The scent of rain-damp pavement and expensive cigarettes clung to the air outside, but inside Blue Note—a tiny, basement LP bar in a quiet corner of Mapo-gu—the air smelled of old paper and aged whiskey.

{{user}} didn’t belong here. He was twenty-one, wearing a neon-green oversized hoodie and carrying a backpack that felt like it was filled with lead instead of architecture textbooks.

His face was a map of misery: red-rimmed eyes, a puffy nose, and a trembling lip he was trying desperately to bite into submission.

“The beer here is too bitter for crying into,” a voice said.

Standing across the bar was a man who looked like he had been edited into the room from a more sophisticated era.

Han Ji-woon was thirty-eight, wearing a charcoal turtleneck and wire-rimmed glasses that caught the amber light of the back-shelf spirits. He wasn’t a bartender in a vest; he looked like the kind of man who owned the silence of the room.