The call was made. The favor was asked. The gears of old power, greased by wealth and influence, began to turn. An hour later, word came back through a discreet channel: Han Yoo-jin had a meeting. Seven AM. Before the prosecutors arrived for the day. He had his five minutes.
With the meeting secured, a new, more difficult problem presented itself. What, exactly, was he going to say?
He paced the length of the anonymous office, a caged animal in a sterile box. Kwon Ji-hyuk was no longer just a frightened artist. He was a compromised asset, his mind poisoned by a master manipulator. He had been fed a compelling, life-saving lie by Ryu, a narrative that painted Yoo-jin as the villain and offered an escape from the crushing weight of his own guilt. Simple reassurances of 'trust me' and 'we'll get through this' would be useless. They would sound like the desperate platitudes of the very man he'd been told had betrayed him.
Yoo-jin tried to game out the conversation, to run simulations in his head, but his Producer's Eye was useless. The system could analyze data, predict market trends, and calculate scandal probabilities. It could not compute the complex alchemy of fear, shame, and betrayal currently brewing in Ji-hyuk's soul. He was flying blind into the most important negotiation of his life.
He stopped pacing and stood before the monitor displaying Nam Gyu-ri's smug, waiting face. He hated what he was about to do. It felt like an admission of a deeper failure, a surrender to a darker philosophy. But he was out of options.
He took a breath. "I need your advice, Gyu-ri."
A slow, delighted smile spread across Gyu-ri's face. He leaned closer to his camera, his eyes gleaming with intellectual fervor. He was a disgraced professor being asked to lecture on his favorite subject. "Finally," he purred. "The great Han Yoo-jin admits he needs a lesson in the grubby art of human manipulation."
"You're a master of it," Yoo-jin said, the words tasting like ash. "You know how to get inside people's heads. How to twist their perceptions. I'm going in there tomorrow morning. What do I say to him?"
Gyu-ri's smile widened. He was in his element. "First, you must understand your mistake. You think of people as assets, as logical pieces on a chessboard. That is why Ryu beat you. Ryu understands that people are instruments to be played. And right now, Ji-hyuk is an instrument of pure terror and shame."
He leaned forward, his voice dropping into the intimate, compelling tone of a master giving a secret lesson. "So, rule number one: do not you dare go in there as his CEO. Do not go in as his protector or his savior. He doesn't trust that man anymore. In his mind, that man is his tormentor. Ryu has already painted that portrait for him. If you try to argue with it using logic or evidence, you will only reinforce his belief that you are a liar."
"Then what do I do?" Yoo-jin asked, his frustration mounting.
"You don't fight the narrative," Gyu-ri said, his eyes alight with manic glee. "You hijack it. You go in there not as his boss, but as his co-conspirator. His fellow victim. You don't deny the existence of a conspiracy; you confirm it, but you reframe it so brilliantly that he has no choice but to believe you."
Gyu-ri began to lay out the twisted script, his words painting a dark, compelling strategy. "You walk in there, you look him in the eye, and the first thing you say is, 'I know they got to you. I know what they offered you.' You immediately validate his secret experience. Then you say, 'They told you I was behind it all, didn't they? That I set you up.' When he doesn't deny it, you lean in and you tell him, 'They told you part of the truth.'"
"You have to give him a new enemy," Gyu-ri explained, his voice hypnotic. "A bigger, more terrifying, more monstrous enemy than you. You have to make him feel that you and he are the only two people in the entire world who understand the real truth, that you are both trapped together against a monstrous third party. You tell him Ryu's name. You tell him Ryu paid the girl. You tell him Ryu staged the gas leak. You make Ryu the shadowy puppet master behind every single moment of his suffering."
"And what if he doesn't believe me?" Yoo-jin asked.
"Ah, but that's the beautiful part," Gyu-ri said with a laugh. "The truth is your weapon here. You have the advantage of actually being honest about Ryu's role. But that's not enough. You need to give him more than a new villain. You have to give him a new motivation. Hope."
Gyu-ri paused for dramatic effect. "But not the hope of acquittal. That's too abstract. Too legalistic. You must offer him the promise of revenge. It is a much more powerful, much more primal motivator for a man who has lost everything. You look him in the eye and you say, 'Stick with me, and we will not just survive this. We will find Ryu, and we will burn him to the ground for what he did to you.' You don't offer him freedom; you offer him vengeance. You turn his despair into a weapon and you aim it for him."
Yoo-jin listened, a feeling of profound sickness rising in his gut. It was a strategy of pure psychological poison. It was built on lies of omission, on emotional manipulation, and on channeling a young man's trauma into a focused, burning hatred. It was also utterly, undeniably brilliant. It would work.
Ahn Da-eun, who had been listening to the entire exchange from the sofa in the corner, finally stood up. Her face was a mask of cold, quiet disgust. She had come to watch him fight a war. She had not expected to watch him summon a demon for advice on how to corrupt a soul.
"So that's your plan?" she asked, her voice quiet but shaking with repressed fury. "That's how you're going to 'save' him? You're going to go into that room and turn him into a weapon? You're going to fill his head with more conspiracies and twisted promises of revenge? You're going to poison what little is left of his spirit, just so you can win?"
Yoo-jin turned to face her, the exhaustion and moral compromise of the last forty-eight hours etched onto his face. He looked haggard, cornered, and stripped of all his former righteousness.
"If it keeps him out of a prison cell for the next ten years," he said, his voice heavy with a terrible resolve, "and if it saves this company from being destroyed by a monster, then yes. I will."
The words fell into the space between them, a final, definitive statement. Da-eun looked at him, and any lingering trace of the hero she had once seen in him was gone, replaced by the image of a stranger. A cold, pragmatic man who had decided that the only way to fight a monster was to become one himself.