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# Chapter 1
The soft, warm-toned indirect lighting in the enormous dressing room came on one by one.
In one corner of a sprawling, ultra-luxurious penthouse spanning hundreds of pyeong, dozens of high-end automatic watches were silently rotating inside glass display cases that curved around the entire wall, each secured to a watch winder.
The temperature and humidity in this space were perfectly controlled, giving it the imposing atmosphere of an entire men's luxury goods department store transplanted straight into a home.
Standing before the mirror, Taekyung tied his silk necktie with an expressionless face.
Click-
The cold platinum tie clip snapped into place with a crisp metallic sound. He pulled down the cuffs of his shirt with his fingertips. A perfectionist who would tolerate not even a one-millimeter discrepancy in left-right symmetry. Taekyung loved this sense of absolute control, flawlessly maintained from head to toe.
No. To be precise, this control was the only armor he had chosen in order to survive.
Taekyung's gaze shifted toward the very back of the dressing room.
There was an entire rack dedicated to winter coats, packed so densely that it bordered on obsessive. From tens-of-millions-of-won vicuña coats painstakingly crafted stitch by stitch by Italian artisans to heavy cashmere coats with a lustrous sheen. The sheer quantity was unbelievable for someone who had only one body.
The moment he took out the darkest black cashmere coat and draped it over his shoulders, its cool yet soft texture wrapped around the back of his neck, and an old, unpleasant memory brushed past the tip of his nose.
The acrid smell of a kerosene heater on a market floor.
And the chill of the winter when he was sixteen, penetrating all the way into his bones.
The winter vacation of his third year of middle school.
It was the year the family fell heavily into financial ruin after the debt guarantee his father had signed went wrong. Taekyung and his twin younger brother, Taejin, had both become class officers, but their mother sent only Taejin to the official class-officer training retreat.
"Our Taejin is ranked first in the entire school. He can't go to the retreat and feel intimidated."
Their mother scraped together every last bit of money they had left and bought Taejin the most expensive new padded jacket from a department store. Taejin casually put on the clothes he had taken even at his older brother's expense, smiled brightly, and left the house.
Meanwhile, Taekyung, who had been left behind in the marketplace throughout the vacation to help with his mother's restaurant, was given a cheap, cotton-stuffed jacket worth ten thousand won.
"You couldn't even come in first, and you're just going to be around the neighborhood market anyway. Why would you need expensive clothes? We have to boost your brother's confidence. Taekyung, you're the older brother, so make the sacrifice. You're the pillar of this family, after all."
His mother had a natural talent for portraying herself as the pitiful victim.
She was always like that.
On the surface, she pretended to be gentle and generous, but beneath it lurked an obsessive need for control and a vicious favoritism.
Under his mother's violent gaslighting, Taekyung had consumed himself for nearly twenty years.
His time, his labor, even the smallest words of praise, and even the warm hands his father extended to him were all given to his younger brother.
Taejin simply consumed all those sacrifices as though they were his due and grew into a pampered flower inside an enormous greenhouse.
His younger brother awakened as an A-rank Hunter with a spectacular fire attribute and became the star of the family, while Taekyung was classified as an F-rank with no combat power and no attribute.
But there was one truth that not only the world, but even his own family, knew nothing about.
His younger brother's dazzling ability was actually the result of parasitically stealing and using Taekyung's potential and mana, the very source of his life force, unconsciously through the spiritual connection between fraternal twins.
Taekyung became aware of that parasitic connection on the day his true ability, suppressed for years, finally awakened.
The transcendent power of an Absolute Observer, one capable of seeing through the laws of the world and the causalities governing it.
When Taekyung confronted the truth, he did not scream in rage.
With the sensitivity and rationality characteristic of an INFJ, uncontrolled anger was simply an inefficient emotion that consumed far too much energy.
Instead, he made his decision with absolute coldness and calm.
He permanently deleted the folder called "family" from his mind itself.
A perfect doorslam, as psychology called it.
That night, Taekyung used his ability to completely sever the mana link flowing into his younger brother, as cleanly as if he had cut it with a pair of scissors.
There was no emotional turmoil.
No lingering attachment.
It was a perfect severance.
Once he stopped allowing others to siphon away his energy and focused it solely on himself, Taekyung's life exploded outward the moment he stopped making sacrifices.
Five years had already passed since he had walked out of the rooftop room with nothing but his bare body at the age of nineteen.
Now, at twenty-four,
Yoo Taekyung had become the CEO of Oracle Consulting, a massive corporation that controlled all the information on Awakeners in South Korea as well as the entire item economy.
He had become an overwhelming existence that no one dared to touch.
"President, are you finished preparing for work?"
A composed voice cleanly cut through his memories of the past.
Secretary Choi, standing at the entrance of the dressing room, carefully held out a tablet.
"That unwelcome visitor has come back to the first-floor lobby. Shall I have the security team remove him?"
Taekyung buttoned his coat and glanced down at the tablet screen.
The CCTV footage showed a man sitting on the marble floor of the lobby and screaming at the top of his lungs. His greasy hair looked as though he had not washed it in days, and he was wearing a thin coat completely inappropriate for the season.
It was his younger brother, Taejin.
Immediately after Taekyung cut off his mana supply, Taejin's once-spectacular A-rank flames had gone out in an instant.
Having never accomplished a single thing through his own strength and possessing an utterly dependent personality, Taejin plummeted to rock bottom in an instant. After being kicked out of his guild, he was buried beneath enormous penalties and mountains of debt, completely ruined.
Watching his younger brother struggle desperately to keep the security guards from dragging him away, Taekyung let out a dry little laugh.
"No."
Taekyung fixed his gaze on his perfected reflection in the mirror and spoke.
"Don't let him in. Leave him in the lobby exactly as he is. I need to see with my own eyes what it looks like when someone has been driven all the way through the floor and buried in the basement."
The main lobby on the first floor of the Oracle Building.
The heavy heels of a pair of custom-made luxury shoes rang across the vast marble floor.
Click, click.
Taejin, who was being held by both arms by the security guards and shouting at the top of his lungs, suddenly raised his head at the steady footsteps.
"B-Brother...!"
Taejin's eyes shook wildly.
A suit that fit flawlessly from head to toe.
A stride that was so relaxed it bordered on arrogance.
This was not the easygoing older brother he remembered, the one who cleaned up his trash at home and spent every vacation smelling of sweat.
The instinctive intimidation that came from the overwhelming gap between them.
But Taejin, whose entire existence depended on feeding off other people's attention, habitually began playing the pitiful victim the moment he noticed the employees passing through the lobby looking at him.
"Brother! Isn't this seriously too much? How can you do this to me?! We're brothers who share the same blood! How could you block all my calls for five whole years?!"
There was not even the slightest hint of guilt or remorse in Taejin's shout, his neck veins bulging.
Only the horrifying selfishness and dependence of someone who believed his older brother was naturally obligated to save him dripped from every word.
"You went and cut off the mana support you were giving me, and I went bankrupt! Do you know that Mom collapsed trying to pay off my debts for me, and she cries out your name every single day?! Our family is dying, and you're happy living like this in luxury all by yourself?!"
Taejin struggled against the guards and threw out one more name as though he were pulling a hidden weapon from his pocket.
"Even our oldest sister says you're a fucking lunatic! She says you're a monster with no blood or tears!"
His shallow emotional appeals scattered uselessly through the air.
Taekyung stopped where he was and looked down at his younger brother with both hands in his pockets.
There was no anger in his eyes.
No sadness.
Not even contempt.
It was absolute indifference, completely devoid of emotion, as though he were looking at a dented can rolling along the street.
Taekyung's ability quietly activated, and his eyes took on a blue glow.
Within the vision of the Absolute Observer, the rotten threads of causality wrapped around Taejin's body became clearly visible.
Under that chilling and eerie gaze, Taejin's voice gradually dwindled.
By the time the silence had begun pressing down on the entire lobby, Taekyung slowly opened his mouth.
"I think you've got the wrong idea."
His voice was low and calm, but the words carried an immense amount of mana, instantly freezing the entire lobby.
"I'm not angry with you, Mother, or our oldest sister."
"Th-Then why... why are you going this far?!"
"Because the value of your existence in my life has simply become zero."
"...What?"
"The time when I wore an old padded jacket, let you take everything from me, and kept making sacrifices for you ended when I was a teenager."
Taejin's face went pale as a sheet of paper.
This was not the foolish older brother who had spent his entire life giving way to him.
The man standing before him was an existence from an entirely different dimension, someone who could crush him beneath his feet and kill him at any moment.
Taekyung lightly brushed away an invisible speck of dust from his coat sleeve and turned around without a trace of regret.
"Please don't cause a disturbance in my company's lobby. And I'd appreciate it if you would leave, stranger."
"B-Brother! Big brother! Taekyung! Please, save me! Mom said she'd disown me if I couldn't bring you back! Brother!"
A desperate scream and sobbing erupted from behind him.
Taejin fell to his knees on the floor and howled like a wounded beast, but Taekyung's footsteps never faltered even once.
The ten-minute shackle that had clung to him like a leech.
The eldest son who had stopped making sacrifices had finally become the most perfect and ruthless transcendent being.
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