The message came encoded in a couriered ceramic tile.
Unmarked, pale-blue glaze, edges chipped.
When Lin Feng cracked it open along the seam, he found a folded strip of paper inside—typed in Korean, not Chinese.
"The walls have learned to breathe.
But the windows are still bought."
No signature.
But the method, phrasing, and delivery style matched a contact last heard from before the Zixuan collapse—a middle-tier intelligence operative embedded in Seoul's civic media scene.
Lin studied the phrase again.
The walls have learned to breathe.
But the windows are still bought.
He knew what it meant.
The internal fabric of Apex—its rituals, silences, listening practices—was evolving, growing resilience from within.
But the optics, the visible layers—the ones visible to foreign observers, journalists, opportunistic watchdogs—remained vulnerable.
Someone was buying visibility. Twisting the narrative. From the outside in.
