The building in Hanul-dong had been painted since he last saw it. That was the first shock. The second was the doorbell, which now played the first four notes of a pop song and was screwed beside a laminated sign:

*DOYOON'S PLACE. LIVE NOW. IF THE LIGHT IS RED, DON'T KNOCK. IF YOU ARE A FAN, KNOCK SOFTLY.*

The light above it was red.

"Is this it?" said Dil, from the kerb. She had parked the taxi illegally on the corner and put her hazard lights on, which in her theory of the law constituted a permit. "It looks like a place that sells smoothies."

"It used to be a flat," said Seon-ho. "Third floor, left. My room had a window onto a tree."

"Whose is it now?"

He pulled out his phone. It had taken him a day and a half and most of the fund of favours he'd earned in the Land Registry's online portal, but the answer was recorded under a corporate vehicle with a name like a protein shake: *Tidewave Lifestyle Pte.* The director was a Min Do-yoon. Twenty-seven. Heir to the Dolsan Fishing Cooperative, which was to say the Tide Hall, which was to say the people who employed Pyo Gwang-hun.

"The collector's boss's son," said Dil, with relish. "Oh, this is nice. This is like a drama. I'll bring the popcorn."

"You'll stay in the car."

"I'll stay *near* the car."

The light turned green as they reached the third-floor landing. The door was open. Beyond it, the flat he remembered was gone, replaced by a place so full of soft light that it seemed to have no walls. There was a pink neon sign that read *good vibes only.* There was a velvet sofa, a ring light on a stand, a white desk with a microphone on a boom arm. A young man sat in the middle of all this like a bishop in a cathedral of his own making.

Min Do-yoon wore a quilted jacket the colour of lemon sorbet and had the kind of face a dermatologist would put on a poster. He was talking to a phone on a tripod. In the corner of the phone's screen, a number kept climbing: *LIVE 3,418.*

"...and that's the thing about the sea, chat," he was saying. "It doesn't care who your father is. You've got to *earn* the harbour. Oh! Oh, we have a guest! Chat, say hi, we have a guest at the door!"

Seon-ho stopped in the doorway. A cultivator's pressure came off Do-yoon like warmth off a stove: a careless, wide-open fifth layer of Breath. He felt nothing, which meant his body was calm, and he deliberately let the muscles in his shoulders tense a fraction, as one does when a large dog looks over a fence.

"Oh my god," said Do-yoon. He had leaned forward, delighted. "It's the Dry kid. Ryu, right? Seon-ho. We went to the same clinic. You scored a zero! That was *iconic.* The examiner showed us your sheet. We framed it, basically."

The chat scrolled. Seon-ho could see the words fly past in the reflection of the ring light: *who? / the zero guy lmao / is this a collab / poor bro.*

"I'm sorry to interrupt," he said. "I'm here about a tin."

"A tin?"

"Tea. Round, green, a bit dented, with a picture of a crane. It was in this flat. On the third shelf of the kitchen. Behind the rice." He kept his voice quite polite. "It belonged to my mother. I'd like to buy it back."

There was a pause, in which three thousand people tilted their heads.

"The *kitchen,*" said Do-yoon slowly. "This was your *house?*" He laughed. It was a good laugh, bright and carefree, and Seon-ho recognised, with distaste, that it was real. "Chat. Chat! I'm in his childhood bedroom! This is so *deep.* Okay, okay, wait. Don't move."

He vanished into the back, and returned thirty seconds later carrying, to Seon-ho's astonishment, a small green tin. It had a crane on the lid. It was dented.

"I *love* this," said Do-yoon. "It's in my aesthetic. I found it behind a pile of old rice when I bought the place. Vintage! I put it on the pantry shelf for the shot. People ask about it constantly." He turned it in his fingers. "How much would you pay for it?"

"What do you want?"

Do-yoon's eyes lit up, and Seon-ho felt a small cold feeling, the feeling of a man who has just seen the shape of a trap and is walking into it for a good reason. "Okay! A challenge! You know, my audience is always asking what I do with a Dry. We've got a segment, 'Dry Kid Challenge.' You do three things on camera, you take the tin. First: you try to lift this." He nodded at a dumbbell. "Second: you tell chat what it feels like to have no talent. Third..."

"I have a better idea," said Seon-ho.

He hadn't planned it. The idea had arrived the moment he'd seen the room, and he'd been holding it like a hot coal. He nodded at the wall behind the velvet sofa.

Hung there, in a thick gold frame lit by its own tiny lamp, was a sheet of cream paper with a vermilion seal. A handwritten text in an elegant brush hand. A plaque beneath it read: *Authentic Joseon-era Land Deed (1847). Acquired at auction. Do not touch.*

"That's your deed?" said Seon-ho. "Is that your best piece?"

"It is the *crown,*" said Do-yoon, with passion. "Three million won. I got it from a dealer in Seoul. Chat, this thing is *so* old."

"Let me authenticate it," said Seon-ho. "On camera. For free. If it's real, you keep the tin and I'll write you a certificate you can post. If it isn't..."

"It *is.*"

"Then you've nothing to lose."

There was a long, delicious pause. The chat, he could see, had come alive: *oh? / wait / authenticate??? / the zero guy is a deed guy??* Do-yoon, a showman to his marrow, could no more refuse an audience than a fish could refuse a river.

"Do it," he said grandly. "Chat, we're doing it."

Seon-ho lifted the frame off the wall with both hands, laid it face-up on the desk, and held it under the ring light. He looked at the paper for a long time, so long that the chat began to murmur. He tilted it. He smelled the corner. He asked, very politely, for a hair dryer.

"I think," he said at last, "that this is a nice piece of work."

Do-yoon beamed.

"Printed on a good inkjet. Eight hundred dots per inch, I'd guess. The 'ageing' is tea, applied with a sponge, and a little too evenly. Look." He pointed with the tip of a pencil. "The tea-stain has the same density at the edges as at the centre, which no stain made by a hundred and seventy years of damp air ever has. The vermilion is a laser print, so the 'seal' sits on the surface, instead of sinking into the fibre. And the text..." He read aloud, with the voice of a guide in a museum. "'On the fourth day of the sixth month of the year *Gyeo-in*, in the thirteenth year of King Heonjong.' Heonjong's thirteenth year was *Dingwei.* Gyeo-in was nowhere near. Whoever wrote it forgot to check an almanac." He set down the pencil. "It's a gift shop souvenir. Very good of its kind. I'd give it eight thousand won."

The chat exploded.

It happened in a rush, a rolling surge of laughing faces and crying faces and one long unbroken line of capital letters: *HE GOT YOU / THREE MILLION????? / the Dry kid is a ZERO and he still beat you / ratio'd by a zero.* The viewer count climbed to five thousand, six, seven, as people shared the clip across the app. Do-yoon stood perfectly still, his mouth a little open, his face passing through shock, outrage, calculation and, finally, with the speed of a man in love with his own numbers, delight.

"Chat," he said. "Chat, this is the best thing that has ever happened to me."

He held out the tin.

"Take it," he said. "Take it, take it. Say 'thank you for the content.' Do a little bow."

Seon-ho took it. He bowed, deeply and without irony, and said, "Thank you for the content." Then he went down the stairs with Dil, who was crying with laughter, and he did not open the tin until they were back in the taxi.

Inside lay a single folded sheet. The paper had been creased and uncreased so many times that it had gone soft as cloth. The hand was his mother's, the light quick hand of the shopping lists. He read it in the passenger seat, in the sodium light of a Hanul-dong evening, and the script went into him like cold water.

*Seon-ho. If you are reading this, I got something wrong, and so did your father. I'll say it plainly because you hate fuss.*

*I took my own name off the page. I did it with ink and a night I didn't have. I thought if the Registry had no sentence to read, they would stop looking at this house. It was the wrong thing, and I knew it was wrong when I did it, and I would do it again for you.*

*I want you to know that you are not what they wrote on your form. You are not Dry. There is something else. I won't put it here because I don't know who'll read this first. Go to the old man with the noodles. He knows the rest.*

*Now the important part. The man who is going to offer to help you is*

The line stopped. It did not end. It stopped, as a pen stops when someone knocks at the door, and below it there was only a small round blot, where the nib had rested a moment too long before it left the page.