They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die.
Mine? It played like a blooper reel. I tripped. I fell. I screamed. And then I exploded.
Well—technically, I exploded because someone dropped a mana bomb in the scavenger pit. But semantics aside, my final act on Earth was flailing like an idiot while yelling, "Wait, I'm not even armed!"
Which is true. I wasn't.
Because I couldn't afford weapons. Or armor. Or dignity.
That was the last punchline life threw at me before I died: Jin, age 19, professional bottom-feeder, killed by a terrorist attack he wasn't even important enough to be targeted in.
A nobody. Forgotten. Erased.
But when I opened my eyes again, it wasn't fire or heaven or hell. It was... cold.
Sterile. Metal walls. Flickering lights. A soft mechanical hum, and the dull ache of breathing.
What the hell?
I gasped like a drowning man, choking on recycled air. My lungs burned. My throat was dry like I'd swallowed sand. Every nerve screamed in protest.
Alive?
No—something was wrong.
I tried to move. Couldn't. My fingers were slow, my legs limp. I was strapped down to something hard and cold.
A slab?
Medical table. Old-world tech, at least thirty years out of date, judging by the rusted IV ports and cracked interface screens.
Where the hell am I?
My heart pounded as fragmented data flashed across my vision. No—not my vision. My mind. Schematics. Calculations. Data trees. Names and terms I didn't understand and yet did. Like they'd always been there, buried under static.
An AI blueprint scrolled across the inside of my eyelids. A subdermal implant diagram. Then, memories. Not mine.
Explosions. Laughter. Screaming. A woman in a white coat. A child with wires in his skull. And then—darkness.
Something deep inside me clicked. Not metaphorically. Literally—clicked. Like a switch being thrown.
Suddenly, I knew things I shouldn't. Could feel synapses firing like upgraded circuits. I understood the table I was strapped to. Its code. Its function. Its weaknesses.
I reached up—hands shaking—and yanked two cables from my chest. Pain stabbed through me like lightning, but I didn't scream. I grinned.
"I'm not dead," I rasped. My voice was hoarse, but alive.
And then I saw it: a shattered mirror, half-buried under a pile of old instruments.
I turned my head. Slowly. Dread coiled in my gut.
Reflected in the mirror was a face I recognized. Sharp cheekbones. Silver eyes. A faded scar across the left brow.
No. Freaking. Way.
It was the face of Dr. Riven Kael.
The youngest hyperengineer in recorded history. The man who revolutionized artificial evolution. The mad genius who disappeared five years ago after allegedly detonating his lab and killing over a hundred officials in a "research accident."
He'd been branded dead. A terrorist. A ghost.
And I was looking at him.
I was him.
I stumbled off the table, crashing to my knees. My legs weren't used to supporting weight. I crawled across the room, muscles trembling, until I reached the cracked mirror and stared.
"This isn't real," I whispered.
But it was. The face staring back was too detailed, too expressive to be a dream. Not perfect. Tired. Hollow-eyed. But alive.
I touched my face. It touched back.
The lab was in ruins. Walls scorched. Consoles shattered. A gaping hole in the far wall led to a collapsed tunnel, half-caved in with rubble.
But one thing still worked: the central terminal.
I limped to it, hand gripping a nearby pipe for balance. The interface blinked sluggishly. Burnt, but not dead.
I touched the console. It flared to life.
> USER IDENTIFIED: DR. RIVEN KAEL
My stomach dropped.
Data poured into my mind. Protocols. Designs. Log entries. Neural synchronization complete.
> MEMORY SYNC INITIATED...
Agony ripped through me like molten wire. I collapsed, screaming silently, as a flood of memories not mine drowned my senses.
A child genius. A laboratory built underground. Illegal research into post-human evolution. Betrayal. Fire. Screams. A final experiment.
A plan to escape death.
"You left a backup plan," I gasped, panting as the pain faded.
He had planned it. Dr. Kael had created a neuro-lattice. A failsafe. When his body died, his mind would imprint itself onto the strongest viable subject.
But there had been no one strong enough.
Until now. Until... me?
How the hell did a weak scavenger like Jin end up as the container for the world's most dangerous mind?
Unless... it wasn't an accident.
Footsteps.
I froze.
Metal against metal. Heavy. Coming closer.
I limped back, heart racing. No weapons. No powers. Just a stolen body and a head full of stolen genius.
A voice echoed from the shadows. Smooth. Amused.
"You took longer to wake than expected."
A man stepped into view. Tall. Dressed in a tactical coat. Cybernetic eye glowing red.
He smiled. "Welcome back, Doctor."
I smiled back, even as panic churned in my gut.
Time to bluff like hell.
"Miss me that much?"
His smile widened.
*****
The man with the cybernetic eye didn't draw a weapon. That was more unnerving than if he had. He just stood there, watching me like a scientist might watch a rat try to solve a maze.
"Still calibrating?" he asked, tone smooth and clinical. "Or do you remember me yet?"
I didn't respond. My body was in shambles. Every step took effort. Every breath felt like broken glass. But my mind—it was racing.
I accessed the neural memory bank. Data flickered. Faces. Names. Logs. His name blinked into place with a file header:
Commander Aldric Vane – Former head of Project Ascendant Security.
He was one of Kael's enforcers. The man tasked with protecting the research and—more importantly—cleaning up any inconvenient witnesses.
"Where am I?" I asked, stalling.
"Still in the husk of your tomb," Aldric replied, gesturing to the scorched lab. "This facility's been off-grid for five years. You left quite a mess."
I forced myself to stand upright. "And you waited all this time just to say hello?"
He smiled faintly. "I waited to see if your resurrection protocol would work. I always had my doubts."
"So you were watching me?"
He nodded. "Of course. The moment the bio-signature reactivated, I received a ping. I arrived thirty minutes ago. And I must say... you're not quite what I expected."
That made two of us.
Aldric stepped closer. I didn't flinch. Couldn't afford to. Predators react to fear. I gave him a smirk instead—classic Kael arrogance.
"Congratulations," I said. "You found the last ghost of a dead man. Now what?"
"Now," he said, tapping a button on his wristband, "I take you in."
Steel doors ground open behind him. Four heavily armed operatives marched in, armor gleaming with old insignias. Their weapons didn't waver.
This was it. Game over.
Unless...
My gaze darted to the terminal. It still glowed faintly.
Neural Override: ENABLED
The real Kael had built failsafes. If he were ever compromised, he'd built emergency commands into every piece of tech he touched. Including weapons.
I lunged sideways, slamming my palm into the console. My fingers danced across the damaged keys. The neural commands surged through me.
Command Input: Protocol 42-Beta
Executing...
The operatives' weapons sparked—then exploded in their hands. Screams followed as they dropped to the floor, stunned and bleeding.
Aldric dove backward, barely avoiding a chain reaction from his own belt unit. He glared at me, eyes wide.
"You—"
"Genius," I interrupted, panting. "You forgot. I built your toys."
I didn't wait for him to recover. I grabbed the closest weapon from a fallen operative, limping toward the breach in the wall. My muscles burned, but adrenaline carried me.
Aldric shouted something, but I didn't care.
I ran.
The lab corridors were a nightmare. Collapsed beams, flickering lights, old security drones twitching in standby. I sprinted through it all like a rat in a burning maze.
Maps streamed into my thoughts. Emergency exit routes, air vents, structural weaknesses. I could see the way out. Just had to survive long enough to reach it.
Behind me, alarms wailed. Footsteps thundered.
I ducked into a maintenance shaft, slammed the panel shut, and crawled into darkness.
For several long minutes, I moved in silence. Only my ragged breathing echoed in the shaft.
Then I saw light.
A broken grate. A vent to the surface.
I forced it open and pulled myself up.
And just like that, the corpse who died a joke escaped into the world.
But the world wasn't the same.
As I crawled out of the shaft and took my first look at the sky, I froze.
The stars were gone. The sky was veiled in aurora-like streaks of mana pollution. Floating islands drifted overhead. Monstrous shadows moved across distant mountains.
Evolution hadn't stopped.
It had accelerated.
And the world I'd left behind was now a war zone of survival, power, and chaos.
I grinned.
"Time to start over."
Not as Jin, the nobody scavenger. Not even as Kael, the exiled genius.
But as something new.
Something dangerous.
Something alive.