The entrance wasn’t marked because it didn’t need to be.

If you were the kind of person who knew how to find the Street Market, you didn’t need signs. Just that Lady Luck must be shining on your side.

Jiyon stood in front of a shuttered Gimbap Heaven on the south end of Seoul Station, hands in his pockets, waiting.

One-thirty a.m. A cold drizzle misted the streets, and the trains above hissed through fog like metal snakes shedding heat. No pedestrians. Just flickering advertisements pretending everything was fine.

Then, right on cue, a deliveryman in a grey hoodie knocked twice on the alley wall beside the dumpster.

Not the door. The wall.

It opened inward. Smooth, silent, mechanical.

Jiyon followed.

Down one stairwell. Then another.

Then silence.

And then—light.

The Street Market opened around him like a wound carved beneath the city.

A hundred booths. Neon strips nailed to concrete. Plastic tarp ceilings. Generators humming under crates of relic shards, cracked bidding scrolls, spirit anchors, and glitched system nodes wrapped in caution tape.

No signs here either.

Just eye contact.
Just the right question.

Jiyon moved through the crowd unnoticed at first. The people here were too careful, too wired into their own deals to pay attention. But the longer he walked, the more he felt it.

Eyes tracking him.
Whispers in motion.

"That's him."
"Fireball guy."
"No, not just fireball—he glitched a Moderator."
"Tier One and alive? Bullshit."

He ignored them.

He moved toward the rear section, where the air was thicker, older. Where the true vendors sat behind soundproofed curtains.

A girl with rust-red braids sat behind a folding table stacked with expired auction permits and counterfeit bidder IDs. She looked up once, met his eyes, then reached under the table and pressed something.

A curtain opened beside her.

And there she was.

Na Rina.

Not yet masked. Not yet armed.

She smiled at him, eyes full of light that she soon lost, like she’d been expecting him for years.

The curtain fell behind him, sealing out the sound.

Inside the booth, the air was cooler, dry, filtered, quiet. A rune-etched white noise box hummed softly in the corner. The walls were lined with system fragments: rejected items, collapsed bid forms, logic trees half-burned from being read too many times.

And in the centre of it all, Na Rina sat cross-legged on a folding chair, hands in her lap, like a girl waiting for detention to end.

She wore a mask now. Porcelain white, cracked around the edges. Just one detail painted on it: a red circle drawn around the mouth, like lipstick applied with the wrong hand.

But her voice, when she spoke, was calm. Precise.

“You’ve been busy.”

Jiyon didn’t sit.

“I don’t do interviews.”

“Good,” Rina said. “I don’t do journalism. I represent the Cartel of the Unbound. We trade in broken laws, buried protocols, and things the System doesn’t want acknowledged.”

Jiyon glanced around. “Looks more like a trash heap.”

“Funny thing about trash,” she said. “It usually contains the truth.”

She gestured to a slab of obsidian glass mounted to the wall, an auction relic plate. Blank. Dormant. Rare.

“We heard what you did to the Moderator. Aparatus-K was built to purge anomalies. Not pause. Not glitch. Pause implies confusion. And confusion? That means it doesn’t know how to classify you.”

Jiyon said nothing.

Rina leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees.

“Someone in your position could sell their story for more than any relic. But you’re not selling. You’re hiding.”

“Not very well.”

She tilted her head. The mask didn’t move, but something behind it smiled.

“You’re not like the other regressors.”

Jiyon’s eyes narrowed.

That word again. Said too easily.

“I never said I was.”

“You didn’t have to,” she said. “But you left fingerprints. System-patterned dust. Things you should’ve cleaned, but didn’t. Because part of you wanted to be noticed.”

She stood and crossed the room to the wall. From a small black case, she pulled out something thin and folded. A data relic. Handwritten.

She tossed it to him.

“Read that.”

Jiyon opened the page.

Lines of script.

But not item data. Not auction terms.

A memory transcript.

Time-stamped.

…Seong Joon-woo stands over the ash pile, doesn't speak. I think he saw me watching. He didn’t blink. He just left me there, bleeding, like I was a broken tool.
— N.R.

He looked up slowly.

The name.
The scene.
It was impossible.

That moment never happened here.

It had happened then.

And he’d seen her die.

But now she was standing in front of him, waiting for him to admit it.