Chapter 35
Important Information
Han Ji-An let out a long, audible sigh.
"Better that I don't think about him too much. My blood pressure goes up every time."
She pressed her right hand to her forehead and went quiet for a moment.
Then something shifted in her expression — a memory surfacing, connecting to what she had just witnessed at the table. The quiet that followed was brief and purposeful.
"No. Actually, I need to tell you about him."
Her whole demeanor changed. The warm older-sister energy from earlier folded away, replaced by something measured and serious — like a teacher who had just decided a lesson couldn't wait.
"He's a genuinely difficult person to deal with. He has connections to certain higher-ups, and by all appearances he already has a clear path mapped out for his career here. He just needs time and a few contributions he can point to as justification for promotion."
"This facility has only been officially operational for three weeks. In that time, he's already received one promotion — he's now an assistant researcher, sitting just below my position. My role is a little different because I run my own project, but his backing gives him a kind of lateral influence that can occasionally outweigh formal rank."
"And honestly, if it were just that — just nepotism — I could live with it. Nepotism exists everywhere. What makes him genuinely dangerous is his personality."
Lucia quietly slid a glass of water across the table toward her.
Han Ji-An accepted it with a brief, grateful look and took a sip before continuing.
"His notoriety comes in layers. First — he doesn't acknowledge anyone he considers beneath him. Second — if someone makes a mistake or annoys him, even indirectly, he gets physical. Using his hands to slap people when he's angry is apparently a known habit. Third — even people who formally outrank him aren't safe, because he still operates as though his backing is more powerful than their position. The only ones he treats with any real civility are leaders who have actual authority, or people who understand his backing better than he does."
She paused and made deliberate eye contact with Lucia.
Lucia held it, her attention fully on the next words.
'This one is going to be the serious part.'
"What's worse — he uses his position as leverage to go after girls who catch his attention."
Han Ji-An exhaled. Some of the energy seemed to leave her with it, her expression settling into something tired and quietly angry.
"There have already been several victims of his harassment. The worst case involved a girl who ended up leaving the facility entirely after he came close to sexually assaulting her. Someone intervened in time — but there was no concrete evidence afterward, so the case was buried. The victims received hush money as compensation. Everyone who knows the full story is either important enough not to speak, or has already been silenced with an NDA. Only a small number of people actually know what this person is capable of."
Lucia went still.
She glanced around the food court once — a quick, careful sweep — then back at Han Ji-An, dropping her voice.
"Ji-An Unnie… are you sure it's safe telling me this? What if the higher-ups find out? What if his people hear about it?"
Han Ji-An smiled — warm, and just slightly smug.
"Don't worry about me. I may not look it, but I have my own backing. I know people too." The smug expression held for exactly a second before softening into something more serious. "So trust me when I say I'm fine."
Then she leaned forward slightly.
"But Lucia — listen carefully. I don't just think he's already noticed you. I'm certain of it. So please — stay alert around him. Never let your guard down. And there's something else you need to know: he's an awakened person, like you. He's at the upper age limit, twenty-five. I don't know his specific transformation ability, but that doesn't matter. Don't underestimate him regardless of how confident you feel about your own power."
Lucia felt something warm settle in her chest.
A day. They had known each other for barely a day.
'Ji-An Unnie… I think you're going to be my sworn older sister whether you know it yet or not.'
She also quietly filed away the more practical thought beneath it.
'Awakened… right. And I don't exactly have Edward's combat ability. Avoiding direct confrontation is still the smarter play.'
She reached across the table and took Han Ji-An's hand in both of hers, holding it carefully.
"Ji-An Unnie — thank you. For telling me all of this." She smiled, and it was one of her genuine ones. "I'll stay alert. Around him, and honestly around everyone — at least until I know who I can trust. And right now, in this whole facility, the only person I feel safe trusting is you."
Han Ji-An blinked.
Something stung at the corner of her eyes. She pressed her lips together for a moment, composing herself.
"Mm. Mm!" She gave a firm nod, voice just slightly thicker than usual. "That's what older sisters are for. You're stuck with me now."
They paid for the meal and stepped out of the food court.
Neither of them spoke for a while.
Lucia walked with her hands loose at her sides, eyes forward, but her mind was still back at that table.
The NDA. The hush money. People who knew the full story either too important to speak or already legally silenced.
It wasn't just that Jung Si-Woo was dangerous. It was that the facility already knew — and had chosen to manage it quietly rather than address it.
That distinction mattered. It meant that if something happened, the instinct of the people in charge wouldn't necessarily be to protect her. It would be to contain the situation.
She needed to remember that.
'Stay out of situations that require someone else to intervene. Don't give him an opening. And don't assume the institution will act like it's on my side.'
The thought settled and she let it sit without dwelling further.
Han Ji-An led her toward an open track field about fifty meters from the dormitory building — a wide, flat expanse with several dedicated sports courts marked out across it. Basketball, badminton, volleyball, all laid out in clean lines.
Lucia's pace slowed as the large gymnasium building came into view beyond the courts.
She stopped.
The structure was clearly still mid-construction — scaffolding clinging to sections of the exterior, barriers keeping the surrounding area closed off. But even unfinished, the scale of it was impressive. Whatever it was going to be, it wasn't modest.
Han Ji-An stopped beside her.
"That one houses an Olympic-capacity indoor swimming pool and dedicated strength measurement equipment — all built specifically for the volunteers. Health assessments, physical benchmarking. It won't be open for at least another month."
Lucia looked at it for a moment longer.
'A month. That's fine. By then I'll have a better read on this place anyway.'
She nodded quietly and they continued.
The loop of the outdoor area took roughly thirty minutes to complete. By the time they turned back toward the main building, the earlier silence had softened into something more comfortable — the kind that comes after a heavy conversation has been fully absorbed rather than just heard.
Han Ji-An turned to Lucia at the entrance.
"So — back to the dormitory? We could play something together, or if you'd rather keep exploring, I can show you some of the lab spaces. Not all of them — some require an access card tied to your clearance level, which you don't have yet — but there are areas we can still see."
She paused.
"What do you feel like? Rest first, or more exploring?"
Lucia looked at her.
There was a faint line of perspiration at Han Ji-An's temples. She had been on her feet and talking for most of the day without a single complaint.
'She's tired. She just won't say it.'
"Let's go to the dormitory! But I want to see your room, Unnie — not just mine. Show me where you live."
"Of course! There's not much inside, but we can play something on my PC."
Han Ji-An felt genuinely happy hearing that — happier than she let show on the outside.
It was a small thing, but it meant something. She had met a lot of people in this facility over the past three weeks, and most of them came with layers — careful words, measured reactions, the quiet social calculations that people ran constantly in professional environments. Lucia wasn't like that.
What she said was what she meant. No pretense, no hidden angle.
Han Ji-An had good friends, of course. But they had their own lives, their own rhythms, and the distance between meetings had a way of accumulating. Someone like Lucia — genuinely straightforward, someone she could already feel herself being comfortable around — was exactly the kind of presence this place had been missing.
They walked back through the lobby and turned into one of the hallways running toward the far side of the building. Through the glass panels of several small personal laboratories, people moved between equipment and whiteboards, absorbed in their work.
After about two hundred meters of straight corridor, Han Ji-An turned left through a set of double doors.
The environment changed immediately. The institutional hallway gave way to something that looked far more like a residential floor — a row of numbered doors, each with a small nameplate, stretching out ahead of them. Han Ji-An stopped in front of one marked with her official title.
A fingerprint scan, a click, and the door swung open.
"Come in!"
From the entryway, Lucia took it in.
The layout was nearly identical to her own room — same desk placement, same bed, same basic bones. But where her own room currently felt bare and provisional, this one had settled into something lived-in. A few personal pieces of furniture, small decorations placed without overthinking, a quilt that clearly hadn't come with the room. The kind of space that accumulated warmth gradually, one small addition at a time.
Lucia also noticed the scent — something faintly floral, or close to floral. She couldn't name it exactly, but it was unmistakably the scent of a girl's room. Different from anything she had grown up around, even with sisters.
She met Han Ji-An's eyes and smiled.
"Ji-An Unnie, your room feels so warm. Mine just feels empty by comparison."
Han Ji-An chuckled and patted the bed beside her.
"Come sit. Let's rest for half an hour — we can just talk about whatever."
Lucia hesitated for a fraction of a second.
Sitting on a girl's bed, that close to her — it still required a small, quiet act of will. But Han Ji-An had spent the entire day looking after her without being asked to, and that counted for something.
She sat down beside her, close enough that it counted.
Han Ji-An noticed the slight reservation and didn't push against it. She had already read Lucia fairly well by this point — this wasn't dislike or distrust, it was simply the behavior of someone who kept her personal space close and opened it slowly. That was fine. There were ways to close a distance without forcing it.
She decided to start with something true.
"Did you know our research here has only just begun?"
Lucia nodded. A month since the mass awakening — there hadn't been time for much more than the foundation.
"Right now everything is still in the data collection phase. Tracking teenagers approaching the fifteen-year age threshold to see if further awakenings follow the same pattern. Cataloguing transformation races, power types, status distributions. There's more happening in parallel, but most of the active research right now is on the human side of the phenomenon. The deeper questions — what caused it, what's behind the system itself — those are high-clearance territory. That's mainly what the Director and those above him are working on."
She shifted to face Lucia more directly, something lighting up in her expression.
"So — are you curious? About why any of this happened? About how the transformation abilities are distributed the way they are?"
Lucia looked at her — at the brightness in her eyes, the barely-contained energy of someone who had been sitting on these thoughts for weeks and had finally found someone worth saying them to.
She felt it resonate.
She had been a fantasy novel reader for most of her life. Every question Han Ji-An was asking was one she had already been turning over quietly since the morning she woke up in a different body.
'And if anyone can eventually point me toward answers about this "curse"... it's someone like her.'
"Yes. Absolutely — I want to understand all of it. It's like something walked straight out of a fantasy novel and landed in real life. Part of me still can't quite believe it's real."
She paused, the last thought finishing itself too quietly to be heard.
'Especially about my situation.'
Han Ji-An's eyes were already bright with where she was going.
"Alright — my personal theory first. The scale of this phenomenon is what matters. It's simultaneous, global, and it affected a specific age range with precision that suggests intentionality. My working assumption is that this involves a higher dimension and beings that operate from within it — something with reach far beyond what we understand."
"And then there's the system itself. The status panel. In every fantasy novel we've read, the system is interactive — it gives quests, it levels you up, it communicates. This one does none of that. It shows you information. That's all. But what information — a complete breakdown of race, traits, abilities, even detailed functional descriptions. Something is maintaining that database. Something built it. Whatever that something is, it has comprehensive knowledge of what each transformed person has become."
She leaned forward slightly.
"So my conclusion? The existence of higher beings isn't a theory anymore — it's the most logical explanation. And if higher beings exist, then the races that show up in human transformation aren't mythology. They're data. Elves, dragons, angels — whatever showed up in those old stories might have come from somewhere real."
Lucia listened carefully, and found she didn't disagree with any of it.
Her own transformation race had a description that referenced a history — wars, divine lineages, a conflict old enough to have become mythology. That description had always felt like it was pointing at something real rather than generated. She kept that thought to herself.
"And it's not just the theory side!" Han Ji-An wasn't done. "The distribution is fascinating by itself. The vast majority of transformed individuals still have Human as their transformation race. Non-human races are genuinely rare. Something like a dragon as a transformation race — you could probably count every confirmed case in the world on one hand."
Her gaze settled on Lucia with undisguised curiosity.
"So — and tell me if I'm overstepping — based on your appearance, your ability, and the little I do know about your case… I'd guess your transformation race is connected to angels. Or possibly Valkyrie. Am I close?"
Lucia felt the gentle pressure of the question and chose her footing carefully.
She trusted Han Ji-An. But her race carried a history that felt inherently unsafe to state plainly — too specific, too unusual, too connected to things she didn't fully understand yet.
'Better to stay vague than to say something I can't take back.'
"Haha… It might not be a hundred percent off the mark. But even I'm not entirely sure about the specifics."
Han Ji-An read the deflection clearly and accepted it without friction.
'She's keeping it close. That's her right. I'll find out through the research if it ever becomes relevant.'
"Fair enough." She smiled, then shifted into something more practical. "Actually, since we're on the topic — I want to give you some advice before the official research phase starts."
Lucia straightened slightly.
"The facility will ask about your status panel. The numerical stats — Strength, Willpower, Mana, that kind of thing — those are mandatory benchmarks.
You'll need to share those. But your traits and abilities are a different matter. You can be selective. Tell them how many you have and describe how they function in general terms — but the specific details, the exact names, the full descriptions? You don't have to volunteer those."
Lucia held her gaze and nodded slowly, taking it in.
"Thank you, Unnie. That's genuinely useful to know." She paused. "When does the research phase start?"
"Three days from now. Phase one covers personal data — status panel stats, skill and trait counts, race classification — alongside a full physical examination. Both your baseline body and how it's been altered by your transformation race. Internal organs, any structural changes, blood composition, cellular differences if applicable."
Lucia heard all of it.
And then she felt the bottom drop out quietly.
'How am I supposed to handle the original body examination?'
'I'm stuck in this body. There is no "original" left to compare against.'
She kept her expression still.
But her mind was already running.