At first, they sedated him like an animal.

He had collapsed in the middle of a board meeting, screaming that he could hear Min-Jun crying through the air vents. It took five grown men to restrain him — not because he fought back, but because his body had become so heavy, so bloated, so inert with despair that he was like dead weight.

They dragged him back to the estate in silence.

And there, in the shadowed elegance of his childhood bedroom — a room still decorated like a billionaire teenager’s haven, untouched since Harvard — they injected him with something strong enough to still his mind.

When he woke up, everything had changed.

His father had taken over.

Kang Tae-Joon did not rage. He did not shout. That was not his nature. His silence was surgical. Efficient. Terrifying.

“You are broken,” he said, standing at the foot of Dae-Hyun’s bed like a general addressing a failed soldier. “But you are still a Kang. You will be useful. Or you will be discarded.”

Therapists were brought in. Not gentle ones. Not soft-voiced healers trained in grief counseling. No — these were government-level specialists in reconditioning trauma victims. Former intelligence operatives. Psychiatric architects who knew how to break a mind in order to rebuild it.

They did not let him see Soo-Ah.

They fed him nutrient IVs. Began a strict physical regimen. Hooked his brain to sleep-stim machines. They rewired his circadian rhythm, tore down his addictions, peeled him like a rotten fruit until nothing was left but obedience.

At first, he wept. Quietly. In secret. Then less. And less. And then—

Nothing.

Six months later, the staff didn’t recognize him.

The boy was gone.

In his place stood something other — a man carved from grief, every edge sharpened, every ounce of fat burned away like sacrificial flesh. He was lean now. Not merely slim, but sculpted — stark in his beauty, like a statue of a forgotten god. Pale, haunted eyes. High cheekbones. A mouth that never smiled.

He had shed eighty pounds in silence. Never complained. Never asked. Never looked in the mirror.

He was stunning.

And he did not care.

He spoke rarely. When he did, his voice was level, low, clinical. He never raised it. He never argued.

“Good morning, Father,” he would say with the air of a soldier reporting for duty.

He sat through board meetings like a phantom — utterly composed, dispassionate, efficient. He absorbed everything, remembered everything. Analysts began whispering that he was a prodigy. His Harvard record — previously dismissed as bought grades and nepotism — was unearthed and reexamined. Perhaps the boy had always been intelligent, just hidden behind softness, gluttony, childishness.

Now, he was a weapon.

But beneath that still surface, he was rotting.

Because he had not changed to heal. He had changed to gain access.

He did not care about Kang Group. He did not care about profit margins or quarterly growth or hostile takeovers. Every time he walked into a boardroom, he saw it only as a hallway that led to one door:

Soo-Ah.

She was still in the hospital, her body maintained by the most advanced life-support systems on Earth. He was finally allowed to visit again — once per week, supervised. He would sit beside her in silence, perfectly still, hands gloved, expression blank. But inside, he was howling.

“Look what I’ve become for you,” he whispered once, brushing a strand of hair from her forehead.
“Do you see me now? I’m not the useless boy who made you leave that morning. I’m not the coward who stayed behind.”

She never stirred.

But he believed — no, he knew — that some part of her could still hear him.

He never dated again.
Never touched alcohol.
Never spoke of Min-Jun.

Not because he didn’t care — but because he could not afford to.

He was no longer allowed the luxury of grief.

He had trained it into ambition.

And in private, he began to build something.

A secret project. Whispered only to the AI that he coded himself. Locked inside firewalled mainframes and cold rooms. A digital shrine to resurrection. A dream called Project Persephone.

Because if heaven would not return Soo-Ah to him…

Then he would build one with his own hands.