Ghosts of Eternity

The Paris Bar at the Grand Hyatt Seoul, high on Namsan. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, a brilliant night view spilled inside like a scattering of fine jewels.

A gentle jazz melody drifted through the air, blending with the crisp clinking of ice in crystal glasses. Amid the scent of expensive perfume and the oaky undertone of premium whiskey that filled the space, Namgung Ye-ji narrowed her eyes, staring blankly at the bubbles rising endlessly in her champagne glass.

Her gaze drifted past the smooth rim of the glass and lingered for a long moment on Seo-han’s expressionless face across from her.

As the rumored successor to Cheonmyeong Media, the woman poised to stand at the apex of a media empire, making others wait or pressuring them with deliberate silence was almost second nature to her.

Yet, the silence Seo-han exuded now was of an entirely different caliber. It was not a mere withholding of words; it was the product of an absolute control that swallowed all surrounding noise and energy like a black hole, reducing it to nothingness.

"Mr. Lee, you look much sharper in person than you do on screen."

Ye-ji took a sip of her champagne and continued.

"My grandfather told me you were someone truly extraordinary and warned me not to lose my nerve. I’ve never seen him praise anyone like that before. Honestly, I’m a bit jealous. Given the power my family holds in the media world, what on earth are you holding over him to make him act this way?"

Seo-han minutely adjusted the cufflinks of his dark navy three-piece suit and tossed out a simple, stark fact without adding any unnecessary spin.

"Chairman Namgung Hwi was exaggerating. I am merely a scientist who pulls all-nighters in a lab to generate research data. I don't hold anything extraordinary; I have simply endured boring, repetitive experiments that others avoid a little longer."

Ye-ji was momentarily lost for words by the unexpected response.

It was neither vanity nor ostentation, but the attitude of a man who genuinely felt no need to dress himself up. That indifference was precisely what piqued her curiosity. Before she knew it, she leaned a fraction closer to him.

"Hearing you say that only makes me more curious. Honestly, since my grandfather pushed me into this arrangement, I came here intending to be thoroughly difficult. But you are... quite refreshing. You don't put on an act to impress me, nor do you scramble to accommodate me."

Ye-ji set her champagne glass down, her eyes locked on Seo-han.

"Working at a media network, all I hear every day is the sound of people tapping on their calculators. But you don't seem to want a single thing from me, which actually puts me at ease. It makes me wonder even more if there is room for anything else inside that busy head of yours besides work."

As Ye-ji's gaze narrowed across the shrinking physical gap, the unmistakable trace of interest flickering in her eyes disrupted Seo-han’s visual inputs.

When her calculated, flawless features hovered right before him, a massive overload instantly triggered inside Seo-han’s brain circuitry. As his pulse threatened to breach its control parameters, he deployed a dry defense mechanism, utilizing a meticulously ordered academic vocabulary to mask this unfamiliar agitation and racing heartbeat.

"I am accustomed to dealing only with predictable numbers and clear logic, Miss Ye-ji. You are a type I don't have in my database, so I’m having trouble producing an immediate answer."

Seo-han placed his champagne glass down and leaned back by a fraction.

"I am not trying to distance myself; my system has simply hit a brief buffering delay from an unexpected display of goodwill. It is difficult to organize my thoughts when the proximity is this close."

Calming his breath, he turned his gaze toward the urban night view unfolding past the window.

A secluded corner in Insadong. A heavy silence hung over the antique Hanok dining room, insulated from the artificial noise of the city.

Amid the faint scent of agarwood tickling the tip of her nose, Prosecutor Shin Yoo-kyung—known as the razor-sharp edge of the Supreme Prosecutors' Office—set down her neatly brewed teacup.

She stared intently at the flawless alignment of Seo-han’s white shirt collar and the knot of his necktie. The innate intuition of a seasoned investigator, trained to catch even the minute twitch of a suspect's muscle, was systematically dissecting the man before her.

"Strangely enough, I feel more tense sitting here than I do interrogating hardened criminals in the interrogation room. To be honest, even after seeing the news, my rigid legal mind couldn't make heads or tails of that antibody technology you developed."

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Yoo-kyung stared at her own reflection rippling in the teacup before looking back up to lock eyes with Seo-han.

"But sitting across from you now, I think I get the gist of it. You’re a fiercely rigid principled type, aren't you? Just looking at the way you dress, your entire body screams, 'I will not show a single opening.'"

Seo-han looked down at his teacup and responded evenly.

"You might be right, Prosecutor Shin. If things aren't ordered, errors creep into experiments. My attire follows the same logic. I merely match everything to the exact same specifications every morning because I dislike wasting time on trivial decisions. It's less about rigidity and closer to laziness."

The subtle, dry smile hovering on the edge of Seo-han’s lips, combined with the effortless grace of reframing his obsessive precision as 'laziness,' sent a sudden jolt through Yoo-kyung’s chest.

This man was neither frightened nor putting on airs. Yoo-kyung’s gaze deepened with a different kind of interest—one far removed from the pressure she used to break a suspect.

Yoo-kyung silently set her teacup onto the table. Leaning forward at an angle, she completely ignored the boundary of the narrow table separating them and crossed into Seo-han’s defensive perimeter.

The relentless gaze that once controlled even the breathing of suspects now zeroed in on the tightly pressed collar of Seo-han’s white shirt and the smooth knot of his tie.

"Choosing the exact same clothes to save time... I’ve never heard that excuse before. Yet, why does it make you look even more impenetrable?"

Yoo-kyung’s gaze slowly traced the space near Seo-han’s neck. Though she hadn't touched him, a visual pressure more vivid than physical contact settled against the edge of his jawline.

"Usually, when people learn what I do for a living, they put on a mask first. Because everyone has a skeleton in their closet, they orchestrate every breath and expression. But you, Mr. Lee, don't even seem to bother hiding anything from me. Either that, or your self-control is so absolute that my investigator's instinct cannot find a single crack."

As Yoo-kyung’s sharp, intense gaze narrowed the distance precariously, Seo-han’s mind instinctively flashed to Eterno’s hidden fund flows, or a trap laid by Jung Hyun-jin’s faction.

It was a moment where rational alarm and emotional overload fired simultaneously, yet Seo-han calmly met her eyes and countered softly.

"There is no need to orchestrate anything before you, Prosecutor. I am not hiding anything; it is simply that I am not here to be investigated today."

Without a flicker of movement in his eyes, Seo-han took her relentless gaze head-on.

"An investigator's instinct usually feeds on a suspect's hesitation, does it not? Fortunately, I am quite adept at controlling my own system. And above all..."

Just before the pressure from Yoo-kyung’s gaze reached its apex, Seo-han naturally adjusted his posture by lifting his teacup, resetting the distance between them. A faint ghost of a smile brushed the corner of his lips as he drew back ever so slightly.

"If I show you my entire hand during our very first meeting, the next one wouldn't be nearly as interesting, would it?"

A few days later, in the early hours of the morning along Teheran-ro, where the roar of the concrete jungle had finally subsided.

Seo-han parked his dusty, worn-out Grandeur by the curb and remained seated in the driver's seat for a long time. The streetlights cast a cold, elongated shadow across the shoulders of his dark navy suit.

In the handful of encounters that followed his meeting with Kang Si-hyun, the conversations had seemed ordinary and composed on the surface, and the women he met had been flawless in appearance. Yet, since then, not a single person had reached out to him first.

Was this string of introductions merely an offering pushed forward by Vice Chairman Jung’s faction—like throwing prime meat to domesticate a hound, or presenting a sacrifice to an ancient god? Recalling the clear curiosity they had displayed despite their sharp, guarded demeanor and aggressive rhetoric, Seo-han bit his lip with a trace of bitterness.

Two weeks had passed without a single vibration from his phone, without so much as a brief text message.

Namgung Ye-ji and Shin Yoo-kyung would each be waiting proudly in their respective positions. A game where the first one to move loses. The courtship protocol of the upper class they had been raised on always operated on those terms.

But Seo-han was different. In his database, a 'non-response' was a signal of 'zero value,' producing only one result: 'discard target.' It was a data error born entirely from the fact that both sides were running fundamentally incompatible protocols.

"Am I really that unappealing? Why hasn't a single person called..."

Seo-han roughly tore open the knot of the tie that felt like a noose around his neck. The precisely pressed collar of his shirt crumpled, and his metallic cufflinks caught the streetlight, scattering a bitter, cold gleam through the cabin.

Namgung Ye-ji's perfume, Shin Yoo-kyung's relentless gaze, and the voices and silences of the women who had crossed his path before them swirled together in his head. Every time they had closed the physical gap and signaled their interest, his brain had locked up and issued a stop command. The clarity he possessed when designing new drugs or analyzing efficacy data was entirely absent.

A dry sigh escaped his lips. He had never once learned what kind of expression to wear or what words to select when someone stepped close to offer warmth. Terms like 'data' and 'variables' were, perhaps, nothing more than a shield to mask his own ignorance of that realm.

The list Vice Chairman Jung had handed him still had over ten names remaining, but Seo-han kept the ignition off and sank deep into the backrest of his seat.

"What difference would it make to fill all twenty slots if it's going to be like this?"

His self-deprecating murmur dropped heavily onto the old dashboard. The man who could control variables in the laboratory was nothing more than a broken piece of machinery when confronted with human warmth.

It was a void that could not be explained by hormonal command systems or the balance sheets of social status. The uncertain sensor known as the heart was generating the most inefficient pain imaginable inside the logical fortress he had built.

He stood at a convergence point where hundreds of billions of won in capital flows and the desires of tycoons intertwined around him, yet buried alone in the driver's seat of this old car, he was nothing more than an outsider isolated in a frozen routine. Only a silence as frigid as liquid nitrogen hovered by his side.

The phone never rang.

Seo-han categorized the silence as a failure.

It was the kind of data he had spent his entire life misreading.