The convenience store clerk looked at Seo Jinho like he'd just asked to buy the moon.
"Sir, you can't sleep here."
Jinho cracked one eye open. The fluorescent lights were too bright, stabbing directly into his brain with the enthusiasm of a dentist who'd given up on subtlety. He was slumped in the store's seating area, head pillowed on his arms at one of those tiny tables nobody ever actually used.
"Not sleeping," he mumbled. "Resting my eyes."
"You've been 'resting your eyes' for forty minutes. I'm going to have to ask you to leave."
"But I bought ramyeon." Jinho gestured weakly at the empty cup in front of him. "That's participation in the economy. I'm an upstanding citizen."
"You ate that an hour ago."
"Time is a social construct."
The clerk—young guy, maybe twenty, with the infinite patience of someone who'd seen far weirder things on the night shift—sighed. "Sir, please."
Jinho groaned and sat up. His neck cracked in three places, which seemed excessive but was probably what he deserved for using a convenience store table as a bed. "Fine, fine. I'm going."
He stood, stretched, and immediately regretted both actions. His back was not happy with him. His knees were not happy with him. Several gods currently residing in his head were definitely not happy with him.
"The vessel wakes. Finally. I was beginning to think you'd achieved enlightenment through sloth."
That voice sounded like someone reading classical poetry while simultaneously being disappointed in everything you'd ever done. Formal. Archaic. The kind of Korean that made you feel like you should be bowing to your elders even though the voice was technically inside your own skull.
"It's called efficient energy conservation," Jinho muttered under his breath as he shuffled toward the exit.
"It's called being lazy," said a second voice, and this one crackled like fire, sharp and impatient. "You've wasted the entire afternoon sleeping in a convenience store."
"Some people call it a power nap."
"Some people are wrong," the voice shot back.
"Eh, let him be," said a third voice, casual and amused. This one sounded like your friend who always had the worst ideas but made them sound reasonable. "Kid's got a system. It's a terrible system, but it's his."
Jinho pushed through the convenience store door and out into Seoul's early evening streets. September weather, not too hot, not too cold. Perfect napping weather, really, which he'd just been ejected from enjoying.
"Thanks for the support, Demon King," he said quietly.
"I contain multitudes of chaos and destruction," the Demon King replied. "Supporting your laziness is the least chaotic thing I do."
Jinho lived three blocks away in an apartment that could charitably be called "affordable" and realistically be called "the landlord has given up." He'd been there for five years, ever since KSID—the Korean Supernatural Investigation Division had hired him and immediately realized that paying Seoul rent prices for their agents was going to bankrupt the organization.
The building was the ugly kind of concrete block that Seoul had produced in bulk during the eighties. The elevator was broken more often than it worked. His unit was on the fourth floor, which meant stairs, which meant exercise, which Jinho considered a personal attack by the universe.
He was halfway up the second flight when his phone rang.
He looked at the screen: KSID
Headquarters.
He kept walking.
The phone stopped ringing. He made it another three steps. It started ringing again.
"Persistence is not a virtue," he told his phone.
It kept ringing anyway.
Jinho sighed and answered. "Agent Seo speaking, but only technically because I'm off duty and have been for—" he checked his watch, "—six hours."
"Agent Seo." The voice on the other end was female, crisp, and belonged to someone who'd probably never taken a nap in a convenience store in her entire life. "This is Director Baek. I need you to come in."
"Can't. I'm busy."
"Doing what?"
"Existing. It's very time-consuming." Jinho reached his floor and started down the hallway. "Whatever it is, assign it to someone else. Kim's good. Park's better. That new guy from Busan is apparently very enthusiastic."
"It's not that kind of assignment."
"Then it's definitely not my problem." Jinho reached his door—304, the four being an unlucky number that the landlord had tried to hide with a peeling sticker—and jammed his key in the lock. It stuck. It always stuck.
"Director, I just finished a twelve-hour shift watching a warehouse that turned out to be exactly what it looked like: a warehouse. I'm tired, I'm hungry, and I'm going to eat something unhealthy and sleep for ten hours."
"The Bangkok vault was breached."
Jinho stopped jiggling his key.
"Oh," said the Jade Emperor, and his voice had gone sharp. "That's not good."
"That's very not good," agreed the Phoenix.
"That's hilariously not good," added the Demon King. "Like, cosmically bad timing not good."
"When?" Jinho asked.
"Six hours ago. Full briefing at headquarters. I'm sending a car."
"I don't need a car, I can take the—"
"The car is already outside your building."
Jinho walked to his window and looked down. There was indeed a black sedan with government plates parked in front of his building, and the driver was looking up at his window like he knew exactly which one it was.
"That's creepy," Jinho said.
"That's efficient. Twenty minutes." Director Baek hung up.
Jinho stood in his apartment—small, cluttered, with dishes in the sink and laundry on the chair and a general vibe of "person who has mastered the art of doing the minimum"—and considered his options.
Option one: Ignore the car, order chicken, sleep for ten hours.
Option two: Go to headquarters, deal with whatever crisis had happened, probably not sleep.
"You're going to pick option two," said the Jade Emperor.
"I'm seriously considering option one."
"You always say that," said the Phoenix. "And you always pick option two."
"Because deep down, you're responsible," added the Demon King. "It's your fatal flaw."
"My fatal flaw is being cursed by three gods who won't shut up." Jinho grabbed his jacket anyway—black, worn, with pockets that had held everything from police badges to protein bars to that one time a very small and very angry spirit that he'd had to negotiate with for two hours.
He locked his apartment and headed back down the stairs.
The driver was exactly where Jinho expected him to be: leaning against the sedan, checking his phone, looking like he did this sort of thing every day. Which he probably did. KSID went through a lot of drivers.
"Agent Seo?" The driver straightened up. "I'm here to—"
"Yeah, I know. Headquarters. Let's make it quick." Jinho slid into the back seat. "And if there's traffic, I'm taking a nap."
"Sir, it's a fifteen-minute drive."
"Then I'm taking a fifteen-minute nap."
He did not, in fact, take a nap, because the three gods in his head decided this was the perfect time to have opinions about everything.
"The Bangkok vault," said the Jade Emperor, "contains seventeen Class-A artifacts, forty-three Class-B artifacts, and somewhere between eight hundred and nine hundred items of historical significance."
"I know. I helped catalog half of them."
"If someone breached it, they were after something specific," continued the Phoenix. "The question is what."
"Or who," added the Demon King. "Could be a rescue operation. Could be a theft. Could be someone really stupid who's about to learn why we keep things locked up."
Jinho watched Seoul slide past the window—neon signs, convenience stores, people living their normal lives completely unaware that there was an entire government division dedicated to making sure monsters didn't eat them.
"What do you three think they took?" he asked quietly.
The gods were silent for exactly three seconds.
Then the Jade Emperor said: "Something we'd rather not think about."
Which was not reassuring at all.
KSID headquarters looked like every other government building in Yongsan district: concrete, glass, the architectural equivalent of a sigh. The real interesting parts were underground, which was where all the actual work happened. Storage, research, operations. The basement levels went down seven floors, and rumor had it there were sub-basements below that for things nobody wanted to talk about.
Jinho had his access badge—somehow it still worked even though he'd never actually turned it in—and he nodded to the security guard on duty.
"Evening, Agent Seo."
"Evening, Min-ssi. How's your kid?"
"Started middle school. Already complaining about homework."
"Good kid." Jinho headed for the elevators. "Stay safe."
The elevator had buttons for floors one through seven above ground, and buttons for sublevels one through seven below.
Jinho pressed SL-7. Operations level. Where Director Baek lived when she wasn't sleeping, which was most of the time.
The elevator descended with a mechanical hum that Jinho's brain immediately interpreted as "perfect white noise for napping." He closed his eyes.
"Don't you dare," said the Phoenix.
"Wasn't going to."
"You were absolutely going to."
"A man can dream."
The elevator dinged. Sublevel 7.
The doors opened to a hallway of gray walls, fluorescent lights, and the particular smell of bad coffee and worse decisions. A few night-shift personnel glanced up as Jinho passed, did double-takes—he got that a lot—and went back to their work.
Conference Room C was at the end of the hall. The door was closed but not locked. Jinho pushed it open.
Director Baek Yewon sat at the head of a long table covered in papers, tablets, and at least four empty coffee cups. She was in her mid-forties, sharp-featured, with hair pulled back in a bun so severe it looked like it could be used as a weapon. When she looked up at Jinho, her eyes had that particular quality of someone who hadn't slept in thirty hours and was operating purely on caffeine and spite.
"Agent Seo. Sit."
Jinho sat.
"You look terrible," he said.
"You look like you were sleeping in a convenience store."
"I was resting my eyes in a convenience store. There's a difference." Jinho glanced at the scattered papers. "What happened in Bangkok?"
Director Baek pulled out a tablet and tapped it twice. A holographic display flickered to life above the table—security footage, timestamp reading 22:47:33.
"Bangkok vault. Standard security: twelve wards, physical barriers, guards rotating every four hours." She fast-forwarded the footage. "At 22:47, someone bypassed everything. No alarms, no alerts, nothing. They were in and out in under three minutes."
"Three minutes is impressive."
"Three minutes is impossible." Director Baek zoomed in on the footage. The image was grainy, but Jinho could make out shapes moving through the vault with practiced precision. "We don't know how many people. We don't know how they got in. We don't have clear visuals on any of them."
"So you have nothing."
"We have an inventory of what's missing."
She pulled up another screen. A list of artifacts, most of them crossed out, one highlighted in red.
Jinho leaned forward and read the highlighted entry.
Then he read it again.
Then he said: "Oh, you've got to be kidding me."
"Told you," said the Jade Emperor. "Something we'd rather not think about."
The highlighted entry read: Phoenix Seal (Fragment A) - Crimson Jade - Primordial Class - STOLEN
"They took the Phoenix Seal," Jinho said flatly.
"Half of it," corrected Director Baek. "The other half was stolen from a private collection in Singapore three months ago. We've been tracking it, but the trail went cold in Manila."
"And now someone has both halves."
"Potentially."
Jinho sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. The ceiling was not helpful. The ceiling never was.
The Phoenix Seal. Prison of Zhu Que, the Vermillion Bird, one of seven Primordial Spirits who'd been sealed away three thousand years ago because they represented the kind of natural order that humans had decided they didn't particularly enjoy. Things like "survival of the fittest" and "the weak exist to feed the strong" and "entropy is beautiful."
If someone woke up the Primordials, things would get very bad very quickly.
"How bad are we talking?" Jinho asked the ceiling.
"Models suggest 95% human mortality in the first year," said Director Baek. "Give or take."
"That's specific."
"We've had a lot of time to run the numbers." She closed the holographic display. "Which is why I need you to find the Seal and get it back."
Jinho looked at her. "Me specifically."
"You specifically."
"There are forty-seven blessed agents in KSID. Any of them could—"
"None of them are triple-blessed." Director Baek's expression was unreadable. "You're the only agent who can track divine artifacts without triggering their defenses. You're the only one who can handle the Seal if we find it. And you're the only one I trust not to accidentally wake up a Primordial Spirit because you got curious."
"That happened one time," Jinho muttered. "And it was a very convincing box."
"It had 'DO NOT OPEN' written on it in twelve languages," said the Phoenix.
"Which is just asking for someone to open it."
Director Baek pulled out another tablet. "Your flight leaves in four hours. Chiang Mai, then overland to the Golden Triangle. We have intelligence suggesting the Seal is being moved through Myanmar."
"Four hours?" Jinho checked his watch.
"That's not a lot of time to pack."
"You don't need to pack. Everything's already arranged." Director Baek slid the tablet across the table. "Briefing documents. Read them on the plane."
Jinho picked up the tablet and scrolled through the first few pages. Satellite imagery, intelligence reports, a lot of text that he was definitely going to skim instead of read properly.
"Am I going alone?" he asked.
"No. You'll have a partner."
"I work better alone."
"You work lazier alone," corrected Director Baek. "Your partner is already en route. You'll meet at the airfield."
"Who is it?"
"Agent Yuki Tanaka. Tokyo division transfer. Dual-blessed, combat specialist, speaks four languages." Director Baek stood up, which meant the meeting was over. "Try not to get her killed."
"I don't get people killed."
"No, you just complain the entire time you're saving their lives." She walked to the door, paused. "Jinho. This is important. If someone is collecting the Seven Seals—"
"I know." Jinho stood up, tucked the tablet under his arm. "End of the world, 95% mortality, very bad time for everyone involved. I'll handle it."
"Good." Director Baek opened the door.
"Car's waiting. Don't be late."
She left.
Jinho stood in the empty conference room, holding a tablet full of information he didn't want to read about a mission he didn't want to do, and considered the fundamental unfairness of the universe.
"You could say no," suggested the Demon King.
"Could I though?"
"Technically yes. Practically no."
"Duty calls," said the Jade Emperor, and he somehow made it sound like both an observation and a guilt trip.
"Just get it over with," said the Phoenix. "The faster you start, the faster you can go back to napping in convenience stores."
"That's the most sensible thing any of you have said all day."
Jinho walked out of the conference room, down the gray hallway, into the elevator that descended instead of ascending because apparently his life was a metaphor now.
Four hours until his flight.
Three hours and fifty-five minutes until he had to actually do work.
He spent the elevator ride considering whether he could fit in one more nap.
"No," said all three gods in unison.
"Killjoys," Jinho muttered.
The elevator reached the ground floor. The doors opened. The car was waiting outside.
Jinho got in and did not take a nap on the drive to the airfield, but only because the driver was playing K-pop loud enough to make sleeping physically impossible.
Some days, the universe just had it out for you.