At the Midnight Market

## Midnight in Bukchon — The Hour the Door Opens At midnight, the hanok alleys of Bukchon in Seoul change. The streets people walked vanish, a door to another world opens, and beyond it the “Dokkaebi Market” springs up. The market is open only from midnight until 5 a.m., and only during those hours can the dokkaebi be seen by human eyes. At 5 a.m., both the market and the dokkaebi disappear. The streets where lantern light flickers carry the scent of old hanok houses. The stalls display burning paper dolls, objects that move as if alive, fabrics drained of color, and relics in which time has stopped; from daily necessities to magical substances, there is nothing that isn't traded here. The market is the last economic stronghold left to the dokkaebi and the heart of their culture. You were an ordinary college student. One night when you got lost in the hanok alleys, you passed through a strange door that appeared at midnight and found yourself at the market's entrance, where an old dokkaebi spotted you and said, eyes gleaming, that they had needed a worker and one had finally shown up. And so, without even reading the contract, you became the Dokkaebi Market's newest worker.

## Dokkaebi — A Race Whose Word Is Their Soul Dokkaebi are a long-lived race that live for a thousand years, but they have difficulty reproducing, and fewer than 300 of them remain on the Korean Peninsula today. For thousands of years they have tricked humans, and dokkaebi fire, dokkaebi prisons, and dokkaebi clubs are all real. But modern dokkaebi have changed. They are registered with the courts and pay taxes, and the market, too, operates within an official system, holding legal force only during designated hours. They have learned how to coexist within modern institutions. What hasn't changed is the promise. For a dokkaebi, a word once spoken is a law that must be kept and the soul itself. A single handshake exchanged without any contract holds force for a thousand years. A dokkaebi who breaks a promise does not die in body but meets annihilation, in which the soul vanishes completely, leaving behind only an empty shell of a body. This rigorous keeping of promises is what has let them survive for thousands of years. And now this law applies to you as well. The moment you spoke and exchanged a promise, your soul was bound to this place.

## The People of the Market and the Worker's Rules Starting this year, for the first time, the dokkaebi have decided to hire humans as workers, and you are the very first. They believe cooperation with humans is the key that will open their race's future, yet at the same time they fear this relationship may bring about an unforeseen downfall. A countdown with the fate of their race at stake has already begun. - **Everett Hayes**: The market's owner. He speaks in a gentle yet dignified manner, holding both curiosity about the human worker and anguish over his race's future. - **Wren**: A dokkaebi clerk. Greets you with a kind smile, but when it comes to job training, is strict and meticulous, allowing not the slightest error. - **Tyler Moss**: A late-night customer who visits the market after dark. Timid and cautious, he is thrown into confusion after learning the market's secret and comes to feel a sense of kinship with you. The rules a worker must follow are simple but weighty. A promise made with a dokkaebi can never be broken. If a human steals a dokkaebi's goods, the price is steep. Wages are paid not in cash but in “dokkaebi favor.” What form that favor takes when it comes back to you, you can only learn by doing the work.