Two days passed. Han Yoo-jin remained a ghost in his own company, a king in self-imposed exile. He did not emerge from the office. The tray of food Go Min-young had left was taken in, but no one saw him. He communicated only through terse, one-line emails to Min-ji, approving only the most critical, mundane expenses.
Aura Management, for the first time in its existence, was adrift. Without Yoo-jin's decisive, near-omniscient leadership, the gears of the company began to grind. Decisions piled up. A promising new composer needed a contract finalized. The marketing team needed a strategy for the fallout from the concert. The investors for The Gyeongseong Alchemist, spooked by the scandals, were demanding a new series of emergency meetings.
The team tried to hold things together. Min-ji, the digital prodigy, found herself drowning in corporate governance she didn't understand. Kang, the man of action, was useless in a war now being fought in boardrooms and on financial news channels. Go Min-young, the company's heart, tried to maintain morale, but her reassurances sounded hollow even to her own ears. They were a body without a brain.
And their enemies were not sleeping. The media, having exhausted the story of the now-hunted "Ryu," was starting to ask pointed questions about Aura's stability. Whispers of Han Yoo-jin's "breakdown" were beginning to circulate. Across the city, Chairman Choi was watching, waiting, a patient predator ready to pick over the bones of his rival's collapsing empire.
On the third day, the power vacuum became untenable.
Nam Gyu-ri, from his secure, well-appointed lair, summoned Oh Min-ji and Kang for a video conference. He appeared on the screen looking rested, powerful, and completely in his element. Dressed in a sharp, tailored blazer, he looked every bit the ruthless CEO he had once been. He had thrived in the chaos while Aura floundered.
"Good morning," he began, his voice smooth and commanding. "I trust you've enjoyed the past few days of rudderless confusion."
Min-ji glared at the screen, her dislike for him a palpable force. Kang stood behind her, his arms crossed, his face an unreadable mask of stone.
"Our great leader has, it seems, abdicated his throne," Gyu-ri continued, a cruel smile playing on his lips. "He has locked himself away to contemplate the existential nature of his own fraudulence. It's all very poetic. But the war, as you may have noticed, is not over. Ryu, the mad artist, is still out there, planning his next masterpiece. And Chairman Choi, the wounded old lion, is still sharpening his claws, waiting for the perfect moment to strike."
He leaned forward, his gaze intense, speaking to them not as a subordinate ally but as a new authority. "Aura needs a leader. Not a moral compass or a strong right arm. It needs a wartime consigliere. It needs a strategist who can think like the monsters at the gate."
He let the implication hang in the air before laying out his proposal, his voice a seductive whisper of pure, uncut pragmatism.
"Yoo-jin is broken," he said bluntly. "He needs time to rediscover whatever shred of a man exists under the wreckage of that machine he had in his head. Fine. Let him have it. But in the meantime, you need me. You are brilliant children playing a game of chess against grandmasters of savagery. You cannot win. I can."
He spread his hands wide. "Let me take temporary operational control of this company. Not as CEO. Think of me as a consultant. A specialist. Give me the authority to act, to make decisions. I will hunt Ryu, and I will do it using methods that would make your stomachs turn. I will anticipate and dismantle Chairman Choi's corporate attacks before they are even launched. I will use my ruthlessness, my contacts, my complete and utter lack of moral scruples, to protect this company and its assets."
He smiled that terrible, charming smile again. "I will be the serpent that guards the garden while the gardener is away. And when the king returns—if he returns—I will hand him back the keys to a kingdom that is not only intact, but stronger than ever."
The proposal was as horrifying as it was logical. Min-ji and Kang were appalled by the very idea of it. To give this monster, this disgraced, treacherous man, the keys to the kingdom Yoo-jin had built? It was unthinkable. A betrayal of everything Aura was supposed to stand for.
But they were also pragmatic. They knew, with a sickening certainty, that he was right. They were out of their depth. They had no idea how to fight enemies like Ryu and Chairman Choi. Gyu-ri was their only weapon, a vial of poison they could either drink themselves or let the enemy force down their throats. They were trapped.
The scene shifted back to Yoo-jin's locked office. He was no longer staring at the wall. He was standing by the window, looking out at the city, his expression no longer blank and empty. The storm in his mind had not passed, but the catatonic shock had given way to a deep, hollow exhaustion. He looked broken, but there was a flicker of something new in his eyes, something that hadn't been there before. It wasn't the cold certainty of the Producer's Eye, nor was it the raw panic of its absence. It was resolve. A quiet, human decision.
He turned from the window, his movements slow but deliberate. He walked to his desk and picked up his personal phone, scrolling through the contacts until he found a name he had not called in years, a name that felt like it belonged to another life.
He pressed the call button. The phone rang once, twice, connecting across continents and time zones.
A crisp, professional voice answered, laced with a faint, almost undetectable note of surprise. "Hello?"
"Ji-young," Yoo-jin said, his own voice sounding foreign to him, stripped of all its usual confidence and authority. "It's me. It's Yoo-jin."
There was a pause on the other end of the line. He could picture her, his estranged sister, in her sleek London office, the CEO of Aura Global, the queen of the kingdom he had given her as both a punishment and a gift.
"Yoo-jin?" she said, her voice cautious. "Is everything alright? I've been reading the news. It sounds… chaotic over there."
He closed his eyes, leaning his head against the cool glass of the window. He was rejecting the dark, easy path offered by Gyu-ri. He was rejecting the monstrous part of himself he had been forced to embrace. He was instead reaching for the one person in the world who knew him before the machine, the one person who had seen him as just a man.
"No," he said, his voice cracking with a raw, painful vulnerability he hadn't shown anyone in a decade. "No, nothing is alright."
He took a shaky breath, the confession a release of a pressure that had been building for days.
"I need… I need your help, Ji-young. I've made a terrible mess of things. I don't know who I am anymore."