The Aura Management war room, usually a place of quiet confidence and surgical precision, felt like a tomb. It was three in the morning, but the entire senior staff was assembled, their faces pale and drawn in the cold glow of the massive display screens that lined the wall. The mood was funereal. Every screen showed a variation of the same nightmare: news alerts, screaming headlines, and the endlessly looping footage of Kwon Ji-hyuk being shielded by police as he was led from the Cheongdam bar.
The hashtag #KwonJiHyukDrugScandal was not just trending in Korea; it was a wildfire consuming social media feeds across Asia and North America. His manufactured fame had made him a global figure before he even debuted, and now that fame was turning him into a global pariah.
Go Min-young, her usual warmth and optimism completely extinguished, stood before the main screen, her voice flat with exhaustion. "The press is running with the worst possible narrative. They've already dug up photos of him drinking at clubs from his indie band days, before we even signed him. They're splicing them with pictures of the crime scene tape. They're not reporting a story; they're painting a portrait of a reckless, out-of-control party boy."
Director Oh Se-young stood by the window, her arms crossed, her expression like stone. She had been roused from her bed and had arrived looking like a general summoned to a losing battle. "Our primary investors for The Gyeongseong Alchemist have been calling my personal phone for the last hour," she said, her voice cutting through the quiet hum of the servers. "They're panicking. The broadcast station has already sent a preliminary notice, threatening to invoke the 'moral turpitude' clause in our contract. If he's officially charged, they have the right to cancel the broadcast and demand repayment of the production grant."
She turned from the window to face Yoo-jin, her gaze direct and unforgiving. "Our entire production, two years of work and hundreds of billions of won, is on the verge of collapse." She took a step forward, her voice dropping, laced with a bitter 'I told you so' that she was too professional to say outright. "This is the price of manufacturing a star out of nothing, Han Yoo-jin. You built a beautiful house on a foundation of sand, and the first tremor has brought it down."
Yoo-jin didn't flinch. Her anger was justified. His own failure was a cold, heavy weight in his gut—not just the scandal itself, but the failure of his Eye to give him a clear path forward. He was operating blind, relying on instinct for the first time in years.
"What do we have?" he asked, his voice steady, betraying none of his inner turmoil. He looked to the one person who dealt not in emotions or contracts, but in pure, hard data: Oh Min-ji.
His teenage spymaster stood at the head of the conference table, a secure laptop open before her. Her usual energetic confidence was replaced by a grim focus. "The situation is worse than it appears," she began, her words crisp and efficient.
"The bar, 'Le Jardin Secret,' is a well-known 'sponsor' hub. It's a place where high-powered men are introduced to aspiring starlets and trainees. The ownership is buried under three layers of shell companies, but the final layer has documented ties to the 'Millennium Gang,' one of the older organized crime syndicates in Seoul. The police will be under immense political pressure to close this case quickly and cleanly. Kwon Ji-hyuk, a high-profile celebrity with no connections, is the perfect scapegoat."
She clicked a key, and a new file appeared on the main screen: a driver's license photo of a young woman with a sad, pretty face. "The victim. She used the name 'Somi' at the bar, but her real name is Park Eun-sol. Twenty-three years old. She was a trainee at a small, bankrupt agency for four years. Dropped last year. She had massive debts to loan sharks, over a hundred million won. Her family lives in Busan and believed she was working as a waitress. She was desperate."
The story was tragically familiar. A girl chewed up and spit out by the industry's brutal machine. But Yoo-jin's instincts screamed that this was too neat, too perfectly cliché.
"This feels wrong," Yoo-jin said, thinking aloud. "A desperate girl, an actor on the verge of stardom, a shady bar... It's a setup. It's too clean." He locked eyes with his strategist. "Min-ji, forget her past. I need her last forty-eight hours. Bank accounts, phone records, social media DMs. Everything. Dig."
Min-ji looked up from her screen, her expression already grim. "I'm already in. Her finances are a disaster zone of high-interest loans and overdue payments, except for one thing."
She highlighted a single line item on a bank statement displayed on the screen. It was a wire transfer.
"Two days ago, Park Eun-sol received a single, untraceable deposit for fifty million won."
A deep, chilling silence fell over the war room. Fifty million won. That wasn't a sponsor's gift. It wasn't a loan. It was a payment. It was a mission fee.
Director Oh, her face paling, asked the critical question. "From who?"
"That's the problem," Min-ji said, her fingers flying across her keyboard. "The payment was routed through a series of offshore accounts and crypto tumblers. It's a professional money laundering network, designed to be completely anonymous. But they made one mistake. The initial transaction, the one that started the chain, was set up from a burner laptop that pinged a public wifi network at a café near Incheon Airport. It was online for precisely three minutes and twenty seconds."
"Can you trace the user?" Yoo-jin pressed, a knot of dread tightening in his chest.
"The user, no. The laptop, maybe," Min-ji replied, her voice low and intense. "The digital signature of that device—the specific, unique combination of its operating system, browser version, security protocols, and hardware ID... I've seen it before. It's a ghost."
Yoo-jin stared at her, the blood draining from his face as a horrifying suspicion began to dawn. "What ghost?"
Min-ji met his gaze, her young face old with the gravity of her discovery. "During the war with OmniCorp, Nam Gyu-ri had an off-the-books black ops team. They specialized in corporate espionage, honey traps, character assassination. They used a specific digital toolkit, a set of custom-configured burner devices with a signature that was like a fingerprint."
She pulled up a final file on the main screen. It was a split view. On one side was the device signature from the laptop that had paid the dead girl. On the other was a file from their OmniCorp intelligence archive, saved from their last war.
They were a perfect match.
"After we defeated OmniCorp and Nam Gyu-ri vanished," Min-ji explained, her voice barely a whisper, "most of their assets were liquidated or absorbed by Stellar. But some of their most sensitive tools, their digital ghosts... they were never accounted for. They disappeared."
She stood up, her eyes locked on Yoo-jin's, the final, horrifying piece of the puzzle clicking into place for everyone in the room. This wasn't a random tragedy. This wasn't Kwon Ji-hyuk's mistake. This was a declaration of war.
"This was a targeted assassination, CEO-nim," Min-ji said, her voice now cold and hard as steel. "Someone paid that girl fifty million won to get Kwon Ji-hyuk into that room, to take those drugs, and to die at his feet. Nam Gyu-ri may be gone, but someone who knows his methods—someone who has access to his most secret, vicious weapons—is still out there, playing his dirty games."