"He's right."
Jeong Ui-hyun, who had been buried deep within the sofa, broke his heavy silence and nodded. He exhaled a long trail of cigarette smoke, his eyes flashing once more.
"With that doctor’s temperament, if he abandons the company and locks the lab doors just because we stripped his equity, what good is a company valued at 140 billion won if it's nothing but an empty shell? What happens to my dawn injections then?"
The deep anxiety of the two titans filled the room.
It was the stark limitation of capital—the realization that while wealth could confine a genius’s physical body, it could never coerce his inspiration. The gazes of both men naturally drifted toward the specialists sitting across the table.
The first to organize her documents was Attorney Kang Si-hyun, the youngest senior partner at Kim & Chang. With a light flick of her finger, she slid the screen of her sleek tablet across the table, bringing it to a halt before Ui-hyun and Hyun-jin.
The screen filled with dense legal prose and toxic clauses.
"When capital seeks to bind a person, it never relies on a single ledger of shares alone,"
Si-hyun began, her cold voice piercing straight to the heart of the paperwork.
"This is the 'Key-Man Clause' engineered for the preamble of this forty-five-billion-won investment contract. The exact second Lee Seo-han divests his shares, resigns from his position as CEO, or walks away from the company, a contractual penalty equal to three times the investment amount—one hundred and thirty-five billion won—will be triggered for breach of trust and technology leakage."
On top of her intricate legal fortress, a graph mapping a liquidation scenario flashed onto the screen.
"Simultaneously, his entire equity in Aether Bio and all personal assets will be frozen via pre-judgment attachment. The law will brand him a perfect criminal, ensuring he can never set foot in any laboratory in this country again."
Jeong Hyun-jin furrowed his brow.
"Lee Seo-han is no fool. There is no way he signs a contract with a clause that draconian. He's not the kind of man you can push around."
Si-hyun held her ground, matching him with calm precision.
"Founders always want to believe they retain absolute control. That is why on the surface, we will wrap this as a legitimate clause meant to safeguard the founder's interests and protect core personnel. The best contracts never feel like chains."
She tapped the screen again, updating the schematic.
"We link that to a 'Double Liquidation Preference' clause," Si-hyun continued, her voice turning cold. "If the extraction of clinical data is delayed or if the company fails to meet the agreed milestones, the Artemis Fund can immediately exercise its drag-along rights to sell the entire enterprise whole to a global big pharma. And through that liquidation process, Artemis will be the first to sweep away ninety billion won—double their principal investment."
She clicked the screen with a crisp snap.
"If the company sells for one hundred billion won, Artemis takes ninety billion first, leaving a mere ten billion behind. No matter how high Lee Seo-han’s equity ratio is, the structure ensures he is driven out virtually penniless after grinding away seven years of his youth.
Seo-han will sense the risk, but with his immediate desperation for forty-five billion won in clinical funding, he has no choice but to swallow the bait. With Aether Bio’s remaining six billion won runway, he has eighteen months left at best."
Upon that cold web of law, Director Baek Seo-woun layered a cynical smile. As a medical doctor and a ruthless devotee of raw data, her gaze dissected the paperwork like a sharp scalpel.
"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. Even if your bodies feel as though they have reverted to their twenties right now, a substance with an unmapped mechanism remains a time bomb waiting to shatter the user's nervous system."
Seo-woun’s voice dropped an octave, cutting through the room.
"You two are chasing ghosts. The reason I was dragged to this table is clear. The instant I obtain a sample of whatever he's working on, I will put it under the microscope and verify it.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
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.
"Acquiring Aether isn't enough."
Tae-hee slid one more document across the marble table.
"Right now, you are all mistaken."
At that transparent, freezing voice, the eyes of Ui-hyun, Hyun-jin, and Sae-ah rose simultaneously.
"Phantom is not a mere commodity,"
Tae-hee continued evenly, tapping the papers with a slender finger.
"If it were a commercial product that could be packaged and sold, my design would already be finished. A good drug can be bought with money. A good company can be bought with money. Even the patents they possess can be easily usurped through the sheer weight of capital. There is only one thing capital has never learned to buy: genius."
From between her lips flowed an icy investment philosophy that cut straight to the core of the capital market.
"Apple's value was never in its Cupertino headquarters or its MacBook patents. It lived inside the head of one relentless founder named Steve Jobs. The moment Jobs was forced out, Apple became a shadow of itself. The moment he returned, it conquered the world again.
Real monopoly value never resides in buildings, equipment, or intellectual property. It resides in the Founder who designed the game itself."
Tae-hee's gaze swept across the room with a freezing quiet.
"Everything that matters about Aether Bio exists inside Lee Seo-han's cerebral cortex. Whether the company is worth 140 billion won or one trillion, none of it matters unless we can keep that genius tethered to us. Otherwise, the shares you gentlemen are fighting over are nothing more than expensive scrap paper."
Over the ruthless logic of capital that dominated the hidden room, a bizarre, grotesque silence descended.
As Yoon Tae-hee’s frozen quiet deepened, Jeong Ui-hyun finally spoke from the depths of the sofa.
"I don't usually do things like this."
Ui-hyun’s voice was low and gravelly, yet it carried the crushing authority of a monarch, drawing every eye in the room toward him. He exhaled a long plume of cigar smoke. Through the whitening fog, his pupils flashed with an unnatural intensity.
"I've never depended on anyone in my life."
Ui-hyun slowly raised his calloused hand, pressing his fingers hard against his temple. His fingertips were trembling minutely.
"But during those three days... I was myself again."
The air in the safe house stagnated to a suffocating degree.
The conference room of cold capitalists debating an M&A had quietly transformed into a hidden chamber of aging rulers, their souls utterly enslaved to Lee Seo-han by the absolute addiction of youth.
"Hyun-jin, do you remember the North American battery supply chain issue you reported last time? My executives clung to that anomaly for three months without breaking it. But after my injection, I remapped the entire schematic and finished it in forty minutes.
During those three days Seo-han granted me, my mind was resetting to its absolute prime."
A dense madness and an indescribable terror of deprivation intermingled in Ui-hyun’s eyes.
"In that moment, I realized something. I wasn't getting old. I was broken."
Ui-hyun threw the documents onto the table, his gaze piercing through Tae-hee and Kang Si-hyun with a chilling finality.
"The company is a secondary concern. The man himself must stay where we can reach him. Right now."
Yoon Tae-hee set her teacup down, a serene, razor-sharp smile playing on her lips.
"I have someone in mind."
The gazes of Ui-hyun, Hyun-jin, and Sae-ah converged instantly on Tae-hee’s lips. Her voice was quiet, commanding the room so effortlessly it left an illusion that the temperature had plummeted once more.
"Who is it?"
As Ui-hyun swallowed dryly and asked the question, Tae-hee subtly pushed a single sheet of paper across the table and murmured a name under her breath.
"Yoon Seol-hee."
Those three syllables fractured the heavy stillness of the safe house.
As if any further explanation would only degrade the design, Tae-hee simply lifted her glass and offered her uncles a brief, elegant nod—placing a flawless period at the end of her own schematic.
"She's exceptionally good at showing people exactly what they want to see."
Clink.
The pristine sound of glass hitting porcelain shattered the heavy silence.
The blueprint was complete. No longer a scheme to acquire shares, but a prison vast enough to contain both a genius named Lee Seo-han and the insatiable obsession of the powerful men who coveted him.