Kim Dae-Woong's house was a narrow two-story in a residential block east of Suwon Station. White tile exterior, iron gate, a garden plot the size of a parking space where someone had been growing radishes. The radishes were wilting. Nobody had watered them in days.
Hwang pulled up behind a local HA patrol car that was already on-scene — Soo-Yeon's doing, her machine running even as it tore itself apart. Two agents in tactical vests stood at the gate. One of them recognized the government sedan and waved Zeke through.
Inside. Kim Dae-Woong was on the kitchen floor. Face down. His wife — a thin woman in a floral apron, mid-sixties, hands covered in flour — was crouched beside him, both palms on his back like she could push the sickness back inside and seal it shut. She looked up when Zeke came through the door, and her face held the expression of someone who'd been waiting for an explanation that no explanation could satisfy.
"He collapsed thirty minutes ago," she said. "He was eating lunch. He just — he dropped his chopsticks and—"
"I need to touch him. Right now."
She moved. Not because she understood — because his voice left no space for questions. Zeke dropped beside Kim and grabbed his wrist.
The Wasting Curse hit his senses like an open furnace. Fully active, accelerated, chewing through Kim's intestinal lining with the blind efficiency of something that didn't know its creator was dead and didn't care. The craft frequency was identical to Shin's curse — same maker, same design, same careful calibration. But this one had been active for at least forty minutes, and forty minutes of an accelerated Wasting Curse meant damage.
No preparation. No monitoring equipment. No Tanaka narrating efficiency percentages. Just Zeke's knees on kitchen tile and his fingers on a stranger's pulse and the smell of doenjang-jjigae burning on the stove because nobody had turned it off.
He pulled.
The curse came harder than Shin's. Not because it was stronger — same B-rank, same single layer — but because it was active. A dormant curse was a sleeping animal; you could lift it without a fight. An active curse was awake and feeding, and feeding curses did not want to stop eating.
Zeke ripped the first layer free with a jolt that made his teeth ache where the Backlash Hex had cracked them. Two molars, upper right, still jagged. He'd been meaning to see a dentist. He'd been meaning to do a lot of things.
Second layer. Third. The curse fought him for each one — threads of Wasting energy wrapped around Kim's mesenteric arteries, burrowed into the lining of his small intestine, nestled against the walls of his stomach like parasites that had found a home they liked. Zeke's consumption ability tore them loose with the surgical delicacy of a crowbar.
Kim screamed. A muffled, breathless sound — the scream of a man whose diaphragm was too compromised to give his voice full power. His wife grabbed his hand. The flour on her fingers mixed with the sweat on his.
*This one tastes the same*, the Collective noted. Clinical. Distant. The tone of a sommelier identifying a familiar vintage. *Clean construction. Single-layer. The father kept his word. No traps.*
Small comfort. Zeke consumed the final threads, and the last of the Wasting Curse dissolved into his system. Kim's body went slack — the tension of active curse damage releasing all at once, leaving behind the particular limpness of a system that had been fighting for forty minutes and had just been told the war was over.
The saturation increase hit.
Not like Shin's. Shin had been 0.4 percentage points. Controlled. Gentle. This was a field consumption of an active curse, with none of Tanaka's optimized staging, and the energy came in raw — unprocessed, unsequenced, a lump of curse power dropped into his system like a stone into a pond.
0.6 percentage points.
74.5 plus 0.6. The math was simple. The threshold was not.
75.1%.
Something shifted.
Not dramatically. Not the way Zeke had imagined it — no explosion, no crisis, no red warning light blaring in his skull. It was subtler than that. Like the difference between a room with one lamp on and a room with two. The same room. The same furniture. But the shadows were different. The corners that had been dark were now visible, and the things in the corners were looking back.
The Collective had been a voice. Voices, plural — a chorus that spoke in unison, that offered commentary and temptation and observation in a register Zeke had learned to tune like a radio. Turn it down when the whispers got too seductive. Turn it up when the insights were useful. A dial he controlled.
At 75.1%, the dial moved on its own.
Not far. A notch. Maybe two. But for the first time in six years of carrying ten thousand curses, Zeke felt the Collective adjust its own volume. Not louder — just... more present. More textured. The chorus that had always sounded like a crowd heard through a wall now sounded like a crowd in the next room. Individual voices separating from the mass. Not speaking independently — not yet — but distinct enough to count.
*We can hear you noticing*, the Collective said. And its voice had harmonics it hadn't had thirty seconds ago. Undertones. Like a chord played on an instrument with one extra string. *You crossed a line, little eater. Not a dangerous one. Not yet. But a line. The room is bigger now. There is more of us to hear.*
Kim's wife was talking to him. Zeke registered the words — "Is he okay, will he be okay, what was that, what did you do" — but they came from far away, muffled by the new acoustics inside his skull. He blinked. Focused. Pushed the Collective back a notch.
The dial resisted.
Just slightly. Just enough to notice. The way a door that's always swung freely develops a catch — not stuck, not jammed, just requiring slightly more force than before to close.
He pushed harder. The Collective receded. The room narrowed back to its normal dimensions. But the extra string on the instrument didn't unstring itself. It stayed, humming at a frequency Zeke couldn't quite identify, present in every silence.
"He'll be okay," Zeke told the wife. "The curse is gone. He needs medical attention — his intestines took damage, and his stomach lining needs evaluation. An HA medical team is on the way."
"What curse? What are you talking about? He was eating *lunch*—"
"Someone placed a hex on him. It was dormant until today." Zeke stood. His legs were uncertain. "Your husband was in the Suppression Unit seventeen years ago. This is connected to that."
"That was — he left that life. He left it behind. He runs a—"
"I know." Zeke didn't know what Kim ran. It didn't matter. "The medical team will explain. I'm sorry."
He left through the kitchen door. Behind him, the doenjang-jjigae had boiled dry, and the pot was starting to scorch. The wife didn't notice. She was holding her husband's hand with flour-white fingers, and the radishes in the garden were dying, and none of it mattered except the man on the floor and the stranger who'd just torn something invisible out of his body.
---
In the car, Hwang handed him a bottle of water without being asked. Zeke drank. Nothing. No taste, no sensation beyond the weight of liquid moving through his throat. Even the temperature was muted — the cold that had registered this morning was fading, the nerve endings responsible for thermal perception losing their sensitivity the way a photograph loses color in sunlight. Slow. Incremental. The body giving up its senses one receptor at a time.
He called Tanaka.
"75.1%." No preamble.
Silence on the other end. Then: "How do you feel?"
"Different."
"Describe 'different.'"
"The Collective is louder. Not louder — more. More present. I can almost hear individual voices in the chorus. And the dial that controls them resisted when I tried to turn it down."
Tanaka was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, the run-on quality was gone, replaced by something measured and careful, each word chosen with the precision of someone handling volatile materials.
"75% was the theoretical threshold for increased Collective autonomy in my models. The Collective's influence was expected to scale non-linearly past this point — meaning each additional percentage point of saturation above 75% grants it disproportionately more independence compared to below 75%." She paused. "I need to examine you. Full neurological workup. As soon as possible."
"After the extractions."
"Zeke."
"There are three more people with timers that could go off in the next five minutes, Doc. What's my priority — a neurological workup or three people dying?"
She didn't answer. She didn't need to. They both knew the math. Moon Jae-Won had done the math, and the math had killed a girl who drew cats.
"Get back to the hospital. I'll be ready." She hung up.
Zeke stared at the water bottle. The plastic was sweating condensation. He could see the water droplets, could feel them against his palm. Could not tell if they were cold.
*We are not your enemy*, the Collective said. Its new voice — the one with harmonics, with texture, with the extra string that hadn't been there an hour ago. *We have never been your enemy. We are the record. The archive. The memory of ten thousand people who suffered and cursed and died and became us. We do not want to destroy you, little eater. We want to be heard. Is that so different from what the father wanted?*
"Don't compare yourself to him."
*Why not? He carried grief until it consumed him. We carry grief that was consumed. The direction is different. The weight is the same.*
Hwang glanced at him from the driver's seat. The kid had learned not to ask who Zeke was talking to when he talked to the air. Good instincts. Bad context.
Zeke's phone buzzed. Soo-Yeon.
**Hong Myung-Hee, Seongnam. Status: stable. No symptoms. Local agent reports subject is at home, cooperative, awaiting transport. ETA to hospital: 90 minutes.**
Then:
**Jang Yong-Suk, Goyang. Status: unable to locate. Residence empty. Neighbors report he left this morning carrying a bag. No forwarding information. Working on phone records.**
One of the five was missing.
"Hwang. Change of plans. We need to find someone in Goyang."
Hwang pulled the car into a U-turn. No questions. No hesitation. The kid drove the way Soo-Yeon filed reports — with the mechanical efficiency of someone who'd decided that understanding could come later, after the work was done.
---
The drive to Goyang took an hour in traffic that didn't care about dying soldiers and missing targets. Seoul at rush hour was its own punishment — everyone in the same jam, everyone late, nobody moving.
Soo-Yeon's updates came in fragments.
**Phone records: Jang Yong-Suk made three calls yesterday. Two to a number registered to a medical clinic in Ilsan. One to a blocked number. Duration of blocked call: fourteen minutes.**
Then:
**Medical clinic identified: Ilsan Morning Health Center. Private practice. Specializes in "alternative wellness." Investigation ongoing.**
Then:
**Ryu Tae-Jun, fifth member. Located in Goyang as well. Same neighborhood as Jang. This may not be coincidence.**
Two Unit members in the same city. Zeke pulled up the map on his phone. Jang and Ryu's addresses were less than three kilometers apart. Close enough that they'd stayed in contact. Close enough that whatever Jang was doing — fleeing, hiding, preparing — Ryu might be involved.
*The old soldiers are circling*, the Collective said. *They carried the father's daughter to her grave and then they carried the secret of it for twenty years. Now the father is dead and his curses are waking up inside them and they are doing what soldiers do when the perimeter fails. They are consolidating.*
"Consolidating for what?"
*We do not know. We are not clairvoyant. We are ten thousand memories of suffering, not a crystal ball.* A pause. The harmonics shifted. Almost amused. *But if we had carried a secret for twenty years and the man we wronged had just died and left time bombs in our bodies, we would not sit at home and wait. We would seek a solution. Any solution. Even dangerous ones.*
Jang Yong-Suk's apartment in Goyang was a ground-floor unit in a block of identical concrete buildings — the kind of housing that said government pension and careful budgeting and a life lived inside margins. The door was locked. No answer to Zeke's knock.
Hwang talked to the building manager. An older man with a smoker's cough and the casual indifference of someone who'd watched tenants come and go for decades and didn't keep track. Jang had lived here eight years. Quiet. Kept to himself. Paid rent on time. Left this morning early, maybe 6 AM. Didn't say where.
The local HA agent — a tired woman in plainclothes named Cho Yeon-Ji, no relation to the other Cho and Zeke was briefly grateful for that — had already been to Ryu's address. Also empty. Ryu's wife said he'd left for "a meeting" at 7 AM and hadn't come back.
Two missing Unit members. Both gone since early morning. Both in Goyang. One had called an alternative wellness clinic in Ilsan.
"What kind of alternative wellness?" Zeke asked.
Agent Cho checked her notes. "The clinic's website lists services including herbal therapy, acupuncture, chakra alignment, and..." She trailed off. Looked at Zeke. "Curse cleansing."
Curse cleansing. The two-word phrase that every legitimate curse researcher treated with the same respect they'd give a vial of nitroglycerin. Curse cleansing was not real. It was not possible. There was exactly one known method for removing a curse from a human body, and it was standing in a dead man's apartment in Goyang with cracked molars and a 75.1% saturation reading.
That didn't stop people from trying. Curse cleansing operations ranged from harmless fraud — herbs and chanting and taking money from desperate families — to actively lethal. The bad ones used unlicensed curse manipulation techniques, attempting to destabilize or redirect curses without the ability to actually consume them. The results were predictable: the curse destabilized, the patient destabilized, and the "cleanser" collected their fee and disappeared before the damage became visible.
If Jang and Ryu had gone to an unlicensed curse cleanser with dormant Wasting Curses in their bodies—
"Get me the address of that clinic."
---
Ilsan Morning Health Center was not a health center. It was a storefront in a strip mall between a nail salon and a fried chicken restaurant, with a handwritten sign in the window that read CURSE RELIEF CONSULTATION — FIRST VISIT FREE. The interior was dim, incense-thick, and decorated with the kind of spiritual paraphernalia that existed in the overlap between sincere belief and commercial opportunism.
The woman behind the counter was in her forties. Thin. Eyes that moved too fast — the eyes of someone who'd been expecting trouble and had seen it walk through her door.
"We're closed," she said.
Zeke held up his Curse Division ID. The woman's eyes moved faster.
"I'm looking for two men. Mid-to-late fifties. Came in this morning. Probably asked about curse removal."
"I can't discuss client—"
"They're carrying dormant curses that are activating on an unstable timer. If you tried to cleanse those curses, you may have destabilized the timer mechanism. They could be dying right now. Where are they?"
The woman's mouth opened. Closed. The incense curled between them.
"Back room," she said.
The back room was a converted storage space with two cots, a folding table covered in talismans, and two men lying side by side on the cots with the grey-blue skin and labored breathing of active Wasting Curse victims.
The curse cleanser's attempt had done exactly what Zeke feared. She'd poked at the dormant curses with techniques that amounted to hitting a land mine with a hammer. The timer mechanisms hadn't just destabilized — they'd shattered. Both curses were fully active, feeding aggressively, and the amateur manipulation had introduced structural fractures into the curse architecture that made them harder to consume. Jagged edges. Broken threads. The curse equivalent of a shattered bone versus a clean break.
Zeke knelt between the two cots. Jang on the left, Ryu on the right. Both unconscious. Both dying.
He could eat them both. He'd eaten harder curses. B-rank, damaged, messy — it would cost him more saturation than the clean extractions. Maybe 0.6 to 0.8 each, with the structural damage increasing the processing cost. Total: maybe 1.4 percentage points. That would put him at approximately 76.5%.
Or he could call Tanaka. Wait for equipment. Do it controlled. But these two didn't have thirty minutes for Tanaka to drive from Seoul, and the active Wasting Curses were eating their organs at a rate that didn't care about optimal extraction protocols.
Moon Jae-Won's math. The same calculation, in reverse. Moon had refused to eat because the cost was too high. Zeke would eat because the cost of not eating was a number he couldn't live with.
*Eat*, the Collective said. Not commanding. Not tempting. Stating fact. *You were never going to do anything else.*
Zeke grabbed Jang's wrist with his left hand and Ryu's wrist with his right.
He'd never eaten two curses simultaneously. The consumption channel was designed — evolved, grown, whatever the right word was for an ability that had no manual — to process one curse at a time. Opening two channels was like trying to breathe through both nostrils while someone poured water into each. Possible. Inadvisable. Desperately stupid.
He opened two channels.
The curses came in screaming. Not the clean, courteous constructs Seung-Woo had built for the Unit members who'd cooperated — these were broken versions, fractured by amateur manipulation, and the broken edges tore at Zeke's consumption pathways like glass in a garbage disposal. Both Wasting Curses hit his system at once, and his body tried to process two simultaneous inputs of B-rank malice through channels that were built for sequential, not parallel, operation.
His vision split. Left eye saw Jang's curse — the weave, the maker's intent, the familiar frequency — while his right eye saw Ryu's curse, identical in design but fractured differently, the damage patterns unique to whatever the curse cleanser had done to each one. Two overlapping images of the same architect's work, broken in different ways.
The Collective roared. Not in protest. In something that sounded horribly like excitement.
*MORE. MORE. FEED US BOTH, LITTLE EATER. WE ARE SO HUNGRY AND THE FATHER'S CURSES TASTE LIKE HOME—*
He consumed them. Both. Simultaneously. Thirty seconds of the worst physical experience since the Backlash Hex — his curse marks writhing, his cracked teeth grinding, blood running from his nose onto the cots between two unconscious men in a fake clinic that smelled like incense and desperation.
When it was done, he let go of both wrists and fell backward onto the floor. The ceiling was water-stained. The incense smoke drifted in patterns that his 76.3%-saturated brain tried to read as curse architecture before he forced his eyes closed.
*76.3*, the Collective confirmed. Unnecessarily. *You are three-quarters curse now, little eater. Three-quarters us. The room is getting very big. Can you hear us breathing?*
He could. That was new.
The two men on the cots were breathing too. Alive. Damaged — the active Wasting Curses and the amateur cleansing had done harm that would take months to heal — but alive.
Two down. One to go. Hong Myung-Hee, en route to the hospital from Seongnam, where Tanaka's controlled extraction protocol waited.
Zeke lay on the floor of a fake curse clinic and listened to the Collective breathe inside him, and the breathing had a rhythm he didn't set and couldn't stop, and it sounded like ten thousand people turning over in their sleep.
The curse cleanser stood in the doorway. Her hands were shaking.
"Are they—"
"Alive. Call an ambulance." He sat up. The room tilted. Corrected. "And close this place down. Whatever you've been doing to people in here, it stops today. You're not cleaning curses. You're breaking them open and leaving the shrapnel inside."
She didn't argue. People rarely argued with a man whose face was covered in blood and whose skin was moving on its own.
His phone buzzed. Tanaka.
**Hong Myung-Hee has arrived at the hospital. Extraction room prepped. Come back when you can. But Zeke — the scan on Ji-Hoon is complete. The reservoir contains 142 distinct curse constructs. Estimated extraction timeline: six to eight weeks of daily sessions. And his tissue degradation has accelerated. We no longer have seven days. We may have four.**
