Urban Plundering: I Corrupted The System!

Another host leaned back, scoffing.

"Are we supposed to believe that Hwanung—the Son of the Heavenly Lord—was struck down by some dragon with boundary issues?"

One of them tapped their earpiece, pretending to get a production note. "Quick, someone call Netflix. I smell a new fantasy franchise."

Still, the woman said nothing.

She didn't need to. She had already said everything.

She simply stood there, unmoving. Her silence was not submission. It was warning.

Then one of the hosts leaned forward, his sarcasm sharpened by something darker now. An edge of obsession, perhaps. Or fear.

"Fine," he said. "Let's go with your bedtime apocalypse. Let's say Daegon did kill Hwanung. Let's say the dragon broke the sky and won the battle."

He looked at her. No longer smirking.

"Then what?"

His voice dropped.

"Why didn't he take the world?"

"Why didn't he finish what he started?"

"If he could kill a son of heaven… who stopped him?"

No one answered.

The woman was gone. The veiled shaman with the voice like smoldering coal and winter wind. She had told her story—no, she had opened it, like a wound hidden beneath centuries of gold-leafed legends and flattering scrollwork. She had offered not a tale, but a reckoning. And in doing so, she'd reminded the world that not all gods fall because they're defeated. Some fall because they are forgotten on purpose—because to remember them is to invite their judgment again.

Only the faint scent of ash remained. And something colder. Older. Watching.

And in that hush—thicker than silence, sharper than snow—no one noticed the studio screen behind them flicker. Not once.

But twice.

Once for the name they buried.

And once for the return they failed to stop.

The studio, despite its clinical brilliance and designer lighting, felt like a mausoleum now.

Gone was the confident hum of cameras. Gone was the eager static of voices filling dead air. What lingered was silence—thick, waiting, uncertain.

The type of silence that didn't just occupy space but claimed it, the kind that curled under desks and behind stage curtains like an ancient mist finding its way home. One by one, the panelists blinked. Some squinted at their teleprompters as if searching for the next line.

Others shifted in their seats, brushing invisible lint off their designer jackets, suddenly hyperaware of how cold the air had become.

No one acknowledged it, not yet. No one dared give the atmosphere a name.

Then a stagehand dropped a clipboard in the wings, and the sound was sharp enough to make one of the anchors flinch.

A low chuckle broke the tension. The main anchor leaned back in her seat, brushing the edge of his notes with a calculated shrug.

"Well," she said, voice dipped in irony. "That was something. Our viewers at home, don't worry—we'll return to the real news after this scheduled fiction segment."

The laughter returned, but it was no longer full. It was the kind of laughter that sought companionship, not humor. The kind of laughter people used when they were waiting to be told it was all a joke, even if a piece of them now suspected it wasn't.

One panelist rubbed his temple. Another typed something on his phone—perhaps to a friend, or maybe to the network, already writing the incident off as a ratings gimmick gone too far. The influencer host, clearly uncomfortable, glanced back toward the space the woman had stood. Her fingers fidgeted with the hem of her jacket.

"Did… did anyone see her leave?" she asked, trying to sound casual.

No one answered.

Because no one had.

There was no exit. No sound of footsteps. Just the moment she had been there—and then hadn't. Like snow melting under a sunrise no one saw.

Then, without cue, without warning, the massive digital display behind the panel flickered once. A blink, nothing more. The kind of brief visual glitch that usually accompanied a dropped signal or a remote feed error. No one noticed it at first. Not fully.

Until it happened again.

And this time, the flicker wasn't random.

It was a shape. No—a word. Brief, clawed in static and light.

DAEGON.

It vanished as quickly as it appeared.

Half the crew missed it. The others blinked and rubbed their eyes, unsure if they'd actually seen it or imagined it. Someone muttered something about checking the hardware. Another joked nervously about a "ghost in the system."

And yet none of them could shake the way the screen had pulsed. Like it wasn't a malfunction at all.

Like it had whispered.

Outside, the sun was still shining over Seoul. The glass buildings glimmered like mirrors for the sky, and the streets buzzed with their usual blend of purpose and illusion. But somewhere far above—or far beneath—something was watching.

Waiting.

Remembering.

Professor Ji-Min leaned back in his chair, his movements smooth with the arrogance of someone who'd never had to question the world's applause.

Fingers laced neatly over his stomach like a scholar in repose, lips curled into a half-smile that wasn't joy, wasn't amusement, but rather the quiet superiority of a man who had built his career on puncturing the sacred with facts.

Where the others on the panel had jeered openly at the shaman's tale—laughing like drunk jesters before a throne of old gods—they had at least been honest in their derision. Ji-Min's scorn was different. It was clinical. Curated. The kind that cut not out of hatred, but out of necessity.

As though the truth offended his discipline.

"Let's not romanticize myths," he said, with the smooth composure of a man who'd delivered this line in classrooms, documentaries, and international symposiums alike. "Daegon is no more real than the boogeyman under a child's bed and of course our own artist who's become a heartthrob in K-Pop. A dragon corrupted by heartbreak? Please. That's not history. It's projection wrapped in old smoke. The kind of story desperate people tell themselves to survive uncertainty."

The others laughed, appreciative of the performance. The audience followed like sheep behind a familiar bell. The cameras caught his smile.

The makeup light caught his cheekbone just right. On another night, this moment would've gone viral as the kill-shot of the episode. A man of science, eviscerating superstition with a single line.

But something had already begun.

Inside Ji-Min, something pulsed.

A flicker of heat beneath his sternum, like the first flush of embarrassment or too much caffeine hitting his bloodstream. He shifted slightly in his chair, rolled one shoulder. Waved off the discomfort. A reaction, nothing more.

He was already composing his next remark, ready to dismantle the poetic nonsense she'd delivered with a cascade of citations, carbon datings, and lectures on how folklore mutated under social pressure.

That was the real truth. Not dragons. Not heartbreak. Just cultural memory under stress.

But the warmth didn't leave.

It settled.

It stayed.

Not like pain, but like a presence. A second rhythm, drumming beneath his own heartbeat. Slow. Ancient. Patient. Not in the blood, but beneath it. A curling thing. Not intrusive, not urgent. Just there. Breathing with him.

And that was the moment—subtle, quiet, almost beautiful—when the mistake was made.

Because Ji-Min leaned forward again. Smiling. Confident. Unafraid. And in that smile, in that tranquil certainty, something inside him... agreed.

Not with his words. But with his certainty.

It welcomed it.

The warmth inside him curled tighter, the way a serpent might coil in a cradle of sun. It had no name yet. But it didn't need one.

Pride was enough. And Ji-Min had more than enough to offer. A lifetime of dismissals. A hundred books written in ink made from arrogance. Generations of myths scoffed into silence. He had built a palace from disbelief, and now, deep in the oldest corners of his spirit, something had come home to live inside it.

The shaman had warned them. Not in threats, but in memory. Not in fire, but in facts older than their science dared to name.

The sins that devoured Daegon had not died with him.

They had scattered.

And they had waited.

And now one of them had found a new voice.

Ji-Min didn't know, not yet. He still thought the tremble in his spine was adrenaline. The tightening in his chest was a lecture delivered well. But somewhere beneath the stage, far below the concrete and wires, the shadows were shifting. Not dramatically. Not yet. But shifting nonetheless.

The seed had taken root.

And it would grow.

Quietly. Elegantly.

Until one day, the man who mocked the fall of Daegon would wake up… and not realize he had become him.

Not the dragon. Not the myth. But the next vessel. The next corruption.

And by then, the warmth in his chest would no longer be warmth.

It would be hunger.

And it would whisper no more. It would demand