The Hannam-dong safe house.
Jeong Hyun-jin swirled an empty vial instead of a whiskey glass.
"Damn it."
The low muttered curse echoed through the hollow living room.
He had launched the analysis with absolute certainty, but Professor Ki Jong-ho’s report had utterly pulverized his arrogance. Despite grinding a world-class laboratory and its best minds into the dirt, the conclusion was despairing.
Hyun-jin squeezed the vial in his hand, his knuckles turning white.
Ki’s report was ultimately nothing more than a post-mortem confirmation of the exact trap Lee Seo-han had engineered.
The bastard had been toying with me from the start.
Seo-han’s expressionless face flashed before his eyes. The man had already known.
He knew that someone would eventually try to analyze it, and he knew exactly how the lab's instruments would fracture and filter the proteins.
It was no different from a spider coating its web with venom, perfectly anticipating that a rat would come to steal the blueprint of the trap.
Hyun-jin buried himself deep into the sofa.
Thanks to the drug, his body still felt charged with drive, focus, and the certainty that he could seize the world again, but his mind burned with a suffocating helplessness.
His gaze shifted to the document envelope sitting on the table—the report delivered after his matchmaking meeting with Attorney Kang Si-hyun.
Frankly, Hyun-jin had believed that a woman of Kang Si-hyun’s caliber would be the end of it.
Beauty, supreme intelligence, the title of S Group’s senior legal counsel, and an exceptionally powerful family background. Kang Si-hyun was the apex lioness of Korea's elite social ecosystem.
Even the most arrogant second-generation chaebols trod lightly and assumed a low posture in her presence. Hyun-jin himself remembered repeatedly failing whenever he tried to bend her sharp intellect and elegant arrogance.
He had been thoroughly convinced that someone like her would shake even the clinical, dry Lee Seo-han. At the very least, he expected her to draw out whatever desires lay hidden behind that ruthlessly rational facade.
But the contents of the report were the exact opposite of his calculations.
A perfectly drawn line.
Throughout the entire dinner, the two had shared no emotional exchange beyond that of business partners.
Si-hyun’s feedback was brief and flat: An intellectually intriguing individual, but nothing further.
Hyun-jin let out a hollow laugh.
Her polished phrasing of "nothing further" read, in reality, as an elegant packaging of her own rejection. Even though that proud woman had extended a hand first, Seo-han had lightly brushed it aside.
"Looks, family, pedigree, brains..."
Hyun-jin counted them off on his fingers.
In South Korea, the number of women whose credentials surpassed Kang Si-hyun’s could be counted on one hand.
If throwing a woman like her as a disposable asset yielded zero reaction, where on earth did that bastard's thirst actually lie?
Hyun-jin stared intently at the vial resting in his palm.
A man with no lack of material desires is difficult to handle. But it wasn't that Lee Seo-han lacked desire; he was a monster harboring a craving from an entirely different dimension.
A sudden chill traveled down Hyun-jin’s spine as the realization struck him: nothing his empire could offer would ever truly bind this man.
"What the hell does that bastard actually want?"
Every time the drug wore off, he would either have to wait for Seo-han to arrive or crawl to whatever location the man designated. Replicating the drug was out of the question; all that remained now was absolute submission.
Hyun-jin painfully realized that the retail empire and power he had painstakingly built were being slowly devoured by a clear liquid inside a tiny glass bottle.
He stared out the window into the deep darkness shrouding the safe house.
For a fleeting moment, he hallucinated that the distant city lights were the eyes of a massive laboratory engineered by Seo-han, watching his every move.
Bzzzz— Bzzzz—
A heavy vibration rumbled from deep within his trouser pocket.
Seo-han’s fingertips froze just as he was about to open the door of the German sedan he had just parked by the main road. The door handle felt ice-cold against his palm.
A name clearly illuminated the screen. [S Group Vice Chairman, Jeong Hyun-jin]
With a completely expressionless face, Seo-han hit the answer button.
Before he could even bring the smartphone to his ear, Hyun-jin’s signature, greasy laughter erupted through the speaker.
"CEO Lee, I trust you’re doing well?"
Hyun-jin’s voice was slick and unctuous. Beneath the veneer lay a subtle tremor, carefully reading Seo-han's mood.
It was the typical camouflage of a capitalist, testing the waters to see if Seo-han had caught onto his petty calculations and intended to cut off the supply.
Seo-han stared indifferently out the car window at the hazy, gray forest of skyscrapers drifting across Seoul.
His gaze remained fixed, his voice low and dry.
"Yes, I am doing well. What can I do for you, Vice Chairman?"
"I heard the last arrangement didn't quite work out... What seemed to be the issue? That friend of mine has such a rigid personality, I suppose she must have exhausted someone like you. I’ll make sure to give her a piece of my mind—"
"There is no need for that. What is or isn't to my liking is irrelevant. It isn't a matter of her shortcomings, but rather an issue regarding my own senses.
The rules are the rules; I simply wish to see the next card."
Seo-han’s definitive line caused Hyun-jin to lapse into silence.
The bizarre arrogance and overwhelming composure radiating from the biotech genius was something he could never get used to, no matter how many times they faced each other.
But right now, he was the desperate one.
Hyun-jin cleared his throat a few times before letting a pathetic, pre-packaged excuse slip carelessly from his lips.
"Right, if you say so, then that must be it.开, CEO Lee. I hate to impose, but I have a rather urgent favor to ask."
"Go ahead."
"Well, it was entirely my oversight, but the kitchen maid in charge of managing the safe house was cleaning out the refrigerator.
She mistook the three precious vials you delivered last week for some nutritional supplement samples and threw them all into the trash. I threw a total fit when I found out, but the sanitation workers had already collected them. There was nothing I could do."
It was a wretched, transparent lie.
For an excuse coming from the mouth of a titan ruling South Korea's retail sector, it was excessively clumsy.
The reality was obvious. They had desperately scrambled to break through the cloaking barrier Seo-han had engineered somewhere, tearing three vials of raw solution apart molecule by molecule.
They had likely attempted to analyze the structure using the powerful ionization beam of an LC-MS/MS system, only to tear their hair out when blocked by the serum shield Seo-han had strategically mixed in.
Unless they could clear that massive forest of protein signals, the amino acid sequence of the genuine active ingredient would remain forever veiled in fog.
Seo-han read the transparent context in real time but chose not to show it. He merely offered a calm, agreeable response.
"That is an unfortunate accident."
As Seo-han replied indifferently, Hyun-jin internally breathed a massive sigh of relief and carefully steered the conversation toward next week's arrangement.
"Exactly. It’s absolutely turning my stomach. So, CEO Lee, regarding the arrangement for this week, I’ll personally ensure it’s perfectly coordinated with someone strictly from the top tier.
But if it’s not too much trouble, when you come next week, could you prepare a month’s supply—four weeks' worth—all at once by the vial again? I’ll pay the entire cost upfront, just like last time."
Desperation bled through Hyun-jin’s voice, but the lingering greed of a capitalist still lurked deep within it.
Although Professor Ki Jong-ho had utterly failed, the stubborn obsession that they could run the SNU lab's ultra-high-resolution spectrometer one more time if a full four-week supply of undiluted, highly concentrated raw solution fell back into their hands had not completely died out.
Ki Jong-ho’s fatigue-ridden face, crying out, "A trace sample like a smudge on a needle tip won't do! We need a whole vial of raw solution to filter out this noise and reverse-engineer the compound!" must have flashed through Hyun-jin’s mind.
Seo-han had no intention of crushing that persistent delusion and futile challenge just yet.
As long as they failed to decipher the cloaking mechanism utilizing human serum, they would continue to slam their heads against the noise barrier, even if he handed them a hundred bottles.
Seo-han paused briefly to catch his breath, lowering his voice to a more flexible, yielding register.
"We can't hold you responsible for a kitchen maid's mistake, Vice Chairman. Very well. I will bring a replenished month's supply with me next week."
"Oh, is that so? Thank you, CEO Lee! You truly are a man of deep understanding."
Hyun-jin’s voice brightened instantly. But Seo-han’s next line delivered a light, jarring blow to the Vice Chairman's head.
"However, for this month's payment, keep the cash in the bag at the original 100 million won.
Consider it my way of offsetting the loss you suffered due to the kitchen mishap. As I told you before, I am not providing this drug to do business. I have no desire to break our trust over 100 million won."
The sound of breathing on the other end of the line stopped abruptly.
Within the mechanics of a chaebol family, money was synonymous with power and a tool for dominance.
Yet, this scientist was casually rejecting a massive sum of 100 million won, effectively shaming him under the banner of "trust" and "goodwill."
Hyun-jin felt goosebumps break out across his entire body. The calculator in his mind began to spin frantically.
This man could no longer be viewed as a mere drug broker trying to exploit him.
He was either a genius genuinely blinded by a pure, artistic stubbornness and rules, or a colossal monster looking right through something far greater—a realization that instilled an awe bordering on raw terror.
"...CEO Lee, you really are a terrifying individual. Thank you. For this week's arrangement, even if I have to grind my very soul to dust, I will personally serve up someone who perfectly matches your taste."
The call disconnected, and Hyun-jin, left completely alone in the Hannam-dong safe house living room, let out a deep exhale.
Sunk deep into the ultra-luxury Italian leather sofa, the subtle scent of agarwood drifted around his body. He toyed with a crystal glass filled with sparkling water instead of a cigarette.
His fingers still held the hard, restless strength Phantom had given him, but his mind was an intricate mess.
The thought that had occupied a corner of his mind just moments ago—the plan to run the analysis gear again with the new supply—had completely vanished as if it were a lie.
It was the result of a strange alignment between the despairing report Professor Ki had delivered over the past three days and the bizarre generosity Seo-han had just displayed.
He recalled Ki Jong-ho’s helpless eyes as he adjusted his reading glasses, muttering, "It’s analytically impossible... This isn't a new drug; it's a formulation engineered to deceive."
If he clumsily attempted to fabricate a replica, broke the trust with this genius PhD, and had the supply permanently cut off, he possessed no means to endure the whiplash of reality and the terror that would follow.
The sensation that made him believe he could seize the world again every morning before the mirror. The boiling drive. The vanished helplessness.
Losing that was a terror worse than death.
"Fine, let's abandon any thought of running the spectrometer again. For the next few months, I'll quietly accept whatever treatment Lee Seo-han provides and focus on preserving the drive Phantom awakens in me. I'll think about the bigger game later."
Hyun-jin lines the veins on his forearm, a satisfied smile settling onto his face.
Lee Seo-han, whom he had initially thought of as a hunting dog on a leash, had suddenly become an entity he dared not turn into an enemy.
Whether the man was a god or a devil remained to be seen.
But one thing was absolute: the hand resting on the switch to his desire belonged entirely to Lee Seo-han.