# Chapter 224
## 19. And So the Pupa Becomes a Butterfly (Part 2)
The automatic door opened with barely a sound. Like the man’s footsteps.
In fact, everything in this space was like that. A vast tomb-like silence filled the air completely. The excessively clean, bright interior rather strongly reinforced the desolate impression.
Perhaps it was the man’s taste. The arrogance that filled him from head to toe bore the light of contempt more strongly than ostentation. A pervasively proud mindset of someone raised as a genius, deeply instilled with a sense of being the chosen one, not considering others as human beings like himself—preferring to be alone rather than sharing space with those he considered inferior.
It undoubtedly resembled him, walking alone like a ghost.
The man who had been striding unhesitatingly through the spacious room stopped. He was in front of a bed placed starkly in the middle of the room.
No, calling it a bed was somewhat misleading. The soft sheet neatly spread over the waist-high platform seemed plausible enough, but the thick, sturdy glass cover placed over it had tight margins fitted to the size of the person lying there. The height was so low that it would be impossible to sit up in bed.
It seemed designed on the premise that such a thing would never happen.
Inside, a man lay in a formal position with electrodes attached all over his body. The electrode wires connected beneath the bed sheet and led to external facilities. The figures displayed on several monitors indicated that the facility was functioning normally.
Taejin looked down at Iyeon asleep in the bed. The body, though thin, had appropriate muscle tone from regular living and was only slightly rising with very faint breaths. As he quietly reached out to stroke the glass case, it felt so cold that he couldn’t sense the warmth of the person inside at all. Taejin’s lips suddenly curled up as he quietly savored that sensation.
Finally caught.
At last!
His nephew remained naive and stupid even after many years. Drugging the unsuspecting Iyeon with a sleeping anesthetic and moving him here had been so easy it almost brought tears to his eyes.
Of course, he didn’t intend to kill him. Only a fool would kill the goose that lays golden eggs. He deserved to be kept alive forever.
So Taejin was extracting gi-ryeok while Iyeon slept. Since extracting too much at once might kill him, he was slowly transferring the golden eggs from that small body over a long period.
So that after emptying it completely, he could make new golden eggs again.
When there’s barely any gi-ryeok left in the body, even after waking, one cannot properly use their ability. Since a superpower is also a type of physical ability, one cannot exert great power when unable to move a finger. Taejin remembered how his former colleagues had restrained many superhumans in this way.
The bed where Iyeon lay had all the basic life support equipment for critically ill patients. It was a facility no less impressive than any major university hospital in the country. Not only the air circulating inside but also nutrients and hygiene were provided without fail. It could well be called a luxurious life.
Well, lying down forever would cause other physical abilities to atrophy, but it wouldn’t endanger his life. He only needed to keep breathing. The rest was not Taejin’s concern.
The owner of the bed could never escape from it.
So it would be more correct to call it a coffin rather than a bed.
After leaving the room where Iyeon was, Taejin walked through a corridor with a complex structure toward another room.
A large bookcase and numerous cabinets, along with a computer placed on a spacious desk. It was a properly established office that was hard to believe had been set up in such a short time.
Taejin went straight to the desk and turned on the computer. After clicking the mouse a few times, a phone connection was established immediately, as if it had been waiting. Taejin asked in a light tone.
“How’s the situation?”
[It’s quiet.]
If asked to name the most troublesome entity in his plan, it would undoubtedly be Je Sano. The greatest headache for Taejin, who had terribly poor timing.
To be honest, he hadn’t expected Sano to be this cumbersome.
He was a researcher who had observed Je Sano for a very long time. The scope of observation was not limited to gi-ryeok or superpowers alone. To examine all conditions enabling the manifestation of superpowers, Taejin analyzed not only Sano’s physical information but also his personality and tendencies. He was confident in his understanding of Je Sano as a person.
But even for him, Sano’s special affection for Iyeon was an incomprehensible realm. The Je Sano that Taejin had come to understand wasn’t capable of such feelings. He not only felt no need for understanding others or social interaction, but the concept of affection was also very vague to him. It wasn’t that he wanted to but couldn’t. He simply didn’t do it.
If Sano had come to like Iyeon so much after just those few days of companionship, then Taejin and the other researchers should have been treated like parents. At that time, Sano was a key test subject in the laboratory, and in human experiments, the voluntary cooperation of the subject was paramount. No researcher treated Sano carelessly. Rather, everyone tried to win his favor.
It’s also a fact that all those attempts utterly failed.
The research Taejin conducted wasn’t deceived by Sano’s schemes or plots. The personality analysis of Sano based on his communication activities had very high accuracy. Even if there were exceptions, the basic information wasn’t wrong.
And as most people well know, humans don’t change so easily.
[A colleague from the office showed signs of looking for him, but it will be a wasted effort. They didn’t seem to know it was related to us.]
Taejin quietly arranged the information calmly recited by the person on the other side of the screen and the facts so far.
It had been about 24 hours since he brought Iyeon here. Given Iyeon’s personality, he wouldn’t have told others about his business with Taejin in detail, so the possibility of a civilian work colleague figuring out the situation and finding Iyeon converged to zero. Even if they were a highly skilled hacker, the situation wouldn’t change. How could they find something when they didn’t even know what to look for? The same applied to his other acquaintances.
Perhaps except for Jin Heesu, who had impudently dared to conspire with Iyeon to deceive him.
“What about the young master’s side?”
[Also quiet. I don’t know how much information he has been shared, but there’s a high possibility that he doesn’t know the current situation. It seems the cause is minimizing contact for security reasons.]
Iyeon’s likely course of action after learning about the terrain setting function was obvious. Either come directly to Taejin or contact the Superpower Management Office. When Taejin realized that Iyeon was pretending to do the former while actually doing the latter, he was even proud of his nephew’s growth. Though it was still within Taejin’s palm.
Assuming Iyeon and Heesu had made contact, their plan was also vividly clear. He already knew that Taejin and his mother had an amicable relationship, and would try to use this to bring down his mother, Jin Jeongwon.
Not only had Heesu’s relationship with his mother, Jeongwon, been consistently poor recently, but he had also left the family home, significantly narrowing his standing within the family. Outside, they might raise him up as a director or whatever, but within the household, Jin Heesu’s influence couldn’t even be compared to that of his mother. The power he could wield was likewise.
In such a situation, Iyeon had fortuitously approached Heesu with a very good hand. How delighted must he have been to hear the story? Taejin’s lip corner rose crookedly. Iyeon would have pretended to cooperate with Taejin, sought evidence of Jeongwon’s collusion, and Heesu would have planned to use that material to bring down both Taejin and Jeongwon.
Jin Deokseon’s movements, which had increasingly frequent contact with Heesu recently, also lent strength to that speculation. Lately, she had been taking a different course than before. Sudden business promotion. It was a completely different direction from living quietly, just handling personal requests as she had been doing until now.
She was originally highly regarded as an engineer. There was probably no other such obvious unopened lottery ticket. Even with items not yet released, there was a frenzy of offers to provide funding from various sources, and it was clear as day that if her business succeeded, massive funds would be secured. What Jin Heesu was aiming for was precisely that wealth.
