Five days.
Five days of extractions. Five constructs pulled from Ji-Hoon's body, consumed, digested, absorbed. The C-rank template on day one. The B-rank offensive hex on day two. A B-rank defensive ward blueprint on day three — and that one had been strange, consuming a defensive construct, like eating a shield. It left a metallic impression in his sinuses that vanished before he could identify it. Day four, another C-rank. Day five, a complex B-rank tracking hex that Seung-Woo had designed to follow a target through three layers of curse-masking — the kind of craft that took years to develop and seconds to consume.
Five constructs. A hundred and thirty-seven remaining.
Saturation: 77.4%.
Each extraction pushed him up by a fraction — 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points per session, small enough that Tanaka's models called it sustainable, large enough that the cumulative effect was impossible to ignore. In five days, he'd gained nearly a full point from Ji-Hoon alone. Add the field consumptions — the five Unit members, the Eunpyeong-gu Consumption Curse, Park Joon-Ho's residual energy — and Zeke had gained over ten saturation points in three weeks. Three weeks. The curve that Seung-Woo's letter had described — the one that was not in his favor — was not slowing down.
Tanaka tracked it. She tracked everything. Her lab had become the nerve center of whatever they were doing — monitoring, documenting, maintaining the illusion that data could protect them from outcomes that data could predict but not prevent. The wall behind her equipment shelves held a chart she updated by hand, because some things needed to exist in physical form to feel real: a timeline. Zeke's saturation percentage plotted against dates. The line climbed. It always climbed.
"The rate of increase is consistent with my models," she said on the morning of day six, while Zeke sat in the extraction chair drinking coffee that was nothing. "But the rate of Collective autonomy growth is exceeding projections."
"Exceeding how?"
"At 77.4%, your synaptic interference level should be approximately 18% above baseline, based on the non-linear scaling model I developed from the 75% threshold data. It's at 23%." She showed him the graph. Two lines — predicted and actual — diverging. The actual line climbed steeper. "The Collective is gaining independence faster than the saturation numbers alone would predict. Something else is contributing."
"Like what?"
She hummed. The humming was back — she'd reestablished her verbal cadence after the stripped-down days following the Gwanak-gu disaster, but it was different now. Less musical. More mechanical. The hum of a machine running diagnostics rather than a person thinking out loud.
"Hypothesis: the simultaneous dual consumption you performed in the Ilsan clinic may have created new neural pathways between you and the Collective. By opening two consumption channels at once, you established a connection architecture that didn't exist before — one that gives the Collective additional vectors for interfacing with your cognitive processes." She looked at him. "You taught it a new way in."
"I was saving two people."
"I'm not criticizing. I'm observing." She set down the graph. "We should consider limiting further field consumptions to single-channel operations. No more simultaneous extractions. The risk of creating additional interface pathways—"
"If two people are dying in front of me, I'm not going to eat one and watch the other die because my neural pathways might get complicated."
"I know." She said it without frustration. Without judgment. The flat acknowledgment of someone who understood that the person she was monitoring would always make the choice that increased the numbers she was tracking. "May I take a blood sample?"
He extended his arm. She drew blood with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd been taking his blood every morning for a week and had stopped asking permission for the needle stick itself while still asking permission for the blood. A distinction Zeke appreciated. The needle going in was medical. The blood being taken was personal.
---
Ji-Hoon was getting better. Not healthy — the word healthy had left his vocabulary the moment Seung-Woo's curse reservoir slammed into his body. But better. Five constructs lighter, his skin had regained some color, and the curse marks had thinned slightly in the areas where the extracted constructs had been concentrated. He could sit up without assistance. He could eat solid food. He'd asked his mother to bring his economics textbook, which she'd done with the barely contained relief of a parent who interpreted studying as a sign that the world might eventually return to normal.
Zeke visited him between the morning extraction and the afternoon field calls. A routine that had developed without either of them acknowledging it: Zeke would stop by the ward, stand outside the glass, and Ji-Hoon would look up from his textbook and nod. Not a wave. Not a smile. A nod. The shorthand of two people who understood each other's situation without needing to discuss it.
On day six, Ji-Hoon pressed the intercom button on his bedside panel.
"Hey."
"Hey."
"My mom wants to know if you eat lunch."
Zeke looked through the glass at Ji-Hoon's mother, who was sitting in her chair — the same chair, every day — with a wrapped bento box on her lap. She held it up. Raised her eyebrows.
"Tell her I'm good."
"She's going to leave it at the nurses' station anyway. She's been cooking for you for three days. The nurses have been eating it."
"The nurses have good taste."
Ji-Hoon almost laughed. Caught it. The laugh turned into a wince, because laughing still hurt when your body was a warehouse for a dead man's arsenal. "I heard you saved some kid in Eunpyeong-gu."
"Yeah."
"And the mom—"
"Yeah."
Ji-Hoon looked at his textbook. The cursor of a thought moving across his face, visible and then gone. "My mom hasn't left this hospital since the first night. She sleeps in that chair. She eats in the cafeteria. She calls my dad once a day and tells him I'm doing better even when I'm not." He paused. "If you'd had to choose. Between me and her. In the store."
"I didn't have to choose."
"But if you did."
The glass between them was reinforced. Curse-resistant. Designed to contain whatever was inside from whatever was outside. Zeke looked through it at a twenty-two-year-old who was asking the question that every person touched by curses eventually asked: *Would you save me? Or would you save the person I love more?*
"I would have saved you both," Zeke said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
Ji-Hoon nodded. Went back to his textbook. The intercom clicked off. Zeke stood at the glass for a moment longer, then walked to the nurses' station, where Ji-Hoon's mother had left a bento box wrapped in a cloth with small flowers printed on it. He took it. Sat in the hallway. Opened it.
Rice. Kimchi. Rolled egg. Braised tofu. Everything a mother packs when she wants someone to eat properly. Everything organized into neat compartments, each ingredient placed with the care of a person who couldn't fix what was wrong but could at least make sure the person trying to fix it wasn't going hungry.
He ate. The rice was warm. The texture was present — grain against teeth, the soft resistance of properly cooked rice. No flavor. None. The kimchi had a faint, ghost-of-a-ghost tang that registered more as a memory of kimchi than the real thing. The egg was nothing. The tofu was nothing.
He ate it all anyway. Because a mother had made it, and eating was the least he could do.
---
The Curse Division had been restructured. Cho's suspension had triggered a cascade of administrative changes that Soo-Yeon — no longer officially involved but apparently unkillable in terms of institutional influence — described in a phone call that Zeke took in the stairwell between the sixth and seventh floors.
"Acting Division Chief: Han Yeong-Ja. Thirty-year career, primarily in administrative oversight. No field experience. No curse-adjacent background. Her appointment is political — she is a compromise candidate acceptable to both the reform faction on the committee and the institutional preservation faction within HA leadership." Soo-Yeon's voice was different on the phone. Sharper, maybe, or just less filtered. Without the HA's institutional framework shaping her communication, her natural cadence emerged — still precise, but with a velocity that suggested the precision had been a discipline, not a personality trait.
"What does that mean for me?"
"It means that for the next thirty to sixty days, the Curse Division's operational tempo will decrease significantly. Han Yeong-Ja's priority is institutional stability, not case response. Field operations will be subject to additional approval layers. Response times to curse incidents will increase."
"People will die."
"Yes." No hesitation. "That is the predictable outcome of appointing an administrative caretaker to lead an operational division during a period of elevated curse activity. I communicated this assessment to the committee. They acknowledged the concern and proceeded with the appointment."
"So what are you doing now?"
Pause. The sound of keys clicking. Even fired, Soo-Yeon was at a keyboard.
"I am consulting. Independently. Several parties have expressed interest in my expertise — private security firms, research institutions, and..." Another pause. Longer. The kind of pause that contained a decision being made in real-time. "And a group within the HA that disagrees with the current leadership's approach to curse-eating oversight. A group that believes Cho Min-Seok's contingency planning was not an aberration but a symptom of institutional policy."
"A group."
"I should not say more at this time. But I wanted you to know that my access to institutional resources has not been entirely severed. Certain individuals within the Association still provide information. Unofficially."
"You built a spy network in the week since you got fired."
"I reallocated my existing professional relationships to a different operational framework." She paused. "But functionally, yes."
---
The new cases came in steadily. Not a flood — a drip. One or two per day, routed through the Division's dispatch system, which now required Acting Chief Han's personal approval before assigning a curse eater to the field. The approval process added an average of forty-seven minutes to response time. Zeke knew the number because Tanaka tracked it, because Tanaka tracked everything, and because forty-seven minutes was the difference between a curse that could be consumed cleanly and a curse that had enough time to do permanent damage.
Day seven. A C-rank Binding Curse on a restaurant owner in Gangnam whose business partner had decided that a lawsuit was too slow. Zeke consumed it in ninety seconds. The owner's wrists, which had been locked in a phantom grip that prevented him from holding anything, relaxed. He picked up a glass of water with the careful wonder of someone who'd spent three days unable to grip a doorknob.
Day eight. No cases. Ji-Hoon's seventh extraction — a C-rank sensory disruption template that, when consumed, briefly made Zeke's left ear ring with a tone that sounded like a tea kettle screaming three rooms away. Saturation: 77.8%.
Day nine. A B-rank Rage Curse on a teenager in Nowon-gu whose girlfriend's father had decided that breaking up wasn't sufficient. The teenager had spent four days in a state of uncontrollable fury, destroying his bedroom, punching walls until his knuckles broke, screaming at his mother until his voice gave out. The curse made him rage. The rage made him hurt people. The people he hurt confirmed the rage, feeding the curse, a self-sustaining cycle that would have ended with the teenager killing someone or dying of cardiac arrest.
Zeke ate the Rage Curse. It tasted — not tasted, the word was wrong, but the consumption sense registered something. Rage Curses always registered. They were hot and fast and they burned on the way down, and the consumed rage joined the ten thousand other rages inside him and the Collective absorbed it the way a bonfire absorbs a match.
The teenager's mother cried. The teenager sat in his destroyed bedroom and stared at his broken hands and said nothing, because the absence of rage left a void, and voids were their own kind of curse.
Day ten. The dispatch system flagged something different.
**CURSE INCIDENT REPORT — PRIORITY A**
**Location: Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul**
**Type: Multiple curse placements, suspected coordinated attack**
**Victims: 3 — all employees of Hanjin Chemical Corporation**
**Pattern: Sequential placement over 48 hours, suggesting organized wielder cell**
**Responding agent: PENDING AUTHORIZATION**
Three victims. One corporation. Sequential placement — meaning the curses were placed one after another over two days, on three different employees, by what appeared to be a coordinated group. Not a single angry ex-husband. Not a grief-stricken father. A *group*. Operating with a plan.
Tanaka saw it on the shared system at the same time Zeke did.
"Organized wielders," she said. The words carried a weight that individual curse cases didn't. Individual wielders were fires. Organized wielders were arsonists. "The craft signatures — if the HA has signature data from the three placements, I can run frequency analysis. If the wielders are using different techniques, we can determine how many individuals are involved and whether they share training or methodology."
"Get the data."
"I need authorization to access case files. With Soo-Yeon gone, my access privileges are—"
"I'll get the data."
He called Soo-Yeon's unofficial number. She answered in three seconds.
"I saw the dispatch. I am already working on obtaining the signature data through my remaining contacts. It will be available to Dr. Tanaka within the hour." A beat. "Zeke. Coordinated curse attacks on corporate targets. This is not random. This is a pattern — and it is a pattern that resembles the early stages of what Han Seung-Woo was doing before he escalated to the Suppression Unit."
"I know."
"The difference is that this appears to be multiple wielders acting in concert. Seung-Woo operated alone. A cell of wielders with a shared ideology and complementary skills is a categorically different threat."
"I know that too."
"Good. Then you also know that the standard HA response — containment, pursuit, neutralization — is the approach that drove Seung-Woo to suicide and got an innocent student cursed. If these wielders are ideologically motivated, a confrontational approach may produce a similar outcome. Or worse."
Zeke thought about Seung-Woo's apartment. The books on curse theory. The photograph of Yuna. A man who'd compressed twenty years of grief into an arsenal because the system had given him no other option.
He thought about Park Joon-Ho in his goshiwon. A man too small to hold the weight of his own damage.
He thought about a letter that said: *You are both machines built to process other people's suffering, and machines break.*
"What are you suggesting?"
"I am suggesting that before you eat these curses, you consider talking to the people who made them. Understanding their objectives. Determining whether there is an outcome that does not require consumption."
"Diplomacy with curse-wielders."
"Information gathering with potential de-escalation. Diplomacy implies authority I no longer possess." She paused. "But yes. Talk to them. Before they decide that dying is preferable to being caught."
The line went dead. Soo-Yeon's communication style hadn't changed with her employment status. She still said what needed to be said and hung up, leaving the person on the other end to deal with the implications.
*Diplomacy*, the Collective mused. Its harmonics carried something Zeke couldn't quite parse — was it amusement? Skepticism? Or the ten-thousand-voiced equivalent of hope? *The little eater wants to talk instead of eat. Fascinating. We approve, for what our approval is worth. Eating has not solved the problem. Perhaps words will do what teeth could not.*
Zeke pocketed his phone. Looked at Tanaka. She was already at her station, preparing to receive the signature data, her equipment humming its familiar mechanical heartbeat.
"Doc. I'm going to try something different with this one."
"Different how?"
"I'm going to find the wielders before they place any more curses. And instead of eating what they've built, I'm going to ask them why they're building it."
Tanaka looked at him. The inside-out sweater, the binder clip in her hair, the red-rimmed eyes that had become permanent fixtures. She hummed once — brief, considering.
"May I come with you?"
"Why?"
"Because someone should be there who is paying attention to what happens to your body when you're too busy paying attention to everyone else."
He almost said no. The field was dangerous, and Tanaka's value was in the lab, behind equipment, monitoring from a distance. But the way she'd phrased it — *someone should be there* — carried the specific weight of a person who'd spent two weeks watching a man destroy himself in increments and had decided that watching from a screen wasn't enough anymore.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
It was, possibly, the most dangerous decision he'd ever made.
