For three days, Seraphina did nothing.
At least, nothing that anyone else would have noticed.
She went to class.
She returned home.
She ate dinner with her parents.
She studied.
She slept.
She even laughed at something her mother said one evening.
From the outside, nothing had changed.
Inside her mind, however, she kept returning to the same moment.
The orange.
The alley.
The man’s trembling hand.
And the symbol beneath his sleeve.
She had spent two years looking for something impossible.
Now she had found it.
And she wasn’t sure whether she was relieved.
She began with the simplest question.
Where did he live?
Seraphina didn’t know his name.
She didn’t know his occupation.
She didn’t know whether the name he used in the market was even real.
But she knew roughly where he had gone.
So she returned to the area.
Not once.
Several times.
She visited cafés.
Bookstores.
Small shops.
Public transportation stations.
She watched.
She listened.
She didn’t ask directly about him.
That would have been too obvious.
Instead, she gradually reconstructed his movements.
The man appeared to live somewhere within the district.
He visited the same market several times a week.
He usually came alone.
He wasn’t particularly social.
And, most importantly, nobody seemed to think there was anything unusual about him.
That last part bothered her.
If he really possessed some kind of supernatural ability, how had he managed to live normally?
Or perhaps—
he didn’t know it was supernatural.
Seraphina wrote that possibility down.
Then underlined it.
That night, she opened an encrypted browser.
She had discovered the hidden corners of the internet almost a year after beginning her investigation.
At first, she had thought the so-called “dark web” was mostly another collection of people pretending to know things they didn’t.
She wasn’t entirely wrong.
There were criminals.
Scammers.
Extremists.
People selling stolen information.
People pretending to possess secret knowledge.
But buried among the noise were stranger communities.
Small ones.
Quiet ones.
Communities where people rarely used real names.
Some posts disappeared within hours.
Some accounts existed for years without saying anything.
Some users seemed obsessed with ancient religions.
Others discussed unexplained deaths.
Others searched for artifacts.
And some were looking for people.
She had never contacted any of them.
She had only watched.
Tonight, she opened one of those forums again.
A post from several months ago caught her attention.
Looking for verified information concerning anomalous individuals in South and East Asia.
Payment negotiable.
Evidence required.
Seraphina stared at it.
She scrolled.
There were dozens of replies.
Most were useless.
Fake photographs.
Stories.
Conspiracy theories.
Attempts to scam the original poster.
Then she found another post.
Information concerning individuals capable of producing physical anomalies.
Anonymous transactions available.
Her finger stopped.
She read it twice.
Then closed the page.
Opened it again.
Closed it.
She leaned back in her chair.
“So I’m not the only one.”
The realization should have comforted her.
It didn’t.
She opened another archive.
A different person was offering money for information about ancient symbols.
Another wanted records of unexplained incidents.
Someone else claimed to be searching for people who had “survived contact with the unknown.”
Seraphina had no idea whether any of them were genuine.
That was the problem.
She couldn’t distinguish the hunters from the predators.
And now she had something they wanted.
A real supernatural individual.
Perhaps.
She looked at the folder containing the photographs from the market.
She had taken several after returning.
Nothing useful was visible.
Except the symbol.
She zoomed in.
The image was blurry.
Still recognizable.
She opened another photograph from two years earlier.
The same structure appeared on an ancient artifact.
Her stomach tightened.
There was a connection.
She didn’t know what it was.
But there was one.
She began typing.
Then stopped.
She deleted everything.
No.
Not yet.
She had spent two years learning one thing.
Never reveal what you know before understanding who is asking.
The next morning, she created a new document.
She titled it:
CONTACT — UNKNOWN
Underneath it, she wrote:
Possible supernatural individual.
Then:
Observed ability: unknown.
Known phenomenon: apparent manipulation of moving object.
Possible connection to unidentified symbol.
Location: probable.
Then she added:
Threat level: unknown.
She stared at the last line.
After a moment, she added another:
Information value: extremely high.
She paused.
Then:
Personal risk: extremely high.
She smiled faintly.
“At least I’m being honest.”
For the next week, she continued observing the man.
She never approached him again.
She didn’t follow him closely.
She simply watched from a distance whenever their paths happened to cross.
She learned his routine.
He bought food from the same market.
Visited a small secondhand bookstore.
Sometimes sat alone in a public park.
Once, he spent nearly an hour staring at an old building.
Nothing happened.
No supernatural displays.
No rituals.
No strange creatures.
He looked almost painfully ordinary.
That made him more frightening.
Seraphina had expected someone with supernatural abilities to behave differently.
Instead, he seemed like someone who had accidentally wandered into a world he didn’t understand.
And perhaps that was exactly what had happened.
On the eighth night, Seraphina made a decision.
She returned to the forum.
She found one of the accounts that had repeatedly asked for information about anomalous individuals.
She didn’t reveal the man’s identity.
She didn’t give his location.
She didn’t even mention the symbol.
She wrote a single message.
I may have information concerning an individual exhibiting an unexplained physical phenomenon.
What information can you provide in exchange?
She stared at the message.
Her finger hovered over Send.
This was the moment.
Once she sent it, she couldn’t completely take it back.
Someone would know that there was another person investigating.
Someone would know that she had information.
She almost closed the window.
Then she remembered the man stopping the orange in midair.
She pressed Send.
For several minutes, nothing happened.
Then a notification appeared.
New message.
Her heartbeat increased.
She opened it.
There were only two sentences.
Do not give me the person’s name.
Tell me what he did.
Seraphina stared at the screen.
That wasn’t the response she expected.
She typed:
Why?
The reply came almost immediately.
Because if you have truly seen what you claim to have seen, you are already involved.
She stopped breathing for a moment.
Then another message appeared.
And if you’re looking for answers, don’t ask the wrong people.
Seraphina read it again.
Then again.
She looked at the clock.
Almost midnight.
For the first time in two years, she had deliberately reached toward the hidden world.
And something on the other side had reached back.
She closed the computer.
But she didn’t sleep.
Because one thought kept returning to her.
She had spent years asking whether the strange things happening around the world were connected.
Now she had a different question.
How many people had already noticed?