Darkness welcomed him again.
The wind had howled in his ears just before the world broke. Glass, metal, bone — all crumpled in the fall. His body had died, shattered on the concrete far below, but his mind remained wide awake. A flicker of pain, then nothing. And now…
Silence.
Gin Chan stood once more in Death's Realm, though it felt colder this time. The vast expanse of black mist was still and breathless, like a held breath waiting to collapse.
He looked down at himself — no blood, no wounds. Just the strange emptiness of a soul between lives. The fractured memory of his last fight still lingered: fists, blades, a rooftop war, and finally the sky swallowing him whole.
He didn't speak.
He didn't need to.
From the shadows, Death emerged. The figure, hoodless this time, wore no face. No eyes. No mouth. Just presence — heavy and vast like a collapsed star. Unlike before, there was no riddle, no smirk, no gesture of theatrical cruelty.
Just a voice.
Low. Measured. Sharp.
> "You're beginning to understand, aren't you?"
Gin narrowed his eyes. "Understand what?"
> "This isn't vengeance. This isn't justice. This… is design."
The words echoed like thunder across nothing.
Gin stepped forward, defiant. "You said I was cursed. You said I was chosen."
Death did not move. But the air shifted.
> "I never said who chose you."
That stopped him.
> "You think your deaths are coincidence? Each body a random draw? No, Gin Chan. You are sewn into a tapestry of rot. The thread beneath your skin was placed there long before your first death."
Gin's fists clenched. "Then who did this? Kang Seo-Yul? The Syndicate?"
Death paused. The silence lasted long enough to feel like an answer.
Then, a whisper:
> "The veil was only the second layer. You've yet to bleed truth from the wound."
"Wait,what!!"Gin Chan wanted to say something but was not given an opportunity.
A cold wind howled suddenly through the mist, pushing Gin backward. The floor beneath him cracked, spiraled, and fell away. His body began to dissolve — scattering like ash — and Death's voice thundered one last time before the light swallowed him:
> "You seek the cursed. But you carry the curse."
---
He awoke gasping, soaked in sweat.
Not in a mansion.
Not in a precinct.
This time, he lay in a cheap apartment room, sunlight slanting through blinds, fan spinning noisily overhead.
A desk nearby. A small fridge. A barely-working laptop.
On the wall — a new identity.
A new name.
Han Ji-won, municipal record clerk for Daeryun City.
No friends.
No family.
No questions asked.
Gin sat up slowly, wiping sweat from his brow. He breathed deeply, grounding himself, remembering Death's words. The curse… the wound… the thread.
He wasn't just hunting now.
He was infected with something far older than bullets or betrayal.
This time, he wouldn't just chase names.
He'd tear apart the hands holding the thread.
And with that, Gin Chan stepped into a world that had already buried him once more.
---
---
Daehwa never slept — it just changed masks.
At sunrise, the city wore its polite face. Neon signs dimmed, street vendors fired up grills, and the flow of life resumed like nothing lurked beneath. But in alleys behind glass towers and beneath the hum of power lines, truth trembled.
Gin Chan knew that tremble well.
In this life, he was Han Ji-won — a bland government paper-pusher tucked into a cubicle on the 7th floor of Daehwa Municipal Records, with a smile no one remembered and a presence that faded behind walls of dusty files.
But behind that desk, he was watching.
Behind those eyes, he was hunting.
Kang Seo-Yul.
The name Minjae had whispered before dying.
That name had festered in Gin's skull like a splinter. He'd waited. Calculated. And now, he searched — his fingers dancing across keys inside a system that wasn't built to hold monsters.
> Search: Kang Seo-Yul.
The results came fast. Too fast.
Every page a glowing hymn.
Photos of Seo-Yul smiling beside orphans, speeches at cancer wards, donations to failing schools and prisons. Founder of Daehwa's Hope Initiative. Owner of Seoyeon Conglomerate — the parent company of everything from biotech firms to AI labs. A guest on national talk shows. Praise from political analysts. Worship from the masses.
The man wasn't just clean.
He was sacred.
A saint.
And Gin knew saints didn't leave people chained in warehouses.
He leaned back, jaw tight.
> "You built your kingdom on bones and applause," he muttered.
---
That night, he called Ruko with a burner phone that he took from Ruko.
Three rings.
Ruko answered without a word.
"It's me"Gin
"Yo," Ruko's voice came low, paranoid as ever. "I was filtering old packet trails... that drive you gave me? It's like slicing open a ghost. Hidden ports, triple masking. But something blinked."
"What?"
"A heartbeat," Ruko said. "Two shell companies. Both buried deep. But they pinged."
"How deep?"
"Below floorboards in the dark. Both supposedly construction outfits. One shut down five years ago. One's still technically breathing. Guess who signs the tax records?"
Gin already knew.
"Kang Seo-Yul."
"Bingo."
---
The next week, Gin made his move.
He didn't need bullets.
He used bureaucracy — the deadliest disguise of all.
As Han Ji-won, he filed an anonymous health and finance audit request. Standard procedure. Just enough to raise flags. Days later, Daehwa's inspection division raided both buildings.
What they found?
A horror show.
In the first warehouse:
Crates of unregistered weapons. Dossiers. Surveillance logs. Maps with red X's. All sterilized — but not well enough for Gin.
In the second:
Tunnel blueprints. Trafficking routes. A room full of fake IDs and surgical equipment.
And most damning of all:
A vault of drives, all marked with Nexcore's encrypted sigils.
Gin was already inside before they could even lock down the scene. In uniform. Badge hanging. Smiling. No one questioned the helpful officer who knew exactly what to "secure."as he's available for a scapegoat candidate
They never asked what he took.
They never saw what he burned.
To them, it was a lucky bust.
To Gin, it was a war move.
---
He stood alone that night on an overpass, watching Daehwa glow.
Kang Seo-Yul's face blinked on a billboard: "Daehwa Deserves Better — Vote for Integrity."
Gin didn't blink.
He whispered beneath the roar of traffic:
> "Your sins are loud, Saint Seo-Yul. I just
learned how to hear them."
---
Ruko's hideout wasn't listed on any map. It didn't have to be. It existed between frequencies, tucked beneath the ruins of a forgotten manga café two blocks past Daehwa's neon pulse. The sign above read Closed Since 2016. That was just about right.
Gin Chan pushed the rusted door open. The hinges groaned like they hadn't been touched in years. But someone lived here. Survived here.
Below ground, the air tasted of burnt circuits and ramen packets. A low hum filled the basement — fans, servers, tangled wires breathing like lungs.
Ruko didn't turn as Gin entered. He was already at the center of a throne made of monitors.
> "You're thirty-two minutes late," Ruko said, voice low, but laced with that familiar static.
> "I was hunting," Gin replied, dropping a small drive onto the desk. "Two dead branches off the tree."
Ruko finally turned. Messy hair, eyes like a nocturnal animal's, hoodie zipped halfway to hide a deep scar running under his jaw. No greetings. No small talk. Just results.
> "You want it clean or raw?" Ruko asked, plugging in the drive.
> "Start raw. Then show me what bleeds."
The screens flickered.
Layers upon layers of surveillance feeds, financial laundering logs, obscure employee tags, drone cam snippets, hidden network threads. Like a virus that adapted and survived inside systems not even the government could name.
Then one window stilled.
A subway platform.
> Timestamp: 4 days ago.
Location: Sungshin Station.
Subject: Tier-2: Yoon Seo.
Gin froze.
On the screen, Yoon Seo stepped from the train, bag slung over her shoulder, checking a message on her phone.
The red tracking box locked onto her as if the screen itself hungered for her. The cam followed. Down escalators. Past vending machines. Through a crowd. All while she remained unaware.
Another screen opened — a café security cam. She was there too.
> "They're watching her," Gin said, more to himself than anyone.
Ruko nodded, slow. "Whoever runs this op… they've got her tagged, triangulated, and probably assigned a fallback kill order."
Gin's jaw clenched.
> "And yet she walks… smiles... lives. Why haven't they pulled the trigger?"
Ruko pointed to a separate data stream. An internal command cache Gin hadn't seen before. It was encrypted deep — but Ruko's workarounds were elegant, surgical.
The command tree wasn't just watching Yoon Seo.
It was watching Gin.
> "You're being tracked too," Ruko said.
"Not me but after all the destructions that I've caused so far,they think that we're an organization trying to stop them,so they're on guard. They just...."
> "They don't know who I am."
> "They're suspicious. These orders have hesitation written all over them. Delays. Audits. Shadow protocols."
> "Means they're nervous," Gin muttered.
> "Means they don't know what you'll do next," Ruko corrected.
Gin looked again at the looping footage of Yoon Seo. In some, she was at a bookstore. In another, talking with children outside a shelter. Then leaving a university building.
There was warmth in her steps.
She didn't know the threads winding around her.
> "They're baiting me," Gin said. "Testing to see if I'll break cover."
> "Will you?" Ruko asked softly.
Gin didn't answer.
Instead, he moved to the bulletin board.
From his coat, he retrieved three red strings. He pinned the first through Minjae's name. The second — around the man from media, whose body now lay cold beneath headlines and conspiracy.
The third thread hung loose.
He looped it around a new name:
> Kang Seo-Yul.
Then below it, another phrase.
Not typed. Not printed.
Just handwritten, with scarlet ink:
> They watch the wrong soul.
Ruko watched him from behind.
> "You're thinking of telling her."
> "I'm thinking of when I'll have no choice."
> "There's never going to be a clean time."
> "Then I'll make one," Gin said. "When the next string snaps."
---