Ghosts of Eternity

The small meeting room of Eterno, nestled deep within the maze of service roads behind Teheran-ro’s forest of skyscrapers, was practically a vacuum, completely severed from the outside world.

The enclosed space, stripped of even a single window, seemed to erase the very flow of time.

The recessed LED lights in the ceiling flared with an unnatural brightness that left no room for shadows. The only furniture occupying the room was an aluminum table reflecting a cold, metallic sheen and two ergonomically designed black chairs.

The odorless, dry breeze exhaled by the air purifier was the sole force maintaining the taut tension inside.

Lee Seo-han sat with the sleeves of his linen shirt casually rolled up to his elbows, staring intensely at a complex protein structure map cascading across his tablet monitor.

The silhouette shifting beneath his shirt belonged less to a conventional academic and more to someone who had spent a long time training his body and mind to move in a singular, calculated rhythm.

Beneath the rolled-up sleeves, the veins along his forearms stood out with each precise swipe of his hand across the tablet.

He looked as if he controlled the very air in the room.

Across from him, Koo Tae-min, the young emperor of MK Group, was exuding an energy completely altered from his usual composed demeanor.

His fingers, restlessly adjusting his intellectual silver titanium glasses frames, carried a microscopic, irrepressible tremor.

For a man who had broken his family’s traditional line of succession to ascend the throne as an adopted heir, the 'technology' held by Lee Seo-han was the only new continent capable of validating his legitimacy.

“Dr. Lee, isn't it about time you showed your hand? I'm talking about elevating Ghost to an official pipeline and laying out the commercialization roadmap.”

“……”

“For Eterno to remain a mere shell company quietly backing a handful of royal families... isn't the potential of this technology far too grand to waste?”

Tae-min’s tone was low and precise as always, yet within it rasped the panting hunger of a parched predator.

Every morning, the 'hyper-calculative catharsis' gifted by Ghost 2.0 left his brain entirely saturated.

To a man who could survey global supply chains in a single, unclouded glance with that crystal-clear mind, the ordinary human intelligence he had to crash back into once the drug wore off felt like a hellish inefficiency—an unbearable symptom of degradation.

“If we anchor MK’s global clinical network and advanced material manufacturing lines to your tech, we can overturn the entire global biotech market within six years. This isn't just some nasal spray. It’s a new operating system to optimize human hardware. It will become the standard.”

Tae-min slid his heavy briefcase slightly forward across the table.

“The proposal offering that entire infrastructure as your underlying foundation—I assume you’ve already reviewed it.”

Without breaking his gaze from the monitor, Seo-han responded with complete indifference, as if merely listening to the background noise of an interesting specimen.

“Chairman Koo, Ghost cannot enter the official development stage yet. Or, to be more precise, it will not. At least, not under the current framework.”

Tae-min’s eyebrow twitched violently.

The rhythmic clicking of his smart ring tapping against the table grew faster. To a man who knew the euphoria of overclocking his brain cells, waiting was a form of torture in itself.

“Is funding the problem?”

“…….”

“The subscription fees wired to Eterno’s account every month should be more than enough to fund clinical development. If Vice Chairman Jung’s capital is not enough, I can open MK’s private capital lines even wider for you.”

Seo-han finally set his tablet down slowly and looked up.

The cold glare flashing behind his lenses severed Tae-min’s impatience in a single strike.

Seo-han knew perfectly well that no matter how powerful the head of MK Group was, he would never leak this secret.

As long as Tae-min himself remained the most thoroughly addicted beneficiary of this forbidden fruit, exposure meant his own ruin—a permanent demotion back to a mundane middle-aged man.

“Money is not my driver,” Seo-han’s dry voice filled the room.

“Challenging the greatest objective on earth—conquering aging, a realm once deemed the domain of gods—and proving it with my own hands. That is the sole momentum keeping this project moving. Ghost is merely a minor initial piece of that vast journey. A prototype, of sorts.”

Seo-han unscrewed a water bottle beside him and took a sip. Even the disciplined movement of his throat as he swallowed looked like a calculated part of a machine.

“As you have verified, Ghost arrests psychological regression due to aging and temporarily delays accelerated secondary aging. But this is not the ultimate solution. It is merely a supportive mechanism that temporarily aligns certain signals of the brain and endocrine system to match their peak prime patterns.”

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Seo-han flicked his finger lightly.

“The true barrier is the obsolete system known as regulation.”

Tae-min swallowed hard, his eyes locked onto every syllable slipping from Seo-han’s lips. His mind was already running at full capacity to process the data Seo-han was throwing out.

“The FDA and global health authorities do not define aging as a 'disease' to be treated. There is no regulatory body that will grant an approval stamp to a drug that modulates neuroendocrine signaling simply because someone wishes to be sharper or younger.”

“…….”

“No matter how flawless the data we present, they will categorize it as a controlled substance with a high risk of abuse.”

“Then are you saying, Dr. Lee, that you intend to hide in the shadows for the rest of your life, dispensing rations of a drug to people like us? Using that brilliant mind of yours to act as nothing more than a glorified narcotics dealer?”

Tae-min’s tone broke out like a suppressed groan. It was the fury of an ambitious man, a resentment directed toward the proxy of a god.

“No. I am preparing a bypass. Before the law can define the phenomenon, science must first pin it down as an undeniable reality.”

Seo-han leaned deep into the back of his chair, crossing his arms.

Within his eyes rested a dry, absolute conviction that reached far beyond MK’s stock prices or Tae-min’s business calculations.

“The moment the capital flowing into Eterno passes its critical threshold, I will initiate the next phase. The full commercialization of Ghost will take place only after Aether Bio secures dominant market leverage through its listing.”

“The next phase? What exactly are you designing?”

“The foundation work to convert aging into a disease model that can be managed within the established institutional system.”

Seo-han’s gaze drifted back to the monitor.

“Let us divide the thresholds of aging into distinct boundaries: one hundred, one hundred and twenty, and one hundred and fifty years. Surpassing these individual milestones is not something that can be resolved by a few giants like yourself quietly distributing a drug. It is a transformation akin to the evolution of a biological species.”

Seo-han tapped the tangled protein chains on the tablet screen with the tip of his finger.

The nano-structures flashing in crimson and blue rearranged themselves, tracing a complex geometric wave.

“The moment the average human lifespan breaks past the hundred-year mark, the physical body encounters structural limits that cannot be sustained by simple hormonal adjustments alone.”

“…….”

“If Ghost is an additive that changes the engine oil and raises the octane level, then reaching the uncharted territories of one hundred and twenty or one hundred and fifty years will require rebuilding the engine block itself—with sophisticated antibodies and protein therapeutics.”

Seo-han’s eyes gleamed intensely. Tae-min held his breath, burning the molecular structures on the screen into his memory.

“Aether Bio is the forward base designed to validate that massive blueprint within the established system. The research we conduct in the light—on immuno-oncology and antibody platforms—is actually the process of legally refining the core tools needed to build a workable disease model of aging.”

Absolute certainty anchored Seo-han’s tone.

“If Aether Bio fails to absorb institutional capital and infrastructure to complete these components, the next phase cannot exist.”

Seo-han pulled his chair sharply forward, closer to the table. Behind his lenses, Tae-min’s pupils dilated minutely.

“The moment Aether Bio establishes itself as the market standard through its listing, and the protein libraries we designed achieve official validation—that will be the exact instant Eterno enters its true orbit.”

“……!”

“From that point on, clinical validations will begin on a scale so precise and aggressive it will defy comparison. Eterno will become the institution that redraws the human lifespan curve with real clinical data, using the platforms Aether Bio refined within the boundaries of the official system.”

Tae-min lightly rubbed his lips with his smart-ringed hand.

The analytical circuits in his brain were racing madly toward a technological singularity ten, twenty years into the future.

“So that was the structure. Behind the shield of Aether Bio, you were sharpening the spear of Eterno all along.”

Awe and a visceral shiver struck Tae-min’s tone simultaneously.

“Dr. Lee, the map you are drawing... it wasn't a blueprint for a mere multi-trillion-won enterprise. It was a blueprint to re-engineer the hardware of the human species itself.”

Instead of answering, Seo-han lifted his cold cup of espresso. The light fractured like sharp glass over the dark liquid surface.

“The future you will witness is merely the beginning, Chairman.”

Seo-han’s voice grew increasingly solid and clear, and the heavy air inside the room began to exert a strange, atmospheric weight around him.

“What I require is a vast quantity of clinical observations. I must verify the reaction curves of a massive cohort across diverse ages, occupations, metabolic states, and cognitive functions over an extended duration. Only when those biological response curves secure statistical significance can aging be treated not as a destiny, but as a controllable variable.”

Seo-han set the cup down.

“Figures like yourself meet unusually rare criteria for an initial observation group. Rigorous self-reporting capacity, access to top-tier medical care, traceability, and the financial bandwidth to sustain long-term costs.”

Seo-han lightly flicked the sample case of Ghost 2.0 resting on the table.

Ching.

The cold, metallic sound sliced through the silence.

“Chairmen like you are the ones standing at the very front line of that long-term tracking cohort. To secure statistical reliability, a group with these exact parameters is absolutely necessary. That is, if you wish to see the landscape of a one-hundred-and-fifty-year lifespan—and feel the true weight of an undying throne.”

Tae-min could not formulate a single word in response.

He stared into the massive abyss lurking behind Seo-han’s indifferent eyes.

A cold shiver ran through him at the sheer arrogance of this man, who treated him not as the supreme leader of MK Group, but as one expensive data point on a vast genomic map.

Yet at the same time, the resolution of the future Seo-han presented was so overwhelming he could not bring himself to look away.

With a trembling hand, Tae-min took off his glasses and placed them on the table.

As he rubbed his bloodshot eyes, a fatal noise disrupted the calculations in his mind.

This was nothing like the warnings Vice Chairman Jung Hyun-jin had muttered while downing whiskey in the Shilla Hotel private suite.

Vice Chairman Jung had concluded that Lee Seo-han was a political hunter, a man collecting the dirty laundry and fatal weaknesses of political and business giants to pull their strings from behind the curtain.

He was convinced Seo-han was a vile conspirator using the drug as bait to leash the highest tier of South Korean society, manipulating state power through silent blackmail.

But the man standing in front of him was different.

Lee Seo-han did not cast so much as a glance at their filthy corruption or political secrets. He had zero interest in such crude power games to begin with.

Reflected in Seo-han’s clear, unclouded gaze, Tae-min was not a great tycoon being blackmailed for his power.

He was merely a high-resolution biological data sample introduced to yield a value called statistical reliability—an expensive fuel destined to be consumed and spent for the sake of research.

‘Vice Chairman Jung was trembling in fear, thinking that man was trying to domesticate us through political blackmail.’

Tae-min picked up his glasses again, swallowing a hollow, dry laugh.

‘But he was wrong. Domestication at least involves emotion. This man... does not even view us as human beings. We are just well-behaved lab rats for his clinical trials.’

A frigid chill crawled straight down Tae-min’s spine.

What was far more terrifying than a crude political threat was this devastatingly dry, scientific madness that defined him not as a human being, but as a mere mass of organic matter.

Jung Hyun-jin had misread this man entirely.

A sensation of profound helplessness, dizzying and absolute, surged up his spine and struck the very center of his mind.