Ghosts of Eternity

Even after Seo-han left, Jeong Hyun-jin did not rise from the sofa for a long time.

Watching the receding silhouette of the worn Hyundai Grandeur sedan through the glass, he traced his forearm. The thrill Ghost 2.0 had gifted him was still flowing clearly through his veins.

The nerves beneath his skin felt as sensitive as a tightly tuned string, and his vision was as sharp as looking through a telescope, capturing every detail of the distant contours.

As long as he could maintain this magical sensation, a few hundred million won from his slush fund was a lighter price than the cost of changing his interior decor every season.

Jeong Hyun-jin picked up the encrypted smartphone resting on the table.

He dialed the familiar number, and after a mere three rings, a calm voice flowed through the receiver.

"Calling at this hour is rather uncharacteristic of you, Vice Chairman."

Kang Si-hyun’s voice was as cool as the night air. Leaning back deeply into his seat, a devious smile touched Hyun-jin's lips.

"Dr. Lee just left. An opportunity arose much easier than expected. The bastard is planning to route his funds through a shell company."

"A shell company? For what purpose?"

"What purpose? Well, it’s..."

Hyun-jin rubbed his tightly drawn brow roughly. He couldn't confess that it was a slush fund pipeline to purchase the compound he was paying 100 million won a month to obtain.

"Aren't all bio ventures like that? It’s a special purpose entity for technical consultations. Dr. Lee is pathologically paranoid about security, you see."

Hyun-jin rolled his eyes, tracing his neck where a cold sweat was beginning to bead.

A veteran predator who had reclaimed the vitality of his thirties, yet found himself flailing within the suffocating swamp of dependence engineered by Seo-han—that anxiety was laid bare in the twitching of his mouth.

"It seems he’s trying to manage capital injected from somewhere."

Hyun-jin waved his hand through the empty air, blurring his words.

The predatory aura of a beast that used to violently reshape the retail markets had already evaporated. Only the subservient mask of a dependent reading the mood of his supplier was reflected back in the glass.

"Right. Step in as the legal counsel for Eterno. Ensure everything—from the investment rounds he’s conducting on Teheran-ro to the hidden capital flows—passes right before your eyes. Si-hyun, this is no simple advisory role."

Jeong Hyun-jin lightly swirled the crystal glass in his hand. The sharp, resonant clack of ice fragments cutting through the quiet space echoed coldly.

"Strip away his layers, one by one. Find out exactly what lies at the bottom of Lee Seo-han, and drag out the fatal vulnerability hidden behind that fastidiousness of his."

An obsession bled through Hyun-jin's voice.

"I don't care if it's a woman, a past trauma, or a hidden debt. Find that critical loophole that will let us collar him without a soul knowing, and bring it to me."

A brief silence flowed through the line.

Kang Si-hyun stood by the window of her Seocho-dong office, looking down at the night streets. Tap. Tap. Her fingers lightly rapped against the cold pane.

"Vice Chairman, I am a jurist, not a private investigator."

"Do you honestly think reaching the core partner track at Kim & Chang at your age was achieved purely by digging through legal codes? Reading your opponent’s hand and piercing their most painful vulnerability to settle the game is your entire specialty."

"If there is something to be seen, I will pass it along. Evaluating risk as a business partner is my core profession, after all," Si-hyun’s reply was flat.

She scanned Lee Seo-han’s resume resting on her desk—an unblemished career, a brilliant record of publications.

"However, I will not go out of my way to dig up dirt on him. That brand of background investigation only clouds my objectivity. If a definitive flaw is captured through my own judgment, I will let you know then."

"Si-hyun, don't tell me you’ve already been reeled in by the bastard?"

"Dr. Lee is far too boring a subject for me to be reeled in. He is a man who belongs with numbers rather than emotional machinations. I am hanging up."

Click.

The call ended, and Jeong Hyun-jin let out a scoff, tossing the phone aside.

He liked Kang Si-hyun’s arrogance. He was certain that the moment she captured what she deemed a 'definitive flaw,' Lee Seo-han’s lofty genius would ultimately be crushed beneath his feet.

In the darkened office, Si-hyun stared quietly at Lee Seo-han’s identification photograph. A cool gaze staring back through the lens.

She could instinctively sense that Seo-han was not a man to be easily manipulated by capital, despite what Jeong Hyun-jin believed.

"A vulnerability..."

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Si-hyun muttered to herself, closing the file.

To her, this assignment was no mere execution of the Vice Chairman's directive. It felt closer to an intellectual game—an exercise in decoding a flawless, veiled enigma.

Si-hyun grabbed her jacket and slowly turned off the office lights.

In the upcoming play named 'Eterno,' a strange curiosity pricked at her cold intellect, wondering what mask Seo-han would wear when he stepped onto the stage.

The air inside the vacant laboratory was as cold as nitrogen gas. An artificial, odorless silence dominated the space.

The only disruption to the midnight stillness was the low mechanical hum of the high-speed centrifuge. Cool air flowed steadily from the HEPA filters in the ceiling.

Seo-han gripped a micropipette before a metal table illuminated by a pale halogen glow. A distinct tension hung over his blue nitrile gloves.

Even within it, his movements were mechanically precise, refusing to grant entry to even a microscopic tremor of his nervous system.

Drip. Drip.

Onto the transparent vial containing the freeze-dried peptide powder, the hydrophilic polymer solution fell drop by drop like a sequence of tears. The transparent liquid seeped into the white solid matrix.

Staring at that fleeting configuration, Seo-han recalled the data inscribed inside his mind.

Ghost 2.0.

A form of ultra-precise control that could command the body’s pituitary axis without exhausting its physiological rhythm—stealing the rhythms the body already recognized, striking and retreating like a phantom only when necessary.

It was Seo-han's unique masterpiece, a realization of true pulsatility.

"Ultimately, data does not lie," Seo-han muttered softly, replacing the pipette tip with practiced ease.

Snap! The crisp friction sound of the tip mounting sliced through the stillness, reflecting off the laboratory walls.

The past six weeks had been a testing ground for bizarre human dynamics just as much as an accumulation of clinical trials.

As if competing, Vice Chairman Jeong Hyun-jin and Chairman Jeong Ui-hyun had thrust their highest-caliber 'samples' right in front of him.

Kang Si-hyun, a core partner at Kim & Chang who concealed a desire for conquest behind her legal codes.

Yoon Tae-hee, the reclusive heiress to a private equity dynasty. And even Dr. Baek Seo-woo, the analytical MD.

Seo-han analyzed the dialogues they had shared from multiple angles.

Their responses had been entirely formulaic, devoid of any disruption.

Faced with the cold cynicism and academic arrogance he threw out, they had maintained a calculated distance using elegant rhetoric. A cold calculator was embedded within their pupils.

The issue was the stillness that followed those encounters.

In the business ecosystem, the foundational rule was to establish subsequent touchpoints to achieve an objective. Yet, they had maintained an absolute silence.

He surmised that these women, exhausted by the high-society ritual of arranged meetings, had merely showed up under pressure from the Jeong chairmen before returning to their own worlds.

The sole exception that shattered this statistical regularity was Chae Do-hee from Cheongdam-dong.

Only Do-hee had stepped first into his domain, forcing a personal stimulus into the cracks of his 'deprivation' and 'madness.'

"For everyone to seal their lips as if by collusion... Did I demand the introductions too aggressively?"

He murmured into the dark, carefully transferring the silver-tinted formulation of Ghost 2.0 into a specialized nasal spray apparatus.

Categorizing the silence as a definitive 'rejection,' Seo-han closed off his cognitive circuits.

The conclusion was unpleasant, but logically, it was the simplest parameter. What remained in the vacancy was a hollow frustration he could not explain.

He had genuinely wanted to meet someone.

Imposing such a condition on Jeong Hyun-jin was no mere prank or a strategy to deliver humiliation.

The format of the transaction was crude, and it might have appeared offensive to the other party. But to Seo-han, it was perhaps the most realistic method he could choose.

He was not someone who could enter the ordinary world of dating.

His life had been spent moving between laboratories, hospitals, investor meetings, and clinical protocols.

Meeting someone naturally, trading light jokes, arranging a second date—none of it existed in his world.

He didn't even properly comprehend what expression he was supposed to wear, at what juncture to signal interest, or at what threshold to retreat.

So he utilized a transaction.

He believed that within the enclosed network possessed by Jeong Hyun-jin and Jeong Ui-hyun, they could at least bring forward women capable of enduring a monster like himself.

He reasoned that an individual whose intelligence, background, pride, or intensity of desire sat above a certain threshold would not look at him as an entirely grotesque entity.

Yet the only output was silence.

Seo-han pressed his lips into a thin line.

The women had most likely shown up out of sheer formality. It would have been difficult to reject a request from the Jeong family, or perhaps it was a routine arrangement dictated by their family elders.

They smiled without violating etiquette, talked just enough, and ended the meetings at the appropriate time.

And none of them returned.

That was more than enough.

Seo-han let out a brief breath.

It resembled a sigh, but he categorized it as a mere alteration in his breathing pattern due to physical exhaustion. An unnecessary emotional response.

He lifted the vial once more. Within the transparent liquid, a silver wave rippled minutely.

He shifted his processing back to the mucosal absorption curve of Ghost 2.0.

The stability testing for the next batch, the LH pulse at the four-hour mark, the scale of the snapback arriving thirty-six hours post-administration.

Numbers, at least, did not fall silent. Data did not reject him.

Seo-han pushed his consciousness straight back into that familiar universe. There, even a failure possessed meaning, and every reaction held an explicit cause.

As the night deepened, the temperature of the laboratory dropped.

The completed research samples of Ghost 2.0 glided into the laboratory’s cold storage. The dull thud of the magnetic seal closing signaled its isolation.

Next, Seo-han selected a few specialized nasal spray containers for his personal use and slid them carefully into his leather bag.

Snap. Snap.

Seo-han cut the power to the main console.

The faint mechanical whirrs of high-end analytical instruments dissolved into the cold air as they powered down.

Left entirely alone in the sudden blackout, the centrifuge’s fading vibration resonated faintly with his pulse. Seo-han exited the laboratory, leather bag in hand.

With every stride, the Ghost 2.0 containers in his bag clicked softly against one another.

That sound trailed through the vacant corridor before dissolving entirely in front of the elevator.

Exhaustion scraped against his nerves like a razor blade. The metallic chime of the elevator descending to the parking structure rang out with a stark intensity.

Turning the ignition, the aging engine of his seven-year-old Grandeur purred to life.

Driving along the Gangbyeon Expressway, Seo-han habitually checked his phone.

No missed calls. Zero messages.

The silence from Kang Si-hyun, Yoon Tae-hee, and Baek Seo-woo filled the passenger seat like a system error.

He was processing this scenario as a 'normal rejection response of the system.'

Yet, deep within a corner of his chest, an unmapped residual heat remained, disrupting his pulse.

The capital for Eterno was beginning to flow in laundered streams, and Jeong Ui-hyun and Jeong Hyun-jin were bowing their heads subserviently, reduced to slaves of his compound.

He held the world beneath his feet through technology, yet in the stillness of his evening commute, he drifted like a stray electron that had lost its orbit.

The crimson lights of the Seongsu Bridge bled across the windshield. Seo-han tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

The women’s silence was explicit data.

It meant he was merely something to be analyzed, or something to be avoided. Nothing worth further calculation.

His reason, cold and sharpened to a blade, accepted the conclusion.

Yet even as he crossed Seongsu Bridge, the darkness in the passenger seat refused to empty.