Account balances shrinking by hundreds of millions of won every month.
Every morning upon waking, the sheer pressure of those bleeding numbers boring into his consciousness triggered two distinct hallucinations.
A fade to black.
In a dark void where all senses were severed, Seo-han’s consciousness awoke as it unfurled two massive, contrasting blueprints in sequence.
The first was an empire of cold, unforgiving numbers.
Inside a state-of-the-art laboratory bathed in cool blue lighting, clinical trials conducted under absolute standards and total control demonstrated perfect statistical significance without a single margin of error.
Passing the regulatory guidelines, the sequence ended with the spectacular listing of ‘Aether Bio’ on the massive electronic ticker of the stock exchange.
It was the culmination of flawless business success, where global venture capital and Big Pharma slid multi-trillion-won deal sheets through the chilly mists of Boston just to secure a formal licensing agreement.
Yet, to Seo-han, the zenith of that public listing and capital was merely a grand altar meant to initiate his true dream.
The screen warped, finally arriving at the second dream.
It was a domain that bloomed upon the graves of capitalist greed.
A transparent nanogram-scale solution falling into a waiting 50mL Falcon tube.
The moment that unofficial substance permeated the cell membrane, the interlocking cogs of a massive epigenetic clock began to spin in reverse.
The end of the absolute law known as aging.
A vision where the most powerful rulers of South Korea knelt at his feet simply to beg for a few milliliters of the compound.
Beneath the biological mechanisms he engineered, both the legal codes written by man and the fluid rules of nations became nothing more than a childish scribble.
It was the ultimate dominion, the ultimate control.
But at the peak of that brilliant mechanism, his dream was always violently ripped apart by the harsh numbers of reality.
An account balance melting away by hundreds of millions of won every month to fund massive clinical trial expenses and research salaries.
Having burned his bridges by cutting his own CEO salary in half, the ruthless, ticking countdown of Aether Bio’s lease on life hammered through his neural pathways like a flashing red alarm.
Only at the precipice of ruin did the brutally clear awakening effect take hold.
"Sigh."
Seo-han opened his eyes, drawing a sharp, ragged breath.
4:50 AM.
A heavy, suffocating silence locked down the cramped studio apartment as the crisp dawn air seeped through the cracks of the window.
The cold sweat soaking his entire body was chilled by the draft of the air conditioner.
Seo-han checked the smartphone sitting at the head of his bed. The display was completely devoid of notifications.
Six billion won left in the account. Eighteen months of runway.
The IPO he had seen in his dream. The defeat of aging.
The gulf between that vision and reality was rapidly collapsing into cold data.
To the outside world, Aether Bio was a rising biotech company that had raised a total of 60 billion won in investment, and Lee Seo-han was one of the biotech industry's rising stars.
In reality, his personal finances were in shambles.
The 6 billion won stamped on the corporate account was locked capital, restricted exclusively for clinical trials and research development.
Seo-han’s personal assets were isolated within a brutal cascade of compounding crises.
It had begun years ago, when he took out every personal loan he could get to clean up the wreckage of his parents' sudden bankruptcy.
Then came the day when the company's core founding researchers and early employees—who had joined out of pure faith in Aether Bio—demanded to redeem their private equity principal.
To protect the company's core human capital, Seo-han cut his own salary in half and paid back their principal out of his own pocket.
Even the biotech stocks he had hoarded as a final baseline defense were utterly rejected by the market.
Capital had flowed aggressively toward the AI and semiconductor boom, leaving Seo-han’s personal portfolio deep in the red.
The terrible irony that the head of a corporation wielding tens of billions in capital had to do his morning workouts on the worn floor of a cramped studio apartment was the logical outcome of the cold-blooded rules of the capital market.
He stepped slowly out of bed.
His solid, unyielding forty-three-year-old frame rose quietly in the darkness.
Just as he did every single morning to silence the suffocating pressure of his bank balance and the noise of his grand dreams, Seo-han placed his hands flat against the worn floorboards.
One, two, three...
One hundred million won from Jeong Hyun-jin. Forty-five billion won he still had to raise.
To assemble that massive funding round, Seo-han slammed his foot on the accelerator, pushing his body to the limit to the rhythm of sweat droplets striking the floor.
One hundred.
His chest hit the floor, pushing past the chill of the vinyl and breathing out a scorching heat.
His lungs expanded to the point of tearing before expelling a ragged breath like a thunderclap.
Staring at the sweat pooling across the worn floor, he meticulously audited his internal ledger against the violent hammering of his heart.
By now, the stacks of fresh banknotes hidden beneath his bed had grown to 300 million won.
It was the physical weight of Jeong Hyun-jin's rekindled ambition converted into cash.
An ordinary person would have screamed at him to immediately dump this lump sum into Aether Bio’s bleeding corporate accounts, but even as his vision blurred, Seo-han smiled coldly at such a simplistic idea.
The monthly cash burn for research and payroll exceeded 300 million won. The 100 million won he received from Hyun-jin was little more than ten days' worth of breathing room.
Furthermore, Aether Bio’s ledgers—entangled in 60 billion won of institutional capital—rested beneath the microscopes of auditing agencies like a biological specimen.
The moment 300 million won of untraceable cash touched the balance sheet, the razor-sharp blades of the Financial Supervisory Service and the National Tax Service would slice straight through the company’s jugular.
He could hardly confess to the auditors that the cash was a premium collected for maintaining the engine of the S Group Vice Chairman's newfound drive and ambition.
The cash flowing from Hyun-jin had to remain entirely in the shadows—a private war chest earmarked solely for Seo-han’s personal research.
The task of securing the next 45 billion won round was etched into his mind with crystal clarity.
Seo-han’s first survival strategy to stretch the runway was to scrape together every government grant within reach.
The moment he arrived at the office, his sharp eyes audited the documents his researchers had spent the night compiling. If it was a project notice targeting small ventures, he fired off applications even for the smallest pittance.
As a result, he successfully locked down over 500 million won in government research grants in the first half of the year alone.
Compared to the catastrophic expenses of their primary trials, it was a modest sum, but it was a solid defensive maneuver that deferred their internal cash burn by replacing payroll and reagent costs with state funds.
But a 500 million won state grant was merely a desperate stopgap to buy time.
To truly change the game, Seo-han scheduled consecutive Business Development (BD) meetings with global Big Pharma.
Behind the video conference monitors, the eyes of the Asia-Pacific executives representing multinational pharmaceutical giants were seasoned and calculating.
Seo-han presented the superiority of Aether Bio’s core pipeline—the IL-2 variant data—and their platform technology with flawless English diction.
Their reactions were enthusiastic, but the final verdict invariably devolved into the standard, cold-blooded response of the biotech industry.
"This is highly impressive data, Doctor Lee. However, the sample size is still too limited to discuss a formal license-out agreement.
We expect your Phase 2 clinical data to accumulate further to demonstrate a clearer safety and efficacy profile. Let's schedule the next meeting as soon as you secure the follow-up data."
To generate the depth of Phase 2 interim data that Big Pharma demanded, he had to hold out for at least another eight months.
Eight months.
Once that time elapsed, the cash remaining in the corporate accounts would plummet from 6 billion won to under 3 billion won.
The scenario where the company would bleed out before it could prove its flawless data drew itself vividly before Seo-han’s eyes.
There was no room left to retreat.
Seo-han finally threw himself onto the brutal battlefield of investor relations (IR) to draw the country’s topmost venture capitals into a single room.
It was a punishing round designed to validate a pre-money valuation of 130 billion won and secure the promised 45 billion won.
During a tedious, hyper-intense week, Seo-han shuttled between Teheran-ro and Yeouido, facing a total of six major VCs packed with domestic and foreign investment analysts.
The first and second sessions were with the senior fund managers of Korea Investment Partners and LB Investment, the reigning titans of the domestic biotech investment sector.
Inside a conference room overlooking the skyscraper forest of Teheran-ro through floor-to-ceiling glass, Seo-han met them dressed in a perfectly tailored dark navy suit.
Specialized in chasing the scent of capital, they instinctively registered the massive potential of Aether Bio’s IL-2 variant, yet they attempted to crush Seo-han by weaponizing an entirely different logic.
They subtly brought up the brutal 'Biotech Winter' currently plaguing the capital markets and the frozen state of the IPO market.
"CEO Lee, this isn't three years ago when liquidity was overflowing.
The science is compelling, but with market sentiment at rock bottom, a pre-money valuation of 130 billion won is excessively aggressive. Given the risk premium, a valuation adjustment is unavoidable."
Our monopoly ends overnight.
It was the calculated math of seasoned capitalists utilizing the advantage of time, waiting for Aether Bio’s bank accounts to run dry so they could strip away equity at a bargain price.
The third and fourth sessions that followed carried an entirely different atmosphere.
The analysts from InterVest and Daily Partners—VCs specializing exclusively in medical investments—waited for Seo-han like surgeons holding cold scalpels.
Having abandoned university hospital professorships and specialist medical careers to leap into the capital markets, they obsessed over the biological mechanisms of the pipeline rather than financial metrics.
Their eyes reflected the arrogant attitude of judges intent on verifying the defiance of a new breed of humanity, rather than showing the mutual respect due to a fellow scholar.