The Smell of Industry
"The air here smells different from anywhere else."
The moment the car door opened, the heavy, distinctive air of the petrochemical complex pressed against my nose. A briny tang mixed with the smell of petroleum—familiar, yet raw and sharp.
It had been two years. The last time I'd walked out through this gate, it had been the height of summer; in December, even the sky over the Mipo industrial complex was a different color.
"We've arrived."
Jung Tae-sung got out first and gestured toward the factory's main gate. The entrance had changed. Three CCTV cameras now watched the vehicle barrier. A guard with an ID badge around his neck checked the license plate and radioed inside.
"Last time I was here, there was just one old security guard. You've come a long way."
"Choi Sung-hoon, the head of SJ Security, put considerable effort into it."
"I'll have to tell him he did well when I'm back in Seoul. He's better than I expected."
Once the car passed through the gate, Plant 2 came into view. The building I'd only ever seen as numbers in a report was standing there in the flesh. The outer walls were still clean, and white steam billowing from the exhaust ducts on the roof announced that the facility was running.
This was what the factory I'd bought for 2.7 billion won had become.
"Sir."
Director Park Jin-hyuk was waiting at the entrance, gray work clothes under a safety vest—still looking less like a research director and more like a field engineer.
"Director, it's been a long time."
"My goodness, two years since we last met. Congratulations on your discharge."
"I was discharged quite a while ago, actually."
"You've been so hard to reach that I'm only greeting you now."
I shook Park Jin-hyuk's hand and stepped into the factory.
"You came so suddenly today that I couldn't prepare anything. CEO Hong is away on business in Japan, too."
"What's to prepare? I just wanted to see the current state of things."
"Still, from now on……"
For me, I'd simply come down because I felt like it, but from Park Jin-hyuk's perspective, it clearly wasn't that simple. Even the CEO who handled management had been on a pre-existing business trip.
"I'll schedule ahead next time."
"I'd appreciate that. Shall we start with the JV line, then?"
"Yes. Let's look around in order."
I changed into cleanroom gear and entered the JV line. Two engineers dispatched from Shinei were studying monitors alongside the Korean staff. When I greeted them, they bowed deeply.
"Q3 revenue is up 35 percent year over year. Semiconductor demand recovery and JV synergy stacked on top of each other."
While Park Jin-hyuk explained, I walked along the line. From the cleaning chemical filling process through quality inspection to the shipping staging area, the line ran end to end without a single gap.
The line was packed. Both Plant 1 and Plant 2 had no spare space whatsoever. Forget expansion—there wasn't even room for one more piece of equipment.
"The aisles are pretty narrow."
"Well, we had to cram the lines into limited space……. But we did it while securing safety as much as possible."
"There's no way to add more lines, is there?"
"No, sir. Plants 1 and 2 are nearly full as it is."
I was glad I'd come down to see for myself. Receiving only reports in Seoul, I never could have imagined it looked like this.
"We're wrestling with it too. If we could add lines, revenue would grow a little more……"
When the market grows, it becomes a battle for market share, and when it becomes a battle for market share, unit prices fall. Today's margins would never last forever.
After finishing the tour of every line, including Plant 1, we stepped into a corridor—and Park Jin-hyuk stopped walking.
"Sir, there's actually one more thing I'd like to show you."
His voice had dropped slightly. He led me to a small room at the end of the second floor of the main building, a door plaque reading Analysis Lab B. Inside, a small reactor and rows of sample bottles sat lined up on the workbench. A researcher rose and bowed.
"What is this place, that you're being so careful about how you mention it?"
"Secondary battery electrolyte additives."
Park Jin-hyuk lifted one of the sample bottles.
"We applied the ultra-purification technology we use for semiconductor cleaning. We can control metallic impurities in the additives that go into electrolytes down to the parts-per-billion level. The existing market is monopolized by Japan, but we've reached a point where we can compete on purity."
His words were calm, but his fingertips were trembling faintly.
This man really isn't used to hiding his excitement.
"Of course, it's still at the prototype stage. No mass-production line, and the capital investment for equipment……"
His voice trailed off—deliberately, it seemed, to keep expectations low.
I took the sample bottle. The clear liquid swayed gently under the fluorescent light. I couldn't tell what I was looking at, but the feeling of holding the prototype was entirely different from receiving Jung Tae-sung's report that Shinhwa Weltech was aiming to expand into the battery market.
"Good. I don't understand a word of what it is, but I like it."
The secondary battery materials market was going to grow enormously. In my previous life, electric vehicles had gone mainstream from the mid-2010s, and demand for battery materials had exploded. Every core material had grown into a semiconductor-scale market within a decade. And Japan's monopoly on electrolyte additives had been broken in the late 2010s, when Korean and Chinese purification technology caught up.
Which meant the sample in my hand right now was the starting point of all of it. If I invested now, I could pull the timeline forward by years and perhaps claim a monopolistic position in the market.
This was exactly why I'd hoarded all that money—and it felt like the time had come to scale up.
"Director."
I set the sample bottle down.
"You've worked hard. Acquiring Shinhwa Weltech and handing you full authority over research—I'm realizing it was truly the right choice."
Park Jin-hyuk's expression changed. He opened his mouth and closed it, over and over. It was the first time I'd seen the man's eyes turn red.
"……Thank you, sir."
"Save your thanks for when the mass-production line is running."
"Mass production?"
"Yes. Your research phase is essentially finished, isn't it?"
The face of the man who'd been so carefully lowering expectations moments ago flipped one hundred and eighty degrees.
"It is. Building a line and testing yield should take about two years."
"Then we start expanding the line now."
"Th-thank you, sir!"
"Let's head out."
As we left the analysis lab, I looked at Jung Tae-sung.
"Director Jung, is there any vacant land next to the factory right now?"
"I'll find out. I'll contact the industrial complex management corporation first thing tomorrow morning."
"If there's an empty lot, get the size as well. We'll need two or three times this factory's footprint."
Jung Tae-sung nodded and wrote it in his notebook.
After finishing my conversation with Park Jin-hyuk, I went straight up to the fourth floor of Shinhwa Weltech's main building. Unlike the tidy factory below, cables snaked across the corridor, and no fewer than three whiteboards hung on the walls, packed with equations and schematics. The handwriting slanted, as if someone had scrawled it in a hurry.
"I told CEO Seo Min-seung you were coming, but he seems to have forgotten. Shall I call him?"
Jung Tae-sung asked quietly beside me, but I shook my head and simply looked into the office. Inside, Seo Min-seung, who had been alternating between three monitors while fixing something, looked up. A hooded sweatshirt under an anti-static vest, and a face that looked like it hadn't seen a razor in days.
The sight made me laugh despite myself.
"Wow, this place looks exactly like a startup."
"Oh—you're here?"
Spotting me, Seo Min-seung rose from his chair and brushed off his hands. When it was just the two of us, we spoke casually as seniors and juniors do, but this was a company, and mutual respect naturally came first.
"CEO Seo, you do the assembly yourself?"
"We're short-staffed, so there's nothing I don't do."
Two researchers in the back rose and bowed.
"Come in. I've been waiting for you to show up, anyway."
I gave the staff a nod and followed Seo Min-seung inside. If Shinhwa Weltech downstairs was a company generating revenue, this was still a lab that only burned money. Every kind of component lay scattered across the workbenches.
"Let me show you."
Seo Min-seung stood before the robot arm at the center of the workbench. It was a small robot about the size of a human arm, with cables hanging off it in bunches. Seo Min-seung walked to the monitor, typed something, and the robot arm began to move.
Ziiiing—
It picked up a metal block on the workbench, lifted it, moved it thirty centimeters to the side, and finally set it down. Precise. Not even the slightest tremor between movements. It picked the block up again, and this time rotated it at an angle and placed it elsewhere. The motions were fast—and clean, almost like a human's.
"Impressive."
I meant it.
"Thank you. But this is just it doing what I told it to do."
"What do you mean, what you told it?"
"Right now this arm is executing coordinates I pre-entered, in sequence. Think of it like a car following a navigation route."
Seo Min-seung nudged the position of the metal block on the workbench slightly with his hand.
"Let's run it again."
The robot arm repeated the same sequence. The descending fingers grazed the block, gripped it askew, lifted it at a tilt—and dropped it midway.
Clang—
The sound of metal striking the workbench rang through the lab.
"This is it."
Seo Min-seung picked up the fallen block.
"If the position shifts even two centimeters, it fails. In a factory, someone would have to re-enter coordinates every time a part's position changed, and reprogram every time the environment changed."
"So it's useless in the field."
"In this state, yes."
He pointed at the monitor.
"What I really want to build is something else. A robot that finds and grabs the block wherever it happens to be. Not one fed coordinates—a system where you give it only a goal, and it learns the movements on its own."
I'd read about this in his thesis. The theory was proven. The question was whether it could actually be made to run.
"What do you need to get there?"
"Two things. Computing infrastructure—and people."
Seo Min-seung sat down as he spoke. Typical of a born engineer, he laid out the real-world problems in flat, clinical terms.
"Computing can be solved with money. I'm sorry to say that when I'm the one burning through your cash."
"I told you already—money is my problem to worry about. I'll handle that. There's another issue, though, isn't there?"
"Yes. People."
"What kind of people?"
"Researchers who can apply reinforcement learning to physical systems. People who can design simulation environments and write the algorithms that let a robot teach itself movements through thousands of rounds of trial and error."
He paused, then continued.
"There are almost none in Korea. The number of people researching this field at all fits on one hand, and every one of them is a professor—untouchable."
So mechanical, electrical, and control engineers could be sourced domestically. Narrowly speaking, Ulsan itself had national universities and schools specializing in science and technology, so that was covered.
But the person who would build this robot's brain did not exist in Korea.
"CEO Seo."
"Yes?"
"I'll find that person myself."
Seo Min-seung looked at me. There was a flicker of puzzlement in his eyes, but he didn't ask again. His face said he knew I wasn't one to make empty promises.
"Then I'll keep polishing the hardware."
"I'm counting on you. Well, there's work waiting, so I'll head out first. I'll be in Ulsan for a few days—let's meet often."
After parting with Seo Min-seung and stepping out of the lab, Jung Tae-sung fell in beside me.
"Both of these are critical businesses for us. I think we need to move fast."
"Then my task is……"
"We're short on space to grow both of them. The land—check on it quickly."
"I'll make it my first call tomorrow morning."
"Haah……"
Back at my lodging, I showered and sat on the bed. I opened my laptop but didn't look at the screen. I needed time to think, and plenty of it.
Shinhwa Weltech's secondary battery electrolyte additives. Synapse's learning robots. Seen separately, they were two businesses—one materials, one machinery.
But when I wove in the memories of my previous life, the picture changed.
"The age of the electric vehicle is coming."
From the mid-2010s, EVs had begun mass production in earnest. Demand for battery materials exploded, and the core materials markets grew tenfold within a decade. Korea's three battery giants carved up global market share, and behind them stood the materials supply chain.
And that's when robots started being deployed across manufacturing in earnest, too……
And robots went into the EV factories. Fewer parts than internal combustion engines, but battery pack assembly demanded such precision that the share of automation actually rose.
The learning robots Seo Min-seung was researching would prove their true worth in exactly that environment. Robots that adapted on their own, whether the parts changed or the line changed.
In the end, both threads pointed to the same future. Shinhwa Weltech would make the battery materials, and Synapse would build the robots that assembled those batteries.
Just as when I first resolved to become the Super-Eul—rather than competing against them, I had to climb aboard their value chain. From top to bottom, from materials to manufacturing, all within one fence.
"The problem is scale."
Shinhwa Weltech was packed to the brim with semiconductor chemicals. There was no room for a battery mass-production line. Synapse was borrowing a single floor of someone else's building—cramped even for building one prototype.
Money and technology were sufficient, and people could be found. What was missing was land—and since Jung Tae-sung was on it, that would be solved. The problem was……
"I have to climb onto a proper value chain. In Korea……"
The only automaker in Korea capable of building EVs was Sunjin Motors—and that was out of the question. It was Kang Tae-yong's domain.
Having settled my thoughts, I took out my phone and pressed the call button.
-Yo, Seon-woo! Isn't it the middle of the night in Korea?
Danny's welcome voice came through the receiver.
"Danny, there's an EV startup called Volta Motors that should be receiving early-stage investment around now."
-Volta…… Motors? Where do I know that name from?
"It's a venture founded by Ryan Holt."
-Ah! Ryan Holt. Yeah, I think I've heard of him.
"Look into it for me. Everything. All of it."