Tucked away on an isolated hill in Hannam-dong, the air inside the top-secret safe house was heavy, sinking like a block of wet lead.
Atop the black marble table in the soundproofed sitting room sat two matte-black briefcases, aligned in perfect symmetry.
Seo-han didn’t bother to pop the latches to verify the stacks of currency inside. He merely wrapped his slender fingers around the handles, gauging the sheer volume of their capital by weight alone.
The two men who stood at the apex of South Korea's corporate world—Jeong Ui-hyun and Jeong Hyun-jin—sat side by side, holding their breath as they tracked the clinical, indifferent movements of his hands.
Jeong Hyun-jin toyed with his shirt collar, deliberately avoiding the older patriarch's eyes.
It had all started a mere fortnight ago, during a presidential economic gala.
Jeong Ui-hyun had immediately caught the sudden, unnatural tightness around Hyun-jin’s eyes—the unshakeable, volatile vitality radiating from him. It was an aura that should have been physically impossible for a man pushing his sixties.
Ui-hyun had clamped his hand firmly around Hyun-jin's wrist mid-toast, delivering a low, gravelly whisper.
"Hyun-jin. What the hell are you putting into your body these days? Your face looks dangerous."
The older man's pursuit had been relentless, and Hyun-jin had ultimately surrendered.
Ui-hyun’s shadow intelligence network was far too dense to evade forever. Furthermore, Hyun-jin had run the numbers: rather than anchoring the lethal risks of this secret asset alone, it was infinitely safer to drag the monarch of the nation's automotive empire into the conspiracy as an accomplice.
Seo-han placed a refrigerated insulated case containing four transparent vials onto the table.
Chairman Jeong Ui-hyun pulled out his reading glasses, staring intently through the glass at the clear, silver-gleaming liquid.
The old chairman's eyes—belonging to a man who made multi-billion-dollar decisions without so much as a blink—dilated minutely in a fine tremor.
"Are you telling me that my lost prime is locked inside this tiny glass bottle?"
With an expressionless face, Seo-han drew a fresh disposable syringe from his coat pocket.
The pristine liquid was sucked smoothly into the cylinder, leaving a trail of microscopic bubbles against the inner walls.
The Chairman's eyes tracked the sharp tip of the needle with absolute focus. The towering charisma that usually commanded global markets had vanished entirely; in its place lived only the raw, biological drive to escape the crushing prison of old age.
"Roll up your sleeve, Chairman."
At Seo-han’s low, clinical command, the monarch of H Group rolled up his silk shirt sleeve.
The precise needle pierced his taut skin, sliding smoothly into the subcutaneous tissue. Ui-hyun drew a sharp, clipped breath.
Seo-han casually tossed the used alcohol pad into the trash bin, his movements completely detached.
"Does this clear solution truly possess the mechanism to turn my brain back thirty years?" Ui-hyun asked, gripping the puncture site as a raspy tremor escaped his throat.
"To be precise, it disrupts the manner in which your brain perceives time," Seo-han replied, checking his watch before burying himself deep into the leather sofa.
"The exact second the human organism determines it no longer requires reproductive capacity, it minimizes its internal energy output and complies with the law of decay."
Seo-han’s monotonous voice dropped an octave, turning ice-cold.
"Phantom precisely strikes the receptors within your hypothalamus, forcefully reactivating the dormant gonadal axis. It tricks every individual cell into believing it has returned to its absolute prime—a state where it must once again prepare for conquest and survival."
He adjusted his lapels.
"It takes exactly sixty minutes for the active molecules to clear the blood-brain barrier and flood your entire system. Until the testosterone fraction in your blood spikes past the critical threshold, simply remain inside your aging body and wait."
Jeong Ui-hyun bit his dry lips.
Beside him, Jeong Hyun-jin crossed his legs, a subtle, knowing smile playing on his lips, as if relishing the memory of his own first encounter.
Though the thermometer inside the room stabilized at a pristine 24°C, a dense, humid sweat had already begun to break across the nape of Ui-hyun’s neck.
Soon after, a scorching heat erupted from the base of his spine, surging violently throughout his entire frame.
It wasn't a simple rush of physical energy. It was a terrifying, razor-sharp cognitive awakening—as if every dormant nerve in his body had suddenly awakened.
The chronic fog of fatigue that had blurred his vision for years was severed cleanly. The crushing mental load that battered his cortex every single day evaporated like mist.
The rigid, stiffened muscles of his shoulders uncoiled with fluid elasticity, and his heart began to pound with powerful, rhythmic authority.
As if possessed, Ui-hyun snatched the tablet PC resting on the table.
The complex financial metrics and supply chain bottlenecks of the North American battery market—data that his executive teams had spent weeks scrambling over without an answer—suddenly aligned into a pristine, transparent puzzle inside his brain.
"Reflecting the taut vitality of a man at the height of his powers, Ui-hyun murmured, his voice stripping away the raspy rust of old age."
"It feels as though my brain is computing variables faster and with more precision than any software architecture on earth."
Watching the transformation unfold, Jeong Hyun-jin let out a silent sigh of relief and bowed his upper body deeply toward Seo-han.
Having tasted the absolute reality of Phantom himself, he understood better than anyone that the forty-three-year-old scientist before them held the master key to their existence.
"Do you understand my position now, Chairman?" Hyun-jin unctuously broke the silence.
"Now, Director Lee. As agreed, my secretariat has already finished screening the next lineup of candidates for you. This time, we filtered out an elite selection of top-tier candidates with medical backgrounds."
"Four arrangements a month between the two of you is more than enough," Seo-han cut him off cleanly, his tone flat and unyielding.
"My time is a scarce resource, and Aether Bio’s clinical schedules will not wait for anyone. Divide the alignment amongst yourselves. Four targets a month. Anything beyond that is a physical operation I have no intention of balancing."
The two tycoons locked eyes.
It was, for all practical purposes, an insult. But before the absolute miracle of Phantom, pride was an expensive luxury.
Rather, as the suffocating pressure of having to present a top-tier target every single week was sliced in half, a strange sense of relief settled over their faces.
With the combined intelligence infrastructure of South Korea's two most dominant conglomerates, sourcing and managing four pristine targets a month was child's play.
"Furthermore, any new arrangements will be placed on hold for the time being."
Seo-han gathered the two heavy briefcases from the table and rose from his seat.
The massive weight of the leather cases traveled up through his palms, but his disciplined frame, hardened by a rigorous fitness regimen, didn't permit a single millisecond of instability.
As the rhythmic, crisp clicking of his shoe heels cut through the heavy air of the sitting room, the gazes of the two monarchs anchored magnetically to his retreating silhouette.
Seo-han paused momentarily at the threshold, without so much as turning his head to face them.
"My assessment of Ms. Chae Do-hee remains incomplete. Until I draw a definitive conclusion regarding that variable, do not introduce any noise. Wait until I call you."
Jeong Hyun-jin’s pupils dilated minutely.
Seo-han had merely stated a transparent, objective rule: he was currently observing his first variable, Chae Do-hee, over cheap convenience store coffee, and he refused to contaminate the data with outside variables until the reaction profile was complete.
But inside the brains of these men—tycoons who had survived at the apex of a corporate jungle governed by endless betrayal, schemes, and leverage—Seo-han’s dry vocabulary was instantly warped into a highly sophisticated masterstroke of corporate posturing.
Has this doctor already been compromised by Do-hee? Is his orbit shifting? Or... is he weaponizing her as an armor block to freeze our secretariat out and control his own board?
Jeong Ui-hyun furrowed his brow, turning a sharp, icy glare toward his cousin.
"Vice Chairman Jeong. What kind of weapon is this Chae Do-hee woman you deployed, that a man as clinical and arrogant as this doctor places us on a waiting list? Have you opened up a secondary backdoor behind my back?"
"No, Chairman. Absolutely not," Hyun-jin swallowed dryly, a cold sweat breaking beneath his collar.
"I can't model the way that man thinks."
Hyun-jin let out a hollow, silent laugh.
Whether Lee Seo-han was rejecting billions of won or putting a freeze on top-tier women, the man maintained an absolute, terrifying dominance—utterly defying the rules of capital they had spent their lives mastering.
Jeong Ui-hyun rose as if possessed, walking toward the large mirror mounted on the wall. With a trembling hand, he traced the contours of his own reflection.
The dark shadows of age that had weighed around his eyes just an hour earlier had thinned. The dull, gray complexion of his skin had dramatically brightened.
The chronic cerebral fog and exhaustion that had tortured him for years had lifted; in its place flashed the predatory drive of a tycoon who had once carved out global empires from nothing.
The blood pumping through his veins pulsed to the rhythm of a twenty-year-old organism, and an unmappable, scorching heat blazed beneath his skin like a midsummer sun.
With a shaking hand, he drew his smartphone and dialed the Chief of Staff.
"Convene an emergency global strategy meeting in ten minutes. Place the autonomous driving algorithm overhaul and the North American M&A sheets on the agenda simultaneously. Any executive who fails to appear is dismissed on the spot."
The voice delivering the command carried an overwhelming, tectonic authority.
With this impossible velocity—with every single brain cell living and operating like a high-performance processing unit—rewriting the landscape of the global automotive industry in a single night felt entirely within his grasp.
Where the avenue of decay had been cleanly severed, a primal, massive hunger for conquest and expansion reared its head.
It wasn't the simple peace of feeling young. It was the lethal, engineered biological drive Lee Seo-han had deliberately weaponized against them.
A total war chest of $150,000, obtained by leveraging the desperation of the two tycoons who commanded the nation's two greatest corporate axes.
The weight of the crisp new banknotes inside the briefcases was heavy, yet the countenance of the man gripping the steering wheel held not a single trace of excitement or satisfaction.
This money was shadow capital, unable to mingle even as a single cent within Aether Bio’s official accounts.
Evading the dense nets of the National Tax Service and the Financial Supervisory Service, it would remain strictly isolated as a private war chest—true private research funds meant to covertly abstract and experiment on the immunotherapies and anti-aging mechanisms mapped inside his mind.
Seo-han stepped on the gas.
Emitting a worn engine note, the Grandeur glided into the cold night scenery of the Gangbyeon Expressway.
Yet, the reality awaiting Seo-han in the light on Monday morning was still unyielding.
Waiting for him was a corporate balance of six billion won, bleeding out ruthlessly by 330 million won every month. The countdown timer of that eighteen-month runway was hammering his neural pathways at this very moment.
The pressure of Phase 2 interim data and the close-quarters combat of the upcoming funding round against the frozen VC analysts of Teheran-ro awaited him.
Seo-han locked a firm tension into his fingers holding the wheel, and a faint, icy smirk settled onto the corner of his mouth.
The predators of capital had already begun to move within his orbit. With nothing left to lose, Seo-han accelerated straight into the heart of the frozen biotech winter.