Ghosts of Eternity

Jeong Hyeon-jin carefully placed a finger-sized transparent vial onto the heavy marble table.

Sliding across the luxurious navy velvet pad, the silver solution inside sloshed, casting a bizarre, almost organic luminescence.

On the opposite side, Jeong Se-ah sat askew in the seat of honor on the sofa, her legs crossed with casual arrogance.

Her blood-red dress brazenly accentuated the contours of her body, its slit spilling open as the hem trailed across the carpet. Toying with the bold gold chain around her neck, she kept her eyes locked on him as she slowly brought the wine glass to her lips.

“So you finally got it. Is this the bait Lee Seo-han threw us?”

“AEC-101. An antibody-enzyme depilatory. The antibody guides the enzyme to targets around the hair root, allowing it to break down the structures that support the hair with minimal irritation to the surrounding skin.”

Jeong Hyeon-jin tapped the controller next to the table, and the smooth glass wall instantly transformed into a holographic screen.

On the screen, a magnified video showed hair-root tissue being dismantled in a loop. It was chillingly efficient destruction.

“Apply it to the skin, wait ten minutes, and wipe it off with water. No burning through laser sessions. No tearing at the skin with wax. It’s a guided strike on hair, nothing more.”

Se-ah set her glass down without a sound and picked up the small vial from the table.

Savoring the cold sensation of the glass against her fingertips, she tilted the vial slowly, holding it up to the light. Within the silver liquid, microscopic particles swirled, leaving an afterimage like a miniature galaxy.

“Interested?”

At Hyeon-jin’s question, a faint, cryptic smile played on Se-ah’s lips.

“Uncle, once this hits the market, the picture draws itself.”

Her voice was low and calm, but an undeniable current of destructive desire ran beneath it. Se-ah tossed the vial back down onto the velvet pad.

“The existing beauty cartel will be utterly obliterated. The bastards selling expensive laser machines, the brick-and-mortar shops scattered across the country—all of them. I absolutely love watching a fortress someone painstakingly built over decades crumble in an instant because of a single tiny bottle.”

Her eyes flashed with cruel amusement.

“Can’t you already hear the screams echoing from that absolute pandemonium?”

Hyeon-jin leaned deep into the sofa, silently studying his niece. She didn't just want money. She craved the catharsis of a ruler overturning the entire board.

“Fine. If I place this completely in your hands, tell me how you’re going to rip this market apart.”

Se-ah lightly traced her upper lip with her index finger, lost in thought. Her gaze drifted out the window toward the forest of skyscrapers in Gangnam—the very symbol of South Korean capital.

“In the beginning, we control the supply strictly. It won't be something anyone can buy just because they have cash. We will supply it exclusively to a select few premium clinics under the guise of a 'certification system.' We'll price it at double the current full-body hair-removal packages.”

“For the upper class, this won't be mere maintenance. We'll instill the perception that it’s a privilege reserved only for the chosen few.”

Hyeon-jin nodded with interest, prompting her forward.

“And after that?”

“Once the market is sufficiently starved and the rumors hit their peak, we flood the market with the consumer-grade line overnight. We cut off their oxygen before the existing cartel even has time to react.”

Se-ah crossed her legs again, locking eyes with Hyeon-jin.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Right when the high-volume dermatology clinics in Gangnam start falling like dominoes into bankruptcy because they can’t afford their equipment leases and storefront rent... we just pop up a single screen. A perfect D2C app of our own, with zero middleman margins and zero offline retail overhead.”

Her gaze glinted like a predator cornering its prey.

“With them wiped out, we are the only alternative left. From that point on, we completely pivot the positioning to a daily necessity. We turn the entire nation into monthly subscribers through our app. We swallow 100% of the middleman margin that used to feed the doctors and shop owners.”

Se-ah stood up, her movements elegant yet precise.

“What drives humans more powerfully than the desire to be beautiful is the isolation and dread of being left out. We sell that dread at a premium. Uncle, this isn’t mere cosmetics. It’s a status marker that divides who belongs with us from who gets left behind.”

Instead of answering, Jeong Hyeon-jin propped his chin on his hand.

To her, business was not coexistence. It was an arena. And that was exactly the kind of blade Hyeon-jin needed right now.

“But Se-ah, have you thought about what Lee Seo-han will demand from us using this as bait? That man is not the type to hand out gifts for free.”

“He’s probably looking at a board so far above us that we can’t even see its edges. But doesn't that make it more fun? Watching to see exactly when he hits his limit and breaks.”

Se-ah grabbed her designer bag and prepared to leave. Pausing by the door, she flicked the vial on the table with the tip of her finger.

Tick.

The crisp sound echoed through the silent room.

“I’ll send over the real execution plan soon. Rather than you uncles handling this politely, it’ll make a much prettier picture if I tear this board to shreds myself.”

The executive office of Aether Bio was needlessly quiet.

Only the blue light emanating from the tablet on the desk fractured across the lenses of Seo-han's rimless glasses.

On the screen, eighteen names and profiles handpicked by Vice Chairman Jeong Hyeon-jin were displayed in a neat grid.

Seo-han massaged his stiff nape and muttered in a low voice.

“I believe I explicitly said four a month.”

Eighteen people. It was a relentless, brute-force bombardment of data—a method distinctly characteristic of Jeong Hyeon-jin, designed to induce cognitive overload and cloud judgment.

Out of that entire sea of names, Chae Do-hee was the only one who had reached out to him personally. She was a variable who had already confessed, during their very first meeting, that she had been weaponized with a specific directive from Jeong Hyeon-jin.

Seo-han shut down the tablet completely.

That was the end of his hesitation, and the end of any emotional interference. He had no cognitive bandwidth to waste on useless noise.

He sank deep into his chair and switched the monitor interface.

Jeong Hyeon-jin was a capitalist operating within the margins of Ghost's efficacy and withdrawal; Chae Do-hee was a variable disrupting prediction values at the boundary of emotion and flesh. Even Kang Si-hyeon was merely a highly competent observer armed with the language of law and capital.

Not a single soul was looking at the actual coordinates Seo-han was staring at.

They held AEC-101—the bait he had tossed them—and were consumed with calculating how to expand their empire by merely scraping away superficial hair.

Entirely blind to the true erosion occurring deep beneath the shallow boundary of human skin.

Seo-han’s enemy was clear: the creeping degradation known as time, accumulating silently within the inner machinery of cells and the interstitial spaces of tissue.

And the colossal fortress of regulation that barred any approach to alteration, wrapping that inevitable decay in the poetic phrasing of 'the laws of nature.'

Seo-han pressed a hand against his chest. Beneath the shell reinforced by cold reason and data, an unquantifiable pulsation struck his palm.

This was no mechanical hum. It was the sole, defiant resistance thrown against a destiny marching toward a predetermined annihilation by a creature born with a heart.

Seo-han gripped the mouse. A recent paper published in Nature slid up onto the monitor screen.

‘Anti-IL-11 therapy extends mammalian lifespan by 25% and improves metabolic function.’

Seo-han stared intensely at the graphs and supplementary data.

The survival curves of the mice, the alterations in adipose tissue, the preservation of muscle fibers, and the downward trajectory of inflammatory signaling—all aligned toward a single vector.

IL-11.

The fragmented pieces of aging, fibrosis, and metabolic decay scattered under that name began to lock into a single axis inside Seo-han’s mind.

If AEC-101 was a flashy lure handed to Jeong Se-ah to reel in capital, this axis was the actual lever capable of recalibrating the human hardware itself.

25 percent.

Translated into human desire, it was a number that practically screamed the words 'twenty years.'

It wasn’t a mere statistic. It was stolen time—something capitalists would gladly sell their souls to purchase.

No matter how high the walls of regulation stood, they could not permanently cage this undeniable phenomenon unfolding at the cellular level.

Oblivious to the deepening night, Seo-han sank back into the data on the monitor.

He opened a new project folder.

It bore a name entirely different from AEC-101. It was not a lure designed to shatter markets like Lysis. In the dead center of the screen, a code name that had yet to be shared with anyone flickered into existence.

[AX-11]

Seo-han gazed at those four characters for a brief moment before typing the first line.

— Aging is not a single door.

He moved the cursor down one line.

— It is a structure composed of multiple overlapping axes of collapse.

His fingers paused momentarily before appending the final sentence.

— And IL-11 was one of its quietest hinges, turning in silence as the body hardened around it.