The building still smelled of smoke.

Even after hours, the air clung to my clothes like something alive, thick with burnt wood and oil. When I stepped inside, the ash drifted around me, floating in lazy circles before settling again on the floor. My boots made soft crunching sounds over what used to be desks, crates, and plans.

It wasn't the first time I'd seen a place end like this, but this time felt different.

The fire hadn't just eaten wood and paper. It had eaten silence.

I walked deeper into the hideout, the mask on my face cracked along the edge from the fight earlier. The others had already left, but I stayed behind. Something about the fire felt wrong, like it had burned too clean.

I knelt near a pile of ash. Some metal pieces had melted together into a single shape — tools, maybe, or gears from our supply cart. When I picked one up, the heat still lingered faintly against my glove.

And beneath it, half-buried under the debris, was a piece of paper that shouldn't have survived.

I brushed away the soot carefully. The corner flaked away, but the middle held firm.

The texture wasn't parchment — too thin, too even. Not from this world.

When I looked closer, my chest tightened.

Letters — strange, soft curves and straight lines — written across the center in black ink.

Hangul.

I froze. My throat went dry.

It was the same language I'd once used to write shopping lists, to text people, to live.

That wasn't supposed to exist here.

I read the few surviving words slowly, my tongue almost forgetting how to pronounce them.

"성역의 손가락… 화염의 기억을 따라…"

The Finger of the Sanctuary… follow the memory of fire…

The handwriting wasn't mine. The strokes were cleaner, more deliberate.

Whoever wrote this knew what they were doing — and more importantly, they knew this language.

For a moment, I forgot the heat, the ruin, everything. All I could hear was my heartbeat echoing inside the hollow space of my chest.

Hangul.

Someone else was here.

Another transmigrator.

I sat back slowly, holding the half-burned page in both hands. The edges were dark and crumbling, but the words in the middle seemed untouched, like the fire itself had refused to consume them.

This was no accident.

The Demonic Sanctuary. That name appeared faintly below the Korean letters, half burned away but still readable. I'd heard the whispers for months — an ancient sect hidden beneath layers of history, worshipping sin itself. Most thought it was a myth, something preachers used to scare children. But I'd seen enough to know better.

They were real.

And now, this — this piece of writing — was proof that they had ties to another world.

To my world.

I ran a hand through my hair and sighed quietly. The air stung my throat with every breath.

So that's what this was about.

All this time, I thought I was cleaning the filth of Victoria's underworld, forming Chrome Hearts to fight corruption and build power from the shadows. But that was only the surface.

I wasn't just building a syndicate.

I was building a map.

Every noble house, every gang, every underground broker — each of them connected to something deeper, something that led straight into the cracks between worlds.

The Demonic Sanctuary sat at the center of it all, and now I had proof they were linked to another transmigrator.

I could almost laugh at how foolish it must look from the outside — a disowned noble running a criminal organization under a false name, pretending to be a villain in a world already filled with them.

But I knew why I had to.

To survive.

To find whoever did this.

And to end the cycle before it ended me.

I looked at the burned page again. The more I stared, the more it felt like it was looking back — whispering questions I couldn't answer. How many times had I died? How many lives had been rewritten?

Was I even the first?

Maybe I wasn't. Maybe someone came before me, tried the same thing, and failed — leaving behind this message, this tiny piece of another world for me to find.

A trail of breadcrumbs across timelines.

The idea sent a chill down my spine.

I stood up, brushing ash off my coat. Around me, the flames had eaten through half the ceiling. Through the cracks above, I could see the faint morning light starting to pour in, pale and cold.

I walked toward it, my boots leaving black footprints behind.

The Chrome Hearts. The endless schemes. The bloodshed. It all made sense now. I wasn't doing it for revenge against nobles or the empire. I wasn't doing it for power. I was doing it to reach this — the truth buried beneath everything.

This world was not stable.

I had seen too many timelines, too many resets, too many roads leading to the same ruins. Every version of me ended the same way either dead, erased, or forgotten.

I wanted it to stop.

And if the Demonic Sanctuary was part of that curse — if the other transmigrator was one of them — then this was my chance to find the source.

My chance to end it.

I held up the paper one last time and whispered, almost laughing at myself, "If you're really out there… then I'll find you."

The flames crackled quietly somewhere in the distance.

I tucked the page inside my coat. It was fragile, but it felt heavy. Heavy enough to pull at something inside me that hadn't stirred in a long time.

Not hope.

Not curiosity.

Just a quiet, stubborn determination — the kind that came from someone who's died too many times to still care about fear.

As I stepped outside, the light blinded me for a second. The city stretched beyond the hill — gray smoke, iron rooftops, streets already filling with carriages. Life continued, indifferent as ever.

And beneath it all, I could feel it. The pulse of something unnatural moving through the veins of the city — the Sanctuary's shadow, spreading quietly under everyone's feet.

I whispered to myself, "I'm close."

It wasn't for Chrome Hearts. It wasn't for redemption.

It was for truth — the one thing this world never gave willingly.

Because if someone else came from my world, then they might know what I've been trying to forget:

That maybe, just maybe, we were never supposed to exist here in the first place.

I looked down at my hands, still dusted in ash, and smiled faintly behind my mask.

"The Fingerprint of Fire," I murmured. "You left it behind for me, didn't you?"

The wind carried the words away, and I let it.

Because from this moment on, everything I'd built from every lie, every mask, every drop of blood spilled — was no longer for survival.

It was for the hunt.

For the one who came before me.

And this time, I wouldn't stop until I found them...even if it meant burning the entire world down again.