What He Was Hiding
How much time had passed?
David, the Vice Chairman who had been sharing easy laughter with the guests, saw his expression harden by the barest fraction.
He leaned in to leave a tender whisper with his wife, Victoria, then turned and walked toward a deserted corridor at the edge of the banquet hall.
Where’s he going?
Dohwan set down his champagne flute and followed at a leisurely pace.
The moment David stepped into the blind spot beyond his wife’s line of sight, that ramrod-straight back crumpled as if the strings holding it up had been cut. He tore his necktie loose and sagged heavily against the wall.
“What the hell…”
Watching from a distance, Dohwan’s eyes flew wide.
Only moments earlier David’s face had been clear and healthy. Now it was draining to a deathly ashen gray, as if the color itself were being sucked out of him.
Just beneath the glabella—the palace that governed lifespan and disease—a thick black miasma of death energy erupted without warning and swallowed David’s entire face. At that density, it would not have been strange if he dropped dead on the spot.
There was nothing there a minute ago.
While Dohwan stared in shock, David’s frantic hands came into view. He pulled a small pill bottle from his inner pocket, shook two tablets into his trembling palm, and dry-swallowed them.
A few minutes later his ragged breathing began to steady. At the same time the black death aura that had raised the hairs on Dohwan’s neck receded like an ebbing tide, and the healthy color flooded back over David’s features as if it had never left.
He had forcibly jacked his life force with drugs and painted over the aura of death.
Holy shit. He’s been suppressing the black energy with medicine?
Every tangled thread in Dohwan’s mind snapped free at once.
Whether it was a powerful painkiller or some vicious experimental drug still in clinical trials, the pills temporarily disguised David’s body as perfectly normal—so precisely that even a physiognomist’s eyes had been fooled. The instant the effect wore off, the suppressed agony and black miasma exploded outward again.
That explains every contradiction.
A husband who refused to become a burden had been enduring with brutal medication, hiding his own death completely. With the little time he had left, he wanted to leave his wife nothing but perfect love.
They said her husband had become devotedly affectionate lately.
Of course he had. He was about to leave forever.
On the way home he just takes a longer drive. That’s all.
That, too, made perfect sense. He could not let his wife see the hellish pain that arrived when the medicine faded. His only hobby—driving—had been a solitary battle in the back seat of a limousine, swallowing agony alone.
“Haah…”
Dohwan let out a short breath as he watched David lean against the wall, still catching his breath.
The Empress who had weathered every storm had not been wrong. Her predator’s instincts had correctly sensed that her husband was hiding an enormous secret and that he might soon leave her. She simply had never imagined the reason was illness.
“The Chairman’s gut wasn’t off after all. Her husband wasn’t cheating—he was literally dying.”
Victoria had ordered him to bring back proof of her husband’s betrayal. What Dohwan had found instead was a foolish pure love: a man crushing pain with toxic medicine so he could face death alone.
Dohwan pulled the flip phone from his pocket and opened it.
“Any progress?”
The Boss’s dry voice came through the receiver.
“Tell the client to drop the suspicion. Husband’s not cheating.”
“Then what about the rest of the behavior?”
“The husband’s quietly dying alone right now.”
A brief silence, then the Boss spoke slowly.
“That would explain everything. Possibility confirmed.”
Dohwan kept his eyes on David, still slumped against the wall and fighting for breath. The artificial life force from the drugs covered him completely, yet deep inside a faint, unbroken thread of vitality still flickered. His life thread had not yet snapped. There was still room to intervene.
Dohwan adjusted his grip on the flip phone.
“So tell her we’re changing the contract.”
“On what terms?”
“That I can raise the husband’s odds of survival, even a little.”
The Boss did not bother asking how one raised the survival odds of a man with a terminal disease. The Dohwan he knew had always pulled miracles out of the impossible.
“Understood. I’ll pass it on.”
The next morning Dohwan was summoned to a vast mansion on the outskirts of New York City—the private residence of Victoria, Chairman of Aero Dynamics.
Escorted into the reception room, Dohwan—face completely hidden behind sunglasses and a mask—crossed one leg over the other on the sofa. Across from him the couple’s expressions could not have been more different. Victoria’s face was carved with deep worry and desperation; David looked endlessly apologetic and desolate, as if he had already become a criminal in his wife’s eyes.
Victoria broke the heavy silence.
“You said there’s a way?”
No greeting, straight to the point. Dohwan actually preferred it that way. Her husband’s disease was racing the clock; every minute mattered more than etiquette.
“Yeah. There is.”
His confident answer made David’s eyes sharpen instantly—the look of a man staring at a cheap con artist. A stranger in sunglasses and a mask talking about treatment was bound to provoke that reaction.
Dohwan gave a short laugh and struck first.
“Relax. I’m not about to spout nonsense about miracle drugs or magic hands that cure disease on contact.”
“Then what exactly do you intend to do?”
“I read people’s fates. Yesterday, when your medicine wore off, the death fate showed on your face. That’s why I told them.”
Dohwan leaned across the table until his gaze locked with both of theirs.
“But fate’s an interesting thing. Depending on which doctor operates on you, which doctor treats you, a death fate can flip into a life fate.”
His finger pointed straight at David.
“All I’m going to do is one thing: pick the real doctor who holds your life thread—the one who gives you the highest chance of surviving.”
“How would you even…”
“If I meet every specialist and still can’t see a path for you to live? I won’t take a single cent of the fee. That would be my failure.”
The promise that he would refuse payment if he failed left David speechless.
“So I need your full cooperation. We have to meet every top expert who claims they can treat your husband’s disease.”
Dohwan tapped the table with one finger.
“We can bring them all here at once, or we can go to the hospitals ourselves. Speed is what matters. You know better than anyone that time’s running out.”
A scorched-earth declaration that he would work for free. To Victoria, who was about to lose her husband this very moment, corporate schedules worth hundreds of billions and the risk that this man might be a fraud meant nothing. If it could save her husband she would sell her soul.
Decision made, the predator’s light returned to Victoria’s eyes.
“Fine. Do it.”
Permission granted. Dohwan rose and asked lightly,
“Then which hospital first?”
Victoria stood as well, already pulling out her phone.
“We’ll start with every hospital in New York City we can reach today. Travel by helicopter.”
She gave her secretary a terse order, then added coldly and firmly to Dohwan,
“While we circle New York, every authority in other states or overseas will be brought to this mansion no matter the cost.”
She spoke as if even waiting was a waste of time. The overwhelming wealth and decisive will of a corporate empress detonated at once.
Dohwan left the reception room thinking at least he would never be bored.
Upper East Side, Manhattan.
The first helicopter landed at the world’s most prestigious cancer hospital: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Specifically, the top-floor consultation room of the David H. Koch Pavilion, reserved exclusively for the highest VVIP patients.
The first man they met was David’s original attending physician—one of the top three authorities in pancreatic and biliary surgery in the United States.
A massive monitor displayed a precise 3-D scan of David’s abdomen. The doctor’s face was grave.
“Locally advanced pancreatic cancer. The absolute worst-case scenario within that category.”
He pointed a laser at the black mass tangled around the pancreas.
“As you can see, the tumor has completely encased the superior mesenteric artery—the great vessel that supplies blood to the organs of the abdomen.”
Victoria’s face went paper-white.
The doctor continued, calm but unyielding.
“As I have said before, surgery itself is not physically impossible.”
Nor was it possible.
“The moment a scalpel touches the tumor, the probability of arterial rupture and massive hemorrhage is overwhelmingly high. The chance of surviving on the operating table is less than ten percent.”
He looked at David with heavy sorrow.
“This is not a matter of skill. No surgeon on earth can meaningfully reverse those odds. Rather than risk opening the abdomen…”
He spoke as if this were the only rational choice.
“Continuing targeted therapy and pain management as we are now is the best way for the Vice Chairman to live even one day longer.”
The coldest, most reasonable judgment a physician could render. David lowered his head; Victoria bit her lip hard enough to draw blood.
In that heavy air Dohwan, arms folded, suddenly spoke.
“If you yourself held the scalpel?”
The doctor’s brow furrowed. An unidentified man in sunglasses and a mask interrupting out of nowhere was enough to offend anyone.
“Even if I performed the surgery the outcome would not change significantly. I would give everything I have, but if massive bleeding occurs the probability of death on the table remains overwhelming.”
The instant the answer left his mouth, Dohwan’s gaze left the doctor and locked onto David’s face on the sofa.
If this doctor operates…
He read the compatibility between the two men and the fate written on David’s features. When the doctor’s energy touched David’s life force the resulting wave was neither bad nor good. The man would do his utmost and follow textbook precision. Yet the black miasma crushing David’s face only thinned for a heartbeat before settling again like heavy storm clouds. The overwhelming vitality that could punch through a ten-percent miracle never rose.
There’s a reason he recommended drug treatment.
Dohwan clicked his tongue once and turned without regret.
“Pass. Next hospital.”
The doctor’s eyes bulged at the cool, absolute verdict.
“N-next? Who the hell is this man? Are you seriously going to gamble in an operating room on a ten-percent chance?!”
He shouted in panic, but Victoria had already slammed the consultation-room door open and was striding out.
After that they hit every renowned cancer center in New York City. The results were uniformly bleak. Dozens of specialists later, not one produced an aura stronger than David’s original physician.
Yet it was still too early to quit.
When the couple returned to the mansion, Victoria’s private jets were disgorging authorities swept up from every corner of the globe. The living room looked like an international medical conference.
“If you operated?”
Dohwan lounged deep in a sofa and asked the same question of every world-famous surgeon who had flown in. He watched the death aura on David’s face for the slightest shift.
“Pass.”
“This one too. Next.”
World-class professors in impeccable suits packed their bags one after another. No matter whom he matched against David, the thick black miasma of death never lifted.
Time passed. Near the end of the interviews the reception-room door opened and an old man of completely different atmosphere walked in. Unlike the polished authorities, he wore a faded check shirt and a wild white mane—looking like someone even a neighborhood clinic would turn away.
Victoria’s secretary whispered after checking the file.
“An old man buried in a backwoods research lab in Texas. His surgical methods are so extreme the academic societies treated him like a madman and essentially expelled him… but his success rate alone is freakishly high.”
The madman of the operating room.
The secretary was about to usher him out when Dohwan suddenly asked,
“If you operated?”
The old man only clicked his tongue and shuffled up to the giant 3-D monitor. Without a laser pointer he jabbed a gnarled finger at the artery on the screen.
“You dragged me all the way to New York and woke me from my nap for this?”
His cloudy eyes flashed like a beast’s.
“Tumor wrapped around the aorta? Then just hack the whole damn artery out along with the cancer and slap in an artificial vessel. The problem is all you cowardly pretty boys who wet yourselves at the thought of blood and teach people to just take palliative care.”
Not carefully avoiding the cancer with a scalpel—cutting out the very vessel that was the root of life and replacing it with a new one. A lunatic idea only possible with overwhelming skill.
The moment the answer fell,
…!
Dohwan’s eyes stretched wide enough to tear.
The black miasma crushing David’s brow cracked with an audible snap and shattered. Through the fissure a red, volcanic vitality erupted like a heart about to burst—so fierce it could perfectly twist a death fate.
The single madman who could rewrite a doomed destiny. The true benefactor who would drag David’s life thread out of the grave.
“Found him.”