Ghosts of Eternity

The light from countless crystals in the chandeliers of the Blue House Guesthouse—the presidential reception hall—stabbed down, unusually cold and sharp.

Ahead of a massive diplomatic event—the ROK-US summit—the apex predators of South Korea’s capital and power were gathered in the banquet hall.

On the surface, it was a commonplace social venue for the political and business elite.

Yet, the undercurrent flowing through it was different. An abnormally chilling and taut tension dominated the room.

Every laugh in the room was measured. Every handshake lasted half a second longer than necessary.

Around them moved ministers, presidential aides, conglomerate heirs, military officers, and foreign diplomats, all pretending this was merely another ceremonial evening before a summit.

But beneath the polished etiquette, another hierarchy had already begun to form.

It was not written on the seating chart. It was not announced by protocol officers.

It moved through complexion, posture, voice, and the unnatural brightness in the eyes of men who should have been visibly surrendering to age.

The Empire of the Ghost.

The members on that secret roster—a private code name they had begun using for themselves, though Seo-han remained entirely unaware of it—radiated a vitality so alien it bordered on violent.

Chairman Namgung Hwi of Cheonmyeong Media, who was once losing control of his media empire due to early-stage Alzheimer’s, was now scanning a British economic briefing paper without even his reading glasses. His gaze moved across the text like a blade.

The fierce, low baritone from his youth, unbelievable for a man past seventy, overwhelmed his surroundings.

He was not the only one.

General Pak Sang-do, a retired four-star army general rumored to be confined to a wheelchair due to chronic sarcopenia, stood with his iron-like spine perfectly straight, laughing heartily as he conversed with a US Navy Admiral.

As if a long-extinguished biological rhythm had been reignited, the veins beneath his wrinkled hands pulsed with force. He radiated the commanding aura of a commander in his prime.

A strange pressure hung around them, as if they had briefly escaped the gravity of aging.

It was a tension entirely different from that of the other chairmen, whose complexions turned ashen under the inescapable weight of time.

Beneath the brilliant lights of the Blue House Guesthouse, Koo Tae-min, the pinnacle of MK Group, minutely adjusted his intellectual silver titanium glasses frames as he observed the scene.

Though he boasted a flawless suit fit that defied his forty-eight years, the sight unfolding before his eyes was a bizarre phenomenon that even his precise data-processing systems could not easily reconcile.

The smart ring on his finger recorded his pulse rhythmically.

Yet, the miraculous vitality displayed by the old men before him was more than enough to overload his rational data engine.

Koo Tae-min had been born into a branch family, then adopted into the main line, breaking a succession tradition that had lasted for generations.

For him, proof was not ambition.

It was survival.

The throne he occupied had never been freely given. It had to be justified every day, with numbers, acquisitions, patents, factories, and industries no one else had seen coming.

Believing that monopolizing the future industries of the next decade was the only way to justify his throne, the bizarre 'update' achieved by those elders struck him not as mere curiosity, but as an existential crisis.

Koo Tae-min lightly swirled his champagne glass and walked toward the spot where South Korea’s two titans of mobility and distribution stood. His noiseless premium loafers slid seamlessly across the carpet.

"Gentlemen, what kind of air are you breathing these days? Is the oxygen level in the Guesthouse that much more pleasant than the nitrogen cooling units in the MK Data Center? Or has a new energy source been commercialized without my knowledge?"

Koo Tae-min slipped quietly between Jung Hyun-jin and Jung Ui-hyun, lightly clinking his champagne glass against theirs.

Clink.

A crisp sound rang out, but it carried no warmth.

Vice Chairman Jung Hyun-jin of S-Group elegantly adjusted the sleeves of his brilliant, deep burgundy bespoke suit and offered a relaxed smile.

"The air is just the air we always breathe. Chairman Koo, you seem overworked lately. There are dark circles under your eyes, and your complexion isn't what it used to be."

Jung Hyun-jin casually tossed the provocation.

"Is the processing speed of your brain failing to keep up with the hardware of your body? It would be a disaster if the system crashes."

The provocation carried a strange sense of superiority.

It was like a user who had updated to the latest firmware first, offering patronizing sympathy to someone still running an outdated version.

Hearing this, Koo Tae-min’s gaze instantly turned ice-cold. The glare behind his glasses pierced Jung as if dissecting him.

"Stop joking. Just last month, rumors of Chairman Namgung's retirement were circulating because he could barely move. Now, he looks ready to dictate his own New Year’s address single-handedly. And what about General Pak?"

Koo Tae-min dropped his gaze.

"It feels like your processing speeds have outpaced MK’s next-gen AI processors. Has there been a firmware update I missed?"

Koo Tae-min’s gaze relentlessly scanned Jung Ui-hyun’s face behind his glasses.

It was a process of converting reality into data—scanning skin tension, the depth of wrinkles around the eyes, and the minute pulsing of blood vessels, as if MK Group’s cutting-edge LiDAR sensors were precisely mapping a target.

A suffocating obsession for proof and a burning desire to witness and control the technological singularity of the next decade churned beneath his cold engineer persona.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Forty-eight.

To the family elders, it was an age bubbling with youth, but to Koo Tae-min himself, a body in its forties was merely an obsolete processor with declining processing speed.

Yet, the old men in front of him were flaunting an unrealistic agility, equipped with a far smoother firmware.

“I won't beg to be squeezed into this exclusive social circle. I am simply asking you to share an efficient methodology for optimizing the system.”

Tae-min tapped the surface of his champagne glass rhythmically with his smart-ringed finger.

“For the figures holding the core infrastructure of Korean mobility and logistics to monopolize peak computing power on their own high-performance OS—isn't that highly inefficient for the nation's economy?”

Tae-min leaned in closer.

“Before an overload triggers a system shutdown, dispersing the risk through MK’s hardware would be the wiser choice.”

Jung Ui-hyun and Jung Hyun-jin exchanged a glance for a fraction of a second.

Even in that brief instant, their brains were running complex political-engineering simulations, fully utilizing the transcendent calculating power granted by that secret signal.

The wretched reality of having their necks leashed by an arrogant, genius architect named Lee Seo-han. A humiliating dependency where they had to entrust their prime to a single signal delivered every morning.

If they remained hidden beneath the shadow of this drug alone, and the supply cut off or a public scandal erupted later, they would have to bear the entire legal and moral burden themselves.

But what if.

What if the key figures among South Korea’s top twenty business groups were forcibly bound to this 'daily subscription' system?

If they could drag a young, brilliant architect like Koo Tae-min into the swamp of complicity.

This secret addiction would no longer be an aberration. It would solidify into a new 'lifestyle' for the upper class, an unbreakable 'unofficial order of the elite.'

Once enough names were written into the same secret ledger, guilt would no longer function as guilt. It would become mutual insurance.

A scandal that could destroy one man would become untouchable once it implicated every engine that kept the country running.

Prosecutors could cut down a single corrupt chairman. They could not amputate the entire nervous system of the economy without killing the body attached to it.

That was the ugly genius of complicity.

The more hands held the same forbidden cup, the less forbidden it became.

Neither the National Tax Service, the prosecution, nor any authority higher would have the courage to excise the heart of the nation all at once.

If these men stopped, the gears of the massive machine called South Korea would grind to a halt along with them.

The secret network of addiction was already locking into place as an essential protocol driving the national economic engine.

“Very well, Chairman Koo. Then let’s widen the board properly—with you on it.”

Jung Hyun-jin tapped Koo Tae-min on the shoulder with the magnanimous air of a man granting admission to a private kingdom.

The diamond cufflinks at the edge of his brilliant royal blue suit sleeves cast a venomous gleam under the lights.

“The South Korean economy is far too frozen for us to keep this heaven-like processing power to ourselves. Shouldn’t we let a little warmth circulate through the system?”

Intoxicated by the illusion that he was driving the board, he downed his champagne with an arrogant smile.

Standing beside him, Jung Ui-hyun also shifted his firmly closed lips, signaling silent assent.

Inside their brains, the capital synergy that twenty tycoons would bring was already drawing a complex geometric silhouette.

That night.

Leaving behind the tight security surrounding the Blue House and the chilly air heralding the beginning of winter, the key figures among South Korea’s top twenty business groups secretly registered their names onto the expanded roster of the 'Empire of the Ghost.'

It was a topographical map of a massive human data center holding the strings behind South Korea's capital, information, legislation, and administration.

It was a ledger of new accomplices about to connect to a high-performance OS named 'Ghost 2.0.'

Two days later, in Aether Bio’s executive office overlooking the skyscrapers of Teheran-ro in Gangnam, Lee Seo-han looked down indifferently at the list of twenty additional names placed on his desk.

Beneath his linen shirt, its sleeves rolled up roughly yet precisely, blue veins stood out along his forearms, giving them the hard, disciplined look of machinery.

“Twenty more people?”

Seo-han’s voice was so dry it seemed to scrape the moisture from the room.

He looked up slowly.

“Without my guidelines.”

A brief silence.

“Without my consent.”

That low baritone alone instantly froze the air in the office.

Jung Hyun-jin, who had walked in grandly wearing his brilliant royal blue suit, was now shifting uncomfortably, swallowing dryly.

"Dr. Lee, this isn't just about increasing the headcount. It's about risk diversification. The advisory fees funneled into your account will more than triple. As a businessman, there's nothing to lose."

"You are completely ignoring the physical limits of logistics and processing, Chairman."

Seo-han tossed the list aside.

"Ghost 2.0 is not a low-grade mass product rolled off a factory line. It requires precise management of individual response variance and stability."

Seo-han’s point struck home.

"To handle this many individuals simultaneously means a physical bottleneck will occur, from raw material management to validating response values."

Seo-han took off his glasses and set them down on the desk with a sharp clack.

That single, casual motion made Jung Hyun-jin’s shoulders flinch. Seo-han’s gaze viewed the man not as a business partner, but as an uncertain variable that needed to be controlled.

"And the money is the same issue. Now, nearly 3 billion KRW in cash will be funneled into Eterno every month. Do you think Attorney Kang Si-hyun is an idiot?"

Seo-han’s gaze locked straight into Jung Hyun-jin’s eyes.

"Do you think she will tolerate astronomical advisory fees regularly landing in a one-person entity with so little substance?"

"Th-that... Kang will defend it on her end. We are paying her legal advisory fees handsomely, and she is on Chairman Jung's line. Surely she won't cut off her own nose to spite her face?"

"Kang Si-hyun is a shield, not a launderer."

Seo-han cut him off coldly.

"Her intellect demands flawless evidence and a logical structure. Continuous high-volume fund flows with no physical substance, like what we have now, will eventually become a guillotine blade hanging over all our necks."

“…”

Jung Hyun-jin had no answer.

“Money without a structure is not capital. It is evidence.”

Seo-han’s gaze did not waver.

“Evidence that someone paid. Evidence that someone received. Evidence that there was something both sides agreed to hide. The larger the number becomes, the less it looks like consulting and the more it looks like a confession written in bank transfers.”

Seo-han stood up from his chair and stared at the night view outside the window.

The massive flow of capital wrapped around the city like invisible blood vessels, and every branch of that vascular network seemed to end in greed.

The weak pretext of 'advisory fees' could no longer sustain this ballooning flow of funds.

He needed a lawful, legitimate 'interface in the light' where large sums of cash could flow naturally without drawing anyone's suspicion.

Seo-han’s mind whirled at ultra-high speed, scanning past memories and current data.

A minute cut on the edge of his chin from shaving. The ridiculous company-wide request for donated hair.

It was absurd. A cosmetic category no serious power broker would ever bother to look at twice.

And yet, precisely because it looked trivial, it could become the perfect interface.

Money that would look obscene as advisory fees could become ordinary as royalties. Cash that would stink of blackmail in the dark could smell like consumer demand in the light.

A secret biological dependency could be hidden behind the most mundane desire in the world: the desire to make the body look cleaner, younger, and more controlled.

The dots connected, and a massive blueprint snapped into place.

"The depilatory antibody project."

Seo-han murmured in a low, yet certain voice.

"What? Depilatory? No, Dr. Lee. Are you talking about pulling hair out in a situation like this?"

"An interface that takes the unstable capital flows you are about to inject and converts them into a legitimate revenue structure."

Seo-han picked up his pen again.

"This is no mere functional cosmetic product. It is an antibody-based platform that selectively acts only on hair structures while minimizing skin damage."

Next to the roster, Seo-han began effortlessly writing down complex technical notes and financial simulation formulas.

"We will establish this as the cash cow in the light, and position Eterno as the corporation managing the core underlying IP and supply rights. Then, even if hundreds of billions of won flow in every month instead of billions, Kang Si-hyun can defend this fund flow using the flawless legal logic of 'exclusive patent royalties.'"

Seo-han turned his head.

"In fact, even if a tax audit occurs, the structure would give us a defensible argument: that this is a national strategic technology asset."

The gaze behind Seo-han’s glasses gleamed intensely.

Over the grid the predators of capital had woven to trap him, he began designing a grander, tighter defensive wall of science.

To Jung Hyun-jin, it felt as if Seo-han had tightened the leash around their necks by another notch.

He had come here believing he had expanded the board.

Instead, Seo-han had turned the expansion itself into another wall.

Yet in Seo-han’s eyes, none of it was about domination, humiliation, or power. It was merely structural reinforcement.

A collapsing system required support.

That was all.