Chapter 7 — Hairline Cracks
Night brought the first tremor.
Not in the ground — in the air.
It happened just after two in the morning.
The city slept. Traffic thinned to the occasional lonely taxi. Apartment windows glowed one by one and then flicked dark. Somewhere, a drunk laughed too loudly and then hiccuped himself into silence.
Kim Jae-hwan opened his eyes.
Not because of a sound.
Because of pressure.
The world felt… off by half a breath.
He lay still for a moment, listening.
The fan on his desk hummed. Pipes in the wall sighed. Someone in the unit above turned over audibly in bed. All ordinary.
But beneath the ordinary, reality hummed like a glass about to crack.
He sat up slowly.
His room was dim, silvered by streetlight bleeding through the curtains. The crack in the ceiling looked like it had shifted, although he knew it hadn't. His heart beat steady and calm, but his skin prickled slightly.
Mana.
Not yet born, not yet acknowledged by science textbooks, but already pressing inward from the seams of the world.
He swung his legs off the bed.
The floor was cool.
He stood, crossed the room, and pressed his palm flat against the windowpane.
The city lights blurred beneath a thin film of glass and fog.
It wasn't wind rattling the pane.
It was tension.
A bowstring being drawn back.
He whispered into the quiet:
"…early."
In most regressions, he hadn't felt this until much closer to First Gate. But then again, most regressions hadn't involved cracking an aptitude machine simply by existing.
His presence bent probability now.
He had become, by sheer repetition, the statistical equivalent of a loaded die.
The sensation intensified.
For a heartbeat, the sky looked wrong — as if someone had taken invisible chalk and drawn a circle too wide and then tried to erase it, leaving a faint outline.
A Gate?
No.
Not yet.
Just a shadow of one. A bruise under the skin of reality.
And beneath it — watching through it —
That presence.
The unseen observer.
The corridor of mirrors without mirrors.
The slow, patient dark.
He closed his eyes.
He didn't try to reach it.
He simply… acknowledged it.
The pressure eased a fraction, like an animal relaxing when someone refuses to flinch.
He opened his eyes again.
The city returned to itself.
Streetlight. Fog. Distant siren. Nothing broken yet.
He stepped back from the window.
His hands were steady.
His breath was even.
There was no fear.
Only confirmation.
"The countdown's accelerating," he murmured.
He returned to bed but didn't sleep.
He didn't need to.
His mind drifted through simulation instead: how governments would react when the first Gate appeared, which talking heads would be wrong with confidence on television, which guilds would eat which smaller guilds.
He made adjustments.
Small ones.
Quiet ones.
When dawn finally softened the edges of the dark, he was already fully awake.
---
The school felt tighter than usual.
Students didn't know why they were restless. They blamed it on exams, on hormones, on gossip. They didn't have the vocabulary yet for ambient mana fluctuation anxiety.
He did.
At lunch, the cafeteria buzzed like a disturbed beehive. Trays clattered louder. Laughter came too quickly and died too abruptly. People bumped into each other more often than usual, as if the space between bodies had physically shrunk.
"Everyone's weird today," Min-seok said around a mouthful of noodles.
"They can feel it," Jae-hwan replied.
"Feel what?"
"The future."
Min-seok blinked, then laughed because that was the easiest thing to do when something made him uneasy.
"You're saying creepy stuff again. Did you stay up too late?"
"Yes."
"See? That's it. Sleep deprivation philosophy."
He grinned and went back to eating.
He truly didn't know.
None of them did.
That ignorance made them look unbearably fragile to Jae-hwan — like eggs stacked on a shaking table.
From the corner of his eye, he noticed Yoo Ji-ah sitting two tables away, barely touching her food, staring at the ceiling lights.
She felt it too.
Of course she did.
Her intuition had always been a fracture line the world pressed on.
Their eyes met briefly.
No words.
Just acknowledgment.
He returned to eating.
He tasted nothing.
His body performed the action of consuming food because bodies demanded maintenance. Habit moved chopsticks. Thought moved somewhere else entirely.
---
After school, he took a different route home.
Not the main street past the convenience store.
A side road.
Narrow. Older apartments. Laundry hanging like faded flags from rusted balconies. Cats sunning themselves on car hoods and glaring at anyone who disturbed their kingdom.
He counted steps without realizing it.
At the twenty-third step, the air changed.
Thicker.
He stopped.
No one else noticed. A woman passed him carrying groceries. A child ran past swinging a cracked plastic sword, making explosion noises. A delivery scooter backfired loudly.
Underneath all that — the hum.
Like the aptitude machine's echo.
Like the mirror corridor.
Like something huge pressing its face against a window and fogging the glass with a breath the world pretended not to feel.
He moved toward the alley at the end of the street.
Shadows pooled deeper there.
Not ominous, exactly.
Just… concentrated.
A narrow passage between buildings where sunlight rarely reached, filled with trash cans, scattered cardboard, and the faint smell of damp concrete.
He stepped inside.
The hum sharpened.
Something tugged at the inside of his chest — not physically, not emotionally, but conceptually, like gravity discovering a new mass to pull toward.
He exhaled slowly.
"So here it is," he murmured.
A hairline crack.
Not large enough to be called a Gate.
Not stable enough to form a rift.
Just a thin wound in the air, invisible unless you had died enough times to recognize the wrongness of reality stretching.
He lifted his hand.
Stopped before touching it.
He wasn't suicidal.
He was curious.
The crack pulsed slightly, like a heartbeat trapped behind drywall.
He felt watched again.
Not from the crack.
Through it.
He closed his hand into a fist.
"Not yet," he whispered.
He stepped back.
The crack thinned and faded, embarrassed at being noticed, like a shy child retreating behind a curtain.
He left the alley.
The world resumed its ordinary, comfortable lie.
A horn honked. Someone argued on speakerphone. A bird dove and stole a piece of bread from a table.
He blended back into the flow of the street.
His conclusion was simple.
The Gates were coming early.
Which meant everything else would shift — recruitment schedules, research timetables, political opportunism. Regret twisted slightly through him, not for humanity, but for the elegant structure of plans he had already built.
He would adapt.
He always did.
---
That night, he didn't write in the notebook immediately.
He sat on his bed, back resting against the wall, and simply listened.
The apartment breathed around him — his sister snorting in laughter at a drama, his mother chopping vegetables, his father sighing the sigh of a man counting numbers that never favored him.
He tried, experimentally, to imagine not doing any of this.
Not planning.
Not avenging.
Not breaking the world.
Just… living the life of an E-rank with a small apartment, simple work, quiet evenings, someone sitting beside him on the couch as years blurred gently by.
The thought felt foreign.
Heavy.
Impossible.
He set it aside.
He opened the notebook.
He wrote:
— Gate-infiltration training must begin earlier — monitor micro-fractures in urban mana density — minimize contact with government researchers until leverage improves — prepare Min-seok for early deployment patterns — keep Ji-ah away from first-wave sites
His pen paused on the last line again.
He clicked his tongue softly.
"Annoying," he muttered.
He didn't like unexplained impulses.
He added one more line:
— investigate personal motivation drift
He leaned back.
Closed the notebook.
The light on his ceiling flickered once, then steadied.
He didn't look at it.
He looked instead at the darkness pooling behind the edges of objects, at the way shadows seemed to breathe like living things.
The presence was closer tonight.
Not touching him.
Just… near.
"Watching?" he asked softly.
Nothing answered.
He smirked faintly.
"Enjoy the view. It will get worse."
Whether for the world, or for himself, even he wasn't certain.
He turned off the lamp.
He lay down.
Sleep took him without dreams.
Outside, in an alley he had just left hours before, the hairline crack pulsed once, then twice, then went still — like a heart syncing itself with someone else's cadence.
Iteration forty-seven continued.
And reality had begun to fracture back.