The blood reached his shoes before the guards did.
Kang Tae-Hyun stood in the middle of his private office, staring down at the red spreading across the Italian marble floor like a slow, deliberate infection. It crept forward, touching the tip of his polished black leather as if testing whether he was still alive.
He was.
For now.
The city burned outside the full-glass wall. Neon lights, traffic, life—everything continued, unaware that the man who owned half of it was bleeding out on the seventy-eighth floor.
The first bullet had shattered the glass behind him.
The second had entered his back.
The third was still inside him.
He could feel it.
Hot. Heavy. Settling.
He pressed his palm against his ribs. Blood slipped between his fingers instantly. Too much. Too fast. His lungs felt wrong. Wet.
A calm voice echoed in his ear.
"…You shouldn't have accessed that file, Chairman Kang."
Not Chairman.
Not anymore.
Tae-Hyun turned slowly.
Three men stood near the door. All in black. All wearing the company badge of Helix Crown Biotech.
His company.
The one he had built from nothing.
The one he had planned to destroy tonight.
"You authorized Project Devil's Heir." The man in front spoke with almost gentle regret. "That gave you clearance. But it didn't give you the right to open the sealed archives."
Tae-Hyun laughed.
Blood spilled from his lips.
"So that's what you named it," he whispered hoarsely. "The human-evolution trials. The missing patients. The underground labs."
Silence.
Then the man tilted his head. "You weren't supposed to find out you were funding it."
Ah.
There it was.
Betrayal always sounded simpler out loud.
Tae-Hyun's vision blurred. His heartbeat thundered wrong, uneven, panicked. His body—trained, disciplined, powerful—was already failing him.
"Who?" he asked. "Who else knows?"
The man raised the gun again.
"You don't need that information where you're going."
The shot exploded through the office.
Pain vanished.
His legs gave out.
He hit the floor hard, breath tearing from his lungs. The ceiling lights fractured into white shards above him.
Footsteps approached.
Someone crouched.
A familiar voice leaned close to his ear.
"You were a good CEO," it said softly. "But you were never meant to be human."
His vision went dark.
His heart stuttered.
And then—
It stopped.
Darkness did not come.
Instead, something opened.
Not eyes.
Cells.
He felt them.
Every single one.
Breaking.
Burning.
Rewriting.
Pain unlike anything tore through him. Not the pain of injury.
The pain of being rebuilt.
His dead heart convulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Something foreign threaded through his nerves like liquid fire.
A voice—no, a signal—spread inside him.
Command accepted.
Initializing biological authority.
Template: Devil's Heir.
His body arched violently.
His mouth opened.
No sound came.
And in the place where Kang Tae-Hyun died…
Something else began to breathe.