The internet had never been so alive with liars.

Yoon Jiyon sat in a dingy underground internet café in Gangseo-gu, hood up, tapping through four different windows on his borrowed terminal. Each one was a different kind of panic.

“SEEN THE FLAME DUDE???”
A grainy, reposted screen grab of his fireball mid-cast.
41K comments. Mostly arguments.

“How to fake the Auction interface (tutorial)”
A 16-minute YouTube video showing a knockoff gold UI coded in JavaScript.
The creator was already getting sponsorships.

“Is the Auction System a cursed app?”
A twenty-eight-minute podcast episode released this morning.
The hosts laughed. One of them cried at the end.

And then there was the forum thread.

He found it buried in an obscure paranormal board.
Just twenty posts.
All anonymous.
Thread title:

“[BID #3] Anyone else see a ‘Glass Coin’ listing???”

Jiyon’s eyes narrowed.

That wasn’t right.

There was no “Glass Coin” in the early listings. Not in his memory. Not even as a scrapped entry. The third global bid had been an Iron Skin Spell, and it had taken place in Argentina, publicised when the user tried to tank a car crash and shattered like a dropped statue.

But this?

“Got a popup for ‘Glass Coin – Tier ??’... asked me to bet a belief?? tf does that mean??”

The replies ranged from trolls to sceptics.

“Bet a belief?? Like I believe in anime girls??”
“Yeah bro I sold my faith in taxes and now I levitate.”
“OP’s just fishing for clicks.”

But one post stood out:

“[Deleted User] — 12:51 PM:
That item shouldn’t exist yet. You’re either lying or very lucky. Or very doomed.”

That post had been deleted within three minutes. But the timestamp burned into Jiyon’s skull.

Because in his timeline, that kind of phrasing only ever came from one group:

System-aware users.

People like him.

He stared at the screen, lips drawn in a tight line.

The world was waking up, yes.

But someone else was awake early.

And now?

Now he had to move.

Because if the third item had changed, then the System was no longer just reacting to him.

It was adapting.

The Moderator arrived without fanfare.

No storms. No golden light. No booming voice from the clouds.

Just a ripple.

At exactly 3:03 a.m., a security camera on the roof of the abandoned Nakwon Shopping Arcade froze for six seconds. Every cat in the alley hissed and scattered. The streetlights dimmed—not off, just dimmed, like they were squinting.

Then, in the next frame of footage, something new stood in view.

Tall. Thin. Wrapped in a robe made of negative space, as if light refused to touch it. A humanoid shape with no face. Only a mask—a smooth white surface etched with a grid of silent numbers.

It didn’t walk. It simply adjusted the position. One frame at a time. Always slightly closer than the one before.

The cameras resumed.

The world moved on.

And the system had arrived.

Jiyon watched the entire thing from a hijacked CCTV feed inside a fried chicken place two blocks away. He sipped lukewarm cola as he watched the footage loop.

So.

They’d sent one early.

This one’s designation floated silently across the terminal in that familiar gold script.

Moderator-Class Entity: Aparatus-K
Protocol: Anomaly Identification and Rectification
Status: Active
Target: Unresolved

In his last life, he hadn’t seen a Moderator until Year 2, when a bidder tried to sell the concept of death to a divine-class collector. The fallout levelled six city blocks and erased the guy’s bloodline from public record.

This one was early. A year and a half early.

Which meant they were nervous.

Good.

Jiyon leaned back in his seat and cracked his knuckles.

He wasn’t going to run.
He wasn’t going to hide.
He was going to answer the knock.

Just not with a handshake.

He sent a single ping to his burner terminal across the river, the one he’d set up in the husk of an abandoned mall.

The bait was already laid.

Aparatus-K would be looking for proof. For signs of the unauthorised auction listing. Something to catalogue. To erase.

Jiyon was going to give it something better.

Something it couldn’t erase without responding.

And if the system wanted to play chess now, he was fine with that.

He still remembered how it ended the first time.

And he was rewriting every move.