Chapter 1 The Ghost Editor

Ten years.

That's how long it took Jun-park Dhan to rise from the flames.

Ten years to erase the name that once belonged to a child with ash-streaked cheeks and soot in his lungs. Ten years to claw his way out of foster homes, stolen identities, hacked accounts, and bloodstained hands. Ten years to build a faceless empire from the ruins of his family's company - and the ruin of his own name.

And now, after all that time, he stood in front of the glass doors of Krown Media.

Tall. Polished. Unrecognizable.

The building shimmered under the morning sun, every inch of it remodeled, renamed, reborn - but Jun knew what lived beneath the surface. He knew the bones of this place. Beneath the corporate shine was the charred ghost of a company that used to bear his family name. The boardroom was built over the ashes of his father's office. The break room now stood where his mother once handed him warm cookies in secret while she whispered, "Just ten minutes, baby. Then Mommy has to go back to saving the world."

His heart hadn't stopped aching since.

Now it is steady and cold.

Jun smoothed his tie, adjusted the forged ID badge clipped to his blazer, and stepped through the front doors - not as a billionaire, not as the orphan boy the world forgot, but as Jun Dhan: a quiet, underqualified editorial assistant nobody had heard of.

A ghost, back to haunt his own grave.The air inside Krown Media was expensive - filtered, perfumed, artificial. Jun breathed it in and felt his throat tighten. Not from nerves. From the echo of smoke.

Do you smell that?

He did. Every time. Even now.

Burnt paper. Melted glass. Gasoline.

Ten years ago, this building wasn't glass and steel. It was brick and legacy - Dhan Corporation, voted Best Innovation Firm of the Year. There were streamers that day. Balloons. A celebration. His father was going to make a speech. His mother had been wearing the emerald earrings Jun helped pick out.

They never made it past the second toast.

Jun had been playing hide and seek with the head of marketing's daughter when the first scream echoed down the hallway. By the time the fire alarms wailed, the upper floors were already engulfed. Someone had tampered with the sprinklers. The exits locked on themselves. The staff suffocated trying to break through boardroom glass.

And his parents... his parents never stood a chance.

The smoke had knocked Jun unconscious near the basement stairwell.

He should've died there. And maybe part of him did.

But someone pulled him out.

A man with scars on his hands and a smell like rust and old leather. A criminal, Jun would later learn - one of the arsonists. But something about Jun's small, limp body must've reminded him of something - a son? A brother? Regret? He carried Jun out before the structure collapsed, dumped him near the alley like discarded evidence... and vanished.

Jun woke up coughing in a hospital with a name tag he didn't recognize, no visitors, and no living relatives. No one claimed him.

So he disappeared.

On paper, Jun-park Dhan died that day - body unrecovered.

But in truth, he went underground.

And started watching.Jun spent the next ten years becoming no one - and then everyone.

He moved through foster homes like a shadow. Quiet. Distant. Observing. His first arrest was at thirteen - not for violence, but for hacking into the school board's system to change a friend's grades. The judge called him dangerous. The system labeled him high-risk. But one tech worker, a Korean woman with tired eyes and a quiet mouth, saw something else.

She smuggled him a laptop in juvenile detention. No camera. No tracking. Just code.

That's when Spectra was born.

He started with proxies, building anonymous sites, offering underground encryption software to journalists and black-market traders alike. By fifteen, Jun was freelancing under ten different aliases. By seventeen, he had enough cryptocurrency to vanish completely.

He traveled under fake passports. Studied in the backrooms of hacker collectives. Slept with a blade under his pillow. Ate instant noodles in abandoned office buildings and taught himself corporate law by candlelight.

He didn't just survive.

He evolved.

By twenty-one, Spectra Holdings was the name whispered at closed-door meetings. A faceless conglomerate buying up distressed media firms, investing in military-grade cybersecurity, and partnering with companies that wanted protection more than publicity.

No one knew the face behind the empire.

That was intentional.

Jun had no use for fame. Only leverage.

And now, Spectra had enough reach - enough power - to move against Krown Media from the inside.

He didn't need to blow up buildings anymore.

All he needed was access.

And today, he had it.The HR manager was trying too hard to smile.

She led Jun down a glass corridor lined with framed awards and fake ficus plants, her heels clicking nervously on the polished floors.

"You'll be assisting Mr. Chi Suy-un," she said, voice pitched high like a warning. "He's brilliant, really, just... intense. Very focused. Very private. Doesn't do small talk. But fair. Totally fair. Just, um, don't take things personally."

Jun didn't respond. He didn't need to.

Chi Suy-un.

The only son of the people who stole his parents' company - the same people who, days after the fire, had bought the crumbling remains of Dhan Corporation for a fraction of its worth and renamed it Krown Media. The press called it a rescue. Jun called it a heist.

Chi was just a teenager back then. The golden boy. Private school. Silent in public. Sharp-featured and untouchable. Jun had seen photos - cold eyes, bored expression, expensive clothes.

But the real thing?

Was colder.

Chi stood behind a glass desk in an office trimmed with chrome. He didn't look up when they entered, his hands typing with mechanical precision, sleeves rolled back to reveal a black ink tattoo peeking out beneath his cuff.

"This is Jun Dhan," the HR woman said, voice softer now. "Your new assistant."

Chi finally looked up.

And the world tilted.

Jun met his eyes - and for a second, the room felt like it had dropped into silence. Chi's gaze was sharp. Unreadable. Deep. Not just assessing - dissecting. Like he could smell lies.

Jun didn't flinch.

Chi blinked once, slowly. Then said, "Leave," to the woman.

She all but fled.

Jun stayed.

"Sit," Chi said.

Jun sat, spine straight, gaze even.

"You don't talk much," Chi said after a long silence, folding his arms. "That's rare."

"I don't like noise," Jun replied evenly.

Chi smirked - barely. "Neither do I."

And just like that... the game began.

Jun didn't come to be liked. He came to dismantle legacies. Quietly. Precisely.

For the next week, he became invisible.

He wore muted colors. Asked no questions. Took notes without drawing attention. But beneath the surface, his mind moved like a machine - tracking patterns, absorbing routines, memorizing the building's entire digital nervous system.

The HR floor had two firewalls - weak. The break room router was unprotected. The copy room had a hidden server junction behind a supply cabinet.

Every day, he stayed late. Every night, he downloaded.

And every time, Chi noticed.

"You're here late again," Chi said one evening, standing in the dark near Jun's cubicle, arms folded.

Jun didn't look up from his screen. "So are you."

"Difference is, I own half of this building."

Jun shrugged. "You act like you own the people in it, too."

Chi raised a brow. "That supposed to be an insult?"

"No. Observation."

Chi stepped closer.

"What's your deal, Jun Dhan?" he asked, voice low. "You don't gossip. You don't panic. You don't even breathe like a normal person. You're here, but you're not here."

Jun turned. Calm. Ice in his voice. "Maybe I just don't like the way you run things."

Chi stared at him.

Then, unexpectedly - he laughed.

It wasn't warm. It wasn't kind.

But it was real.

"You've got some teeth," Chi murmured, eyes gleaming. "I thought you were just a quiet little pet. But you bite."

Jun stood slowly, facing him. They were barely a foot apart.

"You don't scare me," Jun said.

"Good," Chi replied. "Fear is boring."

And then, just for a second, their eyes locked - like they recognized something in each other. Not comfort. Not kinship. Something dangerous.

A reflection.The night Jun broke into the server room, the sky over Seoul was black velvet.

The building was quiet. Security had rotated. The cleaning crew was on break.

He moved like a shadow.

The cloned keycard buzzed against the reader. One green blink. The door clicked. He slipped inside.

Rows of humming machines. Cold blue light. A wall of data - Krown's skeletons buried behind firewalls Jun had already dismantled from the outside. But tonight, he wasn't here to spy. He was here to extract.

He inserted the flash drive.

One by one, the files spilled out: offshore accounts, internal memos, falsified reports - proof that the empire built over his parents' grave was not just stolen, but rotten.

And then-

A voice behind him.

"You're either a tech genius..." Chi said coldly, "or a goddamn idiot."

Jun didn't flinch.

He turned slowly, the flash drive now hidden in his sleeve. "I was just-"

"Don't insult me," Chi snapped. "You cloned a card. You bypassed three security doors. And you're standing in my server room. So... what are you?"

Jun tilted his head. "A ghost."

Chi stepped closer. "That's not an answer."

"No," Jun murmured. "But it's the only one you'll get."

Their eyes locked - steel to steel.

Chi's voice dropped. "You're not here to assist anyone. You haven't written a single word. But you've read everything. Watched everyone. And yet... no questions. No mistakes. You walk through this place like it owes you something."

Jun said nothing.

Chi took another step. They were chest-to-chest now.

"You're here to break something," Chi whispered. "And I don't know if it's the company... or me."

Jun didn't blink.

And then Chi kissed him.

Hard. Sharp. Furious.

Jun didn't stop him.

It wasn't sweet. It wasn't gentle.

It was desperate.

Teeth. Breath. Heat.

When they pulled apart, Jun's voice was ice. "You shouldn't have done that."

Chi looked wrecked. "Then why didn't you stop me?"

Jun didn't answer.

Because he didn't know.