Spirit Management Bureau, Seoul Branch, fourth-floor conference room.
A single report lay on the table. Not even two pages. One and a half.
Tae-gyeol Park read it three times.
“Solo subjugation of a Grade Three malignant spirit. Approximate time: 15 seconds. No purification response. Presumed method: yin energy absorption. Subject’s condition: substantial nasal bleeding, able to walk unassisted.”
There were no adjectives. No interpretation. Just facts. That made it even stranger. The facts contradicted each other.
Se-ra Yoon sat across from him. She didn’t lean against the back of her chair. The wound at the corner of her mouth had nearly healed.
“Could you have been mistaken?”
“You mean the possibility that I mistook a Grade Three for Grade Zero?”
Her voice was flat. Tae-gyeol set down his pen.
“The malignant spirit might have dispersed on its own. Iron-frame parasites scatter easily. Maybe your attacks built up—”
“Not one of my attacks landed.”
Tae-gyeol looked up. It was the first time he’d heard a girl from the Yun family bring up her own failure first.
“He didn’t destroy it.”
“Then what?”
Se-ra paused, choosing her words. She looked like she was about to say something she hadn’t put in the report.
“He ate it.”
The ventilation system roared.
That afternoon, the Bureau moved on three fronts.
The Technical Department took apart the Spirit Gauge. They dismantled the sphere in the center of the testing room and inspected the axle and the sensor plates one by one. Nothing wrong. They cross-checked 412 measurement records from the past three months. Nothing wrong.
The Disciplinary Department searched for a clause. No contact with the Other Side by anyone classified as Grade Zero. Violators would be summoned for an investigation. They found one quickly. It just hadn’t been written with the possibility of a Grade Zero catching ghosts in mind. There’d been no need to account for such a case.
And Tae-gyeol opened his own drawer.
The report from three weeks ago. SW-17 sector, Grade Five vengeful spirit eliminated. No purification response. Traces of yin energy displacement. One attached photo. A black spot on asphalt.
It was human blood. Unrefined yin energy left around it. Not from a ghost, but from a human body.
Tae-gyeol opened Jin-oh Seo’s file beside it. Address. Three hundred meters from the edge of SW-17.
The two points connected.
He sat there for a long time. His index finger tapped the corner of the file twice. It had taken two seconds to see the name in the testing room and move on. He tried to recall those two seconds. He couldn’t picture the boy’s face. He’d never seen him.
He filled out a new form.
“Jin-oh Seo. Rescheduled retest deadline: six months → two months. Reason: evidence of unauthorized exorcism. Investigation summons to be issued concurrently.”
He signed his name. The pen pressed harder than usual, leaving marks on the back of the page.
I was at school.
It was the first day I’d gone with the switch closed.
The classroom felt strange. No, it felt strange because it wasn’t strange. The lingering spirit that always crouched in the corner by the blackboard was gone. So was the shadow that used to rest on the shoulder of the girl in the third row by the window. There was just a blackboard, and just a girl.
I couldn’t remember her name. We’d been in the same class for over a year. All that time, I’d only been looking at her shoulder.
I fell asleep in math class. For the first time in my life, without a care in the world.
The teacher hit me on the head with the attendance book. It hurt. But I didn’t mind. So this was what everyone meant by boredom.
When I got home, there was an envelope on the table.
A yellowed document envelope. My name on the front. The Bureau’s seal on the back. It had already been opened.
Grandma stood by the sink, holding a dishcloth. The table was already clean.
“It was in the mailbox.”
“Yeah.”
“I read it.”
Grandma didn’t look at me. She folded the dishcloth. Unfolded it. Folded it again.
There were two sheets of paper.
Notice of a change to my retest deadline. From six months to two. If I failed to prove I was Grade Seven by the deadline, I’d undergo the purification procedure. Below that was an attachment. An investigation summons for unauthorized exorcism. The date: next Tuesday.
There was a note in parentheses beside “purification procedure.” In tiny print. Permanent erasure of Other Side perception.
It wasn’t flipping a switch. It was cutting the wire.
Grandma set down the dishcloth. The veins stood out on the backs of her hands. Her fingertips trembled ever so slightly. They’d trembled the evening I came back from the testing room, too.
“Your mother, too…”
Grandma stopped there. The next words wouldn’t come. I didn’t ask.
I folded the papers in half. Then folded them again. I put them in my pocket.
“Let’s eat, Grandma.”
She looked at me. For a long time. Like she was searching my face for something. I don’t think she found it.
She served the rice and reheated the soup. We sat across from each other and ate. The only sound was our spoons.
Night.
Lying in bed, I felt the papers in my pocket. A folded corner caught against my fingertip.
Two months.
The Spirit Gauge would read zero. Take it apart, and there’d be nothing wrong with it. The problem wasn’t the scale. It was how the scale measured. Two months from now, it would still read zero. Even if I held a black bead in my palm right now, it would read zero.
That left one path.
Make what the scale couldn’t read so big that the people holding it couldn’t pretend they didn’t see it.
I flipped the switch open.
The layers returned overhead. The floor above me. Beyond that. And outside the window.
Someone stood on the roof of the commercial building across the street. A person. Alive. Their yin energy was orderly. White and transparent, with the texture of something filtered once and set. It belonged to the Bureau.
They were looking at our window.
I flipped the switch closed. The rooftop became just a rooftop.
How did I look to them? A kid with a constitution, but no yin energy. An empty vessel.
They wouldn’t know that the empty vessel had been looking right back at them.
I rolled over. The new wall beneath my heart was quiet. Not nine spots, not ten. Not a single one of them stirred.
I didn’t think two months would be enough.
But living at zero was something I’d been doing for thirteen years.