The body was discovered at 06:42 a.m.
That fact alone would later become one of the few things everyone agreed on.
The call came in from a landlord who hadn't received rent, who hadn't heard movement, who hadn't smelled anything yet but had felt uneasy enough to unlock the door himself. When he found the man inside, lying neatly on the living room floor, he did what people always did.
He froze.
He swore.
He called the police.
By 07:18, the house was wrapped in tape.
By 07:30, the first detective was already tired.
The man had no identification.
No wallet. No phone. No keys that fit anything nearby. His clothes were clean, unremarkable, purchased off racks that existed in thousands of stores across the city. No blood pooled beneath him. No visible wounds. His expression was calm, almost composed, as if death had arrived mid-thought and been politely accommodated.
The medical examiner crouched beside the body and frowned.
"Time of death's going to be tricky," she said.
It always was.
The house itself offered little.
No forced entry.
No overturned furniture.
No signs of a struggle.
Dust lay evenly across shelves. Cups sat washed and dried on the rack. The bed was made. Even the trash had been taken out.
"It's like he was borrowing the place," one officer muttered.
They photographed everything anyway.
The autopsy complicated things.
Cause of death: asphyxiation.
Method: undetermined.
Tox screen: inconclusive.
No defensive wounds. No clear ligature marks. No fibers under the nails.
The examiner removed her gloves and sighed.
"Someone knew what they were doing," she said. "Or maybe… he let them."
They ran fingerprints.
Nothing.
They checked dental records.
Nothing.
They cross-referenced missing persons.
Too many matches. None was precise.
The man existed in the margins of every system. Close enough to be plausible. Far enough to vanish.
That same night, a video passed ten million views.
It showed a man in a white mask standing on a subway platform, arm outstretched, calm amid chaos. The comments scrolled faster than they could be read.
Hero.
Finally,
Where has he been all our lives?
At a precinct television, officers watched in silence as the masked man spoke.
"This city belongs to all of us."
…
The first week passed in a flurry of motion.
Detectives chased tips that evaporated under scrutiny. A neighbor who thought he'd seen someone visiting late at night couldn't remember a face. A coworker from a short-term job remembered the man being "quiet, polite, forgettable."
Every interview ended the same way.
"I didn't really know him."
Then the case began to spread.
A stolen vehicle in another district matched a time window tied to the address. A break-in three blocks away used a method similar to the asphyxiation.
Each lead didn't close the case.
It opened others.
The incident board filled until the red string crossed over itself, looping and knotting like veins.
One detective stared at it too long and said, quietly, "This isn't a case. It's a sinkhole."
By the third week, priorities shifted.
Violent crime spiked downtown. Copycat vigilantes appeared at protests, faces half-covered, cameras rolling. A masked figure began trending online, his clips shared with captions like Finally someone doing something and Where were the police?
Resources moved.
People moved with them.
Meetings grew shorter.
Updates became vaguer.
"What's the status of the unidentified male?" someone asked during a briefing.
A senior detective exhaled through his nose.
"Not a single clue. We're chasing smoke."
Another officer said, "We could keep digging."
"And dig into what?" came the reply. "Another dozen unsolved cases?"
Silence answered that.
A junior detective hesitated.
"What about Shin Hyerin?" he asked. "She's good with pattern anomalies."
Someone shook their head.
"She's busy," another said. "And this case is already buried."
The file was stamped and reassigned to storage.
The final report avoided strong language.
Unidentified male.
Cause of death undetermined.
Investigation ongoing pending new evidence.
It was placed in storage alongside hundreds of others that had once mattered deeply to someone.
The unidentified man remained in the system, his time of death logged, his name blank.
The case wasn't solved.
It was outgrown.
And somewhere in the city, something else was just beginning.
…
The room was quiet in a way police stations never were.
Only filtered air and the low hum of a processor filled the room.
The white mask rested on the desk, angled slightly to the left, as if it had been set down with intention rather than discarded. Its surface reflected the soft light without distortion.
Across from it, multiple screens glowed.
Engagement graphs. Sentiment analysis scrolling in clean percentages.
A spike pulsed upward in real time.
Ten million views had become twenty.
He watched without expression, one hand resting lightly against the edge of the desk.
On another screen, a calendar remained open.
18:00 – Public Address, Tomorrow.
He studied the time for several seconds.
In the corner of the monitor, system notifications rotated quietly. One line lingered a fraction longer than the others before dimming.
06:42 – Entry Detected.
It faded on its own.
A separate window displayed a news summary feed. Headlines moved in steady lines.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE — INVESTIGATION ONGOING.
He did not open the article.
After a moment, he reached forward and adjusted the schedule.
18:00 shifted to 16:00.
Two hours earlier.
A message was sent automatically to three recipients.
Confirmed.
The notification regarding the unidentified male updated in the corner of the screen.
Status: Lowered Priority.
He muted it.
Then he turned the monitor slightly, just enough that the calendar was no longer centered.
The mask remained where it was.
Outside, somewhere beyond glass and concrete, sirens moved through traffic and dissolved into the distance.
Inside, the graphs continued their steady climb.
He picked up the mask and turned it once in his hands.
Everything remained on schedule.