In Black Knight, Ryu Seok is the man who is against the government’s relocation plans and is ready to go to great lengths to stop the relocation of the refugees. Song Seung-heon plays the role of Ryu Seok.
Ryu Seok is the CEO of Cheonmyeong Group. Years ago, his father, Chairman Ryu, built the world that they are living in today, and now, Cheonmyeong is responsible for supplying people with oxygen through their delivery system.
Now, Cheonmyeong is building a new district, District A, and Chairman Ryu wants the government to handle the relocation of the citizens, as the government plans to relocate the refugees also. However, Ryu Seok has plans of his own.
Plans for the new world
Ryu Seok refuses to keep the president updated on the development of District A. He only reports to his father, who does not fail to remind him that Cheonmyeong Group is not Ryu Seok’s.
Chairman Ryu wants to include everyone, including the refugees, in their relocation plans because he does not want to repeat his past mistakes. However, Ryu Seok is adamant about not including the refugees and leaving people out.
Chairman Ryu does not trust anyone, especially his own son. He believes that like several others living in this world, Ryu Seok is also losing his mind.
He is not wrong, as Ryu Seok is a bigot who does not value human life. He sees humans as stupid people living in the world created by his father and taking it for granted.
Ryu Seok wants to create a new world with the most superior genes, so he asks Seol-ah to give him the personal data of all the citizens for his relocation plans. His plans do not change even when Seol-ah points out to him that choosing people like this cannot be fair, no matter what the criteria is.
The mass murders
When Chairman Ryu does not budge from his plan of including everyone in the relocation plan, Ryu Seok decides to take extreme measures. To give hope to the refugees, he allows Sa-wol to advance to the third round of the Deliveryman Recruitment Tournament.
He then sends presents and big screens to the refugee settlements for the refugees to gather in different places to watch the last round of the tournament. He also sends bombers to these gatherings and kills hundreds of refugees in one day.
He then pretends to follow his father’s instructions and go along with the government’s relocation plans. He conducts a registration and vaccination drive for the refugees that would facilitate their relocation.
However, these vaccines are meant to kill the refugees after a certain period of time. Once again, Ryu Seok takes several lives just to get his own way.
Sickness and kidnappings
Chairman Ryu is unaware that his son is sick and is dying. To find a cue for his sickness, Ryu Seok has been kidnapping the teenagers whose parents worked in oxyanium mines to find those who are mutants.
Most of these children are refugees, but some of them are from the General District. He experiments on people who have the same sickness as him with mutant blood. He uses 5-7 to kidnap these teenagers for his experiments.
When 5-7 no longer wishes to be a part of his schemes, it does not take him long to get rid of him. Ryu Seok places tiny devices in the bodies of the people who serve him to control and kill them within seconds whenever he wishes. Using this device, he kills 5-7.
The thirst for power
Ryu Seok is a man who wants control and power; he even tortures his right-hand man, Director Oh, with the device in his body to exercise control over him. He is also seen killing the kidnapped teenagers on a whim.
Since Cheonmyeong Group makes its fortune from oxygen as well as the delivery service, Ryu Seok deliberately pollutes the air to keep the people always in need of oxygen. If the air gets cleaner, Cheonmyeong Group will lose its power.
5-8 and his group of deliverymen figure this out. They also know about the kidnappings and the attacks on the refugees, so they decide to assassinate him. However, they fail to kill him, and Ryu Seok declares them terrorists, forcing them to go into hiding.
At the same time, Seol-ah tells Chairman Ryu about Ryu Seok’s crimes. Chairman Ryu decides to hand over the delivery system as well as the supply of oxygen to the government to stop his son. Additionally, he plans to get his son arrested.
Ryu Seok refuses to lose the Cheonmyeong Group like this. The defense minister, who has been in cahoots with Ryu Seok, comes to arrest him. Ryu Seok then asks his father to kill him, but before he could do that, the defense minister kills Chairman Ryu, who had been stopping them from executing their plans.
Ryu Seok’s end
After his father’s death, Ryu Seok is surprised for a while but moves on to the next step of his plan just as easily. With his father out of the way, he plans to wipe out the refugees completely, as there is no one to stop him.
He is going to stage a coup with the defense minister. For that, they capture the president as well as Sa-wol, as Ryu Seok knows that Sa-wol is a mutant.
While getting a direct blood transfusion from Sa-wol, Ryu Seok is told that 5-8’s group as well as Seol-ah’s team has attacked them, and Ryu Seok is forced to stop the transfusion.
When he knows that he has lost and that there is no way out, he decides to kill himself and everyone around him by overloading the Air Core, which would result in a blast. He would rather kill himself than be arrested by a former refugee like 5-8.
He shows no regrets about killing so many people, even when 5-8 corners him. 5-8 manages to kill him and rescue Sa-wol, but even after getting shot in the head, Ryu Seok is seen moving. He is then caught in the blast and is assumed dead.
