The Oak Room, a private lounge near the Park Hyatt in Samseong-dong.
Beyond the soaring floor-to-ceiling windows, the silent procession of imported cars on Yeongdong-daero and the bustling crowds of COEX drifted by like a muted reel. The interior was filled with a heavy blend of mahogany, the bitter edge of freshly roasted coffee, and the dry scent of premium leather sofas.
In a secluded corner by the window, two women stared down into their cooling teacups, as if by design.
Yoon Tae-hee sat dressed in a calm brown knit and a plaid wool skirt. Impeccably turned out from her hair down to the tips of her loafers, only the fingertips gripping her fine porcelain teacup betrayed a microscopic tremor.
Across from her, Yoon Seol-hee was subtly scanning her surroundings with her signature sharp eyes, fighting to maintain her perfectly calibrated mask of elegance.
"He is fundamentally different from the men we usually deal with," Tae-hee said, breaking the heavy stillness as she slowly stirred her tea with a silver spoon. "No, it feels as though his entire biological framework operates on a different system altogether."
"It’s strange. He doesn't follow any of the usual patterns," Seol-hee replied, letting out a long sigh as she adjusted the collar of her silk blouse. "Ordinarily, a man would instinctively fall for the honey trap I laid out, or at the very least, lose his composure. But Dr. Lee was different."
Her voice, which had always held the desires of high-society men in the palm of her hand, was now thick with a helpless frustration she had never experienced in her life.
"He felt like a fortress shielded by an invisible barrier. When he looked at the masterpiece hanging on the wall, his gaze was chillingly detached. I couldn't tell if he was discussing art history or analyzing the chemical composition of a counterfeit layered over a canvas. He resembled a brutally precise machine, as if the entire realm of human emotion had been surgically excised."
Yoon Tae-hee stared indifferently at the ordinary couples passing by outside, biting her lower lip. To a woman who had spent her life measuring the world through the cold logic of capital, Lee Seo-han was an unmapped variable.
"He undoubtedly suspects us. He isn't treating the women Chairman Jeong arranges for him as personal connections or mere amusement. He views them as contaminated data invading his laboratory—as noise that must be filtered out."
"But sister, there is something even stranger," Seol-hee said, leaning her upper body deep across the table, her voice dropping an octave. "The way he looked at me just as our conversation was drawing to a close. It wasn't the cold suspicion or the twisted sense of possessiveness we expected. It was an entirely different sensation."
Tae-hee finally set down her teacup, locking her eyes straight onto Seol-hee.
"What did it look like? The Project Chronos data sheets we prepared—those were definitely the real deal. Dr. Baek Seo-woo prepared them with absolute precision."
Tae-hee slowly shredded the napkin on the table into tiny pieces. Though she was a woman who routinely held her composure even before masterpieces valued at tens of billions of won, her sharp reason was fracturing before an undecipherable entity like Lee Seo-han.
"The data Dr. Baek handed over was real. The moment Lee Seo-han verified it, he looked as though his breath had stopped entirely."
Seol-hee gripped her teacup, her hands trembling. The faint clatter of ceramic against metal betrayed her panic.
"But sister, that’s the part that makes my skin crawl. The moment he realized the data was genuine, every shred of suspicion in his eyes evaporated instantly."
"Evaporated?" Tae-hee asked, fiddling with the torn pieces of the napkin.
"It was absolute certainty. A pure, unadulterated trust without a sliver of doubt," Seol-hee swallowed hard. "Ordinarily, men avert their gaze to hide their lust or clumsily make a move, but Seo-han was different. He stared at me as if I were the sole master key to the very universe he hungered for."
Seol-hee pulled her jacket tighter around her chest, shrinking back. She was still trapped in the illusion that his bizarre gaze was lingering at the back of her neck.
"Sister, that wasn't the gaze of an appraiser looking for a counterfeit. It was... the eyes of a fanatic who had finally reclaimed a lost piece of himself. I don't believe for a second that it was an act. That kind of gaze cannot be performed by a human being."
"Trust? A fastidious man of his caliber worshiping you over a few sheets of paper? Seol-hee, it is highly probable that it’s a sophisticated deception designed to lower our guard so he can extract something larger."
Tae-hee shook her head, drawing a cold line through her thoughts. Yet, the image of Seo-han’s pristine, almost clinical trajectory flashed through her mind.
"Do you really think so? Sister, I saw it clearly. Once he verified that information, my human shell didn't register in his mind at all."
Seol-hee’s eyes wavered.
"Only the 'essence' he craved was reflected in his pupils. The terrifying thing is, that trust didn't allure me—it felt as though it was erasing my very existence."
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Tae-hee shifted her gaze back to the monochrome cityscape beyond the glass. A raw curiosity, one she had never experienced even when acquiring multi-million-dollar paintings, pricked at her sharp intellect.
"So, instead of stepping into the trap we laid out, he walked into our snare and transformed that very space into his own sanctuary."
For the first time, Tae-hee found herself questioning the fundamental premise of the operation.
Dr. Baek Seo-woo’s intention was clear. The Chronos data was bait. It was the most sophisticated leash engineered to drag a monster who had built an empire in the shadows out into the legitimate clinical framework.
Tae-hee had known the blueprint from the beginning. That was why she moved Seol-hee, unlocked the gallery's secret vault, and placed the real data Lee Seo-han could never turn away from right in front of him.
The problem was what came next.
When confronted with a leash, a man generally shows one of two responses—he either runs or tamely submits. But Lee Seo-han was neither.
He didn't fear the leash. Instead, he studied it with a cold, microscopic gaze, evaluating its texture and tension. He looked less like a man wondering who was trying to bind him, and more like an architect calculating exactly how far he could drag them using that very leash.
Tae-hee found that realization profoundly unsettling.
"Seol-hee, did you genuinely read personal goodwill in his eyes?" Tae-hee asked, setting her teacup down with a sharp clack. A heavy silence dropped onto the table.
"To call it goodwill feels far too heavy, sister. It resembled... the madness of a scholar who had finally discovered a missing dissertation after a decade of searching."
Seol-hee fidgeted with her slender fingers. The lounge lighting reflected unpleasantly over her meticulously manicured nails.
"What I threw out was bait—a failed project from decades ago that we had carefully packaged. Yet, when he saw it, he didn't mourn, nor did he ridicule it. He simply devoured it. As if he refused to let a single drop of data go to waste."
Tae-hee tapped the edge of the table rhythmically. The precise sound echoed through the quiet space.
"It’s as if a hunter laid bait, only for the beast to eat it while staring straight down the barrel of the gun. He didn't ask where the bait came from; he simply enjoyed the meal and kept his eyes fixed, waiting for the next course."
"Sister, that is exactly how I felt. Every line I prepared, the entire narrative of sophisticated seduction I had woven around art history, turned as thin as a sheet of paper in front of him."
Seol-hee’s voice fractured minutely. To a woman who had spent her life sculpting the desires of the elite, the experience of having her very 'existence' erased sent a chilling jolt through her.
"He isn't curious about who I am. He is only curious about what I possess. But it doesn't look like commercial greed—it resembles a pure, unadulterated thirst……"
Tae-hee stared at the dark liquid inside her teacup. Her reflection on the surface had frozen into a cold, still image.
"What if that failed clinical report contained the definitive parameter Lee Seo-han currently requires?"
Tae-hee’s low hypothesis rippled across the surface of the tea.
Seol-hee’s gaze drifted, entirely lost.
Tae-hee knew it as well. What they had thrown out was a relic of the past, discarded waste spat out by corporate capital. Yet, Lee Seo-han had radiated a bizarre vitality upon seeing it, as if he had found a flawless pearl buried in a heap of filth.
Tae-hee sank deep into her chair. As her fingertips slowly traced the rim of the cup, a deep furrow carved into her brow.
The suspicion that the value of the data Baek Seo-woo provided differed from the reality Lee Seo-han witnessed began to coil inside her mind like a snake. Between the gears of the trap engineered by the hunters, had the prey walked in on his own terms to build a fortress they couldn't even comprehend?
In the silence, perfectly sealed off from the roar of Yeongdong-daero, Tae-hee bit her lower lip, sensing that the temperature of the board she was manipulating was shifting violently.
At the same time.
Inside the very trap Yoon Seol-hee called a sanctuary, Lee Seo-han was quietly swallowing the data.
A long, crimson shadow stretched across the cool metal table of the laboratory. Seo-han calmly read through the Project Chronos report delivered by Yoon Seol-hee on his tablet screen.
It was no mere arrangement of metrics and graphs.
It was a chilling declaration of war, proving that they had already clearly mapped out the precision-targeting mechanism of the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonadal axis (HPG Axis)—the very core of the Ghost and Phantom compounds.
This was a caliber of data an independent researcher could never hope to acquire.
It was a long-term tracking record of unapproved hormone derivatives accumulated over years, backed by the sheer capital of a global big pharma and a worldwide clinical network.
The sweetest, most lethal trap designed to domesticate Seo-han by luring him out of the shadows and into a controlled system.
But Seo-han interpreted this fatal snare differently.
To him, it was the massive, sophisticated research grant he had been handed entirely for free.
In the darkened office, the blue glow of the tablet stained his expressionless face.
Seo-han’s pulse began to beat with a low, rapid rhythm. As his eyes swept down the core indicators of Chronos filling the display, there was no admiration—only pure, ruthless computation.
The chaotic mass of raw data rapidly began to shift its alignment inside his mind.
The clinical data of Project Chronos was dismantled into microscopic variables, rearranged to serve his needs.
They instantly combined with the definitive parameters to be proven in the clinical trials of Ghost, recombining toward the biological finality he craved.
The essence of the trap Baek Seo-woo designed was explicit.
To drag Lee Seo-han’s genius out of the realm of unrepeatable alchemy and reduce it to a standardized protocol that giant capital and systems could control and replicate.
Standardization meant stripping the technology of its singularity. It was a declaration of intent to strip the authority straight from Lee Seo-han as an individual.
Yet, as if mocking Baek Seo-woo’s arrogant intentions, Seo-han used the data he had been fed as the foundation for an impregnable wall.
He was fully prepared to rise from a recluse in the shadows to a sovereign of the legitimate framework.
Seo-han was already controlling their biological rhythms, having secretly supplied Ghost 2.0 to Jeong Hyun-jin and Jeong Ui-hyun.
Ghost 2.0 was fundamentally different from crude counterfeits.
The hydrophilic polymer coating delayed any structural analysis, while the newly engineered peptide sequence severed continuity with existing clinical drugs.
It was no simple refinement.
It was an intellectual fortress built to delay reverse-engineering, encase the compound in patents, and legally and technically block any external replication.
Therefore, the vast clinical records Baek Seo-woo flaunted yielded a paradoxical result.
It became the perfect guide, pre-clearing the hurdles Ghost 2.0 would inevitably face upon entering the institutional system.
The map Baek Seo-woo had offered was now laid bare across Seo-han’s desk.
In the dark, Seo-han looked down at the palm of his hand.
Inscribed there was a blueprint of youth that no amount of capital on earth could ever purchase.
Baek Seo-woo had supplied the map, but it was Lee Seo-han who would dictate the destination.