chapter 4-the boy who called ghosts

Chapter 4 – The Boy Who Called Ghosts ( 1000 words)

The candlelight flickered, restless as if the room itself were breathing. Seok sat alone at his desk, its surface littered with old papers, yellow talismans, and a small wooden box carved with symbols older than language. His long fingers rested lightly on its lid, but he didn’t open it. He didn’t need to. He could already feel the Echo stirring inside, the way it hummed through his blood like a second heartbeat.

Echo Relics… they weren’t just objects. They were graves without bodies, vessels for the stubborn will of the dead. Most men would go mad clutching one. But Seok was never most men.

He had been born under bad stars. That was what people whispered when he was a child, when dogs barked at him, when shadows clung too long, when his toys moved on their own. A jinx. An omen. A boy the dead adored too much.

His parents tried to shield him. His mother, soft-voiced and bright-eyed, carried charms sewn into his clothes, whispered prayers over his sleeping body. His father, stern and pragmatic, taught him to bow to spirits as one bows to kings. But fear eats families alive. And fear was all anyone ever felt around Seok.

By the time he was nine, neighbors stopped visiting. By twelve, his schoolteacher trembled when he spoke his name. By fifteen, he stood in their house and watched his father slam doors against invisible hands, watched his mother light sticks of incense until the air turned black with smoke.

They loved him. But love, under the weight of curses, curdled.

One night—it must have been summer, because the windows were open and cicadas screamed outside—his parents simply vanished. No bodies. No blood. Just a house heavy with silence, and a boy standing in it, listening to the whispers of the dead.

The only thing left behind was his mother’s rosary. The beads were cracked, the cross bent. It should have been useless. But when Seok touched it, he felt warmth—and then voices, hundreds of them, pouring into his ears. The rosary became his first Echo Relic. His inheritance. His curse.

From then on, Seok stopped hiding. He bargained with ghosts. He commanded them. He learned how to twist grief into a blade, how to drink vengeance like wine. If the world thought him a jinx, then he would become one.

Yet… there was still one memory that did not rot.

A boy.

That night—the night Seok’s life and the supernatural collided most violently—he had stumbled upon another child. The boy had been small, trembling, clutching something to his chest as screams rang out in the distance. Seok had shielded him, whispered hurried words, pushed him away before the spirits clawed too close.

The boy ran. And Seok never saw him again.

For years, he thought the memory would fade, like a dream gnawed at by daylight. But it hadn’t. Because Seok remembered the boy’s eyes. Dark, terrified, full of life he didn’t deserve to lose.

And lately… Seok felt those eyes again.

He leaned back in his chair now, the rosary dangling from his fingers. Ghosts stirred in the corners of the room, whispering fragments of voices—names, regrets, threats. But his mind wasn’t on them. His mind was on the man he had seen only nights ago, standing alone on a rain-slick street.

Ji.

The years had changed him. Taller now, sharper around the edges, carrying the kind of weariness only the city gives. But it was him. The boy. The one who had run.

Seok had thought the dead were his only tether. But Ji… Ji was proof the living could haunt too.

“Why now?” he murmured to the empty room. His voice was low, almost reverent. “Why come back into my world now, after all these years?”

No answer. Only the Echo humming in his palm, like it too was waiting.

Seok rose, his shadow long against the wall. He moved past shelves stacked with other Relics—each one dangerous, each one stolen from grief too deep to bury. A cracked mirror. A broken hairpin. A child’s shoe. But none of them pulled at him the way Ji did.

And though he did not yet know why, though he had not yet seen the necklace glowing faintly beneath Ji’s shirt, he felt it. Felt the thread tying them, taut and unbreakable.

Seok wasn’t foolish enough to call it fate. Fate was too kind a word.

This was hunger. This was inevitability.

He stepped to the window, the city sprawling below, neon lights fighting the night. Somewhere down there, Ji lived his fragile, stubborn life, clinging to work, to survival, unaware that the ghosts he had once escaped were circling back.

A slow smile curled across Seok’s lips.

The dead had given him many gifts. Power. Fear. Silence. But Ji… Ji might be the one thing he couldn’t control. And Seok had never feared anything more than that.

Still, the game had already begun.

And games, Seok always won.

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