Seori handed Minjae a warm canned coffee right as he sat down. "Your eyes look worse than my desktop background," she remarked.
Minjae blinked at her for a second. Then he took the coffee with a low grunt. "Appreciate it," he murmured. The words got half lost in the hum of his computer starting up.
"Don't thank me. Just drink it. You look like you haven't seen a pillow in days."
He didn't argue with that. He just nodded politely. Then he turned to his monitor. His fingers fell into that same old rhythm. Logging in, checking messages, clearing the morning backlog. He skipped any excuses. She didn't push for one.
A few minutes went by. Yura passed their desks. Her steps were light, but her smirk was on purpose. She leaned over the partition. Elbows resting there like a cat on a fence.
"You know," she said, "we did reschedule the meeting. We figured you'd pull another all-nighter."
"Only half the night," Minjae replied. He didn't even look up.
"Oh, good. That means you'll only collapse halfway through the presentation."
Yuri's voice chimed in softly from her spot behind them. "He'll be fine. I already forwarded him the adjusted minutes. And the updated charts. Plus, I added a note to the end of the report. Just in case."
Minjae paused. He turned slightly in his chair. "Thank you, Yuri."
She nodded once. Calm as ever. "If you forget to eat again, I'm filing a report. HR's watching."
From her desk, Seori raised a hand in a mock salute. "Vigilant and concerned."
That pulled a small exhale from Minjae. Almost a laugh. Then the office settled back into its rhythm. Soft tapping of keys. Distant drone of printers. Muted conversations bouncing between cubicles.
Hours passed like a low tide.
Meetings came and went. Reports circulated. Numbers filled the air like dust in a shaft of light. But underneath it all, Minjae's thoughts drifted elsewhere. Every spreadsheet he opened, every pattern he analyzed, carried some undertone no one else picked up. The familiar logic that had always shaped his work now felt like a veil. Something older stirred beneath it.
He noticed correlations that shouldn't exist—tiny, elegant repetitions between datasets that were supposed to be random. It wasn't mathematics. It was… rhythm.
He blinked, forcing himself to focus on the quarterly projections. But the feeling persisted. Intuition pressed beneath logic, whispering of patterns that couldn't yet be measured.
Instincts.
They were faint, but distinct, like echoes in a chamber only he could hear.
He knew this feeling. Centuries ago, he had followed such instincts through storms and mountains, reading currents not by sight but by pulse. The same quiet awareness now stirred again—subtle, dangerous, intoxicating.
He pressed his palms together, grounding himself. Not here.
Across the office, Yura's voice broke the silence. "Hey, genius, you spacing out or solving world hunger again?"
Minjae blinked and looked up. "Both."
She grinned. "At least warn us before you transcend."
Seori looked up from her desk, shaking her head. "Don't tease him, Yura. We actually need him conscious for this quarter."
Yuri, without looking up, added, "And I'd prefer not to redo his slides again."
"Noted," Minjae said dryly. "I'll remain mortal for the rest of the day."
"Good," Yura replied. "Mortals take lunch breaks."
"I'll keep that in mind."
They exchanged small smiles, brief and unspoken. Then the rhythm of work resumed, and the office faded back into its steady hum.
But Minjae's mind didn't quiet.
Every time he glanced at a column of numbers or reviewed a chart, his focus slipped. His perception blurred the data into something else—structures that reminded him of runes. The angles of graphs resembled the intersecting lines he'd drawn in chalk the night before. It wasn't coincidence. It was pattern recognition, ancient and unconscious.
He tapped the table lightly with his pen. A quiet pulse of thought: They're connected somehow. All systems are.
He looked up. Through the glass wall of his division, the others went about their work—humans, unaware. He wondered, not for the first time, how thin the boundary was between what they believed was normal and what truly existed underneath.
---
That night, the lab greeted him with silence. A silence so complete it felt like an exhale waiting to be drawn again.
The scent of worn chalk lingered faintly in the filtered air. The table gleamed under the fluorescent lights, now prepared with two rune variants—one the original glyph, the other slightly altered in line width and orientation. Each curve was drawn with mathematical precision.
He wanted to identify sensitivity to *form*—to see whether the rune reacted to aesthetic exactness or if its activation transcended visual error. Dragons could adjust mental sigils with instinct. Humans had to write them by hand.
He turned on the recorder.
"Trial Eleven. Subject: Veran. Variant A and B prepared. Testing visual tolerances."
He exhaled once, slow and steady, centering himself.
The ambient lighting dimmed slightly as he adjusted the controls. Temperature stable. Airflow sealed.
He placed a finger at the edge of the first glyph and spoke, voice low and measured.
"Veran."
Nothing.
He waited ten seconds, tried again.
Still nothing.
Moving to Variant B, he paused longer this time, letting the silence stretch until his own heartbeat filled it. Then—
"Veran."
A spark. Weak, but visible.
His eyes narrowed. He leaned forward, examining the faint luminescence curling along the edges of the glyph.
"Variant B retains partial effect despite angular deviation," he recorded, voice calm but tight. "Tolerance margin estimated under two degrees. Suggests semi-symbolic dependency."
He straightened, tapping the chalk gently against the table. "Then maybe… the glyph isn't the only variable."
He sat back down, opening his notebook. His handwriting was sharp, precise, but the thoughts were less so.
The human reports he'd gathered over the past months flashed through his mind—cases of impossible phenomena: spontaneous strength, momentary levitation, healing without contact. The details differed, but every subject described one common element.
Pressure.
Not the kind measured by weight or force—but *emotional compression.* Moments of panic, desperation, or loss.
Extreme conditions that shattered conscious control.
He stared at his notes.
Is pressure a trigger? A means to isolate the will?
He thought back to his first successful activation—the flicker of light, the tremor in his chest. He hadn't been calm that night. He'd been restless. Torn between exhaustion and obsession.
Maybe the spark required conflict.
He ran a hand through his hair, the motion sharp and tired. "So not just surrender," he muttered. "Surrender under strain."
His reflection in the lab glass looked different tonight. Pale. Unblinking. A man too tired to appear human.
He turned back to the rune.
The room stayed still, but in his chest, his pulse picked up. He needed to create *pressure*—controlled, repeatable pressure. But how? Physical strain would only damage the experiment. Emotional strain was volatile, unquantifiable.
He thought of work.
Of the weight on his title, the quiet congratulations that felt like veiled expectations. The way Seori's concern always sounded like she knew too much. The teasing glances from Yura that he pretended not to notice. The unspoken watchfulness in Yuri's eyes that made him feel… seen.
He stopped himself.
No. Don't use them.
That wasn't who he was anymore.
But the thoughts had already done their work. Pressure, even imagined, had begun to build—gentle, tightening, undeniable.
He adjusted the room temperature slightly lower, feeling the chill creep across his skin. Then he sat on the edge of the stool, posture rigid. A position that demanded alertness, not comfort.
He closed his eyes. Let the silence stretch. The hum of the air system faded into distance.
When he spoke again, it was softer. Almost reverent.
"Veran."
Nothing.
He opened his eyes. His jaw tightened.
"Veran."
Still nothing.
He gritted his teeth. Frustration pooled thick and hot in his chest, no longer restrained by analysis.
"Veran!" he hissed—half shout, half invocation.
The air erupted.
A blinding pulse burst from the rune, throwing him backward. The stool clattered against the floor as the table flared white. The room was consumed in raw, unfiltered brilliance for less than a heartbeat—then all at once, it was gone.
Minjae coughed, dragging air back into his lungs. Smoke curled from the edges of the chalk lines, leaving blackened residue across the polished surface. His hands trembled.
"That…" He coughed again, blinking through the haze. "That was new."
He forced himself upright, wincing as his knees protested. No burns. No visible injuries. But his muscles ached like he'd been struck. The air still shimmered faintly where the flare had been.
He stumbled toward the monitor. The heat sensors were still running. He skimmed the data, heart still pounding.
For 0.4 seconds, the table had emitted more thermal energy than an induction burner at full output. Then, nothing.
He stared at the screen. "Pressure works," he murmured. "But unpredictable."
He sat back down, the adrenaline fading into exhaustion. The chalk lines were ruined—burnt and fractured, no longer coherent symbols. But among the damage were faint glowing veins, like cracks in cooling stone. They pulsed once before fading.
He reached out, fingertips hovering an inch from the surface. No warmth remained. Just silence.
He opened his notebook again, writing in careful, trembling strokes:
Observation: Activation succeeded under emotional strain. Intensity uncontrolled. Duration: 0.4 sec. Residual pattern confirms energy conversion, not reflection.
Memory flash: cliffs, wind, ascent. Possibly emotional resonance tied to prior state of existence.
He paused. Then, softer, wrote:
Risk: increasing. Control insufficient.
He leaned back, head tilted against the cold metal wall. The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly above.
His mind replayed the imagery that had flared in that instant—wings catching wind, the dizzying rush of ascent, the endless horizon splitting beneath him. He could almost *feel* the air, thick and clean against scales that no longer existed.
Could it be memory itself? Was he drawing from fragments of what he once was?
If so, he was venturing into something dangerous. Even for him.
The human body wasn't built to hold that kind of current.
He sat in silence for several minutes, breathing slow, letting the rhythm of it anchor him. The lights flickered once, then steadied. Somewhere above, the building settled into its nocturnal hum.
He imagined the world above—the office floor, now empty. Seori's mug still on her desk, half-finished. Yura's jacket draped over her chair. Yuri's neatly aligned pens, untouched.
They would see him again tomorrow, same as always. Professional. Composed. The quiet, unremarkable man they thought they knew.
He would smile, nod, and drink whatever coffee they handed him.
And none of them would know that beneath that surface, he had already begun to unearth the heartbeat of something older than their world itself.
He looked at the rune one last time. It was dead again, but he could feel it—waiting.
He touched the edge lightly, almost tenderly. "Not tonight," he whispered. "But soon."
The lights dimmed on command. The recorder clicked off.
He gathered his things, straightened his tie, and left the lab the same way he had come—quietly, precisely, as though nothing had happened.
The door sealed behind him with a hiss.