While Min-Joon embraced his new life, the consequences of the original, failed timeline were finally closing in on Kang Seo-Yun and Han Joo-Hyuk. They had successfully fled the Busan warehouse after the murder (unaware of Min-Joon's miraculous resurrection and the rewrite of the current timeline), but their escape was a miserable, desperate flight.
The billions they had stolen were frozen shortly after the transfer—a measure Min-Joon had put in place even in the doomed timeline. They were rich on paper, but poor in reality.
They were hiding in a dilapidated, rented apartment in a remote city in Thailand, living in constant fear and suspicion. The air was thick with humidity and the stench of decay. Joo-Hyuk, paranoid and violent, blamed Seo-Yun for the frozen money. Seo-Yun, seeing her grand plan dissolve into squalor, despised Joo-Hyuk for his recklessness.
"We have to move the money, Joo-Hyuk!" Seo-Yun hissed, pacing the humid room, wiping sweat from her brow with a stained silk scarf. "We killed him for nothing! We're trapped here with his cold corpse still freezing our accounts!"
"He's not freezing anything! He's dead!" Joo-Hyuk screamed back, throwing a glass against the wall, the sound echoing sharply in the small space. "He is worm food! Stop talking about him like he's some kind of omniscient ghost!"
"He is a ghost now, one that haunts our bank statements!" Seo-Yun snapped, her voice cutting through his drunken rage. "You were supposed to be the specialist! The one who understood the digital trail! Why the hell did he have a time-lock on the assets? Why didn't you foresee this?"
Joo-Hyuk stumbled toward her, his eyes bloodshot and malicious. "It's the system! It's the bank! Your perfect plan was flawed, Seo-Yun! You are nothing without his money!" He grabbed her arm roughly. "Don't you dare blame me! I handled the messy part! You poisoned your own well!"
Seo-Yun yanked her arm away, her face a mask of cold fury. "I poisoned nothing! I gave you the blueprint for a kingdom, and you turned it into this miserable prison!" The beautiful, elegant façade of Seo-Yun crumbled under the pressure. She realized that she hadn't escaped Min-Joon's control; she had simply traded it for the volatile control of a desperate criminal. The love she had feigned with Joo-Hyuk turned into hatred fueled by their shared crime. "I should have done this alone. At least Min-Joon was predictable. You are just a reckless animal!"
"Predictable? Min-Joon was calculating! He used you!" Joo-Hyuk scoffed, sinking onto the edge of the cheap, sagging bed. "And you know what? He paid for it. We are the ones who are alive. We just need time."
"Time is the one commodity we don't have!" Seo-Yun pointed a shaking finger at the peeling paint on the wall. "We are trapped in this rat hole! Every sound is a police siren, and every shadow is a witness! Do you think those billions matter if we spend the next decade looking over our shoulders?"
"We could have waited! We could have planned the asset movement better! But you insisted on the urgency, didn't you? You always had to be the mastermind, the one step ahead! Look where your cleverness has landed us!"
The arguments grew louder, fueled by cheap liquor and mutual suspicion. They stopped sharing meals, communicating only through accusations and threats. Sleep became impossible.
One night, Joo-Hyuk, drunk and panicked, tried to blame her for the murder, his voice thick with malicious intent. "You know, the police would go much easier on me if I testified that you planned everything, including the killing. You were his fiancée. You had the motive. I was just the hired muscle."
Seo-Yun went utterly still. The mention of the murder, the final, irreversible action, settled heavily in the room. "You wouldn't dare," she warned, her voice barely a whisper, yet colder than ice.
"Oh, I would. You ruined my life, Seo-Yun. I'll take half the sentence if it means watching you take the other half. It's only fair." He flashed a cruel, drunken smile. "You should have been smarter than to trust a man you forced to kill for you."
Seo-Yun, now a cold veteran of betrayal, was faster. She had listened to his threat and instantly analyzed the situation. Her future was either shared squalor or managed destruction. She chose the latter. She had hidden the original M-Data flash drive—the one containing the evidence of the transfer and the biometric key—believing it might be useful someday. It was her final insurance policy.
She waited until Joo-Hyuk finally passed out, snoring loudly and face-down on the pillow. She quietly retrieved the flash drive from its hiding spot—taped beneath the loose floorboard in the bathroom—and slipped out into the humid, neon-lit night.
She found a dingy payphone—she couldn't risk using her own encrypted phone—and made a calculated call to her father's old, discreet lawyer in Seoul.
"I need to report a crime and offer up an accomplice," she stated coldly, her voice clipped and professional, the years of corporate training kicking in. "I have the physical evidence—a flash drive detailing the illegal transfer of funds from K.M. Holdings. The crime is the theft of corporate assets and, yes, the disappearance of Chairman Kim. The accomplice is Han Joo-Hyuk. I was coerced and put in fear for my life after the theft."
The lawyer, recognizing the gravity of the situation, immediately began coordinating her surrender and the capture of Joo-Hyuk.
"I want full immunity for the disappearance," Seo-Yun demanded. "And assurances that my cooperation on the theft will minimize my charges. I am a victim of coercion and blackmail."
The negotiation was short and brutal. Seo-Yun knew she couldn't escape the theft charge entirely, but by delivering Joo-Hyuk and the flash drive, she could minimize her sentence and, crucially, escape the claustrophobic trap of their shared poverty and paranoia.
The next morning, the local authorities, alerted by the lawyer's tip and the international warrant for corporate theft, descended on the apartment. Joo-Hyuk awoke to the sound of crashing wood and shouted commands in a foreign language. Realizing he had been utterly betrayed, he fought back violently, screaming obscenities, but was quickly subdued and arrested.
Seo-Yun, presenting herself as a fragile, traumatized victim, was also arrested and quietly extradited back to Seoul. She hadn't found freedom; she had only ensured that her destruction was managed on her own terms, one last cynical act of control.
The original timeline's villains were now captured, their actions confined to a single, chaotic reality that Min-Joon himself had escaped. The balance was restored. Their greed had led them, not to billions, but to isolation, betrayal, and a miserable end.