The interior of The Black, a private lounge in Cheongdam-dong, was filled with a meticulously engineered silence and excessively dim lighting.
In the heavy darkness, Han Ji-yeon’s eyes gleamed as sharply as a cat's, fixed entirely on Lee Seo-han's face.
Her predatory curiosity drifted through the air, softened only by practiced elegance.
On the table, the large rock ice inside his crystal glass fractured from its core, letting out a faint crack.
The sharp crack cut through the silence.
At that exact moment, Ji-yeon's question lingered in his ears.
"When was the last time you were in a relationship?"
Ordinarily, a dry, calculated response would have surfaced within a second, but it was stalling strangely deep within his mind.
His mind, which had remained perfectly clear even while exploiting the biological desires of conglomerate tycoons, had briefly short-circuited.
In the void it left behind, a blurred afterimage bloomed, still burning with impossible heat.
The memory of sitting close together beneath the brief shade of an eave, sharing a passing breeze.
A breathless silence that arrived long before any spoken word.
The gaze of someone he refused to forget returned, sending a jolt through him far greater than any artificial awakening provided by Ghost.
Ji-yeon, seemingly fascinated by his heavy silence, tilted her head slightly.
"Was the question too difficult? Or was it so devastating that you forcibly wiped it from your memory?"
Ji-yeon leaned forward languidly, pressing deeper into his personal space.
An intoxicating scent drifted from her—a blend of refined agarwood and the natural warmth radiating beneath her skin.
Seo-han accepted the invasion without moving an inch, but his mind kept sliding backward under the deep shade of his past.
The low, distant hum of a liquid nitrogen tank.
A desperate bond forged through survival, tempered by countless all-nighters in the lab.
A sudden thought crossed his mind—that perhaps the stubborn camaraderie forged over more than a decade had simply been another form of love.
But the moment that bond fractured, the emptiness left behind became an abyss no chemical compound could ever bridge.
"What exactly is the definition of love to a cold scientist like you? Is it simply a surge of dopamine in the brain?" Ji-yeon’s voice dragged him back to the present.
It was a challenge laced with cynical intellect.
Her slender finger brushed perilously close to the stiff collar of his shirt.
His vision wavered slightly as he stared at her red lips.
Even as memories lost their shape, their warmth endured.
Seo-han finally opened his mouth, his voice heavy.
"Even when the shape blurs, the heat remains for a long time."
He felt the Cold beads of condensation clung to the glass beneath his palm, murmuring as if speaking strictly to himself.
"If love is defined as constantly looking deeper because that heat refuses to cool…… then I suppose a certain memory in my mind remains permanently blurred."
Seo-han let out a short, quiet laugh, mocking himself.
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He was an arrogant man who ridiculed giants of the business world and held the powerful captive through their own neurochemistry, yet he couldn't decipher the true identity of the haze flickering within himself.
Ultimately, he didn't try to parse the meaning of his own words.
As always, it was far more efficient to shelve an undefined emotion.
Ji-yeon, determined not to miss the slight fracture in his fortress, whispered softly.
"What does it matter if it’s incomplete? I could always fill that empty space for you."
Her warm breath brushed his cheek, sending an instinctive jolt through him.
Yet, Seo-han's hand remained completely motionless inside his coat pocket.
This entire situation was nothing more than a trap set by capital predators.
The sheer terror of an uncontrollable variable awakened his reason far faster than a passing moment of passion.
Seo-han closed his eyes, then slowly opened them.
When he withdrew his hand from his pocket to grip his glass, his fingertips were unnervingly steady.
With the exact same dry gaze he used when flipping through data sheets in the lab, Seo-han looked straight at Ji-yeon.
"You are too close, Ms. Ji-yeon."
It was a blunt truth, entirely unadorned.
Seo-han set down his glass and stood up, firmly widening the intimate distance she had closed.
The sleek curve of Han Ji-yeon’s lips stiffened minutely.
The calculated allure she used to wrap men around her finger vanished completely into thin air, neutralized by a single, dry phrase.
"Data belongs in a laboratory, not a private lounge. It's late, so I will take my leave."
There wasn't a single flaw in his movements as he buttoned his coat.
Ji-yeon leaned back comfortably against the sofa, folding her arms.
Watching the retreating back of this stubbornly rigid genius—who was throwing up a brick wall precisely because he was acutely aware of her as a woman—she let out a quiet chuckle.
Her cold curiosity as an ace began to sink even deeper.
4:10 AM.
Seo-han’s eyes snapped open long before his alarm could go off.
He stood up mechanically and drank a cup of cold water. The chill sliding down his esophagus sharply scraped awake his dormant brain cells.
The moment he turned on his tablet, the cash flow statement of Aether Bio filled the screen.
Eighteen months.
That was the exact amount of survival time allocated to him before he had to ascend the altar of a NASDAQ listing.
Seo-han ran a routine commercialization simulation for Ghost 2.0.
The business model that secured an astronomical one hundred million won every single month from Jeong Hyun-jin and Jeong Ui-hyun was a sophisticated trap engineered entirely by his calculations.
His ultimate destination was no vulgar performance-enhancer trade.
He envisioned an era in which humanity's evolution would be driven by a legitimate medical system.
It was the ambition of someone who believed even God could be outdesigned.
To build the fortress walls of that massive empire, Seo-han armored himself with substance patents.
He had placed dozens of decoy sequences around the core active sites of the protein structure.
While his competitors bled their capital dry in the swamp of that fake data, Aether Bio would run the field alone.
Seo-han was certain.
The moment this design was finalized, no one would be able to evade his patent network for the next fifteen years.
It was a massive intellectual fortress forged purely by his genius—stronger than any wall built by wealth, and higher than any barrier of ethics.
Reviewing his pipeline data, Seo-han checked a notification on his smartphone.
Amidst the flood of emails from the night before, an unfamiliar name caught his eye.
[Doctor Lee, I am reaching out to you through a recommendation from Director Yoon Tae-hee of Artemis. A certain 'masterpiece' that is strictly hidden from the public has just arrived in the secret vault of the gallery where I serve as a docent. I wanted to show it first to someone who understands value that cannot be quantified by numbers. May I invite you back to the gallery this evening?]
One corner of Seo-han's mouth twitched.
To him, a masterpiece consisted strictly of reproducible data and absolute purity of active pharmaceutical ingredients.
The texture of pigments layered over a canvas was nothing more than opaque noise.
That evening, Seo-han put on his suit and stood before the heavy iron doors of Gallery Yoon.
The click of his heels against the marble floor echoed coldly through the space.
Appreciating art and exchanging flirtatious banter.
To Seo-han, it was a task far more baffling than memorizing a Phase 3 clinical trial protocol down to the letter.
His rigid posture held only the intense stiffness of an academic dropped into an unmapped territory.
"Welcome, Dr. Lee. You arrived five minutes earlier than expected."
Deep inside the gallery, silhouetted against soft pin lighting, Yoon Seol-hee slowly turned her head.
Her hair was pinned back so neatly that not a single stray strand fell out of place.
Her finely tailored tweed dress, with its crisp yet premium texture, made her translucent skin look surreal.
Seo-han stopped in his tracks.
The woman standing before him resembled an impossibly perfect sculpture.
The gentle slope of her shoulders, the measured cadence of her voice carefully performing classical elegance, and her precise maintenance of distance.
Every aesthetic variable that comprised her was calibrated to perfection, free of any margin of error.
Faced with a woman of such flawless specifications, the mind of this forty-three-year-old, emotionally awkward man found himself momentarily overwhelmed.
Confronted by such meticulous perfection, his social reflexes simply locked up, as rigid as a machine exposed to extreme sub-zero temperatures.
"What category does this masterpiece fall under?"
To hide the raw, unfamiliar helplessness flooding his mind, Seo-han chose the driest academic vocabulary he knew.
"Is it a restoration of a classical Renaissance painting, or contemporary art serving merely as a store of value to secure capital liquidity?"
It wasn't an attempt to sustain a conversation.
It was a retreat into the only language he truly understood.