Now then, everyone.
Let me tell you something that happened in the heart of Jongno. Something I heard — I can't say for certain it's true. It's just a story that leaked out from someone who claimed to be there that day.
This was a few years back, apparently. The Le Meilleur building in Jongno — some of you may know it. Quite a tall structure. The kind of place packed wall to wall with offices, hundreds of people passing through on any ordinary day.
And that day was supposed to be ordinary.
People had come back from lunch, settled into their chairs, switched on their computers, shuffled through papers, answered phones. That kind of hour. Then, gradually, something began to feel wrong. At first it was almost nothing — a glass of water sitting on a desk gave a small tremor. A ripple. No wind. Nothing had touched it.
And then it started. The building began to shake.
"Shake" feels like too mild a word. The person who told this story said the vibration rose up through the soles of their feet, traveled up through the calves, and settled somewhere in the lower back. The solid concrete floor moving as though it were alive. People on the upper floors said the walls tilted — slowly, unmistakably — and then swung back. That the Jongno street visible through the windows drifted to one side, then returned.
Do you know what the office was like in that moment?
Not a sound. At first.
No screaming. No one could speak. Everyone had simply frozen — gripping the edges of their desks, meeting each other's eyes. Someone who saw those faces said it wasn't quite fear. It was the expression people make when they've witnessed something they cannot process. The particular stillness that comes not from calm, but from disbelief.
Then someone stood up and ran for the door, and that was all it took — everyone poured out at once. Over a thousand people flooding down the stairwells. No one took the elevators. No one had told them not to. It was simply instinct.
The building was closed for several hours. An official statement came later. A blade on the rooftop cooling fan had snapped off, sending vibrations through the entire structure. Mechanical failure, they said.
But here's the thing.
The person who was there that day said they stopped for a moment on the stairs going down. They pressed their palm flat against the concrete wall. They could feel the vibration traveling up through it. And it felt, they said, like breathing. Perfectly rhythmic. Steady.
Rhythmic.
If a fan had lost a blade, shouldn't the shaking have been erratic? Uneven? But this vibration was too consistent. As though something — something very large and very quiet — was in there, steadily drawing breath.
That person doesn't go near the building anymore.
They couldn't really explain why. Only that they keep thinking about it. The feeling that stayed in their palm.
