Having fully conquered Earth, humankind propelled its civilization forward at an explosive pace. Nations were formed, borders hardened, and technology accelerated beyond anything any other lifeform had ever achieved.

  At the end of that progress, humanity fought two world wars. They were not wars for survival, but wars of domination and expansion. The First and Second World Wars set the planet ablaze, leaving behind death and destruction on an unprecedented scale.

  From that very point onward, complaints regarding the Earth Branch began to rise sharply at the headquarters of Reapers Inc.

  The end of war did not restore order.

  For nearly a century after the Second World War, Earth never once returned to complete stability. Systems collapsed and were rebuilt. Ideologies clashed. War persisted, changing only its form, continuing through regional conflicts and proxy wars.

  Death no longer followed a predictable flow.

  Civilian massacres.Political purges.Industrial disasters and large-scale accidents.Conflicts so small or obscure they never even received a name.

  The number of souls arriving from Earth became increasingly unpredictable, and the processes of retrieval, classification, and transfer began to experience cascading delays. Internal reports at Reapers Inc. repeatedly labeled the Earth Branch as “the most unstable jurisdiction.”

  Once praised as a model settlement planet, Earth had quietly become the most difficult region to manage in the entire galaxy. And the complaints continued to accumulate.

  In an effort to contain the growing chaos, and at the request of the Earth Branch Director, successive expansion projects were approved for Hell and the Intermediary Realm. Containment zones were enlarged. Temporary processing facilities and holding areas were added. Personnel responsible for soul classification and transfer were reinforced multiple times.

  At first, the situation was attributed to simple physical overload caused by population growth. However, analysis of accumulated complaint data revealed a pattern that directly contradicted that assumption.

  The problem was not the volume of incoming souls, but the abnormally high proportion of irregular cases occurring during processing.

  Souls deviating before completing procedures.Souls arriving in unstable forms.Cases that resisted classification altogether.

  These anomalies were repeatedly observed in specific periods and specific regions. Yet making a decisive judgment without conclusive evidence posed a level of risk that even Reapers Inc. could not afford.

  Was the flaw within the system itself?Had a structural failure emerged within the Earth Branch as an organization?

  Or, more fundamentally, was the human species itself changing—mutating in a direction no one had anticipated?

  At this stage, estimation and statistics were no longer sufficient. What was required was decisive proof.

  Proof of why human cruelty, over time, had become more efficient and more concealed.Proof of why violence and slaughter were no longer driven by emotion, but executed in the name of systems and logic.

  The source had to be identified.

  Otherwise, the Chairman and CEO of Reapers Inc. would be forced to make yet another extreme decision—just as he had sixty-six million years ago, when an entire planet was erased from history and memory.

  Earth, too, could not be exempt from that list of options.

  ---

  Meanwhile, in a philosophy studio tucked away in Seoul.

  Warm morning sunlight brushed the window at an angle and settled quietly across the bookshelves. The light traced the texture of the pages, lingering softly, like dust suspended in the air.

  Standing before the shelves, his gaze fixed on a single book, Tak Hyun-pil turned the pages in silence. More than a month had already passed since he first took this seat, spending his days buried in books.

  At first, he had intended to stay only briefly. Now, the space felt like a small refuge. The pain of his past slowly lost its shape, like an old dream fading upon waking, and Hyun-pil passed his days as though he had been granted a new life—quietly, gently, with a sense of calm joy.

  Even so, speaking was still not easy for him.

  Back in high school, the friends he first met were drawn to him by his good looks. They approached first, smiling, striking up conversations, sometimes giving his shoulder a casual tap. But as conversations continued, confronted with Hyun-pil’s awkward tone and expressions that refused to open easily, their steps gradually drifted away.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  No special reason was needed for someone to turn their back. With nothing more than the feeling that things were awkward, people could leave.

  After that, Hyun-pil spoke less, and his gaze turned inward. Slowly, he began to hide himself inside a world of his own.

  Then another person appeared—someone who saw him exactly as he was, besides his mother.

  At first, he had simply been that man.Now, naturally, he had become Teacher.

  His name was Baek Kyung-soo.

  He waited, even when Hyun-pil’s words came out clumsily. Even when his expression stiffened, Kyung-soo looked past the surface and into what lay beneath—unpolished words, unfinished thoughts, even the stretches of time that passed without a single word spoken.

  Kyung-soo accepted all of it, just as it was.He was the second person in Hyun-pil’s life to do so.

  Hyun-pil’s favorite moments were the ones spent sitting beside Baek Kyung-soo in that space, each reading their own book, exchanging words sparingly.

  Silence that never felt awkward.Short sentences, passed carefully, only when necessary.

  The countless books lining Kyung-soo’s shelves had begun to feel like treasures. Each time Hyun-pil reached out, it felt as though a door to a new world was opening.

  Among them, the book on Myeong-ri he had recently begun reading led him in a direction entirely different from anything he had known before. It did not claim absolute answers. It did not attempt to persuade. It simply spoke of flow, explained relationships, and quietly pointed toward an unseen order.

  That world brought Hyun-pil an unexpected sense of calm.

  Yet the more he read, the more a subtle confusion began to grow beneath that calm—like walking slowly into a maze with no paths, moving forward without ever seeing an exit.

  Eventually, Hyun-pil closed the book. After hesitating for a long while, he turned toward Baek Kyung-soo and spoke carefully.

  “Teacher…”

  With his fingertips resting on the page, he continued.“When I read it… here it says one thing, and over there it says something else. It’s… a little confusing.”

  Kyung-soo looked at him in silence for a moment, then smiled softly.

  “Books on Myeong-ri,” he said, “are ultimately written by people. What they saw with their own eyes, what they felt in their own bodies—they put it into words. You can’t really call that truth.”

  He set the book down and continued.

  “That’s why, if you truly want to understand this field, you have to realize it for yourself. Only then do the words start to show you what they’re actually saying.”

  His gaze drifted past the bookshelf, into empty space.

  “There are people who wrote with real understanding, of course. But even they only made it that far.”

  He turned back toward Hyun-pil and smiled.

  “Don’t overthink it. What you need now isn’t the words themselves…”

  After a brief pause, he finished quietly.

  “It’s the insight that lies beyond them.”

  Hyun-pil carried those words with him for days, turning them over again and again, yet his thoughts continued to circle the same place.

  And then, one morning.

  With warm sunlight filling the room, Hyun-pil sat with a book open in his hands, lost in thought.

  The door swung open suddenly.

  “Good morning!”

  Kyung-soo strode in with energy, and the air in the room shifted at once.

  “You’re here early again. It’s already eight—what time did you get in?”

  His bright smile filled the space.

  Hyun-pil smiled back without thinking, but his body lagged behind his intention. His facial muscles stiffened, his posture twisted awkwardly, and only after a moment did he manage to speak.

  “…Good morning.”

  Seeing this, Kyung-soo smiled even more warmly, as if to say it was all right.

  Hyun-pil liked that smile.Aside from his mother, no one had ever treated him this naturally, this warmly, before.

  “What are you reading today?”

  Kyung-soo stepped closer, scanned the book’s title, then widened his eyes.

  “Oh… wait. Isn’t that—the notebook I hid on the top shelf?”

  He chuckled lightly.“You were looking at that?”

  Long ago, he had bought it on impulse at a secondhand bookstore in Dongmyo, only to be thoroughly scolded by his wife afterward.

  That very notebook.

  Su-Gyeongshin Method — A Summary of the Okchu Bogyeong

  Its faded cover and deep creases, left by countless foldings and unfoldings, quietly testified to the years it had endured.

  Now, that almost forbidden record lay open before Hyun-pil.

  “Hyun-pil…”

  Kyung-soo asked carefully,“Do you think you can understand what’s written in that notebook?”

  Hyun-pil frowned, his face tightening with effort, then nodded.

  “Yes. It’s interesting.”

  After a moment’s hesitation—almost like a confession—he added,

  “…I want to try it too. Just as it’s written.”

  A sharp ache throbbed through Kyung-soo’s head.

  The notebook he had sworn never to touch again.Hidden away after exhaustion had worn him down completely.

  That Hyun-pil had found it was already shocking enough.Now he was saying he wanted to try it himself.

  “Hyun-pil…”

  Kyung-soo paused, then took a deep breath.

  “It’s written very simply. But once you actually begin fasting… it’s really hard.”

  He looked away briefly.

  “That’s why I put it away. I thought, realistically, it was impossible.”

  But Hyun-pil’s gaze did not waver.

  Instead, his eyes widened, his brow tightened, and he spoke with quiet resolve.

  “Teacher. I’ll do it with you.”

  After a breath, he added,

  “Don’t worry. I’m good at going without food.And I’m good at staying awake.”

  Kyung-soo felt as though his entire body had frozen.

  The repeated failures.The mockery, the doubt, the contempt.

  That was why he had sworn never to speak of fasting again.Never to look at that notebook again.

  And yet, with a single sentence, Hyun-pil had dragged those deeply buried fears straight back to the surface.