Seo-yeon noticed it while doing something ordinary. That was how the worst realizations always began.
She was walking home from school, her steps steady and her mind focused on the next application deadline she had written in her notebook that morning. The air carried the faint warmth of early summer, and the street looked exactly as it always had: predictable, stable, and safe.
Until it wasn't.
She stopped—not because something moved, but because something didn't. Her eyes fixed on the small convenience store at the corner. The sign above the entrance flickered. It was a simple electrical delay, nothing unusual or alarming, except for one thing.
In her first life, that sign had never flickered.
Her breathing slowed as she stared at it longer than necessary, trying to confirm, trying to deny. It flickered again, just once, and then stabilized. Her fingers curled slightly at her sides. This wasn't memory failing; this was reality diverging.
The distinction mattered. Memory could be unreliable, but reality could not.
She stepped closer. The store owner stood inside, arranging items on a shelf—ordinary, unaffected, and completely unaware. It meant this wasn't a shared deviation. It was localized. Personal. Structural.
Her pulse tightened. The timeline was no longer just changing through her actions; it was correcting itself around her presence. She swallowed slowly, because correction implied resistance.
And resistance implied that something was aware she did not belong fully in this version of events.