Seol-hee watched him, her red lips curving smoothly into a seamless smile.
It was a bright, perfect smile, laced with the practiced allure of a woman who had spent her life manipulating the desires of high-society men.
As the rhythmic click of her heels against the marble floor brought her a step closer, Seo-han’s brow furrowed minutely.
Dropped into this unmapped territory called art, the pressure to engage in the fluid yet hollow small talk of the elite was pressing heavily on his mind.
It was a desperate struggle for an emotionally awkward man, trying his absolute best not to crumble under the weight of this foreign air.
Seo-han felt far more rigid right now than he ever did when standing before the freezing glare of Chairman Jeong.
"It seems you aren't satisfied, Doctor, until you’ve categorized even the sublime realm of art and reduced it to raw numbers."
Seol-hee reached a light hand toward Seo-han’s arm, only to pause mid-motion.
Sensing a strange, unyielding barrier radiating from him, she subtly altered the trajectory of her hand.
Instead, she elegantly pointed toward an abstract painting hanging on the wall, dominated by a violent storm of crimson.
"Sometimes, you have to let go of that stubborn logic to truly see what is there. Why not simply let yourself feel the heat radiating from this canvas?
Seo-han lifted his gaze.
"Every sense of awe a human experiences is ultimately nothing more than a chain reaction of electrical signals. The 'heat' of pigments is merely a visual illusion."
Seo-han’s response was as cold as a winter scalpel.
Knowing absolutely nothing about paintings, it was a retreat into the only language he truly understood—biological facts.
It was the clumsy escape of a man who possessed zero vocabulary to sustain a conversation over a romantic canvas.
Yet, Seol-hee’s eyes flashed with a sudden, sharp curiosity.
All her life, she had watched powerful men string together empty, extravagant metaphors just to win her favor.
This man’s posture—pushing her away without a shred of pretense, relying strictly on the grammar of science—felt like a jarring, intense jolt.
Seol-hee felt her throat go dry.
The meticulous perfection that had never once slipped through her encounters with hundreds of billionaires and politicians was beginning to waver.
Ordinarily, men followed her lead, intoxicated by the dim lighting and the fragrance of the gallery.
They would scan her face or the silhouette of her dress rather than the artwork. To them, art was merely a sophisticated backdrop to seduce a woman.
But Lee Seo-han was different.
He avoided my gaze again.
The moment Seol-hee tilted her head slightly to force eye contact, Seo-han’s gaze slid past her shoulder without a fraction of a second's hesitation.
The place his eyes settled was not the Mark Rothko piece, valued at over twelve billion won.
Instead, his expression remained terrifyingly detached as he evaluated the digital hygrometer tucked into the corner of the ceiling and the precise angle of the LED spotlights.
He looked at the hygrometer before the painting. Where on earth is this man looking?
Seol-hee suppressed a slight sting to her pride.
She was a flawlessly constructed counterfeit engineered by Yoon Tae-hee.
Every detail had been calculated—her voice, her stride, even the rhythm of her blinking.
Yet, to Lee Seo-han, she was little more than another variable in the room.
"Doctor Lee, when critics look at the overwhelming isolation of Rothko’s red canvases, they often speak of the absence of God."
Seol-hee stepped closer, pressing deep into his personal space.
An intoxicating scent drifted from her neck, invading his breathing zone.
But Seo-han merely took a step back, adjusting his tie.
"Rather than the absence of God, it seems the humidity control required to preserve the artwork has drifted minutely."
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Seo-han’s low voice froze the gallery air solid.
Seol-hee fought back a hollow laugh.
This man wasn't analyzing her seduction; he was evaluating the dehumidifying performance of the air conditioning unit.
"Fine. Then let me show you the exact 'truth' you are so obsessed with. Follow me."
Seol-hee led him toward the deepest recesses of the gallery.
Behind a concealed wall, she guided him to a heavy security door fitted with a hidden fingerprint scanner.
Beep.
The massive metal door swung open, releasing a wave of freezing air that flooded the space.
The low, mechanical hum of the climate control system, operating twenty-four hours a day to preserve the pieces, echoed through the vault.
Thud.
The heavy noise of the door sealing shut behind them swallowed the silence of the vault.
As the vault door closed, a hermetically sealed world unfolded, completely cut off from any external light.
Beyond the reinforced glass, dozens of masterpieces stood arrayed like walls of capital, surrounding Seo-han.
The cold, metallic scent venting from the nitrogen-charged storage units mixed with the musty aroma of ancient documents, stimulating his senses.
Deep inside the darkened vault, illuminated sharply by a single spotlight, stood a massive wooden crate.
Seol-hee stopped right in front of it.
"This is the masterpiece I mentioned, Doctor. A raw, naked truth that even your precise, cold intellect cannot dare deny."
Slowly, and with absolute care, Seol-hee lifted the lid of the crate.
As the thick oak cover opened, the trapped, freezing air brushed against Seo-han’s cheek.
As the woman’s surreal perfection converged with the bizarre stillness of the vault, his heart rate began to climb.
But the object Seol-hee withdrew from the chest was no ordinary painting or sculpture.
It was a heavy microfilm storage case, accompanied by a titanium container.
Seol-hee carefully pulled back the cover, revealing the yellowed cover page of a document.
It seized his attention instantly.
[Project Chronos: 1978-2008 Cold Spring Harbor & Secret Alliance.]
Seo-han’s pupils dilated minutely.
Cold Spring Harbor.
He never expected the name of that place—the holy ground of molecular biology and the cradle of genetics—to surface inside the hidden vault of a Korean conglomerate.
The ancient scent of ozone embedded within the yellowed pages seemed to bleed straight into his fingertips.
Project Chronos.
It was the code name of the longevity conquest initiative launched in absolute secrecy by H Group decades ago.
Despite pouring trillions of won into the project, nothing remained but failed data twisted by severe side effects.
It was a massive ruin left behind by the arrogance of giant capital, a clumsy attempt to distort the endocrine control systems that modern medicine had yet to reach.
Seo-han stared at the faint seal stamped at the top of the document. He immediately understood what it meant.
The data sleeping inside this ruin was the primitive lineage of the Phantom and Ghost compounds he had perfected.
At the same time, it was the final, massive wall he had to climb over.
The suffocating sensation of being trapped by a vague conversation on art and the woman's surreal beauty vanished instantly.
The moment his eyes locked onto the clearly arranged biological data, his senses cleared.
His thoughts aligned with perfect clarity, focused entirely on the unknown data.
"This…… is the masterpiece you spoke of."
Seo-han’s dropped voice cut through the heavy, dim atmosphere of the vault.
The woman whom Vice Chairman Jeong and Chairman Jeong had carefully arranged for him to meet had, instead, personally delivered the classified clinical data on aging that he coveted most.
Inside the intellect of a genius, the cognitive circuit of suspicion—the thought that this sweet information might actually be a sophisticated psychological noose—did not even exist.
From Seo-han’s perspective, only a single, pure premise was deduced.
The Chairmen are far more serious about conquering aging than I thought.
They want to use me as a tool to glimpse a realm humanity has never experienced, and they want to see it faster.
A quiet, burning obsession finally surfaced in the gaze that had been frozen by the woman’s surreal perfection.
It was the direction he had pursued his entire life.
It was a fatal misunderstanding—the belief that this beautiful woman was staring at the exact same horizon, walking the same path.
Without a second's delay, Seo-han took a large step closer.
At that exact moment, Yoon Seol-hee’s perfectly calibrated heartbeat fractured into a bizarre dissonance, freezing solid.
……Why is he looking at me with those eyes?
A chill ran down Seol-hee's spine.
According to the script, the moment Lee Seo-han was confronted with this massive, secret data, he was supposed to be diminished by the power of capital, hungrily biting the bait.
The perfect capture scenario was to seize control of him once his analytical defenses crumbled.
The man had undoubtedly taken the bait.
Yet, it was Seol-hee’s fingertips—the one who was supposed to hold the leverage—that were turning rigid.
What radiated from Seo-han’s eyes was not the hazy passion of a seduced male.
It was an absolute, unconditional trust.
It was a gaze so transparent and unguarded, as if he had finally discovered someone looking in the exact same direction.
She had spent her entire life as a counterfeit in the underworld, exploiting the filthy possessiveness and hypocrisy of men.
To her, the weight of this arrogant yet pure trust Lee Seo-han was projecting was far too massive to be managed by a shallow lie.
"With a data set of this scale, I can isolate the specific patient cohorts to apply the clinical designs I am planning," Seo-han said, his voice low but vibrating with absolute conviction, his eyes never leaving the documents.
"I finally understand perfectly why you called me into this secret space, Ms. Seol-hee."
"……"
"An eye that recognizes true value that cannot be quantified by numbers. The principle hidden in your message…… it was referencing this. The hidden, true future of humanity."
Seo-han slowly lifted his head, locking his gaze straight onto Seol-hee.
The unwavering gaze of a man who had spent his life pursuing nothing but the truth flashed with a surreal brilliance beneath the spotlight.
Under his gaze, Seol-hee registered a heavy, blunt shock.
It felt as though the mask she had spent her entire life performing was fracturing, splintering into pieces.
This man was swallowing her whole with an aura so powerful and pure it threatened to petrify her entire facade into an absolute genuine article.
She thought she had trapped an easy prey inside her cage.
But locked alone inside this vault, she realized the entity sitting across from her was a true predator that she could never hope to control.
The conspiracy of the Hannam-dong safehouse, engineered to hunt a monster, had just collided with the stubborn misunderstanding and conviction of Lee Seo-han.
It began to twist, violently destabilizing.
Stepping forward with absolute arrogance and purity, he didn't harbor a single shred of doubt as he walked right over the delicate emotional trap she had designed.
Seo-han’s fingertips lightly brushed against the texture of the documents resting on the titanium container, as if devouring the data.
In the dead silence of the vault, a cold sweat she couldn't explain trickled down Yoon Seol-hee’s spine.