A quiet espresso bar tucked one block away from the bustling main avenue of the legal district—a hidden sanctuary known only to insiders.
Soft jazz melodies drifted over the cold marble table, yet the air within the space felt frozen, a few degrees colder than the actual room temperature.
Kang Si-hyun, a senior partner at Kim & Chang who would normally be drowning in piles of brief reviews and global M&A contracts, was uncharacteristically dazed.
She idly stirred her silver teaspoon, breaking the crema of her espresso.
Sitting across from her was Baek Seo-youn, scrolling through a global macroeconomics journal on her slim tablet.
Dressed in a pristine silk shirt completely devoid of logos and a pair of minimalist slacks, she couldn't hide the cold, intellectual aura radiating from her rigidly erect spine.
With her Oxford PPE background, her detached gaze viewed every phenomenon in the world through the lens of pure structure.
Seo-youn casually slid the screen away and tossed a low remark.
"That blind date Vice Chairman Jeong of S Group went to such lengths to push. It looks like you completely blew it. Your usual composure is practically nonexistent."
"It wasn't just blown, Seo-youn. Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I tasted a flavor of humiliation that makes my skin crawl."
Si-hyun clanked her teaspoon down roughly beside the cup.
Clink. The sharp metallic sound pierced the quiet air.
"Lee Seo-han, was it? Since Vice Chairman Jeong praised him so highly, I figured he was just another run-of-the-mill biotech founder.
A desperate man with a bit of tech, clinging to the Vice Chairman’s coattails because he ran out of cash."
Si-hyun pocketed her pride and continued.
"But the moment we sat across from each other at Artichoke in Cheongdam and I looked into his eyes, my instincts immediately told me that every assumption I had made was wrong.
I mean, can a person’s gaze truly be that overwhelming?"
"Overwhelming to you?"
Only then did Seo-youn’s fingers stop.
Who exactly was Kang Si-hyun? She was the youngest senior partner at the nation's top law firm—a natural power broker who controlled titans of industry using legal codes as her blueprints.
A man capable of overwhelming even her through sheer presence was a rarity, even if one searched through the most illustrious high-society bloodlines in the country.
"At first, my pride was wounded, so I deliberately sharpened my blade, targeting legal flaws like patent rights and governance defense.
Usually, when you throw those kinds of questions at someone, they stumble, stammer, or bluster to show off."
Si-hyun’s eyes shook violently.
"But the man didn't even blink. Instead, he sliced straight through the flaws in my logic and took complete control of the conversation.
He started talking about how the essence of both law and science ultimately boils down to control.
It sent shivers down my spine because it felt like he was dissecting my innermost thoughts. It wasn’t some lucky guess, either. He spoke with the absolute certainty of a man reviewing a future that had already happened."
"Interesting," Seo-youn murmured, setting her tablet down and picking up her glass.
She had never shown a shred of interest in the transactional, predictable banter of upper-class men who reeked of nothing but capital.
Yet, seeing the unshakeable Si-hyun this rattled was a refreshing stimulus.
"It's not interesting at all. Our conversation flowed perfectly. Intellectually speaking, he would have been a flawless partner.
But the look in his eyes said it all: 'You’re incredibly competent and refined, which makes you all the more tedious.'
It felt like he was erecting a massive wall right in front of me."
Si-hyun let out a hollow, bitter laugh.
"I have no idea what Vice Chairman Jeong has over him to make him drag someone like me out just to cater to that man’s whims.
Yesterday felt like being rejected in the most elegant, polite manner possible."
Unable to contain her lingering frustration, Si-hyun downed her lukewarm water in a single gulp.
Seo-youn picked up her tablet again, but for some reason, the English text on the screen no longer registered.
A startup founder personally introduced to a woman by a reigning chaebol chairman. A man named Lee Seo-han, who pushed aside even the flawless intellect of Kang Si-hyun as if it were nothing but a bore.
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That name began to lodge itself deep inside Seo-youn’s mind as a bizarre new variable.
"Lee Seo-han..."
Seo-youn murmured the name under her breath, bringing the cup to her lips.
A faint, cold smile played on her mouth.
It was the look of an explorer discovering an impregnable fortress, or a mathematician who had finally stumbled upon a perfect equation.
Still unable to calm her frayed nerves, Kang Si-hyun toyed with her purse strap aggressively.
Her neat, orderly existence—which demanded absolute symmetry and balance—had been fractured by the sudden anomaly known as Lee Seo-han.
"The man didn't even skim my background. He acted as if he already knew everything, or perhaps as if it wasn't even worth knowing.
It's the first time in my entire career that my title as a Kim & Chang partner was treated with such utter insignificance."
Seo-youn kept her eyes fixed on her tablet screen, responding in a detached yet pointed tone.
"Isn't that a natural result? What inspiration could a lawyer armed with nothing but the logic of capital and legal defense mechanisms possibly offer him?
You were nothing more than a flashy piece of wrapping paper sent by Vice Chairman Jeong to flaunt his own influence.
Seo-han wasn't curious about the contents inside; he saw straight through the intentions of the person who sent the package."
"Wrapping paper? Me?"
Si-hyun’s eyes narrowed sharply.
A chilling aura—the kind she used when breaking a witness in the courtroom—settled over the teacup, but Seo-youn didn't even flinch.
"Seo-youn, I am the most ironclad legal shield in this country. Calling my expertise 'wrapping paper' is an insult."
"A man like Lee Seo-han isn't looking for a simple shield."
Seo-youn finally shut her tablet completely and looked Si-hyun dead in the eye.
Beneath her transparent, unwavering gaze lay a cold rationality that stripped away Si-hyun's emotional agitation to judge the situation objectively.
"Maybe he's just looking for true love. It was a blind date, wasn't it?"
A freezing silence descended between the two women, as if an acoustic barrier had been thrown up around them.
Only the dull thud of a glass hitting the table weighed down the heavy air of the espresso bar.
Si-hyun’s pride-wounded sigh intermingled with Seo-youn’s silent ambition, filling the room with an invisible, suffocating tension.
Driving his seven-year-old Grandeur IG through the cold night landscape of the Riverside Expressway, Seo-han felt the calluses on his fingertips.
They were the scars and trophies of a genius who had gripped a pipette tens of thousands of times during his doctoral years.
Seo-han went over his conversation with Kang Si-hyun.
A partner at Kim & Chang. Cold, precise, and armed with airtight logic.
She was a woman possessing the most flawless specifications South Korea’s elite could offer, yet to Seo-han, she was merely a flashy piece of wrapping paper delivered by Jeong Hyun-jin.
She likely believed they shared a deep connection, but Seo-han knew the truth.
Kang Si-hyun had only attempted to calibrate his exterior and his circumstances; she hadn't cast a single glance toward the boundless abyss he stared into.
Another façade. A bitter, cynical smile played on Seo-han’s lips.
The cold dawn wind seeping through the cracks of the window scattered inside the cabin of the Grandeur.
Embedded within the firm tension of his grip on the steering wheel was the long history of a deeply isolated man.
He was neither the underground predator holding the leashes of the nation's topmost chaebols, nor the clean startup CEO suffering over a 6 billion won runway.
At twenty-six, still young and idealistic, he had been seized by a massive delusion: the naive calculation that true love would magically manifest only after he achieved absolute, flawless success.
Armed with that shallow conviction, he had isolated himself in the swamp of the laboratory for eight years, spanning his late twenties into his mid-thirties.
While the warmth of his youth withered beneath the faded fluorescent lights as he sharpened immunological mechanisms and molecular formulas, he believed that achieving success would bring the ultimate reward.
Yet, when he finally threw himself into the entrepreneurial trenches at thirty-five, success came with a different kind of curse.
The title of a brilliant PhD revered by the world and his material achievements paradoxically raised his standards for love to an astronomical height.
Worse, the cascade of 60 billion won in cumulative investments that followed was a double-edged sword.
The crushing weight of institutional capital suffocated him, transforming him into a blind racehorse incapable of focusing on any variable outside of work for another seven years.
As he neared the zenith of success, the neural pathways required to recognize true love had completely paralyzed.
Through that ruthless, desolate ice age, there had been only one person who stayed beside him.
From the middle of his graduate years all the way through Aether Bio, she was a colleague who had borne the brunt of his toxic perfectionism and hysteria for a decade.
While their relationship wasn't love, she was the only kindred spirit who looked toward the same boundless abyss and desolate future.
And recently, citing personal matters, she had drifted out of his orbit.
“I’m planning to study abroad. Let’s do a collaborative study when I get back.”
The void she left behind was far more massive than he had anticipated, shattering his entire worldview.
The shock of losing the only soul who understood him and looked in the same direction hit him hard.
Amidst that severe deprivation and emptiness, the forty-three-year-old Seo-han finally realized how futile his fifteen-year formula for success had been.
He had come to realize that little time remained to him, and a relentless yearning had taken root deep within his bones: to find, somehow, someone capable of looking in the same direction he did—a true love.
That was why he was now obsessively lashing out, holding the lives of the country's power brokers in his hands just to find someone who could share his vision.
The reason the flashy specifications and perfect wrapping paper offered by the chaebols couldn't rattle his cold senses was simple: those arrogant elites lacked the eyes to see the direction of the world he had spent his lifetime chasing.
The Grandeur glided into the crimson brake lights of the Riverside Expressway's traffic jam.
Accelerating toward the skyscraper forest of Gangnam, Seo-han caught his breath and sharpened his gaze.
If he used the hands of the two chaebol chairmen who were already semi-enslaved by his needles, he could easily have 45 billion won injected into his official corporate accounts immediately.
But Seo-han had absolutely no intention of mixing his underground operation with his legitimate business.
The exact second a conglomerate's capital became entangled in Aether Bio's equity structure, the eyes and ears of predators would violate the company's sanctuary.
To them, showing the mask of a cash-strapped entrepreneur desperate for a place on the capital stage was the only sensible move for someone as obsessed with control as he was.
The upcoming 45 billion won investment round at Teheran-ro was no begging session. It was a crusade fought in plain sight.
A stage to dismantle the assumptions of arrogant analysts attempting to undervalue Aether Bio using the vocabulary of overwhelming data, and to plant the flag of his academic essence.
The more desperate and heavy his underground struggle to find the real thing became, the more flawlessly he had to execute his performance in the trenches above.
Beneath the crimson reflections dancing across the Han River, the gears of Seo-han's grand design continued to turn—slowly, relentlessly, and without mercy.