Jeong Hyun-jin’s Hannam-dong secret safe house was submerged in a chilling darkness.
The plan Baek Seo-woun had thrown at them—stealing the raw API powder through a carefully constructed imitation named Yoon Seol-hee—seemed flawless.
But reality never waited for their sophisticated timelines.
In the heavy silence, Chairman Jeong Ui-hyun of H Automotive Group sat rubbing his bruised, needle-marked thigh.
He suddenly turned his head, locking his hollow eyes onto Vice Chairman Jeong Hyun-jin.
A sharp realization flashed within his sunken pupils.
"……By the way, Vice Chairman Jeong."
"Yes, Chairman. What is it?"
"To dance to Dr. Baek’s tune and run those machine analyses... didn't we dump every single drop of the remaining four-week supply we wrung out of Lee Seo-han last week right into her lab?"
Jeong Hyun-jin’s face instantly turned the color of ash.
The brutal reality slammed into his mind, forcing him to swallow dryly.
"Ah……."
"Our current cycle of Phantom expires next week. What is your brilliant plan for next week's ration?"
"No matter how flawless of a fake Dr. Baek carves out, raiding Lee Seo-han’s inner pocket will take weeks, if not months."
Deep, grotesque wrinkles carved into the brows of the two tycoons.
The terror of the hellish 'Crash' that would arrive the moment their four days of heaven expired was already cascading down their spines.
Amidst bone-fracturing pain and the terrifying illusion of rotting away into decrepitude, they lacked the fortitude to endure even a single week.
There was only one way out.
Drag Lee Seo-han to this exact room and squeeze another syringe out of him.
The following afternoon, Lee Seo-han was summoned into the heavy, marble-trimmed reception room of the Hannam-dong safe house.
Dressed in his immaculate Teheran-ro CEO attire, Seo-han buried himself deeply into the leather sofa.
He studied the two old men greeting him with entirely detached, dry eyes.
They ruled over the nation's economy like kings.
Their complexions were far too anxious, their eyes gleaming like starving predators.
Jeong Hyun-jin was the first to fracture the silence.
He forced a hollow, jovial smile, closely monitoring Seo-han's expression.
"Ah, Dr. Lee. I apologize for dragging you out here when you're so swamped."
"The truth is…… we've run into a small problem."
"A complication?" Seo-han asked evenly.
Jeong Hyun-jin fidgeted with his fingers, exchanging a brief, tense glance with Jeong Ui-hyun before spilling his rehearsed excuse.
"Well, about the vials we took last time…… a fellow chairman from another conglomerate saw my rejuvenated complexion and practically begged me on his knees."
"Good things are meant to be shared, right? So I let him have a bottle."
"But now our supply schedule is completely tangled. We're short."
"Precisely, Dr. Lee," Jeong Ui-hyun chimed in.
"Our next dose was originally scheduled for next weekend. But could you possibly adjust the schedule just this once and deliver an additional batch tomorrow?"
"We will gladly top off the payment with whatever amount you desire."
It was the quintessential play of capitalists who blindly believed money could solve everything.
But Seo-han saw through the lie instantly.
Giving it to another chairman was a clumsy cover story.
To the man who engineered the molecular architecture, it was laughably transparent that they had handed their remaining supply over to Baek Seo-woun or Ki Jong-ho to attempt reverse-engineering.
Only to completely incinerate the substance in the process.
Seo-han remained motionless, staring at the two old men for a prolonged, suffocating moment.
The air in the reception room sank, turning freezing and heavy.
"……Has Phantom served you well enough?"
Seo-han’s low, freezing murmur shattered the silence.
Startled, the shoulders of both Jeong Hyun-jin and Jeong Ui-hyun fl인치트 flinched violently in perfect unison.
An acute wave of sheer panic and terror rippled across the old men's faces.
Did this bastard figure it out? Is he going to cut off our supply entirely?
The exact second Lee Seo-han decided to pick up his briefcase and walk out because their behavior lacked discipline, everything they had built would come to an end.
The pride that came with their titles evaporated instantly.
Their eyes held nothing but the desperation of cornered rats terrified that their rations were about to be permanently severed.
"D-Dr. Lee! Do not misunderstand! Truly, another chairman—!"
The moment Jeong Hyun-jin desperately tried to lift his hips off the sofa to explain, Seo-han offered a thin, faint smile, lightly raising his hand to halt him.
"There is no need to be so tense. I am not suggesting that I will cut off your supply."
Seo-han slowly pulled an elegant fountain pen from his breast pocket and placed it firmly on the table.
His steady composure seized the room.
"In fact, seeing how recklessly you abuse the compound, the severe limitations of Phantom become glaringly obvious."
"Ninety-six hours of heaven, followed by a brutal three-day descent into a catastrophic Crash."
"When your flesh surges to its absolute prime only to plunge vertically into the abyss—how long do you honestly believe your bodies can endure that hellish trauma?"
The two old men couldn't muster a single word of rebuttal.
That agony was a living purgatory that they could never grow accustomed to, no matter how many weeks they endured it.
"Forcing a needle into your skin every single week, agonizing during critical business meetings over the exact millisecond your efficacy might expire…… it is a grotesque shackle."
Seo-han leaned his upper body forward, his gaze dissecting the very depths of the two tycoons' dilated pupils.
"There is a method to completely terminate this cycle of four days of recovery and three days of agony."
"W-What do you mean, Dr. Lee? Such a method actually exists?" Jeong Ui-hyun asked, his eyes heavily bloodshot.
A cruel yet exquisitely sweet curve etched along the devilish arc of Seo-han’s lips.
"No syringes. A mechanism that sharply awakens the nervous system in a mere fraction of a second, then vanishes entirely without leaving a single trace."
"A completely new paradigm that forces the cells to regenerate on their own without chemically overriding the brain."
Seo-han lightly tapped the fountain pen resting on the table, murmuring in a low tone.
"It does not possess an official corporate pipeline name just yet…… but I call it Ghost 2.0."
Ghost 2.0—the next evolution of the monster hidden beneath the surface of the civilized world—was finally being offered to the greediest men in the country.
"Moving forward, send a member of your secretarial staff to the main gate of Aether Bio every single morning at exactly 9:00 AM."
Seo-han added languidly, setting down his teacup without a single flicker of emotion.
The brief silence as the porcelain quietly met the saucer compressed the entire atmosphere of the room.
"Exactly one day's worth. I will provide a single dose of Ghost 2.0 that will revert your brain, your heart, and the last remaining drop of blood in your veins to their absolute peak twenties for the next twenty-four hours."
"Much like a bottle of fresh milk delivered to your doorstep every morning."
An eerie silence descended over the reception room.
The two titans who reigned at the absolute zenith of the domestic financial hierarchy stared blankly at each other’s faces.
As if they had just encountered an unclassified alien entity.
Vice Chairman Jeong Hyun-jin’s thick lips began to quiver uncontrollably.
"Dr. Lee, are you playing games with us right now? We are not reckless school children picking up packed lunches from a cafeteria line."
"Every single day? And specifically in the morning, we have to dispatch our top executives? Just to beg for a meager twenty-four-hour dose?"
"Is this not the era of the subscription economy?" Seo-han replied smoothly.
"From a risk-management perspective, this protocol is undeniably the most secure and absolute."
"I must monitor the accumulated drug concentration and hematological metrics in your systems in real-time, subtly modulating the active ratios to align with your daily condition."
Because Seo-han’s response was entirely rational and scientific, it tasted infinitely more insulting.
Chairman Jeong Ui-hyun clutched the back of his bursting neck, letting out a heavy groan.
He could explicitly feel the abnormal expansion within his cerebral blood vessels.
"Listen to me! I have an international flight to Detroit the day after tomorrow for an emergency M&A summit!"
"If my efficacy suddenly plummets while I am coordinating a multi-billion-dollar acquisition over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, what the hell am I supposed to do?"
"Am I supposed to rapidly wither away into a wrinkled sixty-year-old corpse inside the first-class cabin?!"
As if he had already simulated this exact hysterical reaction hundreds of times, Seo-han calmly drew another small case from his briefcase.
It was wrapped tightly in deep navy, high-grade leather, bearing an appearance indistinguishable from a luxury pen case or a bespoke watch box.
He slid it across the table.
"For those exact scenarios, this is the travel-exclusive Phantom Kit. Naturally, it is a long-acting formulation."
"A clean four-week supply. I will accept one hundred thousand dollars. Upfront, in cash."
"……You arrogant little piece of shit."
Jeong Hyun-jin let out a hollow, hysterical laugh.
Merely seconds ago, the pride of a king who had swallowed dryly, completely enchanted by the wondrous name of 'Ghost 2.0,' was crumpled like a piece of garbage on the street.
It wasn't about the money.
It was the chilling humiliation piercing through their marrow.
The fact that to receive the crumbs thrown by a forty-three-year-old scientist of obscure origins, they had to faithfully dispatch their closest aids like obedient dogs every single morning to beg.
"However, let me issue one absolute warning."
Seo-han’s eyes sank into a bleak, chilling void.
"The moment your daily Ghost overlaps with the travel Phantom, your pituitary receptors will instantly combust from total overload."
"At that threshold, nothing could save you then."
"An immediate chemical castration syndrome. It is not merely a matter of virility."
"It means you will be reduced to a living corpse, incapable of registering a single shred of human desire or motivation for weeks, perhaps months."
Seo-han slowly stood up from his seat.
His warning was as short and sharp as a blade, and his retreating posture as he turned his back was impeccably neat.
The heavy door clicked shut, severing the external light.
The suffocating tension that had been tightly suppressed inside the reception room exploded instantly.
Jeong Hyun-jin snatched a heavy crystal ashtray from the table and hurled it violently across the sofa toward the fireplace.
The quiet safe house shattered under the sharp, echoing din of fracturing glass.
"That... that insolent little scientist bastard! He treats us like we are some regular convenience store customers picking up a daily loyalty item?!"
"Save your breath, Vice Chairman Jeong," Jeong Ui-hyun muttered coldly.
"Stop your hands from trembling like a leaf before you speak. So tell me—are you going to dispatch your chief of staff tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM, or are you not?"
Jeong Ui-hyun stared down at the back of his own hand with bloodshot, hollow eyes.
The iron hand that had successfully commanded trillions in global acquisitions over decades was now shivering pathetically for a single syringe.
Their bodies had already been completely conditioned by Phantom.
They craved the wondrous vitality of the following morning infinitely more than they cared about the profound insult Seo-han had delivered.
"……I refuse to exist like this. I cannot be dragged around by his leash forever. Tell Dr. Baek to get in here right now!"
Jeong Hyun-jin aggressively snatched his phone from the table.
A few moments later, following a crisp knock, Baek Seo-woun stepped into the reception room.
Dressed in her dark, charcoal gray suit, a cynical smirk played on her lips.
She lightly stepped over the scattered crystal shards with her high heels, standing before the two devastated tycoons.
"You called? The complexions on both of your faces are quite a spectacle."
"If I were to map this out as clinical data, it would yield a fascinating report."
"Dr. Baek, that bastard Lee Seo-han just left after babbling some absurd story about a milk delivery service called Ghost 2.0."
"He's selling a travel kit separately for a hundred thousand dollars, but is it true that if we mix them, our brains will literally melt?"
"Or is he just bluffing to keep us in line?"
Jeong Ui-hyun demanded desperately, grasping at straws.
Baek Seo-woun narrowed her eyes, her gloved fingers carefully tracing the edge of the navy leather case Seo-han had left behind.
Her movements were entirely detached and precise, as if she were inspecting a highly hazardous contaminant.