"Haa... What a mess... What on earth did he do?"

No Gyeong-rok, a researcher on Q-Cell's ESS research team, sighed at the state the principal researcher had left everything in.

He'd obviously been buried in research all weekend without a break.

Testing equipment of every kind sat open, never put away—a total mess.

The fairly large lab looked like a bomb had hit it.

Principal researcher Kim Jae-yeol was nowhere to be seen.

"This is why those foreign-educated types are such jerks..."

No Gyeong-rok let slip the feelings he'd kept hidden.

He'd started at Q-Cell from the bottom.

Once, as one of the founding members, he'd had everyone's hopes riding on him.

But there was no getting around the limits of being homegrown.

He'd graduated from the engineering school at Hanyeong University, said to be second only to Hanguk University in engineering.

He kept getting pushed aside by technology that changed by the day.

It wasn't easy to keep up with the American-educated ones, who combined their work with IT and got full backing from national and university research institutes.

His professors were still clinging to the old ways of teaching.

He'd known he was falling behind, but his family couldn't support him.

When he joined the company with a PhD from Hanyeong University, he'd had big ambitions.

But facing a wall he could see plain as day, he'd crumpled.

To put it bluntly, he'd been pushed aside by Kim Jae-yeol—a foreign-educated man with the same PhD, and younger, too.

He was helpless against research methods he'd never even imagined, a sharper grasp of the work, and the knowledge to back it all up.

In no time he'd dropped from lead to assistant.

He'd read countless new research papers, but he couldn't put his finger on the key.

Kim Jae-yeol, by contrast, was outstanding in every way.

Especially when his research hit a wall, he'd call his school colleagues or professors directly and solve it on the spot.

Even now, he'd clearly been up to something behind the backs of the researchers under him.

"But if you think I won't…