The second night in the sealed tomb of the 108th floor dragged on interminably.

  The overhead LEDs bled a relentless, clinical white, erasing any sense of time.

  Only the intermittent metallic groans of the skyscraper—the skyscraper’s skeleton creaking under the atmospheric strain—gnawed at the survivors' frayed nerves.

  While Director Jo and Yuna slept huddled over the dwindling food crates like scavengers, Professor Park broke the silence with a voice that sounded like grinding stones.

  “He never loved numbers,”

  the professor whispered.

  “He loved using them to dismantle people.”

  Min-ho and Team Leader Park, clutching their hollow stomachs, turned toward him. In the professor's haunted eyes, a vision from thirty years ago flickered into life—a university lecture hall, long before the empire was built.

  "Chairman Kang, back in his undergraduate days, was the star of my Number Theory class. One day, I assigned a simple task: write down the 'most beautiful formula' you can imagine. While the other students submitted Euler’s Identity, that bastard filled an entire sheet with nothing but the sequence of Twin Primes."

  Professor Park swallowed hard, his throat dry as ash.

  "He looked at me and said, ‘Professor, these numbers are monsters. They spend their entire lives watching each other, separated by a gap of 2—the closest they can ever get without touching. Could there be a more perfect human relationship?’"

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  A bitter laugh escaped the professor's lips.

  “Back then, I mistook his words for the insight of a lonely genius. I was wrong. A week later, every terminal in the department’s computer lab was paralyzed.

  The algorithm he’d planted on the server was a digital hostage crisis: unless a student calculated and input the next largest prime number in the sequence, their

  graduation thesis data would be erased, bit by bit, into the void.”

  “He held their life’s work hostage for a game?” Team Leader Park asked, his voice trembling with disbelief.“Exactly. My students spent nights in a feverish, desperate

  trance, calculating primes to save their futures. And that bastard? He sat in the corner of the lab, watching the chaos with a look of pure, serene satisfaction.

  When I demanded to know why, he looked at me with eyes of chilling clarity. ‘Professor, this isn't bullying,’ he said. ‘Only under this kind of pressure will they feel the

  nobility of these numbers in their very bones. I didn’t trap them. I gifted them a mathematical ecstasy.’”

  Professor Park’s hand trembled, his fingers twitching as if trying to grasp a ghost from the past.

  “That bastard deceived us all. He wrapped his madness in the shimmering veil of genius, calling it ‘art’ whenever others were dismantled within the rules he crafted.

  For him, this 108th-floor tomb is nothing but an extension of that computer lab from thirty years ago. The moment we—blinded by fear—stumble upon the code and press those keys, he’ll be popping champagne. Our salvation is merely the final stroke of his masterpiece of despair.”

  Min-ho turned his gaze back to the cold, carved words on the wall. The inorganic chill he had seen in Chairman Kang’s unblinking eyelids and bloodless lips now synchronized perfectly with the professor’s warning.

  A heavy, sickening realization settled in Min-ho's gut. This penthouse wasn't a room to escape from—it was a vast, high-altitude laboratory.

  They weren't survivors; they were the test subjects for Chairman Kang’s ultimate experiment in

  ‘Human Prime Factorization.’

  Hello, readers. Chapter 2, "Madness Behind the Mask of Genius," focused on thepsychological strainof confinement and theunveiling of a villain's past.I wanted to explore:

  Madness vs. Genius

  The Past Haunting the Present

  Psychological Strain

  Contrasting Philosophies