The mall had been dead for years, long before the system came. Concrete bones. Rotting escalators. Flickering LED remnants in fake marble. The shutters of the shops were halfway closed as if everyone had left in a hurry.

Jiyon stepped through the side entrance with a flashlight clipped to his shoulder, scanning for the terminal he’d planted.

It was still there—buried under a shattered perfume counter on the second floor, humming faintly. The listing is still live.

Current Auction Listing:
[The Voice of a Dead Man]
Tier: Undefined
Bids: None
Status: Awaiting Moderator Confirmation

Perfect.

He didn't expect anyone to bid. This wasn't for them. This was for the Moderator.

And on cue, the world folded inward.

It didn't make a sound.

One moment, the mall was empty. Next, Jiyon felt the pressure drop, like a building had inhaled.

Aparatus-K stood by the terminal.

No footsteps. No entry. It simply existed where it needed to be.

Its mask faced the screen. Its fingers—too long, too symmetrical—hovered above the air.

Jiyon stayed hidden behind a half-crushed vending machine, cloak zipped, aura flatlined. He didn’t need to move. He just needed to watch.

The Moderator reached out.

The golden Auction interface twisted in response, glitching for the first time since Jiyon had returned. The screen split—one half showing the listing, the other displaying a spinning wheel of command chains Jiyon didn’t recognise.

This wasn't just a purge.

It was a reconciliation.

The Moderator wasn’t deleting his item. It was trying to fold it into the system.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

Jiyon narrowed his eyes, silently pulled out a second device—a burner node loaded with an old command: one that triggered a localised item-spawn feedback loop.

He typed a simple input.

[Inject: Minor Spell — Lightflare Pulse (Common Tier)]

The terminal buzzed.

A bright, artificial flare exploded in the centre of the floor—enough to blind, but not burn. Enough to distract, but not injure.

He stepped out of cover.

Face uncovered. Calm.

The Moderator turned toward him. Its head didn’t move naturally—it rotated, like a tracking sensor resetting its axis.

They stared at each other.

“First time in Seoul?” Jiyon asked casually.

No reply.

The gridlines on the Moderator’s mask shimmered.

Lines of code bloomed into the air between them.

Bidder-Class Entity: Yoon Jiyon
Status: Confirmed
Error: Temporal Violation Flagged
Classification Update: Threat-Level Escalation Pending
Requesting Override Permission...

Jiyon took a step forward, slowly, hands still visible.

“You're off-script. You're early,” he said. “Which means you’re improvising.”

A pause.

Then a ripple in the air.

Something like static. Something like breath.

The Moderator raised one finger. Not as a warning. As a bid.

[Moderator Entity Aparatus-K has issued a Private Auction Challenge.]

There it was.

The moment Jiyon had wanted.

He smiled.

Now it was his turn.

The air shimmered with invisible law.

It wasn’t magic, but it felt worse.

Jiyon stood five paces from Aparatus-K, the abandoned mall around them now frozen in a pressure pocket created by the Moderator’s presence. The walls didn’t creak. The air didn’t move. Time itself felt subdued, like it had been asked to wait outside.

Above the ruined auction terminal, golden text hung in midair.

Private Auction Protocol Initiated
Challenger: Aparatus-K (Moderator Class)
Respondent: Yoon Jiyon (Unauthorized Bidder)

Terms: System Integrity Violation
Stakes: Access Rights / Memory Rights / Item Custody
First Bidder: Moderator

A thin thread of code unfurled from the Moderator’s mask and formed a spinning glyph.

[Bid 1: Memory Reversal Clause — Remove awareness of soulblade theft.]

Jiyon’s lips curled.

That was the play.

They weren’t here to delete him.

They were here to edit him. Strip the memory. Roll back the error. Quietly move him from the epicentre so no contradiction remains.

He reached into his coat, pulled out his burner node, and fed it a sequence from a corrupted bid cache he’d discovered in Year 3 of the old timeline.

It was a broken listing.
It had never resolved.
Which made it a perfect counter.

[Counter Bid: Claim of Historical Precedence — Soulblade listing registered to User “KZero” (deceased). Memory transfer classified as Inheritance.]

The air flexed.

A flicker crossed the Moderator’s mask. Not emotion — just reaction. Delay.

Jiyon pressed.

[Clause Addition: As Inheritance was uncontested, transfer is immune to Moderator audit unless said audit is part of a Divine-Class Directive.]

The air buzzed.

Text twisted.

[System Conflict Detected.]
[Aparatus-K Parsing Delay: 4.7 seconds]
[System Response: Valid Exploit Pattern Recognized — Logging.]

Jiyon took a single step forward, slow and deliberate.

“You follow the code,” he said. “But the code’s old. It leaks. It forgets.”

Aparatus-K didn’t reply.

It twitched once, subtly, like a glitch inside a neural loop.

Then it issued its second bid.

[Bid 2: Behavioral Loop — Lock bidder Yoon Jiyon in cooldown cycle until memory integrity is restored.]

Jiyon was ready.

He threw his final clause forward like a knife.

[Counter Clause: Exploit Flag — Forced cooldown cycle constitutes harassment under Patch v2.3 “Player-Entity Guidelines.” Flag as abuse.]

For a single breath, the mall groaned.

As if it hated what was happening.

Then—

[System Exception Triggered.]
[Moderator-Class Entity Aparatus-K — Locked. Awaiting Manual Review.]
[Logging for Administrative Override.]

Jiyon exhaled.

He had done it.

He hadn’t just fended off a Moderator.

He’d glitched one.

The entity froze mid-step, arms lowered, code trails dimming like a moth with its wings torn off.

He didn’t move. He didn’t speak.

He simply watched as Aparatus-K vanished one frame at a time, like bad footage deleting itself.

Then the air snapped.

Time reasserted itself.

Jiyon stood alone in the half-lit ruin of a forgotten mall, the system’s bruises still cooling in the walls.

And he smiled.

Because now, somewhere up there in the impossible architecture of the Auction System…

Someone had just been forced to click the “Report Bug” button.

It took twelve minutes for the air in the mall to feel breathable again.

Jiyon stood in the silence, checking the logs. The attack was over. No further presence. No lingering energy. No ambient system field.

The Moderator was gone.

He pulled out his real phone—the one tethered to his Auction credentials—and checked the status interface.

What he saw stopped him cold.

Not in fear. In calculation.

User ID: Yoon Jiyon

Tier: I (Manual Override Pending)

Classification: Unauthorized

Status: Contradiction

Tracer Threads Assigned: 3
Moderator Review: Escalated
Response Level: Experimental

He stared at the word again.

Contradiction.

That wasn’t a rank. It wasn’t a crime. It was a label for something that shouldn’t exist.

Like a recursive loop.

Like a player who had already died.

Like someone the System had already auctioned off once.

He scrolled down.

There was no “ban.” No deletion. The system wasn’t punishing him.

It was trying to understand him.

And that was worse.

It meant it didn’t want to eliminate him. Not yet.

It wanted to study him.

He turned off the phone.

Walked out of the mall.

The city outside was still the same—filthy neon, muttering streets, convenience store clerks wiping down glass doors and not looking up.

But above the skyline, he could see it now.

Just faintly.

A shimmer in the air. A distortion, like a heatwave with direction.

Something was looking down.

Something was watching.

Jiyon didn’t smile this time.

He just muttered:

“Then watch.”

And kept walking.