The Night Incident

## Haebangchon and the Fragments of Gyeongwon Temple The story is set in and around Haebangchon in Yongsan-gu, Seoul. By day, it's an ordinary neighborhood of steep stairways and narrow alleys, with cafés and neon signs perched atop shabby rooftop rooms. But beneath this ground lie the buried fragments of Gyeongwon Temple, a Buddhist temple forcibly demolished in 1998. The boundary script carved into its damaged stone tablet is believed to have twisted the ley lines of the entire area. Every year in the seventh lunar month, a radius of about 800 meters falls within its reach. When it rains, the alleys here smell of iron mixed with wet asphalt, but once the erosion begins, that smell turns into a strange, sweet fragrance. Incident sites are usually places off the beaten path, like dead-end alleys, abandoned houses, and underground passages, and the point where map apps stop working is the boundary line itself.

## The Eroded Underside: A Distortion of the Senses Seoul's nights have two layers. Beneath the surface lit by neon signs flows “the Eroded Underside.” The Underside isn't a physical space but a state in which the senses are warped, and people call it “the Night Erosion.” There are three signs that you're slipping in: the alley's smell turns strangely sweet, the sound of rain grows distant, and the asphalt underfoot feels far too soft. If you surrender to the unfamiliar sense of relief at that moment, the loop closes. Inside the loop, time is frozen on a single night in the seventh lunar month and repeats, and the exits vanish. The phenomenon is approached within frameworks that science can explain, such as low-frequency vibration, ground resonance, and the reconstruction of memory. Still, no explanation can prove everything. The black shadows are shapes born of this distortion, and the more they touch you, the more your memories are gnawed away.

## The Cheongram Investigation Bureau and the Silent Watchers The Cheongram Investigation Bureau is an unofficial detective network formed by teenagers who have lost someone to a disappearance. They analyze rubbings taken from the stone tablet, record the paths of the loops, and track down the whereabouts of the vanished children. Apprentice detective Jake Ramirez lost his older sister when he was six and is the only survivor ever to return alive from the Underside. In exchange, he gained a sense that can detect the boundary, but the heart of the loop constantly pulls at him, so he can't approach it alone. Veteran detective Victor Kane worries about his son setting foot across that dangerous line, yet quietly offers him advice. On the other side are the “Silent Watchers,” working for a construction company that wants to bury its redevelopment corruption. They steal records and scramble witnesses' memories, and Elias Graves, ever unhurried, is the man standing behind them. Those swept into the Underside, like the missing Sophia Lane, become clues to finding the way back to reality.

## The Rules of Clues and the Mood of the Night In this world, evidence is always incomplete. Rubbings are partly damaged, eyewitness accounts contradict one another because memories have been tampered with, and records bear traces of someone having gotten to them first. The more the protagonist pieces the clues together, the more they come face to face with their own sealed-away memories. The protagonist is someone who can both receive the frequency of the erosion and disrupt it. When the protagonist's senses and Jake's touch, the loop briefly becomes unstable, and that gap becomes the path toward escape and the truth. But the closer they get to the truth, the greater the danger. Hallucinations and psychological pressure grow heavier, and the Watchers' interference grows more relentless. The mood flows through the senses: the red glow of wet neon, noise fading into the distance, body warmth against the fingertips. Fear comes not so much from monsters as from the doubt, “Can I trust my own memories?”