Read Rebirth Auction: I Sell the Apocalypse :: Purge Protocol

The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the sky was already golden.

Jiyon walked along the fractured highway shoulder south of Yongin, passing rusted-out cars half-swallowed by weeds and the long-dead hum of forgotten surveillance drones.

No one comes out here anymore.

Too much bleeding. Too many places the System pretended didn't exist.

He found the junkyard just before dawn—twenty-five acres of twisted steel, dented cargo vans, and auction-melted machinery left to rot in the wake of an unregistered divine-class rupture.

He paused at the fence.

Felt the hum in his bones.

Not electricity. Not magic. Something in between.

Residual bid energy—warped, feral, still looping.

He hopped the fence and made his way past a collapsed tower of shipping crates. Somewhere beneath the centre, a rusted container shaped like a claw machine marked the spot.

This was where he’d buried it.

Not a relic. Not a scroll. A node. Flat. Silent. Encoded with the memory of his last death.

He pried up the lid of a half-melted vending machine and reached into the cavity below.

His fingers found it.

A metal case. Hand-scratched code on the side. No system ports. Just raw memory substrate, hidden from auto-indexing.

He pulled it out slowly.

The moment he touched the seal, the air changed.

The shadows around the container deepened.

The field trembled.

Then—

Something whispered.

Not a voice.
Not language.

Just a sensation behind his ear: don’t remember this.

He locked his jaw.

“No.”

He cracked the node open.

A thin beam of gold-grey memory flickered across his vision.

And he saw it.

The battlefield.
The final divine rupture.
The system was collapsing into recursive failure.
His chest caving in from a bid he couldn’t counter.
A god laughing with no mouth.
And then—
The system waspausing.
Not to kill.
To catalogue.

“Subject Yoon Jiyon: Collapse Complete”
“Thread: Terminated”
“Memory Fragment: Preserved for Post-Event Scrub”
[Would you like to recover this fragment?]
[Yes] / [No]

He didn’t hesitate.

He tapped Yes.

And for a single moment, the junkyard screamed.

Every metal surface bent inward. The divine logic snapped tight like a spring. And Jiyon collapsed forward, one knee on rusted ground, chest heaving, blood in his mouth that hadn’t been there a second ago.

But he had it.

Burned into the core of the node in his coat:

His death.

Authenticated. Archived. Complete.

Proof.

He stood.

The wind had gone still.

But the system had felt that.

He could feel it watching now.

And something inside it—deep, angry, cold—had just decided he needed to be removed.

02:01 a.m.

Somewhere below Hongdae Station, a rogue bidder opened a scroll to list a cursed tier IV artefact.

The moment the relic activated, the terminal turned white.

[Unauthorized Memory Signature Detected]
[Classification: Contradiction]
[Patch v3.0 Now Live]
This listing has been corrected.

The bidder was gone before the scroll hit the floor.

02:07 a.m.

In a sealed apartment in Sinchon, a black-market technician tried to back up their relic vault.

The files blinked out in alphabetical order.

[Error: You do not exist.]
[Status: Delisted]

Their device melted through the desk.

02:10 a.m.

Across Seoul, hundreds of unregulated scrolls, fragments, data nodes, and rogue relics went dark.

The patch didn’t kill.

It didn’t scream.

It didn’t warn.

It has just been removed.

Anything unverified. Anything from unstable timelines. Any listing marked by a contradiction-class aura.

02:12 a.m.

Na Rina stood on the second floor of a tea shop in Mapo-gu, watching the lights in her terminal blink out one by one.

She didn’t panic.

She didn’t run.

She took off her auction mask, placed it on the floor, and stepped into the corner behind the data curtains where her system disguise cache was stored.

Thirty seconds later, the patch reached her node.

A scan swept the room.

It hovered over the table. The mask. The terminal.

Paused.

Then beeped.