Patusan is a tropical island situated near the equator. The corporation LK is building an elevator to Earth’s orbit here, and the island is to become the gateway into our planet. The “spider cable” dropped from a satellite in synchronous orbit touches down on Patusan and the other end heads toward the counterweight, creating the long and thin thread that is the orbital elevator. The role of the counterweight is to pull on the cable by centrifugal force and maintain the structure of the elevator. The city it is being built on was once an almost ruined resort town, but with the construction of the elevator, it is now a bustling international metropolis. LK’s late president Han Junghyuk created an ecologically perfect city there where escalators cascade down the mountain like a waterfall, and the spider cable of the elevator grows thicker and thicker along with our widening path toward space.

But not everyone can be satisfied. The Patusan government is but a shell, and no matter how much money LK bribes the indigenous population with, it’s not enough. Eventually, the Patusan Liberation Front is born, and this is where the story of COUNTERWEIGHT begins.

Mac, the head of LK’s External Affairs division, invades a shantytown on a neighboring island to arrest terrorist suspects, only to discover a suspicious Korean man. In a world where everyone has gotten rid of their body hair, this man in his late twenties has opted to keep his beard. A handsome but somehow shabby man, his name is Choi Gangwu and he has just started working for LK. The Liberation Front, thinking the amateur lepidopterist Choi is an environmentalist, try to lure him into spying for them. A Front agent ZS approaches him, and once Mac learns of their relationship, he plants a wire in Choi and tries to entrap ZS. But the situation gets out of hand, and Mac with his vast intelligence network somehow senses Choi is involved in a much larger mystery.

Choi turns into a different person whenever he talks about the orbital elevator, turning from a silly man who likes butterflies into a raving engineering expert. Mac feels a certain familiarity with him when this happens. Who is he really? Unknown forces begin to understand Choi is more important than he looks and begin to converge on him, and the future suddenly looks very chaotic. Can Mac and Choi survive what’s coming to them? They enter a dangerous adventure where they must uncover the truth behind the transnational conglomerate LK, the orbital elevator, and the counterweight high in the sky.