Jiseok was working when Kang Min arrived.
The unfinished piece on the working surface had advanced. Not significantly — a single additional element placed with precision, the kind of incremental progress that accumulated over years into something complete — but visibly further than it had been on any previous visit. The material it was made from was something Kang Min hadn't seen before, a surface quality that shifted between states depending on the ambient light, the way certain high-tier materials shifted when they were between phases in their conditioning.
He noted it and said nothing.
Jiseok looked up when he came in. He read the quality of Kang Min's arrival — the pace, the posture, the specific quality of attention that Kang Min brought when he was carrying information that needed to be exchanged rather than processed alone — and set his tools down.
"The contact came," Jiseok said.
