could hear each other, since learning about Park Minji and Woo Taehyung.
*Hayeon,* Yeji said aloud. The analyst was on the phone with Taeyoung but she looked up. "The RSIP subjects. The ones the Foundation identified as spirit-sensitive and targeted for fragment integration. Were they selected from the screening database? Were they all children who'd been through the sensitivity screening?"
Hayeon's hand covered the phone's microphone. Her eyes did something Yeji hadn't seen before — the analyst's processing speed visible as a physical thing, the connections forming behind the gaze. "The RSIP identified spirit-sensitive individuals through their awakening records. But if the sensitivity wasn't natural — if it was induced by the splinters placed during the screening—"
"Then the Foundation wasn't finding spirit-sensitive people. They were harvesting the ones they'd planted."
The apartment that had been a safe house was becoming the place where the shape of a nine-year-old conspiracy grew visible.
"The screening identified compatible profiles," Hayeon said. Slowly. The analyst building the structure as she spoke. "The splinters were placed in those profiles. The splinters grew. The children awakened. The RSIP screened the awakened population for the specific sensitivity signatures that only splinter-carriers would have. And the absorption program targeted those carriers specifically, because the splinters made them compatible with the fragments."
"They grew us to feed us to the stone."
Hayeon said nothing.
Jisun called at 11:30. The surgery confirmation. Thursday, 9 AM, Gangnam orthopedic center, Dr. Kang operating, Jisun assisting. Jihoon took the call in his room with his right hand holding the phone and his left arm doing nothing. His voice through the door: "Roger that. 9 AM."
The party leader preparing for surgery while the summoner discovered that her ability was manufactured and the analyst traced the manufacturing pipeline and two stabilization broadcasts ran in the background and five subjects in fragments waited.
Everything happening at once. The way everything always happened.
---
Yeji called Chae Wonhee at noon.
The researcher answered on the third ring. She'd been in Seoul since the HOC session, staying in a hotel near the parliamentary complex, making herself available for the investigation's ongoing evidence review. Her voice had the tired precision of someone who'd been answering questions for two days straight.
"Dr. Chae." Yeji sat on the living room floor. Her back against the wall. The position she'd adopted when she needed to ground herself. Bone on surface. "I need to ask you about the National Awakened Sensitivity Screening Initiative."
Wonhee went quiet. Not calculating, not assessing. Waiting. She'd been waiting for this question.
"The school screening program," Wonhee said.
"You know what I'm asking."
"I know what you're asking." Another pause. Longer. The sound of someone sitting down. "When I joined the Foundation in 2013, the screening program had been running for one year. My predecessor — Dr. Baek Yeongsoo — designed the original protocols. He retired in 2014 and I inherited his research archive. The RSIP grew out of his sensitivity identification work."
"Dr. Chae."
"The screening crystals," Wonhee said. Her voice had changed. Not the measured testimony voice from the HOC session. Something underneath it. Something that had been carried for years. "I found irregularities in the crystal specifications when I took over Baek's archive. The crystals used in the screening program had a component I couldn't identify — a microscopic inclusion in the crystal matrix that didn't match any standard mana-reactive material. I flagged it. I submitted an internal review request to the Foundation's materials science division."
"What happened?"
"The review was blocked. Director Han's office classified the crystal specifications as restricted research material under the stability research clause. I was told the inclusion was a calibration component and that the specifications were proprietary." Her voice held. Steady. But underneath the steadiness, the sound of a woman who'd been carrying a question for seven years and who was now answering it for someone else. "I didn't push. I should have pushed. I was two years into a career at the Foundation and the director's office had classified the material and I accepted the classification."
"You knew."
"I suspected. I didn't know. There's a difference, and I've spent six months in Hadong living inside that difference." Wonhee's breathing on the phone. The hotel room. The distance between Hadong and Seoul and between suspecting and knowing. "When I designed the RSIP's screening protocol, I used sensitivity markers that I'd identified from Baek's database. The markers that predicted spirit-sensitivity with the highest accuracy were all from subjects who'd been screened with the inclusion-bearing crystals. I didn't understand why until — until you called me just now, and I heard the question in your voice, and I understood what you've found."
"The inclusions were splinters."
Silence.
"Dr. Chae."
"Yes," she said. "I believe that's what they were."
The living room. The wall against her back. The phone against her ear. Chae Wonhee's silence on the other end, eleven years inside an institution that had been planting seeds in children. She'd suspected. She'd resigned. And only now was she hearing the full shape of what she'd been part of.
"The RSIP subjects," Yeji said. "Yerin Seo. Lee Soyeon. The others. Were they all screened?"
"I would have to check the records against the screening database. But the sensitivity markers I used to identify RSIP subjects were derived from Baek's screening data. If those markers only appeared in subjects who received the crystal inclusions—"
"Then every subject the RSIP identified was someone who'd been given a splinter as a child."
Wonhee didn't say yes.
She didn't need to.
"I'm coming to Seoul tomorrow," Wonhee said. "The HOC evidence review continues at 2 PM. I'll bring what I have on the crystal specifications." A pause. The sound of someone making a decision that had been waiting to be made. "And I'll bring Baek Yeongsoo's personal archive. The one the Foundation doesn't know I have."
The call ended.
Yeji set the phone on the floor beside her. Looked at the ceiling. The apartment ceiling, white, cracked in one corner where the building had settled, ordinary.
In the bond, six spirits waited. Yerin waited. Lee Soyeon waited. Two girls who'd been screened and planted and grown and harvested, who were alive inside the bond of a woman who'd been screened and planted and grown and who had, by some accident of timing and institutional dysfunction, not been harvested herself.
The same pipeline. Different outcomes. Not a gift. Not a curse. A crop.
Jisun's call played back in her head: *Thursday. 9 AM.* Jihoon's voice through the door: *Roger that.*
Tomorrow, a surgery. Tomorrow, Wonhee's archive. Tomorrow, the screening database, if Taeyoung's team could pull it before the Foundation's purge reached it.
She pressed her knuckles together. Bone on bone. The anchor.
The splinter hummed inside her channel, steady and patient, the way it had hummed for nine years.
