Episode 1. The Posthumous Highlight Archive

When a person died, their e-books held a quiet funeral too.

Munseo worked the night shift at the Posthumous Highlight Archive. The archive sat on the fourth basement level of the city library, and living readers were not allowed inside. When a family applied, the archive collected the deceased person’s highlights, notes, and last reading position into a small memorial file. Some families wanted to know the final sentence their loved one had stopped on. Others wanted to learn where a silent parent had cried.

Munseo’s job sounded emotional, but most of it was administration. Hide notes that were too private. Trim long passages for copyright. Separate curses, card numbers, and resentments left for relatives. The hardest part was not the highlights. It was the blank space. If someone had not marked a single sentence until the end, the family always asked the same thing.

"Did they love nothing?"

Munseo always gave the prepared answer. "Not highlighting is also a way of reading."

At three that morning, an alert arrived from a decommissioning server. One overdue reading log had been routed for human review before automatic deletion. The account owner’s name had been erased, and there was no death-registration number. Only the title of the last book remained.

The Night the Highlights Return

Munseo searched the title. There was no publication record. No ISBN, no platform listing, no author page. Yet the log contained 417 highlights. The first one began like this.

Even after I died, Munseo could not quit the night shift.

Munseo stopped moving. Her name was not common. Paired with her job, it was hard to call coincidence. She opened the raw log to check whether it was a prank account. Device data, access time, finger pressure, page dwell time: every field looked normal. The last access time was from the future.

May 8, 2026, 00:17.

Munseo looked at the date in the corner of the monitor. May 7, 2026. There was still one day left.

The second highlight unfolded on its own.

At first she believed she was the reader. But a highlight is not made for the one who reads. It is left for the one who survives.

The archive lights flickered once. Munseo looked at her reflection in the server-room glass: tired face, access card around her neck, the blurred expression of someone still alive. Then a new note appeared in the book’s margin. No one was typing.

The first scheduled death is not a reader. It is the archivist.

Munseo stood up. Deep inside the server room, among devices waiting to be destroyed, one status light blinked like a dawn star. It belonged to a black storage unit used for dead readers’ records. The light should have been green. It had turned red.

On top of the unit lay a very small paper book with no cover. On the first page, in handwriting that looked like Munseo’s, was one line.

Do not read all my highlights. The moment you read a sentence, you follow it there.