The air inside S Group's vice chairman's office was submerged in a heavy stillness, as if the room had swallowed lead.
Beyond the seventy-story floor-to-ceiling windows, the night view of Seoul sparkled like scattered jewels.
But the tension inside the room was as sharp as a blade, ready to slice open flesh at any moment.
Reflected in the glass was Vice Chairman Jeong Hyun-jin, his gaze freezing colder than the city lights below.
Jeong Hyun-jin buried his body deeply into his high-grade Italian leather armchair.
His gaze shifted between the two women seated across from him.
Beneath his eyes hung dark, heavy shadows—the combined toll of absolute exhaustion and the brutal Crash of the drug.
For weeks, he had endured the humiliation of sending a secretary to the main gate of Aether Bio every single morning.
Begging for his daily dose of Ghost as if picking up a newspaper delivery.
His body had regained its peak vitality, but his mind was rotting away with the anxiety of an aging predator.
To him, youth was no longer a simple blessing.
It was a harsh subscription fee that had to be paid every single morning.
"So…… you're saying the man didn't act like a man at all?"
Jeong Hyun-jin forced a dry cough from the depths of his throat, letting out a sharp hiss.
"Even with women like you sitting right in front of him?"
The whiskey in his crystal glass rippled, matching the anxious tremor of his fingers.
His voice carried the signature malice of a predator.
He desperately wanted to pull Lee Seo-han down into the category of an inferior male just to satisfy his own ego.
The second his question cut through the heavy air, Baek Seo-woun pushed up the frame of her rimless glasses with her middle finger.
The collar of her white shirt was pressed so stiffly it resembled a well-sharpened scalpel.
Her face remained entirely detached, like a precision machine devoid of any human emotion.
She recalled the probing look Lee Seo-han had directed at her back at that secluded espresso bar in Cheongdam-dong.
It was a gaze completely devoid of desire.
Human desire had long since been buried beneath data and efficiency. What remained in his eyes was the obsession of a pure researcher.
Her thin lips curled into a cold, cynical smirk.
As the director of clinical development for a global big pharma's Korean branch, she had analyzed the biological data of tens of thousands of subjects.
She had dissected humans strictly within controlled protocols.
Yet, to her, Lee Seo-han remained a completely unmapped anomaly.
During their entire conversation, she hadn't registered a single shred of romantic tension.
Instead, she had felt a chilling discomfort.
It felt as though her own nervous system was being laid bare on a cold dissection table, scraped down to the bone.
In her flawless database, Lee Seo-han was an error.
A fatal anomaly capable of bringing the entire system down.
"Vice Chairman, that wasn't a standard interaction between a man and a woman," Seo-woun said, slamming her tablet onto the table with a sharp bang.
"He was putting on an act from the moment he arrived."
"What kind of man brings up raw data, clinical research, and regulations on a first date? At first, I thought he was simply playing along and offering a compliment about my career."
"But as the conversation progressed, my skin began to crawl."
Her gaze dropped into a freezing void.
"The man was quantifying my social status and my authority within big pharma. He was testing my mind to see what protocol it operated on."
"His objective was clear—shake my composure, force me to lose control, and then scan for blind spots in my thinking."
"It wasn't a date. It was a carefully designed interview for a test subject."
"It went beyond mere rudeness. It was a bizarre, terrifying psychological tactic."
The moment Seo-woun finished speaking, Yoon Tae-hee set her teacup down onto the marble table.
Clink. The sharp ring echoed through the quiet office.
Though she was a woman who always maintained a flawless grace, her brow was now carved with a deep, unprecedented disgust.
The high collar of her dark green coat only amplified the cold energy radiating from her.
"The man was completely deaf to artistic value or the basic decency capital should possess," Tae-hee said coldly.
"He acts like some noble academic who claims numbers are vulgar, but every single conclusion he draws pulls straight back to data efficiency."
"Vice Chairman, this man never intended to play a romantic game."
Tae-hee recalled the dry, hollow gaze Seo-han had given her at the Seongbuk-dong museum.
Far from seeing her as a woman, his posture was entirely detached.
He had evaluated her as though she were nothing more than a high-value asset.
To the intellect of a capitalist who couldn't possibly imagine this was merely a hopeless block of wood failing to process a relationship, the absolute worst conspiracy theory was being born.
"It felt as though he was scanning me under a microscope, checking what kind of high-value component I was."
"Vice Chairman, think about the explicit parameters he demanded for these setups. They are the top one percent. Women possessing supreme education, family lineages, professional titles, beauty, and intellect."
Tae-hee leaned her upper body toward Jeong Hyun-jin.
"These are some of the brightest minds even S Group can't afford to waste."
"He selectively chose to meet those exact women and didn't reveal a single emotional vulnerability? This isn't a matter of bizarre taste."
"His gaze was that of a butcher appraising livestock."
Jeong Hyun-jin’s eyelids twitched minutely.
Tae-hee’s words cut through him like a blade, striking the exact center of the complacency he had coddled while intoxicated by his daily dose.
The absolute physical ecstasy and the total neural awakening provided by Ghost 2.0.
Blinded by the hot surge of his twenties pumping through his veins, he had temporarily forgotten his instincts as a predator.
Now, alarm bells were ringing in his mind.
What he had handed over to Lee Seo-han wasn't a simple list of women or profiles for amusement.
An icy dread cascaded down his spine as he realized it was a map of the financial ecosystem's neural network.
A master key to the nation's brightest minds.
Enchanted by the sweet bait of youth, he had willingly placed the inner flesh of his empire onto a laboratory table.
Jeong Hyun-jin's face turned to ash.
Beneath his royal blue suit, his heart was no longer pounding from vitality.
It was thumping with the terror of a massive, unclassified conspiracy.
"A human collection……" Hyun-jin muttered through his teeth.
Hearing the precise analysis from the two women, the pieces of the puzzle finally locked into place.
Why a forty-three-year-old prodigy would hold a conglomerate vice chairman by the throat just to ask for something as juvenile as a 'blind date.'
The answer to that massive contradiction was finally revealed.
"The bastard had an explicit agenda from the start. Dragging the sharpest minds into his orbit to map out the internal networks of the financial families, to identify medical and legal vulnerabilities."
"Controlling us with a drug wasn't enough for him. He wanted our core assets wrapped around his finger to ensure he held our leverage."
"He never wanted a lover. He wanted a living library to complete his biological empire."
Seo-woun nodded, her eyes flashing through her lenses like a data sheet updating in real-time.
"I agree. Lee Seo-han is an individual completely devoid of emotion. A man like that suddenly talking about 'true love' and seeking a woman makes zero sense in any data model."
She folded her arms, adding coldly.
"It is highly probable that he is using the women you deliver to scan the elite's psychological weaknesses and private networks."
"He is using Ghost as bait to put all of us under his microscope."
"We were nothing but highly sophisticated laboratory rats."
Hyun-jin’s fingers tapped aggressively against the leather armchair.
He had dismissed the man's demands as the bizarre quirk of an eccentric genius, and that complacency was now delivering a brutal blow to his skull.
Shuddering with the humiliation of sending a man to beg for a daily ration, he had failed to see the true horror of the biological domestication unfolding right before his eyes.
"Hearing your analysis…… I realize I was far too compliant," Hyun-jin groaned, rubbing his brow deeply.
"I was blinded by his academic madness. No, my own body's desperate desire for a future veiled my sight."
He had been led by a leash attached to a transparent nasal spray, serving up the group's most valuable human network to him.
Lee Seo-han was no mere bio-venture founder.
He was a monster fueled by a terrifying biological ambition, exploiting the logic of capital to stand above the predators themselves.
Tae-hee stood up, driving a final wedge into his thoughts with a freezing look.
"Do not play along with his absurd romance games anymore, Vice Chairman."
"The more true value you feed him, the tighter our leash becomes. Capital must be as ruthless as art."
"We cannot let him use us. We must lock him inside the cage of data."
Long after Tae-hee and Seo-woun vacated the office, Jeong Hyun-jin remained motionless, staring out into the dark abyss of the city.
Superimposed over his old, weary reflection in the glass was the image of Seo-han’s detached, clear gaze.
More than anything, what choked him was the pathetic humiliation of being tamed by an obscure scientist.
He needed the drug. He absolutely did.
He lacked the fortitude to endure even a single day of that heavy decrepitude and the violent Crash of aging.
But he couldn't hand over the keys to the elite networks along with the knife.
"A human collection…… You dare play games over the head of S Group?"
A freezing malice—the specific, lethal intent of a wounded predator—began to bleed into his eyes.
To shatter the bars of the biological cage Lee Seo-han had built, he had to move.
Whether it meant executing the plan Dr. Baek suggested to send in Yoon Seol-hee and seize the solid API, or hacking his servers to unearth the records of Ghost 2.0 and Phantom, something had to be driven forward.
The misunderstanding and fury of the greedy capitalists inside the room had reached its absolute boiling point.
At that very moment, across town on Teheran-ro.
Lee Seo-han was sitting in complete silence, his mind completely overloaded by Han Ji-yeon’s simple question—“When was the last time you were actually in a relationship?”
For once, the brilliant scientist had absolutely no answer.