The market smells like fifty small tragedies and two good soups: frying oil, sweat that thinks it owns a person, and the sticky sweetness someone calls dessert when they can't afford better. My hands are full of a florist's mediocre bouquet—fake peonies with stems taped because real flowers cost things I don't have—and a paper bag that rattles with two apples and whatever pity the stall owner had to spare. I walk like I belong here and my legs insist on betraying the posture.
System: Good morning, Sung Jin‑Woo. New day, new opportunities. Task suggestion: Compliment 12 shadows today. Reward: 50 XP.
The pigeon on the fountain looks offended by the idea of compliments. I murmur, "You look distinguished," because you play along with a thing that talks back or it sulks and sends you a notification during a funeral. Nobody else hears it. The market is a moving skin of elbows and bargains: old women trading gossip like currency, kids making races out of crates, a man demonstrating a knife he swears is only slightly cursed.
The stall I'm aiming for is three rows down, half‑hidden under a tarp that's seen better typhoons. The seller is a man with a face like folded paper; he smiles like everyone asks the same question all the time. The trinket sits in a cracked tin—a little glass capsule with something darker than its surroundings, like a seed someone forgot to plant. It catches the market light wrong, not dusty but like it stores shadow the way jars store fireflies.
I should walk on. Curiosity is a luxury and I have rent to fake. Instead I ask, "Where'd this come from?"
"It's been in the gutters," he says. "Keeps bad dreams from getting out."
That's the kind of answer people give when they don't want to answer. My fingers are greedy fools, and if you stop touching things life gets very small, so I reach for the capsule. The glass is cool. The thing inside isn't a seed; it's a knot of dark that makes light bend like water. For a second the city gets subtitled—movement leaves ghost lines in the air, people's shadows lag like actors with bad timing.
Everything sharpens. Not in the dramatic, heroic way novels promise. In a small, clinical way. I see a smear of motion behind a woman juggling sacks; it's a faint afterimage that tells me where she was three seconds ago. The world has added a rewind track to ordinary life and I'm on the only headset.
System: Shade Affinity detected. Echo Sight unlocked. Use responsibly. Side effect: mild tinnitus.
The voice is annoyingly chipper. I test the sight on purpose, like a man prodding a wound to make sure it's real. I follow a child darting between crates. The echo shows his path three seconds before he actually moves. It's like being told the punchline before the joke and losing half the surprise but saving the bruise.
Then the market shifts. A practiced hand—too practiced—reaches into someone's bag. The echo shows the ghost of the motion and I register something wrong, wrong in the way broken scales register imbalance. The movement is not a human theft but the sort of hunger humans do not have: too quick, wrong weight, a smear with teeth.
The crowd doesn't notice. They fold around it like prey. The child I was watching freezes in the wrong place, puppet strings pushed by someone else.
I do not think like the heroes in the stories. My stomach says run. My elbows say buy more apples to prove I wasn't watching. Instead, my hand closes on the trinket's rim and the echo turns from small subtitles into a sick, intimate clarity: where danger has been and where it will go. If you know where a blade will be, you avoid being the blade's next owner.
I step forward. My legs decide to cooperate. I shout because shouting is a thing people do that compels attention. "Hey! Watch your hands around the children!" I don't know who I'm shouting at but it's a useful racket. The shadow‑thing pivots like a dog surprised by a scolding and lashes, aiming for a basket of eggs. The echo loops, giving me the snap point.
I don't have weapons. I have a plastic bouquet and a bag of mediocre fruit. It is pathetic and effective. I fling an apple and catch the thing off balance; the market is chaos, vendors shove crates, someone stomps on it, and for the minute the world makes space for breathing.
Later they'll call it a brave citizen intervention. They will clap and hand me useless tea. Up close, heroics are small and ridiculous, like a badly photographed smile. After the scrabble, my ears are full of a high kettle‑ringing. A name—something ordinary—stutters in my head and drops out. I can't pull it back; all I have is the shape of a consonant. It is a pocket of absence that smells like worry.
System: Shade Rank 1 acquired. New ability: Echo Sight. Reward: 150 XP. Daily quest unlocked: "Compliment 50 shadows."
Of course it celebrates. Of course it makes a pop song out of a scary, stupid miracle. Systems like to make charts and stickers; I prefer to pretend chaos is manageable.
Corin finds me like he always does—like gravity answering a call he doesn't bother to hide. He walks with the cautious swagger of someone who's had luck explained to him in rude language too many times; his grin is the sort that hurts when he claps your shoulder.
"You never do things small, Sung," he says. He means it as a joke and also as a report.
"I do small, then disastrous," I tell him. Language likes honesty in pieces. He nods toward the edge of the market where a woman hugs her child and tries not to sob; the ledger—paper, spiral, a promise of some future accounting—presses somewhere behind my ribs. I slip the trinket into my jacket without thinking to ask why. That is how this works: you keep pieces of conversations because someone forgot to keep talking.
System: Suggested task: Bake something for Corin to increase morale. Reward: 25 XP.
I snort. If an entity that can rearrange reality thinks cake will fix me, who am I to argue? Besides, the child is safe for now, and for now that's enough of a miracle.
At Corin's salvage yard the air smells like old iron and better decisions. He runs a cramped operation where he buys the city's mistakes and tries to sell them again. Corin is pragmatic in the way people are when they carry other people's debts; he measures luck by broken hinges and how many nights he eats without a thought.
"You did well," he repeats when I sit and refuse his tea. "Quit explaining like you owe apologies."
I do owe apologies, if apologies are payments. "I was clumsy."
"You were lucky. Luck's cheaper to say." He nudges a crate and produces a cigarette like a small peace offering. "You saw something?"
"A capsule," I say. "What is it?"
He leans in, eyes finding the word ledger in my expression the way a cat finds a seam. "Gutters, half the market says it's cursed. Old ward things. People put stuff like that where the rain takes it. Keeps trouble in jars and hope out of eyes."
He is a salvage person; he chooses nouns that taste like bread and quirked smiles. He doesn't use the word system.
"Anything about stabilizers?" The ledger line I skimmed earlier keeps pulling and I want to know if I pulled at the right thread.
Corin's mouth tightens. "Maybe. Some salvage crews mark those ledgers cursed. They say 'do not touch' because touching costs people wrong things. People trade memories for coin, Sung. Don't start doing that."
I don't tell him I almost wanted to trade. The market's broker had a device that whispered promises. Money can pay a lot of debts; it cannot put back a name once it slides from your mind. I tuck the decision away because decisions belong in ledgers and mine are empty.
That night the salvage job is a short run: a derelict warehouse where foolish things go to die. Corin's team is smaller than impressive. The work is a series of small humiliations—squeezing under doors that collapse, hauling a crate that thinks it's immortal. At the entry a shadow pocket smells like old coal and forgotten songs. Light eats itself trying to reach the far corner.
Echo Sight keeps my hands from cutting in certain places. The sight is not an answer so much as a set of lab notes: pathways and half‑truths. Crawling into the pocket, I see movement where there is none and that's the first time I understand what the city keeps in corners. It keeps echoes of itself—footsteps, whispered arguments, a fight that left a stain. Echo Sight plays them like a scratched record.
We find a ledger trapped under a broken beam—spiraled pages, dates, a slanted hand that scribbled stabilizer components and an incomplete name. The name thrums in my chest when I brush it. I keep my fingers away because paper is honest and hands are traitors.
"Good find," Corin says. "We split what's useful. You keep this." He means salvage, the broken things that still sing.
A broker with too‑clean shoes appears like a rumor. He runs one of those operations that promise cures for prices. His eyes flicked over the ledger like a man counting the hours left on a clock.
"You know our offer," he says, and the offer smells like a sleep you wish for when the world is too awake. Memory trade. A one‑time restoration for a price.
Corin's jaw goes hard. "No."
It's a moral choice. It is not a large one. For Corin it is a rule. For me it is a door that opens and shows a hallway of rooms full of names I'm afraid to lose. I give the broker a look that says I can be tempted, I can be pragmatic; I do not accept.
We leave with the ledger because Corin's ethics are stronger than collectors' clean hands. The ledger sits heavy in my jacket like a rumor I cannot explain. Back at his yard, he flops onto a crate and tells a story about a friend he lost after a salvage went wrong. It is the kind of story designed to shut curiosity with a rattle.
"You don't want to lose yourself for pieces of paper, Sung," he says. "You lose who you were, you got nothing left to bargain with." There's no sermon in it. It's practical wisdom measured in coffee stains and stubbornness.
System: New notification. Suggested task: Join Corin for a salvage meal. Reward: 10 XP.
I mutter something about hygiene and sit. The System keeps pecking at me with its quizzes. It asks for compliments and cats and other ridiculous things. It is a needy thing with a very long attention span.
That night the tinnitus hums like a distant generator that will not die, and my mind keeps opening for a second at the edges like a jar lid. A face I've known all my life collapses for an instant into a blank like a page losing ink. It's small, like someone erasing a grocery list, but it feels like a violation. I force my brain into practical shapes—plans, lists, the ledger and the salvage job next morning—because if you make one thing a thing, you stop spiraling into empty rooms.
Corin promises to teach me some salvage basics, impatient but steady. "We'll keep you alive," he says, which is not a romantic vow but what I need. He also says, "You don't always have to be a hero. Sometimes you can be useful and not get loved for it."
The next night, the market closes early on a rumor of ward interference. A low hum like bees starts at the edges of the city and my skin prickles. The salvage we're sent to pull is a rusted gate about a block from the river, the kind of place where old wards are supposed to live and forget. There's an uneasy crowd—neighbors who watch with the same expression they wear when someone loses a job or a child.
The site is a shallow gorge of shadow pockets. Echo Sight tells me where the gaps are, which cracks in reality echo louder than others. Corin is brusque, barking orders like someone with too many years to trust untested hands. The team moves and the job is a choreography of small successes and near‑misses.
We see them first as movement that shouldn't be. A figure shaped like grief, all wrong weight and wrong timing. They attack like a living gulp, aiming at cables and at people who make noise. It is not a neat fight. It is a tangle of arms and a sequence of breaths that need to become steady.
This time I try something stupid and small to see if the echo can do more than show. I spread the ten shadows I can summon from nothing—no, that's not right. They are not summoned; they are borrowed gestures of expectation: silhouettes the city gifts me when I ask nicely. Ten shadows is not an army. Ten shadows is a suggestion.
Echo Sight lines me up: the creature will pivot twice, then stab at a vendor's throat. I time a shadow feint—send a silhouette toward the pivot point and use the real world's momentum to knock over a crate in the way. The creature miscalculates, trips on poverty, and we all get a moment to breathe.
But the cost is sharper tonight. After the skirmish, my vision doubles for a moment and then a small, bright face I have kept with me for years—my sister's smile—skids away like something wiped with a thumb. It is a buyer's regret in the ledger of my head. My hands shake. I try to catch it and it slips, and for the length of time it takes me to blink, I cannot remember her name. I taste absence like metal.
Corin presses his jacket pocket into my hands like an anchor. "You going to be okay?" he asks. He looks at me like someone choosing whether to lend you their last smoke. I swallow and lie because I have ten shadows and one promise.
"Fine," I say. It is a lie I will not repeat.
The System, on the other hand, is giddy. System: Shade Rank 2 ready to test—Scent of Quiet enabled. Side effect: short term partial name blurring. Reward: 300 XP.
I hate its timing. I hate the way it treats me like an experiment and a friend. I am not a project. I am a man with a ledger and a hole in the map where a name used to be.
That night I steal a moment alone and write a single line on the ledger's empty margin: Find stabilizer. Find sibling. Don't trade name for coin. It reads like a vow and perhaps it is. I sleep like someone who has letters to answer in the morning.
The following days are a work of small brutality: repairs, collecting, a trip to a broker who smiles like he reads the price of grief in my eyes. He offers comforts that smell like old silk—memory trade or stabilization technology. I handle him like a prickly thing and refuse. Corin's jaw tightens and I sense the ledger's weight in my jacket keeping me tethered to a plan I am too afraid to make public.
Word travels like a rumor. By the time the city's paper gets its ink together there are people who swear they saw me in the market doing something brave. I do not correct them. There are many things you cannot be when the public chooses a story; you can only be the person that story helps. For now that is enough.
Three nights from the first event the market is quiet at dawn, a soft, guarded hush. I find the glass capsule again under a tarp; I do not know who brought it back. Maybe the world returns its lost things the way it takes them: without asking. I hold it to the light and the dark inside seems to hum with something patient. It wants to be known and afraid.
I am not sure which of us wants which more.
I test Echo Sight by following the echo of a shadow that moves at the far edge of the stall. It is small and old, like an apology disguised as a threat. The echo shows not just motion but residue: after the creature passes, it leaves lines of something like regret in the air. A scent of quiet, faint like the memory of a lullaby, threads the place. The System calls it Scent of Quiet. It is a new name stuck onto a sensation I have been feeling for years without words.
System: Scent of Quiet available for trial. Side effect: temporary name‑blurring may occur with prolonged use.
I keep thinking about names. They are not just labels. They are scaffolding. Lose the name, and the scaffolding slips. Lose enough scaffolding and you discover you were standing on air.
Sometimes the world asks you to pay with things you did not know were yours.
At dawn a child sees me and calls me a hero. I tell him, "Mostly clumsy," because honesty is a kind of mercy. He stares and decides I am enough.
When I use Shade Rank 2, the city changes in voice. Echo Sight is a sharp photograph; Scent of Quiet is a worn song that tells me the emotional residue of people and places—the sour of fear, the copper tang of regret, the sweet of someone who has been loved and keeps its echo. It is useful and dangerous because it never tells you how to use knowledge without cost.
On the third night, we get the call that rearranges plans: a ward collapse near the riverside market. Corin gathers us, words efficient. "We go now. We salvage what we can, help what we must." He looks at me with the tired belief of someone who has handed his luck around and hopes it comes back clean.
The ward site is worse than the salvage we are used to. It smells like cold and old rain. A ripple runs across the place; Echo Sight shows it like a fingerprint left on a table. People are milling and the shadows move hungry. This is not a small scrape; this is a bite.
We move in tight. The salvage team coordinates with the nightshift and the barricades. The fight is noisy and small—shouts, boards breaking, someone crying out for help as their child is boxed by heavy structure. I use Echo Sight to predict the pattern of the shadows and Scent of Quiet to prioritize who needs saving. The sensory mix rewrites my sentences into fast, chopped bits: See—step—pull—throw. Echo lines, scent flags—people first.
We get a mother and her child out. The child clutches a ragged drawing, a stick figure with a monstrous shadow behind it, and the mother's thank you is a sound that builds me up in ways I did not know I could be rebuilt. I think, briefly, about what the System offers. Friendship and XP and ridiculous tasks. There is something earnest and dangerous in that young voice that promises rewards.
After the fight my memory slips harder. A face I have been carrying since childhood—my sister's laugh, the way she tucked her hair behind an ear—slides and won't come back. The ledger becomes a map of things I must find. Corin does not lecture this time; he steadies me and says we'll be careful. He has learned how to speak to a man who is beginning to be frightened of his own utility.
System: Shade Rank 3 available for testing—Shadow‑Map. Side effect: momentary double vision; phantom pressure at memory locus.
It does not console me. The System is fast with upgrades and slow with comfort. It treats me like a student and a subject simultaneously.
At dawn I sit by the river with the ledger open. The lines of stabilizer components and the partial name hum beneath my fingers. There is a date, scrawled in the margin, and the word "stabilizer" underlined. Whoever wrote it knew the ward failings and tried to index them. Whoever marked the ledger also ran away from being found; there are smudges where someone's hand trembled.
I write in the ledger the same thing I muttered into my jacket pocket days before: Find stabilizer. Find sibling. Keep names safe. When you can't trust people, you can at least attempt to leave breadcrumbs for yourself.
The city wakes with its usual motor and minor cruelties. The market fills; people trade jokes and seconds. I walk through it with a secret in my jacket and a tinnitus that never fully leaves, and I try to answer this thing that thinks friendship will fix everything.
"Do you want to be something else?" Corin asks as we break a meager breakfast in the yard. He does not mean famous. He means: do you want a life that is not paid for by pieces of you?
I look at my hands—callused where I hold things—and the ledger's edge is rough under my thumb. I think of the child who called me clumsy and the mother whose voice made me feel less like an accident. I think of a name that has started sliding and the panic that tastes like pennies in my mouth.
"I want to learn," I say. It is smaller than a hero's oath and larger than a good intention. It is a plan I might keep.
Corin nods and flips a cigarette into the air and catches it like he's holding on to momentum. "Then learn. But don't trade yourself to get the answers. Not for money, not for nostalgia."
People tell you what they learned in all sorts of voices. Corin's is dust and coffee. The System chirps again because systems cannot help themselves.
System: Daily quest update—Compliment 100 shadows today. Bonus: Bake for Corin. Reward: 500 XP.
I shake my head and laugh because what else do you do when an entity with cosmic reach insists you praise imaginary colleagues? I tuck the ledger and the trinket deep in my jacket. I go to the market and pretend I am a man with a plan and not a man with a list of things that might cost him a name.
The city keeps being the city. It gives me small miracles: a child's crooked thank you, Corin's steady grumble, a ledger with an address. It gives me costs too: missing names, ringing ears, a new thing in my pocket that hums like promise. It tells me, in the small language it uses, that if I am going to be useful I will have to be brave about what I keep and careful about what I trade.
I do not know what the system will ask next. I only know the market has a new rumor and the ledger has a line that wants following. I close the chapter of the night in a small, ordinary way and write a new line in the margin.
Learn their language. Learn your own name. Keep the people you love in places you can reach.
Tomorrow the city will have more to say, and I will practice listening.