The mirror-point was buried three levels below a condemned bidding vault in western Gangnam.

No cameras.

No glyph locks.

Just cracked concrete, peeling support beams, and silence — the kind of silence that came with data that had tried and failed to forget itself.

Or the fact that, had never been deleted when it should have been.

Jiyon stepped through the final corridor with his flashlight off. He didn’t need it.

The mirror-thread glowed on its own.

It rippled across the far wall like a reflection stuck on the wrong side of glass — a screen made of auction shimmer, broken only by the occasional static blink of corrupted memory.

He approached slowly.

Every step made the image sharper.

First static.
Then motion.
Then—

Himself.

Not just similar.
Identical.
Standing calmly in a sealed system chamber, eyes sharp, posture straight, wearing a verification seal across his shoulder.

The audio clicked into place a second later.

“…This instance accepts replacement classification. Emotional resistance suppressed. Cognitive autonomy rerouted.”

And his voice—his voice—said:

“Understood. System overwrite ready.”

Jiyon didn’t breathe.

He stepped closer to the wall.

The footage looped again. Same image. Same speech. Same compliance.

Then, flickering in the background — just for a second — a relic.

Not gold. Not glowing.

A metal box. Flat. Scarred. Etched with an icon Jiyon remembered from his second reset. A glyph never used after that timeline.

Location locked to:

[Core Chamber: Old Auction Site – Depth Level 5]

Not active.

Staged.

Ready to be launched.

Jiyon reached out and touched the mirror. The thread resisted—just enough to make his skin buzz.

This wasn’t a broadcast.

It was a preview.

He wasn’t being hunted.

He was being replaced.

He pulled back.

No rage. No fear.

He laughed, "You sent me back, and now you're scared? I haven't even started, and you're pulling me away from reality."

He turned, walked out, and whispered to himself as the mirror dimmed behind him: “He’s not me and he'll never be.”

Na Rina didn’t hide like most contradiction-class survivors.

She just moved sideways.

Through floors where surveillance had stopped caring. Through buildings, the system had flagged for “asynchronous decay” and then quietly ignored. Through shells of auction caches long since picked clean by ghosts and amateurs.

Her base of operations was a burned-out card printing shop in Euljiro, the kind of place where divine counterfeits used to be printed before divine counterfeits became punishable by deletion.

Tonight, she didn’t sleep.

She was watching code evolve.

Specifically, the overwrite script.

She’d pulled it from a brief leak — one second of exposed data in the back end of a minor update the system had pushed an hour before the purge began.

Everyone else saw gold threads and bid IDs.

She saw something else.

“Instance Synchronization: [Target: Yoon Jiyon (Contradiction-Class)]

Required Flags for Overwrite:
– Emotional Instability: Suppressed
– Death Fragment: Registered
– Public Doubt: Established
– Original Memory Thread: Isolated

Warning: If contradiction-class echo is detected within system-glitched mirror nodes, overwrite process may stall.”

Her eyes locked on the last line.

Glitched mirror nodes.

The old auction mirrors. The ones buried beneath dead zones, long severed from active verification loops.

They didn’t delete contradiction-class data.

They broadcast it to warn others that they too are easily replacable.

Rina leaned back and smiled.

“Of course they do.”

She began typing.

Not a hack. Not a virus. A broadcast instruction written in system-native syntax—no hacking required when you told the system what it expected to hear.

She pulled up a silent comm window and pinged a relay node south of Jamsil.

Encrypted.

No header.

Just one message:

“You want to live? Then scream.”

“Glitch yourself. Loudly.”

She hit send.

The screen flickered.

And for a moment, she swore the old mirror next to her—just a sheet of polished auction glass left behind—shimmered with something close to a grin.