Kang Youngtae watched the crows scatter across the sky for a long moment, jaw tight, something unreadable passing behind his eyes before he schooled his expression back into something calm.
“Let’s go inside,” he said finally, already turning toward the house.
Nobody argued.
They filed in behind him, shoes left in careful rows by the door, the warmth of the house closing around them after the strange chill of the courtyard.
A long table had already been set in the main room, dishes of banchan spread across the surface, and more people kept arriving by the minute, elders filing in one after another, greeting each other with the easy familiarity of people who’d known each other their whole lives.
Junho’s mother swept in with a wave and a bright smile, kissing her son on the cheek before turning to the rest of the group.
“Look at all of you.
Sit, sit, you’re making the room look messy standing around like that.”
Everyone laughed and found seats around the table.
Chairman Yoo settled in near the head of it, comfortable among the elders in a way that made it clear he’d done this a hundred times before.
Tea was poured all around, steam curling up into the low afternoon light.
For a few minutes, it almost felt like an ordinary family gathering, the kind Ishaan imagined happened in houses like this every week.
That feeling didn’t last long.
Elder Ha, the oldest man at the table by the look of him, silver-haired and unhurried, studied Ishaan for a long moment over the rim of his cup.
“So,” Elder Ha said slowly.
“This is the one.”
“Yes,” Kang Youngtae said firmly.
“He’s the one.”
Ishaan felt something tighten in his chest, unsure what exactly was happening but certain it wasn’t good.
Beside him, Jihoon didn’t react at all, face carefully blank.
“The goddess’s blessing has gone outside the bloodline,” Elder Ha said, setting his cup down with a soft click.
“That’s not nothing.”
“Bloodline?” Ishaan asked.
“The blessing has always stayed within certain families,” Elder Ha explained, setting his cup down carefully.
“Generation after generation, unbroken.
It can technically land on anyone, in theory.
It’s simply never happened before, not once, not in any record we’ve kept.”
“How does that even work?” a woman further down the table asked, one of the other elders Ishaan hadn’t been introduced to yet.
“How did he end up with it, if it’s never once crossed outside the family lines before, not in all these generations?”
The table dissolved into overlapping conversation, voices rising over each other, someone suggesting they check the archives, another voice insisting they needed more information before doing anything at all.
Then, all at once, the attention in the room swung fully toward Ishaan.
“You said you can see them,” Elder Song said, leaning forward, a wiry older man with a voice sharper than the rest.
“How did you first know that?
Was there something specific that caught your attention?
Or did you simply decide, one day, that you could?”
“Why did you go stare at the statue in the first place?” another elder added, sharper, leaning in like he was closing a trap.
“What made you think it was safe to look at all?” a third voice cut in, before Ishaan had even answered the first question.
He wasn’t sure how to answer without it sounding worse than it already did.
“It was a dare,” he said carefully.
“A bet with friends.
I didn’t know anything would happen.
I was drunk and stupid, honestly, and it was supposed to be a five minute joke.”
“A dare,” Elder Song repeated, unimpressed, like the word itself was an insult.
“Maybe he’s the reason that thing at the mall was even active,” someone else said.
“Maybe whatever woke up in him woke something else up too.
Coincidences like this don’t just happen.”
“That’s a big leap from one bad decision at a shrine,” Somi muttered from further down the table, though nobody seemed to hear her over the noise.
The accusations kept coming, layered over each other, until Ishaan felt like the room had shrunk down to just him and a dozen pairs of eyes he couldn’t read, every one of them waiting for him to say something that would make this make sense.
“If it wasn’t for him,” Jihoon cut in, voice sharp enough to cut through the noise, “we wouldn’t have survived that mall at all.
And even if what you’re suggesting is true, he ended up with a genuinely useful ability.
That should count for something, not nothing.”
Jihoon’s jaw was tight, hands flat on the table like he was holding himself back from saying something sharper than he already had.
“Why him, though,” Elder Song pressed.
“Nobody in our bloodline has ever even set foot in his country.
So how did he wake something that’s only ever belonged to us?
Is that not strange to any of you?
Is it not possibly a bad sign, a foreigner carrying our blessing?”
“Careful,” Chairman Yoo said, voice low but firm.
“That’s my son’s assistant you’re talking about like he’s cursed.”
“I’m simply asking the question everyone else is thinking,” Elder Song shot back.
The room erupted into argument all at once, voices climbing over each other, old men gesturing sharply across the table, the tea going cold and forgotten in front of half of them.
“Enough,” Kang Youngtae said, not loudly, but the whole room fell silent immediately anyway, the weight of the word carrying further than any amount of shouting had.
He looked around slowly, letting the quiet settle before he spoke again.
“I’m not going to blame him for something none of us understand yet,” he said.
“But I also can’t pretend this isn’t worth investigating properly.
It’s true the blessing has landed on him.
We don’t know why.
We need to find out.”
He looked toward Jihoon, then Ishaan, then Junho in turn.
“Go to the archives.
Search whatever records we have.
“I still don’t trust him,” Elder Song muttered.
“Don’t send him into the archives with the rest of them.”
“He said he’d sit it out anyway,” Junho pointed out.
“Nobody’s forcing him anywhere.”
“That’s not the point,” Elder Song snapped back.
“The point is whether we can trust him at all, in this house or anywhere else.”
Another round of arguing broke out immediately, voices overlapping, someone insisting it was fine, someone else insisting it absolutely wasn’t.
Ishaan sat through it for another moment, feeling smaller with every passing second.
“I’ll sit this one out,” he said finally, standing up.
Nobody stopped him.
He wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.
He stepped outside into the cooling afternoon air, the argument still audible faintly through the walls behind him, muffled voices rising and falling like a tide he was grateful to be standing outside of.
His hands were shaking slightly.
He shoved them into his pockets and tried to look like they weren’t.
Doyoon came running over almost immediately, tugging at his sleeve.
“Play with me,” the kid said, entirely unbothered by whatever tension had just filled the house.
“Yeah,” Ishaan said, managing something close to a real smile.
“Let’s play.”
They wandered off toward the edge of the courtyard together, Doyoon already narrating some elaborate game involving invisible dragons.
Back inside, Jihoon stood, chair scraping against the floor.
“If he decides he’s done helping us and walks away with that ability,” Jihoon said, loud enough for the whole room to hear, “I’m blaming every single one of you sitting at this table.”
“He basically turned a full day’s work into fifteen minutes at that mall,” Somi added from her spot near the wall.
“If that efficiency disappears because you all decided to interrogate him like a suspect the moment we walked through the door, I will personally be furious, and you will all hear about it.”
A few of the elders exchanged uncomfortable glances.
Outside, Junho’s mother and Kang Sunhwa, Jihoon’s mother, stepped out through the side door, Hana trailing behind them with a plate of rice cakes.
“Don’t mind them,” Sunhwa said, settling onto the porch step beside Ishaan.
“Men in this family have been like this for generations.
Very dramatic.
Very slow to apologize.”
“I’m a man too,” Ishaan said quietly, mostly to himself, though a small laugh escaped despite everything.
“You’re different,” she said, waving a hand like that settled it completely.
“Have a rice cake.
You look pale.
That house has that effect on people during these meetings, don’t take it personally.”
Doyoon abandoned his dragon game immediately at the sight of food, climbing up onto the porch to claim one for himself before anyone else could.
Back inside, chairs scraped and voices dropped low as the rest of the team filed toward a side hallway, heading for the archive room to start digging through whatever records the family had kept for generations, looking for answers nobody in that house seemed entirely sure they wanted to find.