A frantic, relentless pounding on the iron door of Gilang’s attic shattered the pre-dawn silence, right as Gilang finished shrugging off his bomber jacket and tossing the captured poltergeist capsule onto his cluttered workstation.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

"Please! Open the door, I’m begging you! Help me!" a young woman’s hoarse voice trembled violently from behind the door, followed by a pitiful, muffled sob.

Gilang let out an annoyed grunt. He had just been about to crash onto his thin foam mattress after getting royally screwed over by Ant Corp’s ninety percent tax cut, and now his night was getting derailed all over again. With a screwdriver in one hand and a sour expression on his face, Gilang threw the iron deadbolt.

The moment the door cracked half a meter open, a small figure forced her way inside uninvited. The girl wore an oversized hoodie, her eyes soaked with tears, her breath coming in heavy gasps as if she had just sprinted across half the city running from a monster.

"Hey, hey! At least say hello before barging into someone's home, miss. This isn't a refugee shelter," Gilang protested flatly, stepping back while crossing his arms.

The girl—who would later introduce herself as Rania—collapsed onto the plastic chair in front of the monitor desk. With intensely shaking hands, she rummaged through her hoodie pocket and placed a cracked, black smartphone onto the table right next to Gilang's pile of electronic cigarettes.

"Please... you have to help me. They said you're the most reckless paranormal problem-solving freelancer in Sector 7," Rania choked out, her tears dripping heavily onto the tabletop. "My brother... my brother is dying!"

Gilang scoffed, glancing briefly at the phone on the desk before locking eyes with Rania again in a cynical glare. "Do I look like the international Red Cross to you? Kid, if a family member is sick, take them to the Sector 1 General Hospital, not the attic of a discount exorcist. My consultation fees are expensive, and my wallet just got hollowed out by Ant Corp."

"This isn't a normal sickness!" Rania cut in sharply, her voice cracking with desperation. She stood up, staring fiercely into Gilang's eyes. "My brother, Wira... he's a seventeen-year-old boy in perfect health. No history of heart disease or anything. But ever since he started regularly using that trending SoulSync meditation app made by Ant Corp a week ago... he suddenly slipped into a coma!"

Hearing the corporation's name, Gilang’s eyebrows instantly locked together. His cynical demeanor slowly receded, replaced by a cold, sharp vigilance. The name Ant Corp always brought bad luck.

"SoulSync?" Gilang muttered softly. "That mental wellness app whose ads pop up on every street corner in the city? They claim it uses pure brainwave tech to melt away office workers' stress."

"That's a public lie!" Rania grabbed the phone from the table and shoved it right in front of Gilang's nose. "All week Wira locked himself in his room, wearing earphones every night, saying it let him 'connect with universal peace' just like the app claimed. But yesterday afternoon... his body went rigid, his eyes rolled back white, and his breathing almost stopped. The clinic doctor said his brain function is like... empty. His soul is gone!"

Gilang fell silent. He reached out, carefully picking up Wira’s phone.

"Don't go accusing a major corporation without proof, kid," Gilang said, though his tone was far more serious now. "Fighting Ant Corp in court is basically committing suicide with a soup spoon. They own half the parliamentary shares and every private security force in this country."

"I'm not asking you to sue them in court!" Rania snapped, her voice trembling with anger and tears. "I just want you to find out where my brother's soul went! Inside that phone... just look at what happens when the screen turns on."

Gilang let out a soft huff, then connected a diagnostic cable from his old laptop to the charging port of Wira’s phone. His fingers, accustomed to dealing with bizarre code, began typing out basic scanning commands to read the cache memory of apps running in the background.

"Alright, let's see how advanced this venture-capital-darling startup app really is," Gilang muttered, staring at the monitor screen as it began displaying rows of hexadecimal data.

On the screen, Nara—or at least the standard script program Gilang usually relied on—began mapping the phone's memory activity. But instead of showing chat logs or a photo gallery, the monitor suddenly filled with erratic, pulsing black wave lines.

A strange scent began to drift through the small room—a sharp smell of ozone mixed with the rot of ancient incense.

"Look... look at the screen," Rania whispered in horror, pointing at Wira’s phone on the desk.

The black smartphone suddenly turned itself on without being touched. Its cracked screen emitted a blinding blue-purple light, forming an intricate fractal pattern resembling a labyrinth of DNA chains. The light pattern pulsed in sync with a slow heartbeat, as if the device possessed a life of its own and was breathing right there on Gilang’s desk.

Gilang furrowed his brow, his curiosity shifting into an internal hazard alarm. "Hey... this isn't just some regular meditation app. There's a high-tier curse encryption mapped directly to corporate network protocols."

"Wira said... the app led him to an 'eternal waiting room' before he collapsed," Rania said softly, her tears spilling over again. "You know someone who can bring him back, right?"

Gilang didn't answer right away. He leaned forward, bringing his face closer to read the final line of code successfully decoded by his emergency system. The text flickered unstably. Corporate-type curse energy—cold, systematic, and binding—was unmistakably left behind in the phone's internal circuits. It was the digital signature of state-sanctioned soul theft.

"Damn it..." Gilang sneered quietly. "They're actually harvesting human souls for server fuel."

Right as Gilang reached out to yank the connector cable to stop the synchronization process, Wira’s phone vibrated violently. The device's temperature spiked drastically within seconds.

Bzzzt... bzzzt... click!

"Huh?" Gilang startled, instinctively pulling his hand back.

From the cracks in the phone's screen, purple electrical sparks suddenly snapped and popped with a loud hissing sound. The reek of burning plastic instantly flooded the cramped attic.

Rania let out a small shriek, covering her face with both hands while stepping backward. "What is happening to that phone?!"

Gilang didn't have time to answer. Before they could do anything else, Wira’s phone screen flared with a blinding light one last time, killing every neon bulb in the attic and leaving only the glow of the monitor in the darkness. In the center of the reddening screen, a massive block of text automatically generated, typed letter by letter by an unknown system:

“Signal detected. Ant Corp intellectual property infringement detected.”

At that exact moment, a cold, flat synthetic voice echoed from the damaged phone speaker, whispering directly into both of their ears:

“Intruder in Sector 7 has been locked on. Enjoy the rest of your time, Freelancer.”

Boom!

The phone on the desk gave a small explosion, shattering its glass screen into a thousand pieces and leaving a thin plume of black smoke curling toward the ceiling.

Gilang stood frozen in front of his smoking workbench, while Rania sobbed in terror in the corner of the room. Outside the attic window, the district's automated security siren began to wail, tearing through the night to signal that the hunt had officially begun.