The shimmer of the rune was quieter today. Not weaker—just more refined, like a musician practicing scales until each note turned clean, intentional, muted only because it no longer needed to strain. Minjae adjusted the induction ring slightly, rotating the bronze frame by half a degree until the triad—Aethra, Surnglyph, and the unnamed third—resonated together. The pulses were slow, steady, and almost rhythmic, almost enough to mimic breath. Human breath. He wondered if that was coincidence, or if the materials remembered more than they should.
He leaned close, watching the readings flicker across the side display. Digital data helped, but the old vibration chart—the thin sheet clipped to the wooden board—captured what the sensors couldn't. He still trusted that. Paper didn't lie the way software sometimes did.
Then he did something different.
He rotated the third rune's base clockwise. There had always been a slight resistance before, subtle enough that a human wouldn't have noticed. He did. Today, though, the base moved with no friction at all. Smooth. Cooperative.
A soft tone followed—not metal on metal, not mechanical. Harmonic. Like glass struck lightly by a fingertip.
The shimmer flared. Brief. Controlled. A loop.
A repeatable cycle.
His eyes narrowed in quiet satisfaction. "There it is," he murmured. The consistency he'd been waiting for. Three trials now—three cycles that behaved exactly the same. Enough to call it a pattern, though not enough to name the third glyph again. Names mattered. Runes took them seriously. A premature name might shape the rune wrong.
Still, the behavior pointed to something. Not amplification—the rune wasn't increasing output. Not synchronization either—it wasn't forcing the other two to match. No. The word formed naturally in his thoughts.
Resonance.
It was matching them. Aligning their frequencies the way one living creature might align its breath with another. Binding without overtaking.
He recorded the test, annotated the chart, and reset the array. Slow movements. Quiet practice. Alone.
The quiet suited him. It always did—although he had been noticing lately that silence behaved differently when there were... thoughts he didn't want to hear too clearly. Memories that didn't belong to this lifetime. Instincts that didn't fit a human frame. Breath too steady. Hearing too sharp. A pulse in his fingertips that wasn't blood.
He pushed them aside and reset the ring.
Outside the hidden lab, in the very human world of the company, the meme refused to die. It had spread through the workplace like a persistent breeze—soft enough to seem harmless, but constant enough to remind him it existed. At first it was loud on the main boards, then quieter, passed in private chats and lunch break messages. Never malicious. Just amused.
Amusement was dangerous.
Whenever he walked past a cluster of employees, their conversations paused for a fraction longer than normal. Not enough that a normal person would notice. Enough that he noticed everything.
Some people smiled. Some looked curious. Some glanced at him the way one glances at a puzzle that might reveal something new if stared at long enough.
He ignored it. Or he tried to.
When he crossed paths with Seori by the elevators, she tilted her head with an amused expression she didn't bother hiding. "Your Highness," she said dryly, "do you require a schedule escort today?"
He stared at her. Not annoyed. Just evaluating how much she knew. She smiled first.
"It's a joke, Minjae," she said. "People are just having fun. You know that, right?"
He didn't answer. He pressed the elevator button instead.
Seconds later, Yura rounded the corner and slowed her steps when she saw them. "You might actually want an escort," she added, lowering her voice in mock seriousness. "Your public image has gotten rather… royal."
He exhaled softly and stepped into the elevator as soon as it opened.
Neither tried to follow. Neither pushed too hard. They rarely did. Maybe that was why he tolerated them more easily than others.
Later, around two in the afternoon, he returned to his workstation to find a sticky note on his monitor. Someone had stuck it neatly at the top left corner, not in the middle where it would be intrusive. The message was simple, written in neat handwriting:
> "If you were rich, would you tell anyone?"
No signature. But the loops in the letters were distinctively Yuri's.
He didn't remove the note. Just turned it over so it faced the desk instead of his eyes. He wasn't sure what unsettled him more—that people were joking about him, or that they were looking at him at all.
Back across the city, Renner sat in a quiet corner of the building's café floor, stirring a cup of coffee he'd forgotten to actually drink. The meme still sat open on his screen. The entire post was no longer trending, but it had settled into the kind of visibility that refused to vanish for those who knew to look.
He wasn't startled anymore. It wasn't the caption or the hashtags that stayed with him. It was the expression in the photo. The posture. The stillness.
Minjae, standing quietly in the break room weeks ago. Looking out the window. Unaware he was being observed. Withdrawn, but not empty. Focused on something no one else could see.
It matched too well with something Renner had once imagined during the darkest part of his failed investigation months ago. He had studied every clue, sifted through every false trail, exhausted every hypothesis. At one point, near the end, he had muttered to himself:
"Not from above… but below."
Not someone powerful descending into the company. Not a planted figure or a hidden agent. Someone who had risen from below—someone who blended in so perfectly that nobody questioned them.
He abandoned the theory. Called it absurd. Buried it.
Yet here was that same image—alive in the meme. Sharper than the memory.
He closed the tab.
Didn't delete it.
He needed time to think. And he hated that.
Back in the hidden lab, Minjae prepared the triad for another cycle. With Vitalia Surge still stored securely in the quartz housing, its faint hum resonated through the chamber. He didn't activate it yet. Even he had limits when it came to how much change he could induce at once.
Patience, he reminded himself. Resonance needed time. Runes learned slowly. And once learned, they held onto memories for longer than anyone realized.
He rotated the third rune again.
This time, the shimmer shifted. Not brighter—just different. Foreign. Not an error, not a malfunction. Something else.
Adaptation.
The rune wasn't only resonating anymore.
It was responding to him.
His breath stilled without him telling it to. Fingers curled slightly against the edge of the induction ring.
This rune… understood him in a way the others didn't. Aethra was power. Surnglyph was structure. But this third one—whatever name it would eventually earn—was something subtler. Something closer to what he truly was. What he tried to bury beneath reports and calibration logs.
It echoed him.
He sat back slowly, the low blue shimmer reflected in his eyes.
The meme would fade. Rumors would be replaced by new distractions. People would move on. They always did.
But resonance—this resonance—was different.
It was truth. buried beneath layers of human life, false identities, quarterlies, and harmless jokes. The world above could laugh and guess and speculate, but none of them would ever see this room. None of them would see the runes breathe. None of them would see the quiet flicker of old, buried power aligning with who he used to be.
He reached out again, fingertips hovering over the surface of the rune.
It responded before he touched it.
Not light. Not sound.
Recognition.
As if something ancient whispered, *I remember you.*
And for a moment—just one—Minjae felt the weight of scales beneath his skin again.
He closed his eyes, breathed out once, and resumed the cycle.
There was still work to do.
There was always work to do.
But the rune's quiet shimmer lingered—steady, loyal, and impossibly alive.
---
HEY GUYS—your favorite bird is HERE!
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