Everyone crowded in beside him, following the line of his arm up toward the shadowed gap above the cabinets.
“I’ve got nothing,” Baek said, eyes narrowed at the same spot.
“No intent reading at all off it.”
“Can you describe it for us?” Junho asked, already reaching for his pouch.
“It’s black,” Ishaan said.
“And there’s, like, nothing to it.
No shape, no face, no— I don’t know the Korean word for it, it’s just void, you know?
Empty.”
“Oh, okay,” Somi said, nodding slowly like that actually meant something to her.
“Oh, that’s easy then,” Yuna said, tilting her head.
“D or E class.
Just needs a talisman.”
“Yep, just needs a talisman,” Junho agreed, already pulling one folded paper out.
“Little salt, three or four chants, done.
Don’t worry, it’s not dangerous.
Mostly just causes nuisance stuff, drawers sticking, lights flickering, that kind of thing.”
Everyone visibly relaxed at that, shoulders dropping in unison.
“See, this is the easy version,” Somi said, stretching her arms overhead.
“You should be grateful.
First week and you already got the good kind.”
“There’s a bad kind?” Ishaan asked, only half joking.
“Oh, absolutely,” Baek said.
“We’ll get there eventually.
No rush.”
Junho scattered a thin line of salt below the cabinets, pressed the talisman flat against the metal, and muttered something under his breath, fast and practiced.
The shape above the cabinets thinned, wavered, and dissolved into nothing within seconds.
“That’s it?” Ishaan asked.
“That’s it,” Junho said, already folding up his supplies.
“Come on, let’s head back.”
Outside, the morning had warmed up considerably, sunlight cutting sharp angles across the parking lot.
Somi was already on her phone, probably texting whoever handled the paperwork for a job this small.
“That was fast,” Ishaan said, climbing into the car.
“Most of them are,” Baek said, sliding into his own car parked beside them.
“The scary ones are rare.
Thankfully.”
Back at the office, Ishaan sat in the open area outside Kang Jihoon’s door while an HR employee walked him through a stack of forms and folders.
“This is your building access card,” she said, sliding it across the desk.
“This is the company phone.
A lot of scheduling calls come through here for Mr.
Kang, so it needs to stay charged at all times.”
“Got it.”
“Laptop’s already set up with your email.
Calendar sync is already done too.” She kept going, listing off systems and passwords and where the good vending machine was on the third floor.
“Is there anything I should know that’s, uh, specific to this floor?” Ishaan asked, careful with his wording.
“Specific how?” She glanced up, genuinely confused.
“Never mind.
Just checking.”
She handed him a laminated sheet with extension numbers on it and moved on to explaining the expense report system, three different approval steps for anything over a certain amount, none of which Ishaan expected to remember by tomorrow.
Ishaan’s personal phone buzzed against his leg halfway through.
cursed but broke 💀
Minho: dude where ARE you.
it’s been days
Ishaan: i’m busy 😭
Yoon: busy doing what exactly
Ishaan: things.
corporate things.
i wear a badge now
Daehyun: it’s your official “welcome to the cutthroat corporate ladder” party.
mandatory
Ishaan: yeah yeah i’ll be there
Minho: you better.
we already picked the bar
He slid the phone back into his pocket just as the HR employee finished her last folder and wished him luck.
The rest of the team had scattered to their desks by then, typing up reports from the morning.
Ishaan wandered over to Junho’s desk instead of his own, notebook still in hand.
“So what should I actually be doing right now?” he asked.
“Depends on the day.” Junho didn’t look up from his screen.
“You’ve got his whole schedule to manage now, which is honestly a full job on its own.
Meetings, calls, keeping people away from him when he doesn’t want to be bothered.”
“How often does he not want to be bothered?”
“Every day.
All day.
It’s less a schedule and more damage control, honestly.”
“Okay.”
“Case days are simpler than you’d think.
Normal case, we go, we handle it, we come back, done for the day.” Junho glanced up.
“Something bigger, we might have to go back out at night too.
But today was small.
Nothing to worry about.”
“Right.” Ishaan nodded, filing that away, and went back to his own desk to start on the pile of scheduling spreadsheets waiting there.
The office settled into a quiet rhythm after that, keyboards clicking, the occasional printer humming somewhere down the hall.
Ishaan opened his email for the first time and stared at the number of unread messages already sitting there, most of them meeting requests he had no context for yet.
Kang Jihoon walked out of his office a while later, stopping at the edge of the open area.
“Before anything else.
Did anyone tell him the rules?”
The room went quiet for a beat too long.
“No,” Baek said slowly.
“Wait, there are rules?” Ishaan asked.
“Yeah, there are rules,” Junho said, sitting up straighter.
“We just, uh.
Forgot.
Somehow.”
“How do you forget something like that?” Ishaan asked.
“You’d be surprised how easy it is once it’s just muscle memory,” Junho said.
“None of us think about it anymore.
It’s like breathing.”
“In our defense, we don’t usually have to explain them,” Somi said.
“Most of us learned the hard way.”
“Painfully the hard way, in my case,” Junho added, not looking especially bothered by the memory.
Kang Jihoon didn’t go back into his office.
He leaned against the doorframe instead, arms crossed, watching.
“I’ll do it,” Yuna said, already pulling her chair around to face Ishaan directly.
“It’s pretty simple, actually.”
She counted them off on her fingers.
“One.
Don’t say thank you to anything you see, even out of habit.
It sounds polite, but it’s basically an invitation.
Two.
If something calls your name and you didn’t tell it your name first, don’t answer.
Three.
Never accept anything offered to you on-site, food, drinks, objects, anything.
Four.
If you feel like you’re being watched and can’t see anything, don’t turn around immediately.
Count to five first.”
“Learned that one from personal experience,” Yuna said, not elaborating further.
“That’s it?” Ishaan asked.
“That’s the short list,” Yuna said.
“There’s a longer one for field days specifically, but that covers the basics.”
“There’s one more,” Kang Jihoon said, still by the doorframe.
Everyone turned toward him.
“Five.” He looked directly at Ishaan while he said it, nothing else in the room seeming to matter for a second.
“If something happens on-site and it involves me specifically, you come straight to me.
Not Junho, not Baek.
Me.”
“Why just you?” Ishaan asked.
“Because I’d rather know first,” Kang Jihoon said, simple, like it wasn’t worth explaining further than that.
Junho glanced between the two of them, one eyebrow raised, and said absolutely nothing, which somehow felt louder than if he had.
“Should I be writing this down?” Ishaan asked, mostly to break whatever that silence had been.
“Probably,” Somi said.
“We all learned it the hard way, remember?
Nobody wrote it down for us.”
“That explains a lot, actually,” Ishaan said, and Baek let out a short laugh from his desk.
“Don’t worry, it sticks eventually,” Yuna added.
“Usually after something goes wrong once.”
Kang Jihoon lingered by the doorframe a second longer than the conversation strictly needed, gaze still resting on Ishaan.
“Good policy,” he said finally, though it wasn’t clear anymore if he meant the rules or something else entirely.
He held Ishaan’s eyes for one more beat before turning back toward his office, the door clicking shut softly behind him instead of the usual firm snap.
“So how do you guys usually even find these things?” Ishaan asked, looking around the room.
“Like, before today, before me.”
Everyone started talking at once.
“One of us gets a bad feeling,” Somi said.
“That’s usually the first sign something’s actually there.”
“Sometimes it’s more specific than that,” Baek added.
“A room feels colder than it should.
Or too quiet, like today.
You learn to trust the small stuff.”
“Then we just walk the whole place, corner to corner,” Junho added.
“See if anyone else picks something up.”
“And if nobody finds anything concrete,” Baek said, “we all just look at him.” He nodded toward the closed office door.
“He goes room to room,” Somi said.
“Chanting, swiping through the air with the knife, every single corner, two or three times through if he has to.”
“It looks kind of ridiculous from the outside,” Baek admitted.
“But it works.”
“And I seal every exit first,” Junho said.
“So whatever it is can’t slip out while he’s working through the place.”
“Sounds exhausting,” Ishaan said.
“You have no idea,” Somi said.
“Ask me again after a bad week.
Ask any of us, honestly.”
“It’s slow,” Somi said.
“Really slow.
Today would’ve taken half a day at least, normally.”
“Sometimes longer,” Baek added.
“There was one job that took us until midnight because none of us could pin down which floor it was even on.”
“Don’t remind me,” Junho said, shuddering slightly.
“That was a bad week.”
“You basically made the efficiency problem disappear,” Junho said, grinning at him.
“Kind of weird how that works out, but hey.
I’m not complaining.”
Ishaan sat back in his chair, turning that over for a second.
It was strange, being useful in a way he hadn’t expected to be useful at all a week ago.
He thought about the mountain, the bet, the five minutes of staring that had somehow led here, to a desk outside a CEO’s office with a badge around his neck and a list of rules he was already half forgetting.
He went back to his spreadsheets anyway, because apparently that part of the job didn’t change no matter how many ghosts he could see.