The Scandal-Proof Producer

The hum of the studio equipment powering down was the only sound as Yoo-jin watched Chae-rin's retreating figure disappear down the hall. Kang Ji-won was still muttering at the console, trying to diagnose the un-diagnosable flaw in the recording, but Yoo-jin's mind had already shifted gears. He was no longer a music producer. The dissonant note in Chae-rin's voice had been a silent alarm, and he was now the head of security for a fortress under siege.

He waited until the office was nearly empty, the quiet of the evening settling in. Then he sent a one-line message to his youngest, most dangerous asset: "My office. Now."

Oh Min-ji arrived less than two minutes later. She entered without knocking, her tablet held in one hand, her expression as cool and impassive as ever. She looked less like a teenager and more like a seasoned intelligence operative reporting for duty. The atmosphere in the room was cold, no longer about art but about security.

"Chae-rin is compromised," Yoo-jin said bluntly, skipping any preamble. He gestured for Min-ji to sit. "OmniCorp made a move. I don't know how or when, but it was a psychological probe of some kind, and it was successful enough to completely destabilize her. I need to know what they did."

Min-ji's eyes, usually dull with adolescent boredom, sharpened with clinical interest. She didn't ask if Chae-rin was okay or what was wrong. She asked for data points.

"Define 'compromised'," she said, her voice flat.

"Her performance is shot," Yoo-jin explained. "Her emotional state is a mess of indecision and guilt. It wasn't there yesterday. The shift happened sometime between last night and this afternoon's recording session."

"Pinpoint the time more accurately," Min-ji commanded, her fingers already tapping on her tablet, pulling up a blank analysis screen.

Yoo-jin thought back, replaying the day's events. "The change was evident during her part of the homework assignment this morning. She was distracted, distant. It started sometime after she left the club with Da-eun last night and before she met her this morning."

"Her phone," Min-ji stated, not as a question, but as an assertion. "That's the most likely attack vector. A message. An email. They reached out to her directly. I need access to her phone records."

Yoo-jin's jaw tightened. This was the line. The one he had sworn to himself he wouldn't cross. "I can't do that, Min-ji," he said, his voice firm. "I can't hack my own artist's phone. She's not an enemy agent; she's a victim. The entire foundation of this company is built on trust. If I violate that, even for a good reason, I become no different from the people who managed her at Stellar. I become the enemy."

A flicker of something—disdain, perhaps, for his sentimentality—crossed Min-ji's face, but she accepted the operational parameter. She was a strategist, and a strategist works with the limitations given.

"Fine," she said with a clipped sigh. "Your moral code is inefficient, but we can work around it. There are other ways. We don't need to read her messages. We just need to see who is trying to talk to her." She turned her full attention to her tablet. "OmniCorp operatives won't use KakaoTalk or a standard SMS. Too traceable. They'll use an encrypted third-party app or a proprietary communication platform, routed through a series of shell servers to anonymize the source. If I can get a raw data log for her device's IP address from that time window, I won't see the content, but I might be able to trace the packet's origin."

It was a brilliant, elegant workaround. It targeted the method of delivery, not the message itself.

"I can get that," Yoo-jin said, his mind already working. He pulled out his phone and dialed the number of his newest, most powerful, and most indebted ally.

Director Oh Seung-hwan of Stellar Entertainment picked up on the second ring.

"Director Oh, it's Han Yoo-jin. I need a favor. It's extremely sensitive, and it requires absolute discretion."

"Anything, CEO Han. You know that," came the earnest reply. Director Oh's gratitude for Yoo-jin's handling of his daughter was a deep, untapped well of resources.

"I need a network data log for a specific mobile device on the KT network," Yoo-jin said, reading Chae-rin's phone number from her company file. "I need it for a twelve-hour window starting from 10 PM last night. I don't want content. I don't want call logs. I need a raw dump of the source and destination data for all non-standard application traffic. Can you make that happen quietly?"

There was a brief pause on the other end. It was a highly irregular request, one that would normally require warrants and weeks of paperwork. "Consider it done," Director Oh said without hesitation. "You'll have an encrypted file within the hour."

Yoo-jin hung up, a grim sense of satisfaction settling over him. He had his own network now. His own "old-boy" connections, forged not from corruption, but from gratitude.

True to his word, less than an hour later, an email with a heavily encrypted attachment landed in Yoo-jin's inbox. Min-ji connected her tablet to his computer, and her fingers became a blur. The file was protected by layers of security, but to Min-ji, it was just a series of puzzles to be solved.

"Amateur," she muttered as she bypassed the first layer. "He used a public key that's five years out of date."

A few minutes later, a raw data log filled her screen—a seemingly meaningless cascade of numbers and code. But to Min-ji, it was a map.

"There," she said, her finger tapping on a specific line. "A single burst of data received at 9:14 this morning. About twenty kilobytes. Too small for a media file. It's text. Sent via a secure messaging app with end-to-end encryption." She began to trace the source. "They're routing through multiple VPNs… Sweden… Brazil… but the first layer proxy is sloppy." Her lips curled into a smirk. "It's an academic server registered to Yonsei University. They were trying to make it fit his cover story."

She cross-referenced the server with a database she had already begun compiling on OmniCorp's assets. Her screen flashed. "The server is leased by a foundation called 'The Eidolon Initiative'." She tapped another key. "Which, according to this leaked internal document from a rival tech firm, is a known recruitment front for OmniCorp's Division of Cognitive & Behavioral Science."

Her fingers flew again, peeling back the last layer of the digital onion. "And the original signal pings back to a dedicated server registered to a holding company named 'Ethereal Dynamics.' My database confirms Ethereal is a shell corporation owned and operated by OmniCorp." She ran a final search, cross-referencing known OmniCorp operatives in that division currently stationed in Seoul.

A face appeared on her screen. Handsome, intellectual, smiling. It was a photo from a Stanford University faculty page.

"Dr. Elias Thorne," Min-ji announced, her voice flat but triumphant. "He's their man. Recruitment and Acquisition specialist."

Yoo-jin stared at the face on the screen, a cold fury rising within him. He now had the who, the when, and the how. He and his teenage spymaster had successfully unmasked the ghost haunting his artist.

"So we expose him," Min-ji said, already moving on to the next logical step. "We present the evidence to Chae-rin. Show her he's a liar. Neutralize the threat."

Yoo-jin shook his head, his mind racing past the immediate solution to the deeper problem. "No," he said firmly. "If I go to her with this, I become the all-knowing, controlling producer she ran away from at Stellar. It will prove her instincts right—that she can't trust anyone in authority. It will only make Thorne's twisted offer of 'understanding' seem more genuine by comparison. She has to be the one to reject him. The choice has to be hers."

"That's an emotional and tactical risk," Min-ji countered, ever the pragmatist. "Her stability is a liability to the project."

"We are not them, Min-ji," Yoo-jin said, his voice low and intense. "We don't manipulate our own people. Not even to protect them. We empower them." He looked from the picture of Thorne to the closed door of his office. "I need a new plan. I can't just shield her from him. I need to give her the tools to see him for what he is."