Ghosts of Eternity

The moment the mahogany door of the Emerald Room closed, the gayageum music from the hallway was cut off completely.

Across the heavy table in the center of the room, the bluish light of the cityscape leaked through the window, spreading in a thin layer.

Gu Tae-min pushed up his silver titanium glasses and tapped his index finger against the cold marble surface.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Don’t you think it’s about time we brought this above board? We can’t keep funneling black money through shell company accounts and living at the mercy of a single nasal spray forever.”

Sitting across from him, Jeong Hyeon-jin swirled his whiskey. The square ice cubes scraped against the glass, making a sharp, grating sound.

“Above board? Tae-min, you’re saying that because you don’t know Lee Seo-han. Do you honestly think I’m sitting on my hands because I don't know that?”

Hyeon-jin restlessly twisted the metal cufflinks at his sleeve.

The primal dread of what would happen to his brain if the supply broke for even a single week bled through his tailored collar.

“He isn’t the type to be moved by money. He’s a man who looks at capital itself as something beneath his feet.”

“I don’t get it. If we layer MK’s global production lines and distribution networks on top of his tech, it’ll unlock a scale of value incomparable to the way he’s tossing us rations right now.”

Tae-min tapped the corner of his folder with his fingertip.

“I heard thirty billion won is being wired to Aetherno’s account every month. Compared to the potential of this project, that’s practically pocket change. It makes no logical sense for him to content himself with a few subscription fees.”

Jeong Ui-hyeon, who had been staring out at the city skyline, spoke in a low voice.

He wore his charcoal-black suit buttoned tight to the throat, the knuckles on the back of his hands protruding sharply.

“Lee Seo-han isn’t staying in the shadows because he’s an idiot. He knows that the asymmetric power he holds over our lifelines right now is far more potent than a market value of a few trillion won.”

Ui-hyeon turned a frigid gaze toward the two men.

“He isn’t playing the market. He’s holding the hierarchy of our bodies in his hands.”

The moment those words left his lips, a brief silence descended upon the room. No one could immediately counter him.

Hyeon-jin opened his mouth to speak but stopped, suddenly looking down at his fingertips. A microscopic tremor remained between the thumb and index finger holding his whiskey glass. To an outsider, it could easily be dismissed as mere fatigue.

But he knew. He knew it wasn't just fatigue.

Immediately after a dose of Ghost, his mind was as transparent as glass. Numbers connected themselves. The hidden intentions behind a person's expression were read before they could even formulate a sentence. The volume of reports he could process in a single day tripled, and the lies traded in the boardroom were distinguished as clearly as a foul odor.

The problem came afterward.

The crystal clarity forced awake every morning by the nasal spray would begin to blur as afternoon arrived.

Every time that blur crept in, Hyeon-jin was painfully aware of the agonizing truth: that he was nothing more than an old man draped in patched-together rags of youth.

That violent sensory whiplash was enough to drive a man insane.

Ui-hyeon was no different. He stared silently down at the veins on the back of his hand. There were days when even the simple motion of clenching and unclenching his fist felt heavier than before. Once you tasted the peak acuity granted by Ghost, ordinary aging was no longer a natural process.

It was degradation.

Tae-min swiped a thumb down the screen of his smartwatch. Heart rate, sleep score, reaction speed, focus duration—the numbers were still within the normal range.

But the word 'normal' felt laughable now. Once you experienced the abnormal clarity unlocked by Ghost, normalcy meant deficiency.

All three of them knew it.

That drug hadn't made them young.

It simply forced them to remember, with excruciating precision, exactly what they had been losing since their youth.

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Hyeon-jin roughly loosened his tie as if suffocating. As his shirt collar parted, a faint, self-deprecating laugh escaped him.

“Exactly. We’re trembling in fear that our brains will shut down tomorrow morning if he cuts the supply. The moment we bring this into the light, variables like laws, regulations, and board members get involved. He knows that would dilute his absolute leverage over us. The man is enjoying our submission.”

Tae-min leaned his upper body aggressively across the table.

“Then that’s all the more reason we should set the stage. We elevate it to a Swiss-based holding company and propose a ‘Private Time Bank’ targeting the global royal families. It’s a justification he cannot refuse.”

“If he were a man swayed by temptation, I would have sent Kim & Chang’s top partners to clean this up a long time ago.”

Hyeon-jin downed his lukewarm whiskey in a single gulp. The empty glass hit the marble table with a cold, hollow clack.

“Tae-min, you calculate everything through systems and efficiency, don’t you? Lee Seo-han is cut from a different cloth. He is redesigning the DNA of capitalists. You’ve seen that indifferent look in his eyes—staring down at us like specimens under glass.”

Instead of answering, Tae-min turned on the screen of his smartwatch.

Yet, he couldn't hide the slight tremor at the tips of his fingers beneath the desk. He, too, had long been subjugated by the hyper-calculative euphoria induced by 'Ghost.'

“Even so, we have to try. On next week’s distribution day, I’ll go see Dr. Lee myself. I’ll hand him a formal proposal.”

Tae-min pushed up his glasses.

“The man is a scholar at the end of the day. Would he really refuse the honor of having his technology become the official standard for humanity, cementing his name in history as immortal?”

Ui-hyeon slowly turned his head to look at him. Within his frigid, sunken gaze, an inescapable humiliation was pooling.

“By the way, Vice Chairman... is Dr. Lee blackmailing you with something right now? Does he hold some kind of fatal weakness over you?”

Tae-min locked his eyes onto the slight twitching of Hyeon-jin’s hand. A deep furrow cut into Hyeon-jin’s brow.

“A fatal weakness? Tae-min, you’re saying that because you don’t understand politics.”

Hyeon-jin leaned forward, dropping his voice to a harsh whisper.

“A man like him doesn’t need a long blackmail threat. All it takes is a single sentence: ‘There will be no distribution next week.’”

Hyeon-jin’s fingers obsessively rubbed the rim of his empty glass.

“The instant those words are uttered, half of the Korean business world will bring themselves to their knees before him. This isn't business. It’s blackmail in its quietest, most malicious form.”

Hyeon-jin’s voice was cracked, his eyes showing a hidden, deep-seated anxiety.

Ui-hyeon, who had been guarding the window, finally parted his tightly closed lips.

“The moment he completes that map of our sins, we become his shadow operatives, moving at a single word from him.”

Ui-hyeon’s voice echoed heavily, like cold steel scraping against a concrete floor.

“H Automotive’s engines, S Group’s distribution networks—they will all be reduced to mere components for his immortality.”

“If his ambition is that sophisticated, my proposal will be even more effective.”

Tae-min pushed up his glasses with his middle finger. Through the thin titanium lenses, the cold white light of the private room flashed sharply. His mind was already pivoting into tens of thousands of efficiency calculations.

“A massive ambition means a greater need for a safe, unassailable fortress. If he intends to pull the strings of giants from the shadows anyway, using the infrastructure of a massive conglomerate like MK as a legal shield is far safer than sharpening poison needles in the dark.”

Tae-min slid the folder low across the table toward Hyeon-jin.

“The proposal I carry will be the most luxurious silk robe, wrapping Dr. Seo-han’s dark desires in the noble guise of ‘technology that will save the world.’”

“If he were a man who could be reasoned with, we would have found something to use against him by now.”

Hyeon-jin let out a bitter sneer.

“To catch his weakness, I mobilized the entire executive secretariat to thrust women from the most prominent families into his face under the guise of blind dates. I lined up the most beautiful, highly educated women South Korea had to offer.”

Hyeon-jin’s fingers dragged anxiously down the cold marble table. The harsh friction echoed through the quiet room, chillingly sharp.

“Do you know how he reacted? He read my political intentions and hidden motives concealed behind those dazzling profiles in real time, mocking them as if he were watching a child’s petty game.”

He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple moving prominently.

“I can’t forget that look in his eyes. That arrogant gaze that grips our weaknesses and looks down on us.”

Tae-min’s eyes sank into an analytical stillness.

“You’ll see for yourself when you meet him, Tae-min. The man isn’t some academic we can easily handle. He’s a high-level politician who dissects human desire and strikes its exact pressure point. He doesn't spill a single shred of his own weakness, yet he binds us to his orbit, leaving us to tighten the noose around our own necks.”

Tae-min paused, his finger brushing against the smooth surface of his smart ring.

If Hyeon-jin’s analysis was correct, Lee Seo-han was a power predator holding the lifeline of South Korea’s highest tier, poised to swallow the country from behind the curtain.

As if locating a flaw in a system, Tae-min’s gaze sharpened.

“Fascinating. In that case, all the more reason for me to step in personally. We need to find out if this hunter is truly a beast without a leash, or a man simply looking for a larger cage.”

Tae-min’s voice was low and dry, but laced with absolute conviction.

Unable to hide his anxiety, Hyeon-jin wiped his face with both hands, letting out a deep sigh.

The extravagant cufflinks at the edge of his royal blue suit glinted sharply in the light, but even that opulence couldn't mask the ash-gray shadow over his face or the deep dark circles under his eyes.

By afternoon, that artificial clarity always began to fray. A single word would take a moment too long to surface, his fingertips would lose their sharpness, and the numbers in the boardroom would connect slower than before.

Each time it happened, Hyeon-jin was painfully aware of the truth: he was nothing more than an old man draped in patched-together rags of youth.

The bitter sneer hanging askew on his lips was a self-deprecating groan, a realization that his foot was firmly caught in Lee Seo-han’s massive trap.

Ui-hyeon stared into empty space with a gaze stripped of warmth, while Tae-min’s finger, resting on the desk with the smart ring, twitched imperceptibly.

Within the heavy air filling the room, the gazes of the three men converged on a single point as if by telepathy.

They feared Lee Seo-han.

At the same time, they wanted him. They wanted the substance, the time, and the cold structure that held their lifelines in its grasp.

As that terror and greed locked together, Tae-min was already tracing the blueprint of the trap he would lay in his mind.

He did not know yet.

The trap he was designing had only one entrance.

And it was opening, strangely enough, toward Lee Seo-han’s laboratory.