A heavy, suffocating warmth crept up his spine, pulsing like a living creature as it battered against his brainstem.
It was already the second week of the regimen.
Jeong Ui-hyun, the head of H Automotive Group, buried himself deep into the plush nubuck leather sofa, admiring the interior's color saturation—vibrant to the point of being piercing against his retinas.
The resolution of a world that had grown heavy and dull with age was now forcibly upscaled, as if compressed into a crisp, raw clarity.
A typical stimulant would have sent his heart hammering and spiked his blood pressure, but 'Phantom' belonged to an entirely different dimension.
It was a serene, yet overwhelmingly massive throb, as though the very displacement of his engine had expanded by thousands of ccs.
With a slight twitch of his fingertips, Ui-hyun felt the physical lag between command and neural response disintegrate.
The complex anomalies in the autonomous driving algorithms—the ones his brilliant engineers at the Namyang R&D Center had spent a week pulling their hair out over—felt as though they could be mapped into a flawless schematic in under five minutes.
Time, which had been grinding to a halt, was flowing again.
His body surged with a renewed hunger for the future.
The cautious consultation of Professor Park from the P University School of Medicine echoed in his ears.
“This isn't a mere compound, Chairman. It is a highly sophisticated formulation that precisely anchors a proprietary chemical structure to the receptors of the hypothalamus. It resets the entire hormonal system back to its golden twenties. Literally, it is a biological cheat code.”
"Then why the hell am I reduced to begging for it like this?"
Ui-hyun’s eyes narrowed to sharp slits.
The fact that a man anchoring one of the primary pillars of the nation’s economy had to hang his life on a single syringe handed down by a forty-three-year-old academic—forced to drift between safe houses every dawn like a stray rat—was no longer a matter of simple utility.
It was a fatal scratch on a monarch's pride. It was a fundamental error that had to be corrected.
Initially, Ui-hyun had intended to deploy massive capital to drag Lee Seo-han into his orbit as a partner or an investor.
But after enduring the brutal backlash of the crash and feeling the ephemeral miracle of the drug, his instincts as a cold capitalist awakened.
The core of Phantom wasn't a factory, a facility, or a ledger of patents. It was the monster inside Lee Seo-han’s skull.
Even if they committed hundreds of billions, the game would instantly end the moment Seo-han chose to walk away.
Therefore, purchasing the drug was useless. They needed a way to keep him from slipping beyond their reach.
Ui-hyun picked up the receiver.
"Hyun-jin. Get to the safe house. Right now."
Through the line, the shallow, ragged breathing of S Group Vice Chairman Jeong Hyun-jin leaked through.
He was clearly enduring the crash—the terrifying, hyper-accelerated reversion to decay that arrived the exact second the drug began to fade.
An hour later.
The heavy, soundproofed door of the Hannam-dong secret safe house swung open, and Jeong Hyun-jin stepped inside.
His complexion was even worse than a few days prior, when he had turned pale in front of Lee Seo-han.
The dark shadows pooling beneath his eyes and the subtle tremor in his fingertips rawly demonstrated that his body was violently yielding to the counter-attack of age.
""Chairman, what is the meaning of a sudden summons at this hour?"
Hyun-jin muttered, tossing himself onto the opposite sofa as his skeletal fingers aggressively ripped open his tie.
"I'm already losing my mind trying to calculate the perfect timing to beg that doctor for the next dose."
Ui-hyun stared coldly at the desperate deprivation he knew all too well, before tossing a thick bundle of documents onto the table.
"Forget the equity. Just make sure he stays where we can reach him."
At Ui-hyun’s low, heavy cadence, Hyun-jin looked up.
Ui-hyun tapped the documents.
"Aether Bio needs cash, don't they?"
Ui-hyun’s network had already combed through Aether Bio’s internal situation.
Behind the grand facade of chasing a thirty-million-dollar investment round lay the raw reality of a six billion won runway. Fixed costs and R&D expenses were burning through the reserves every month.
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The intelligence that Lee Seo-han was actively walking the streets of Teheran-ro to secure funds from venture capitalists was already resting in Ui-hyun's hands.
"We simply inject the capital ourselves. Whether we swallow the enterprise whole or strip his voting power to take the reins."
Ui-hyun's voice dropped.
"Sixty billion? No, even if we have to burn six hundred billion, as long as we force him under our umbrella, we tie him to a place where our hands can always reach him. Am I wrong?"
A flash of sudden greed mingled with a dense wave of fear in Hyun-jin’s eyes.
He had personally witnessed the bizarre, borderline academic madness Lee Seo-han commanded.
"It won't be as simple as it sounds. The man has engineered his defensive lines like a monster. This isn't a dimension where you can solve the equation by simply crushing him with money."
Ui-hyun curled his lips into a bitter smile.
"That is why I called them. The specialists who will rip through those lines."
With a brief gesture from Ui-hyun, two women emerged like shadows from the dark corridor connecting to the room.
Attorney Kang Si-hyun, the woman who had faced Seo-han on the blind date, and Baek Seo-woun, the director of clinical development at a global big pharma’s Korean branch.
Dressed in a pristine beige silk blouse, Kang Si-hyun scanned the documents arrayed on the table.
Her pride had already been thoroughly butchered once by Lee Seo-han’s arrogant grace at Artichoke in Cheongdam.
"I have audited Aether Bio’s existing capital structure," Si-hyun began, her eyes tracking the pages. "With over fifteen institutional investors already entangled in their equity, an aggressive buyback will instantly trigger market suspicion. Furthermore, their only visible pipeline on the public books is an immuno-oncology treatment."
Si-hyun looked back and forth between Jeong Hyun-jin and Jeong Ui-hyun.
"But the reason you two are unusually interested in this company isn't because of a publicized oncology asset. I highly doubt Aether Bio’s true value rests solely on what is written on the public ledger."
Though Si-hyun lacked the exact nature of the secret the two titans were guarding, her instincts immediately told her that there was something far more valuable beneath the surface.
"Founders always want to believe they retain absolute control," she continued, her voice turning cold. "But good contracts never feel like restraints to the other party. Stealing technology or utilizing simple intimidation? Lee Seo-han is a man who understands the exact nature of capital. If we do not operate within the absolute boundaries of the law, any contract becomes utterly meaningless the moment the founder turns his back."
The tips of her fingers, flipping through the crisp papers, tightened with a fierce competitiveness—a hunger to solve the complex equation named Lee Seo-han.
To a woman who had broken countless powerful men while scaling the ranks to become Kim & Chang’s youngest senior partner, Seo-han was a towering wall that had dared to challenge her flawless career.
Beside her, Baek Seo-woun adjusted her metal-framed glasses, a cynical smirk playing at the edge of her mouth.
As a medical doctor and a ruthless devotee of raw data, any miracle that fell outside established clinical protocols was nothing more than a carefully engineered deception.
"I don't believe in miracles. Data that cannot be replicated is not data at all,"
Seo-woun said, crossing her arms as she evaluated the two men.
"An unverified substance outside the ruthless protocols of the US FDA is nothing but noise. No matter how extraordinary a drug candidate appears, if its mechanism remains unmapped, it is simply a time bomb waiting to shatter the user's nervous system."
Seo-woun’s voice dropped an octave, tearing through the heavy air like a sharp scalpel.
"You two may be chasing ghosts. The reason I was dragged to this table is clear."
She met their eyes coldly.
"The exact second I obtain a sample of whatever he's working on, I will put it under the microscope and verify it. I will see if the man is a genuine genius, or merely a clever gambler using your excessive expectations to walk a tightrope."
Listening to her clinical analysis, Jeong Ui-hyun nodded slowly, thoroughly satisfied.
Kang Si-hyun, armed with the iron shield of the law.
Baek Seo-woun, wielding the razor-sharp scalpel of science.
The board was set.
A few days later.
The atmosphere within the reconvened safe house had grown significantly heavier, the tension thickening.
The heavy, soundproofed door parted, and Jeong Sae-ah walked into the space, bringing with her an overwhelming wave of Tom Ford perfume that instantly dominated the room.
Her stride was elegant yet predatory.
As a branch of the S Group bloodline and a known apex predator in the retail sector, her sharp, arrogant gaze swept across the room, looking down on everyone present.
Following close behind her like a quiet shadow was Yoon Tae-hee, her dark green coat perfectly tailored, radiating a silent, heavy authority.
"I thought you two spent your entire lives purchasing people,"
Sae-ah drawled, tossing a bitter, mocking remark as she crossed her legs with effortless arrogance at the head of the sofa.
"Yet here you are, causing a pathetic scene over a single biotech startup. It's almost tragic."
She leaned back, her gaze dropping to the documents.
"How long do you intend to play the supplicant while digging through the books of a startup barely running a forty-five billion won round? Drop the one-dimensional idea of crushing him with money. What you want isn't the company. It's whatever's hidden behind it, isn't it?"
Sae-ah rested her chin on her fingers.
"Then you must seize the master key to a global distribution network that commands absolute control over exclusivity and supply lines. My intention is to hollow out Aether Bio, legitimize it, and ensure that control over the final product is usurped not by your massive conglomerate networks, but through my personal line. Investment? Shelve that tepid, vulgar word. This is an explicit hunt."
Yoon Tae-hee, the woman who commanded the real movements of Artemis, the nation's largest private equity fund, slowly raised her head to look at Ui-hyun and Hyun-jin.
To a true capitalist, a single, irreplaceable business model was infinitely more magnificent than a trillion won of cash on a ledger.
"But Sae-ah, if you aggressively strip his equity or break the board as you suggest, we run into a problem,"
Tae-hee noted, a cruel intelligence flashing in her eyes.
"If that maniacal genius decides to walk away and burn everything down himself, your uncles are the ones who suffer the most. The value they see in the company disappears overnight."
The data that Lee Seo-han was currently running a thirty-million-dollar investment round in the open market was already working inside her calculations.
"Ownership alone won't solve the problem. We need to secure the man named Lee Seo-han first."
Tae-hee smiled silently. It was an exceptionally arrogant yet elegant curvature.
"I have a candidate."
At that moment, Jeong Hyun-jin, who had been listening to the plan, cut in with a sharp critique.
"Even if we inject the full forty-five billion won at a one hundred and forty billion won valuation this time to become the largest shareholder, what happens if Lee Seo-han just abandons the company and walks away?"
Hyun-jin leaned forward, his hands tightening.
"Every mechanism is locked inside that stubborn doctor's brain. If the founder defects leaving only an empty shell, our equity ledgers will turn to wastepaper overnight."
In response to Hyun-jin’s counterargument, the temperature inside the safe house plummeted once more.
It was the most fatal variable and a complete disaster for capitalists.
Yet, facing Hyun-jin as he pierced through that contradiction, Yoon Tae-hee offered no reply.
As if she had merely heard the innocent grumbling of a child, she simply dominated the hidden room with a deep, unfathomable, and freezing silence.