chapter 25
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Chapter 25: The Archive Room
The next lead came from someone neither of them expected—Seo Haneul.
She texted Ji-hoon early the next morning:
> "Meet me. I found something. It's time you knew what they buried."
They met in the basement of an old TV studio, long shut down. The building reeked of mildew and old secrets. The electricity was off, but Haneul had brought flashlights and gloves. She led them down a corridor lined with rusted filing cabinets and broken equipment.
"This place was once the media archive for one of Luma's shell companies," she said. "Before they digitized everything, they stored raw footage, outtakes, unedited interviews... Here."
She kicked open a rusted door and gestured inside.
It was a vault—cold, silent, and packed with dusty tapes, hard drives, and faded labels.
Eunha's breath caught. "What are we looking for?"
"Anything they didn't want aired."
---
They spent hours sifting through unlabeled tapes, booting up old laptops, sorting through folders. Most were mundane. But then Eunha found it: a red-marked hard drive with a single post-it note attached.
DO NOT DUPLICATE.
She plugged it in.
Video thumbnails popped up. Dozens of them. Interviews with stars who had mysteriously vanished from the spotlight. Rough edits of behind-the-scenes footage that painted a far darker picture than anything aired. Conversations where directors, producers, and executives joked about pushing idols to breaking points.
But the one that made her blood run cold?
A hidden camera recording inside a boardroom at Luma.
In the video, Ji-hoon's former mentor, Jang Min-ho, sat at the head of a long table. Around him, men and women in suits discussed "strategic reputation damage," "reputation resets," and most chilling of all, something called Project Erasure.
A voice said, "If the girl goes public, activate Erasure. Bury her story. Make her unstable. We've done it before."
The girl… was Sae-jin.
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Ji-hoon watched the clip in silence, then turned away. His fists were clenched, his face unreadable.
"They destroyed her," he finally said. "And they nearly did the same to all of us."
Eunha looked at Seo Haneul. "We release this. All of it."
Haneul hesitated. "Are you sure? This isn't just a story. This could take down powerful people."
"Exactly," Eunha said. "And if we don't, no one else will."
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That night, they went live.
Not through a news outlet, not through a platform owned by the industry—but through an independent livestream, hosted on a server outside Korea, watched by over five million people.
They played the boardroom video.
They showed the confessions.
They named names.
Hashtags trended worldwide within the hour. #EraseTheLies. #JusticeForSaejin. #TheCurtainFalls.
Luma's stock plummeted. Arrest warrants were rumored. Politicians and celebrities scrambled to distance themselves.
But Ji-hoon and Eunha weren't watching the numbers.
They were watching each other—wordless, stunned, exhausted.
And free.
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Far away, in a quiet temple on the outskirts of Gyeonggi Province, an old woman sat before a candlelit altar. On it was a framed photo of Sae-jin, smiling.
The woman whispered, "They finally heard you, my child."
And somewhere, in the echo of it all, it felt like Sae-jin smiled back.