He didn't ask how you found him. You understood that was its own kind of answer. He'd known someone was looking. Had perhaps known it was specifically you, and had continued anyway. Not carelessness. Something more like resignation.
You sat across the desk from him. The mixing equipment between you. Through the glass the young woman was still on her phone, oblivious.
"Is she…" you started.
"She's fine," he said. "Today's session is standard coaching. I haven't…" He stopped. Something crossed his face. "I haven't done anything to her."
The qualification hung in the air.
"But you have to others," you said.
He didn't deny it. He folded his hands on the desk and looked at them. The hands of a man who had spent fifty years listening to voices and had never once been credited for it.
"I want you to understand something," he said. "Before you decide what you're going to do with whatever you've found. I want you to understand what I thought I was doing."
"I'm listening."
"These voices," his voice careful. Precise. The way he'd always spoken, as though language was an instrument that required handling. "What I can hear in them. It isn't metaphor. It's real. It has weight and location and presence. The industry takes it and uses it. And when the artist is finished it's simply gone. Dissipated. Wasted. Decades of something irreducible, discarded."
"So you took it instead."
"I preserved it." The word landed with the weight of someone who had used it many times to justify something to themselves. "That was the intention."
"What changed?" you asked.
He was quiet for a moment. Outside, the street made its ordinary noises. The recording booth was silent through the glass.
"The first time I used the artifact, nothing felt wrong. The extraction was clean. The voice went into the vessel the way the traditions described. I told myself it was safe. That what I'd taken was being held rather than destroyed."
"And then."
"And then I listened to what I had. And there was something else in it." His hands tightened slightly. "Not the voice I'd taken. Something that had been in the space between the physical and the essential. Already there before I arrived. Something that moved in when the voice moved out."
You thought about Sungho's spectral analysis. The reactive presence. Intentionality. The word Sungho had used off the record. Something in that recording that has no business being there. You thought about what four seconds of audio had suggested and what two hours in this room was about to confirm.
"You know what it is," you said.
"I know what the traditions call it." He looked up. "In the Korean mudang practice, there's a category of entity that exists at thresholds. Not malevolent in the human sense. Opportunistic. It needs a specific kind of space. The kind that a trained voice occupies in a person." He paused. "When I removed the voice, I created that space."
"And it moved in."
"It moved in. And I don't know how to remove it without returning what I took."
The booth was quiet through the glass. The young woman had put her phone away and was looking at the ceiling with her headphones around her neck, waiting.
"How many?" you asked.
"Twenty-two."
That was a larger number than you’d tracked so far.
"IU.” You weren’t asking.
"Yes."
"Lia from ITZY."
"Yes."
You thought about Winter forgetting lyrics she'd known for years. About Rei walking into a room that didn't register her. About Yujin's words: less there.
Twenty-two. The number sat in the room.
"Can it be reversed?" you asked finally.
He looked at you for a long time. The expression you'd first seen in the 2016 interview. Between acceptance and grief, and something new alongside it now. Something that looked, at a significant distance, like fear.
"I've been trying to find out. For eight months. That's why I'm still working. Not to take more. To understand what I can give back." He paused. "But it's becoming more complicated."
"What do you mean?"
He was quiet for a moment too long.
"The entities that moved in," he said slowly. "In the early cases they simply occupied the space. Threshold entities. Opportunistic, as I said. But over time…" He stopped. Started again. "Over time, in the older cases, something has changed. The entities are still there. But there's something else as well. Something beneath them. Something… worse. And it noticed what I was doing and—" He stopped again.
"And what?"
"And wanted more," he said quietly. "I don't know what it is. I don't know what to call it. But the older cases, the artists aren't just losing their voices anymore. They're losing something else. Something attached to the voice. The presence. The specific weight of being in a room."
You thought about what Yujin had described. What Karina had told Ryujin. Less there.
"How long have you known?"
"Three months. Maybe four." He looked at his hands. "I've been trying to understand it. To find a way to address it before…" He stopped again.
"Before what?"
"Before it reaches the point where what was taken can't be returned. Not by anyone." He looked up at you. "The window is already closing for some of them. And whatever is driving that, it isn't the threshold entities. It's something underneath them. Something that found what I opened and decided to use it."
You thought about the twenty-two artists. The weight of it settled in your chest. And underneath it, something else. The weight of something larger that you didn't yet have a name for.
"Tell me how to reverse it."
He talked for two hours.
The young woman in the booth knocked on the glass after forty minutes. Gilsoo waved her off with an apologetic gesture and refunded her session through an app on his phone without breaking the conversation. She left without complaint. The studio settled into a quiet that felt appropriate for what was being said in it.
He explained the mechanism. The ritual framework. The traditions he'd drawn from. Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asian, and how he'd synthesized them over the years. He explained the artifact. Its origin in a coastal village in Sarawak. A name he gave you carefully, syllable by syllable, the way you gave someone a name you expected them to need later. Its function. The specific conditions under which it could return rather than take.
You wrote everything down. Your hand kept moving even when the content shifted the ground under you.
1 like from kindtyranny.