Signals in the Blood Crystal
The Moorim Agency vehicle carrying the blood crystal slid into the research institute's underground entrance ramp just as night settled over the city. The surface was dark and quiet, but the building's interior was anything but. Most of the corridors that had teemed with footsteps during the day were now dimly lit, and the elevator hall felt as desolate as a half-dead structure. Yet the deeper they descended into the underground experimental zone, the sharper the air became. White lights stretched unbroken along the corridors, cold light leaked from the gaps of closed doors, and the low hum of ventilation and cooling systems never ceased. This was a space that revealed its true nature only after nightfall.
The mutant embedded with the blood crystal was transferred onto the central dissection table in the laboratory. Ha Yul stood leaning against the wall of the autopsy room, watching the scene. From the brief battle on the campus plaza until now, she had barely spoken. The blood on her coat had been roughly wiped away, but the tension in her wrists and shoulders remained. The light on the dissection table felt colder than before. Sometimes, dissecting a half-corpse was more unpleasant than hunting a living mutant.
While putting on protective gloves, Yu-jin summarized the situation in a short, low voice—securing the scene, requesting campus CCTV footage, controlling external leaked videos, prioritizing preservation of the blood crystal site, and so on. The agents moved immediately. A few minutes later, the laboratory door opened again. Han Seia entered, already wearing a thin protective suit. Her hair was loosely tied back, carrying the slight dishevelment of a weary night-shift worker, yet her eyes were alert. Without greeting, Se-a walked straight toward the dissection table. She glanced down at the mutant, then leaned closer to the red crystal at the back of its neck.
"Is this the mutant found at the plaza?"
Yu-jin gave a brief nod. It matched the campus incident—the second official case since the Jongro Redevelopment Area. Strictly speaking, including the additional discovery in Jongro, it would be the third, but what mattered to Se-a right now was whether this incident aligned with the previous ones.
Se-a gently parted the mutant's nape with her gloved hand. The red crystal had already been partially exposed during Ha Yul's subjugation, half-protruding between the incised tissues.
"The insertion method is identical," Se-a said. "Posterior cervical spine, directly above the nerve-dense region." Her tone was as calm as an anatomical explanation, which only made it more horrifying—the intent of someone who knew exactly where to implant the blood crystal in a human body to elicit the strongest, fastest reaction.
Se-a picked up forceps. With extreme care, as if touching a living insect, she grasped the tip of the crystal and lifted it slightly. Its red surface was no ordinary stone. It looked like coagulated blood that had crystallized, yet something inside still seemed to pulse with flowing blood. She observed the surface for a moment before murmuring, "To think behavior patterns can be adjusted from here..."
Ha Yul recalled the mutant's movements on the campus plaza—the blood crystal entity that prioritized escape over attacking humans, its staggering yet purposeful steps toward a destination, the gaze that still sought the exit even after collapsing. The graphs Chae-won had shown in the lab, Lee Garam's casual mention in the seminar room about the possibility of external stimulus-based behavior adjustment, and Se-a's conclusion now on the dissection table all connected into a single line.
Se-a looked down at the mutant again. "This is closer to a tool than a berserk entity."
The blood crystal entity was a tool someone had created—a body implanted with a device to move mutants according to their will, elicit specific reactions, and direct them toward a destination. Ha Yul's mood darkened further. If monsters were the result of human failure, they could be accepted as a form of tragedy. But tools were different. It meant they had been treated as means to an end from the very beginning.
Se-a lifted her head from the monitor screen. "There was a Garam Bio seminar on campus today, wasn't there?" The question was directed at Ha Yul, not Yu-jin.
Ha Yul answered briefly. "The CEO came too."
At that, Se-a gave a short, bitter smile. "So Lee Garam came."
Her tone carried a subtle emotion that went beyond merely knowing the name of a famous corporate CEO. Yu-jin didn't miss the nuance. Narrowing her eyes slightly, she asked, "Do you know each other?"
Se-a hesitated for a moment, then nodded. "We were university classmates." After a brief pause, she added, "We also worked on research together."
Se-a's gaze drifted momentarily. Back when she and Lee Garam had worked in the same lab, they had been observing the same phenomenon—mutation. The physical changes that occurred when martial arts, qi deviation, blood flow, and neural responses in the human body crossed a critical threshold. It was something everyone feared, and therefore something countless people had tried to analyze. At the time, Se-a hadn't viewed mutation simply as a disease to be eradicated. She knew it was dangerous, of course—failure led to beast-like madness, physical rupture, hunger, and murderous impulses, turning people into monsters. Yet even so, to her, mutation resembled a trace of existing life attempting to ascend to a higher plane. Though the body sometimes broke under the strain, if understood, it held the potential for expansion in entirely new directions.
"She reached a completely different conclusion," Se-a said quietly. To Garam, mutation wasn't possibility—it was danger. An uncontrollable risk that could turn a city into hell, something to be managed, controlled, and used only within safe limits. While Se-a had sought to understand why it happened, Garam had focused on how to stop it or how to handle it safely. Both were brilliant, had seen the same data, and knew the world was changing. Yet their paths diverged.
"We were looking at the same thing," Se-a said. Her gaze returned to the mutant on the dissection table. "But we walked different roads."
Yu-jin asked, "Still, you continue to cooperate?"
Se-a nodded. External research collaboration continued, she said. Since neither had completely left the field, there remained overlapping lines in data, specimens, and project units. "But we're not as close as we used to be." Se-a gave a small smile, as if acknowledging that their relationship had ended. Yet Ha Yul saw beyond it—lingering attachment and unresolved emotions.
Just then, the scanner emitted a short warning beep. Se-a turned to check the monitor. At first, she looked at the screen indifferently, as if it were mere noise, but within seconds her expression changed.
"This... is strange."
Yu-jin approached immediately. "What is it?"
Se-a enlarged the image further. The internal structure of the blood crystal reappeared, overlaid with a regular, repeating micro-waveform on a simple lattice structure. At first it seemed like residual biological response, but as she magnified and adjusted the filters, it became clearer. The periodicity was too consistent and regular to be random noise.
"There's a signal pattern inside the blood crystal."
Ha Yul pushed off the wall and stepped forward. Yu-jin silently watched the screen as well.
"A signal?" Yu-jin echoed.
Se-a explained in a low voice. "It's not simply reacting hypersensitively to external stimuli. It seems to be continuously receiving a constant signal from somewhere. The blood crystal isn't just a means of enhancement—it also appears to transmit or amplify specific frequency-based responses."
It wasn't a pre-installed program. It was possible the mutants had been moving in response to stimuli sent in real time by someone. Under the laboratory's white lights, the red crystal on the dissection table reflected a faint glimmer. Watching that small sparkle, Ha Yul felt an odd sensation. The shaft in Jongro, the mutant on the equipment floor, the movement through the underground, the escape direction on the campus plaza, the seminar presentation, Garam's gaze—scattered pieces were converging back into a single point.
Se-a gazed at it and spoke quietly. "This means someone is continuing to move mutants within the city."
No one spoke immediately. Each was likely thinking of different faces, organizations, and possibilities—Moorim Agency, corporations, unorthodox factions, secret experiments, or someone overlapping with all of them to varying degrees.
Then Se-a added in an even lower voice, "Whoever that person is... one of us might already know."
The atmosphere in the laboratory slowly sank. It wasn't a direct accusation. No specific name had been mentioned. Yet it implied a great deal. On the day of the Garam Bio seminar, a blood crystal entity had appeared right in front of the same campus. The corporate CEO had quickly assessed the situation, and Se-a had once studied the same phenomenon with her in the same lab. The blood crystal on the dissection table glowed coldly—a crystal of blood created by someone's hand, responding to someone's will, moving the city.