The underpass beneath Seongsu Bridge had always been a quiet leak point.

Not officially listed. Not even dangerous. Just like the barrier between code and world had never healed quite right, there.

Jiyon crouched beside a locked city utility box half-covered in vines and subway grime, scanning the faded concrete for a glow. There. A soft shimmer.

He pulled out his node scanner, flicked it on.

Gold glyphs fluttered faintly through the air, like fireflies trapped behind glass.

System Cache Node Detected
Tier Window: III to ???
Available Listings: 1
Status: Unresolved Origin

He frowned.

That wasn’t standard.

He tapped in, slowly, carefully. Not forcing anything. Just listening.

The listing materialised.

No intro. No fanfare. Just pure data.

[Listing Detected]

Title: “Looped Memory — Final Breath (Jiyon)”

Submitter: Yoon Jiyon
Timestamp: ERROR
Origin Code: NOT FOUND

Status: “Bid Available — 1 Viewer Detected”

He froze.

He hadn’t posted that.

He never even saved that memory.

And yet—

The glow intensified.

Not golden now. Pale blue, shivering. Wrong.

The scanner buzzed, then shrieked.

And the world cracked.

Not loudly. Not visually. Just—suddenly.

The shadows on the walls bent backwards.

Time buckled inward like a pulled sheet.

And Jiyon was there again—

—not under the bridge—

—but under fire—

Gyeonggi-Do, Day 118, his last hour.

The system is collapsing. Divine-class logic rewriting mid-bid. Kang-ho screaming at him across the battlefield, begging him to break the loop.

Jiyon didn’t move.

He remembered.

He’d already died here.

He saw the light. Felt his chest burst.

Felt the error message print across his last thought like a final receipt.

SYSTEM ERROR: Outcome Exists Without Process
Cause: Unknown
Recommendation: Remove User From Thread

Back in the underpass, his body didn’t move.

But his mind fractured and reset.

Jiyon exhaled sharply, clenched his fists, and whispered:

“Try again.”

The listing flickered.

The ghost-storm collapsed.

And the world snapped back into place.

He stood in silence, alone, covered in dust that hadn’t been there seconds ago.

The node blinked one last time.

Then died.

No data. No logs. Just a warning, faint and glitched.

This listing should not be here.
Please forget.

But Jiyon never forgot.

That was the problem.

The auction hub in Dongdaemun had once been a luxury tower.

Now it was just dust and forgotten signage, its system access points gutted or locked. But beneath the surface, Jiyon had followed a low-frequency auction pulse—something emitting unauthorised listings that vanished before being cached.

So he came. Alone.

Through a shattered basement door and down a stairwell into half-lit server corridors, the air thick with ozone and damp paper. His scanner picked up nothing concrete.

Until he turned the corner.

And found him.

Eun Kang-ho stood in the centre of the hallway like a portrait waiting for context.

Not a mark on him. No armour.
Just a simple black jacket, a silver system patch on the sleeve.
And the calm stillness of someone who wasn’t surprised.

“Jiyon-ssi,” he said.

No guns. No spells. No code. Just a name.

Jiyon didn’t slow. But he didn’t attack either.

“You’ve aged well,” Jiyon muttered.

Kang-ho smiled faintly. “Funny. I could say the same.”

They stood ten feet apart. Nothing between them but memory.

“You died,” Jiyon said.

“You watched.”

Jiyon cocked his head. “You remember.”

“Of course.”

Silence.

Then Kang-ho walked toward him, slowly, confidently. Not threatening. Just certain.

“I remember everything,” he said. “The end. The collapse. What the Auction became. The divine fracture. The seven-hour war over Seoul. You were there too.”

“More than once,” Jiyon replied.

Kang-ho stopped a pace away.

“I came back with a plan. Not vengeance. Not rebellion. A better idea.”

“And that idea,” Jiyon said, “involves working with the System?”

“With its future,” Kang-ho corrected. “It failed before because it didn’t understand its users. Now it’s learning. It’s willing to delegate. I’m proof of that.”

Jiyon raised an eyebrow. “You’re a moderator’s pet.”

“I’m an extension of something bigger than either of us. And you… You’re just noise.”

Jiyon took a single step forward.

“And yet here you are,” he said quietly, “talking to the noise.”

They stood there.

Breath. Hum. Electricity.

Then Kang-ho reached into his coat, not for a weapon. For a coin. One etched with divine script.

“Come with me,” he said. “We can fix it from the inside. You don’t have to lose again.”

Jiyon looked at the coin.

Then, at the man.

Then turned.

“No.”

Kang-ho didn’t follow.

Didn’t call out.

Just said, evenly:

“The System doesn’t erase everything. But it always corrects. One way or another.”

Jiyon kept walking.

“You already died once,” Kang-ho said, not cold, not angry. “Be careful not to die wrong this time.”

Jiyon didn’t look back.

He just smiled. And kept walking.

The cracked auction tablet hadn’t lit up in hours.

No signals. No vibration. Just dead plastic and dust beside Jiyon’s bed.

Until 02:37 a.m.

No power source.

Just light.

A single thread of grey flickered across the screen like smoke made of static.

“Shadow Auction Notice: Listing #2 Now Live”

Title: Original Timeline: Auction Collapse Protocol
Classification: Redacted
Bid Requirement: Proof that you remember dying

Current Bids: 1
Leading Bidder: [REDACTED]
Verification Code: [BLURRED]
Estimated Value: CATALOGUE BREAKING

Jiyon sat up.

The Collapse Protocol wasn’t a rumour. It wasn’t even a relic.

It was the fail-safe that the system was supposed to trigger if auction activity reached divine cascade levels. It failed. Or was it intercepted? In the original timeline, it never activated.

And now, it was for sale.

Not archived. Not protected.

On the table for people to bid on, to gain it.

He tapped the bid history window.

The screen didn’t load text. Just… shapes.

An outline of a glyph he recognised from Year 5. From the final auction zone in Jeju, just before the divine implosion.

It wasn’t just old.

It was out of order.

The listing shouldn’t exist. The object shouldn’t exist.

And the bidder definitely shouldn’t exist.

He tried to refresh.

The name flickered once, like a blink trying to remember itself.

Then nothing.

[Bidder Identity Obscured by System Echo]

[Viewer Identified: Yoon Jiyon]

[You may not bid until proof of death is submitted.]

He stared at the final line.

Proof of death.

Not a poetic phrase. Not a metaphor.

They meant actual system verification—timestamped, indexed. A memory fragment sealed at the moment of collapse.

He had it.

Tucked away in a dead node he’d buried outside Seoul months ago.

He could submit it.

He could unlock the Collapse Protocol.

He could win.

But then again…

Someone else had already tried.

And they had no name.

Just an outline.

Just like him.

He turned off the screen.

Not out of fear.

Out of timing.

Because now he had to decide:

Does he claim his death?

Or let the other ghost win?