Rora stared at the final, cold message from Chae-won before the status dot flicked back to gray. The connection was severed.

"She’s hiding something about those letters," Da-eun said, her voice dropping to a low whisper as she sat down on the edge of Rora’s bed. "She didn't even try to explain them. She just completely blanked them out."

"If she won't talk, the internet will," Rora muttered, her jaw set.

Leaving the encrypted chat behind, Rora opened a heavily sandboxed browser window. She fired up a custom scraping script she’d built, designed to bypass standard search engine algorithms and dive straight into archived local news databases, old real estate registries, and deleted forum posts from seven years ago.

For the next three hours, the only sound in the bedroom was the rapid clicking of Rora’s mouse and the hum of the laptop fan. They searched every combination of the four families' names alongside the years leading up to the alliance's fracture. They dug through digitized microfilm of old city newspapers, looking for any mention of industrial accidents, sudden corporate restructuring, or scandals.

But the screen offered nothing but a wall of curated, sanitized history.

[SEARCH QUERY: KIM EST. / JUNG CORP. / PARK MEDIA / LEE HOLDINGS — ARCHIVE YEAR: 2019]
> 0 RESULTS FOUND WITHIN PRIVATE REGISTRIES.
> ALL RELEVANT ARTICLES REMOVED VIA LEGAL INJUNCTION.

"Nothing," Rora sighed, rubbing her eyes in frustration. "Every single piece of online press from that exact timeline has been scrubed clean. It’s a total ghost town. The corporate PR firms must have spent millions wiping the servers."

Da-eun leaned closer, pointing at a small, recurring error code at the bottom of the archived pages. "Wait. Look at the digital footprints. The articles aren't just missing—they were systematically deleted by an internal network administrator. The same signature is on all of them."

They hadn't found the truth behind the initials, but the total digital blackout proved one thing: the alliance hadn't just broken over a disagreement. They had buried something alive, and the evidence wasn't on the public internet.

"If the public archives are wiped, the only place left to look is the closed intranet," Rora whispered, her fingers hovering over the mechanical keyboard. "The core servers that the four families share. If I can tunnel through their legacy VPN gateway, we might find the unredacted files from seven years ago."

Da-eun stood watch near the bedroom door, her ear pressed against the cold wood. "Hurry, Rora. The firewall on those corporate networks is going to flag an anomalous ping if you stay in the tunnel too long."

"I'm bypassing the handshake protocols now," Rora muttered, code reflecting in the lenses of her glasses as she forced a backdoor entry into the encrypted network. A progress bar appeared on the screen: Decrypting Node... 42%... 67%...

Suddenly, the floorboards in the hallway groaned.

Da-eun’s eyes went wide. She turned around, frantically waving her hands. "In-ah! She's coming!"

The heavy footsteps stopped right outside their door. The brass doorknob began to turn.

Without breaking a sweat, Rora’s muscle memory kicked in. With a lightning-fast swipe of three fingers across the trackpad, she executed a hotkey command to switch virtual desktops. The terminal windows, the scrolling green code, and the unauthorized network breach vanished instantly.

When the door swung open, the screen was displaying a vibrant, pause-framed video of a high school chemistry tutorial on covalent bonds.

In-ah stood on the threshold, her sharp eyes scanning the room. Her coat was still damp from the midnight rain, and her expression was unreadable. She looked at Da-eun, who was suddenly very interested in a notebook, and then at Rora, who was typing out a fake set of science notes.

"It's past midnight," In-ah said coldly, her gaze lingering on the laptop screen before moving to the window to ensure the blinds were completely drawn. "Why are you both still awake?"

"We have a mid-term exam block starting on Wednesday," Rora said, keeping her voice completely level as she looked up. "I'm just helping Da-eun finish the study guide before the platform locks us out for the night."

In-ah didn't move for three agonizing seconds. The silence in the room was deafening, the background hum of the laptop fan feeling incredibly loud. Finally, she stepped back into the hallway.

"Shut it down in five minutes," In-ah commanded, pulling the door shut until the latch clicked.

Da-eun let out a long, ragged breath, sinking against the wall. Rora didn't move a muscle until she heard In-ah's footsteps retreat all the way down to the kitchen. Only then did she swipe back to the hidden desktop.

The progress bar on the screen had stopped.

[ERROR: CONNECTION TIMED OUT]
> GATEWAY CLOSED BY REMOTE ADMINISTRATOR.
> ACCESS DENIED.

They had lost the connection. The digital front door was slammed in their faces, leaving them right back where they started—with nothing but a handful of names they couldn't verify and a history they weren't allowed to know.

The next morning, the three girls met by the edge of the school courtyard, keeping their voices low as they blended into the crowd of students walking to homeroom.

"We need a different angle," Da-eun muttered, keeping her eyes on her notebook. "If the core servers are locked down, we have to look at the people around the families. Someone who was there seven years ago but isn't protected by a massive corporate firewall."

So-min glanced around before leaning in closer. "What about Hobi? He’s been working with the Park family's media wing since the alliance was still intact. If anyone has unredacted digital logs or old personal emails from that timeline, it’s him."

Da-eun nodded quickly, turning to So-min. "Can you get his primary Gmail address? If you can find the exact account he uses for personal correspondence, Rora can run a public footprint analysis. We don't even need to break into his account—just scraping his public metadata, old forum registries, and archived cross-references from seven years ago might give us the missing link."

"I can try," So-min whispered, checking her phone. "He keeps his personal contact info closely guarded, but he handles the logistics for the studio showcases. I might be able to pull the registration recovery email from the old event sheets."

Rora adjusted her backpack, her eyes fixed on the school entrance. "Just get me the handle. If it's an older account, the digital footprint will still have traces of the 2019 servers before the Kims scrubbed the main network. We just need one loose thread."

CHAPTER ENDS