"Ahh—ahhh!"
Adrian nearly dropped his phone. The panel exploded with moans, letters stretched across the page like the artist was being paid per vowel. The girl's face took up half the screen, eyes rolled back, tongue out, sweat dripping like someone had left a faucet on.
"Bruh…" Adrian whispered, tilting the phone sideways. "Ain't no way she surviving this chapter. She need electrolytes."
He scrolled down.
Another moan. Louder. Longer. The dialogue bubble was shaking like it had stage fright. Her back arched so far it looked like her spine was trying to file for divorce.
Adrian slapped his forehead. "Lord forgive me… but this is hilarious."
Page 11: The heroine clutched the bedsheets. Speech bubble: "N-noo, it's too big—ahhh!"
Adrian wheezed. "Too big? That's a regular size cucumber, calm down."
He kept reading, eyes wide, torn between shame and scientific curiosity. The villain appeared next, shirtless for no reason, growling his lines like a man auditioning for a werewolf movie.
"Bro," Adrian muttered, "why he sound like he ordering food at Jollibee? All that 'grrrr ahhh' like chill."
Page 18: maid outfit.
"Respect. Classic. Fine dining."
Page 21: tentacles.
"…Yeah, okay, we calling the Coast Guard."
Page 27: the best friend walks in.
Adrian pointed at the screen like he was watching NBA highlights. "There it is! The MVP! That 'oops I walked in at the wrong time' trope. Iconic. Hall of Fame material."
He kicked his blanket off, laughing so hard his stomach hurt. Every panel got worse, every moan more dramatic, every pose more impossible.
And yet… he couldn't stop reading.
Adrian burst out laughing, nearly dropping his phone. "No, no, no… that's not even physics anymore. That's black magic with thighs."
He wheezed into his pillow until his sides hurt, then froze as a thought flashed through his head. Word for word, he recalled the entire page he had just scrolled past—dialogue, art, panel order, everything. He could close his eyes and redraw it perfectly, down to the shaky moan bubbles and the suspiciously shiny sweat drops.
It wasn't a fluke. Adrian's brain worked like that with everything. Books, lectures, articles, even phone numbers he read once ten years ago—locked away, filed neatly in some endless library in his head. He had memorized physics textbooks before he hit high school. He could recite legal codes, quote Shakespeare, and solve equations most professors needed a calculator for.
People would think he was a loser, wasting away in bed with his phone glowing lewdly in the dark. But this same guy, this same idiot giggling at overdramatic hentai moans, had an IQ so sharp it could slice through steel.
Adrian was brilliant. Extraordinary. Too extraordinary.
And yet, his brilliance meant nothing.
Because Adrian had no ambition. None at all.
He could've been a scientist, an author, a lawyer, a chess master, a surgeon—hell, anything. But instead, here he was, wasting a godlike memory on panel thirty-two of a hentai manga, muttering, "Bruh… that's not lube, that's motor oil."
Adrian's thumb flicked down and another panel lit up his screen. The girl was sprawled out, blouse slipping off her shoulders, her mouth open mid-moan.
"Haaahh… aahhhhnn~!"
Adrian slapped his forehead. "Girl, you sound like a busted printer."
He scrolled. The next panel zoomed right in — close-up, too close, every line glistening with way too much shine.
The boy leaned closer in the manga, lips brushing her neck. The sound effect popped up: chu, chu, chu.
Adrian blinked. "Not you out here making kissing noises like a Pokémon."
Another page — clothes sliding, her skirt half-tangled around her legs. Her hands clenched the sheets, face flushed deep red. The moan stretched across the page like a broken car alarm.
"AaaaHHhhHHhh—!"
Adrian laughed so hard he almost dropped his phone. "Bro, she buffering. Somebody restart the Wi-Fi."
The boy's dialogue popped in: "I'll be gentle."
Adrian leaned forward, deadpan. "Cap. Pure cap. He about to fold her like laundry."
The next three panels proved him right. The moans turned into whole paragraphs, each letter vibrating, sweat flying like the artist thought this was an NBA game.
Adrian wiped a tear from his eye. "Nahhh, this ain't hentai, this a weather report — 80% chance of fluids with strong gusts of moaning winds."
He scrolled again, unable to stop laughing.
And yet, he kept reading.
Adrian finally lowered his phone, his eyes bloodshot, fingers cramped from hours of scrolling. The glow of the screen faded, leaving his room dim except for the faint orange light spilling from the streetlamp outside.
He blinked. "Bruh… it's night already?"
The realization hit him. His neck ached, his eyes burned, and his brain felt like he'd just taken a two-hour physics exam. He dragged a hand down his face, sighing.
"Man, I'm beat up," he muttered. "I didn't think hentai would require more mental focus than standardized testing."
He sat up straighter, as if about to give a lecture.
"First of all, the sheer cognitive strain of interpreting excessive moaning syllables cannot be overstated. Do you understand the neurological processing speed required to decode thirty-seven consecutive vowels in one bubble? That's a linguistic marathon."
He held up a finger like a professor.
"Secondly, the human spine is not designed to bend in ninety-degree increments while simultaneously supporting double its body weight in… assets. The calculations alone nearly fried my occipital lobe."
Another finger raised.
"And third, the psychological toll of differentiating between artistic exaggeration and potential medical emergency? Immeasurable. At one point, I wasn't sure if I was reading hentai or a CPR manual."
He leaned back, exhausted, eyes half-shut, but still dead serious.
"In conclusion," he muttered, voice low, "hentai is not simply entertainment. It is a high-level cognitive stress test that pushes the human brain to its absolute limits. Frankly, the Ministry of Education should consider replacing final exams with three hours of raw hentai exposure. Only the strong would survive."
Adrian let his phone slip onto his chest.
"God… I need electrolytes."
And with that, he passed out.
Adrian woke with a wet snort, half-choking on his own drool. His phone slid off his chest and clattered onto the floor. He blinked blearily. The room was quiet. Too quiet.
Then he saw it.
Mist. Thin, pale wisps curling around his desk, crawling across the floor, seeping through the cracks of his window as if the night had decided to move in with him.
Adrian froze. His heart skipped.
"…Okay," he whispered to himself, voice shaky. "Mist inside a closed room. Hah. Perfectly explainable phenomenon. Totally normal. Condensation plus… uh…" His brain scrambled, pulling out textbook definitions. "…thermodynamic irregularities caused by… nocturnal airflow?"
The mist thickened.
Adrian's throat went dry.
"Statistically speaking," he muttered, his voice rising, "there's a ninety-nine percent chance ghosts don't exist. But… and this is a big but… there's also a fifty-fifty chance I will pee my pants in the next five minutes because of this exact scenario."
Something creaked at the edge of the room. Adrian flinched so hard his blanket nearly flew off.
He raised his hands defensively, shaking his head. "N-no, listen… I'm sorry, alright? If this is some cosmic punishment, I didn't mean to binge-read hentai that hard. It was just— it was just really well drawn, okay?! Blame the author, not me!"
The mist swirled closer to his bed.
Adrian's eyes darted side to side, panic rising. "Or, or better yet, take the other readers! They're out there too! I'm not even top ten on the degeneracy leaderboard, I swear!"
The silence pressed in. His voice cracked.
"…I'm innocent, bruh."
He pulled the blanket over his head, shivering, whispering calculations about mist density under his breath like they would protect him.
The mist coiled tighter, thick enough to sting Adrian's eyes. His chest hammered. A silhouette moved in the haze, each step measured, deliberate, too slow to be human.
Adrian's throat went dry. He clutched his blanket like a lifeline.
"N-no… no, no, no…" His voice cracked, teeth chattering. "Statistically speaking, ninety-nine percent of paranormal encounters are hoaxes, but this—this is the one percent! AHHHHH!"
The figure drew closer. A heavy shadow loomed just beyond the edge of his bed.
Adrian yanked the blanket over his face. His scream was muffled, shaky. "Ahhh—don't touch me, don't touch me, don't touch me—!"
Then the blanket was torn away.
Adrian froze, his wide eyes locking onto the figure standing above him. An old man. White hair cascading past his shoulders, eyes glowing faintly like embers, robes woven from the same mist that filled the room.
The man's voice was deep, steady, and cold.
"You're dead, Adrian. And I am here to give you a chance."
The words sank like a stone into Adrian's chest. He opened his mouth, but no sound came. For the first time, his genius brain couldn't calculate an explanation, couldn't find a loophole.
His lips trembled. "...So… this is it? The hentai fried my neurons and summoned Gandalf's angry cousin to finish the job?"
The old man didn't flinch. The mist tightened.
Adrian sat there, breath shallow, equal parts terrified and absurdly aware of the ridiculousness of his final thought:
I died reading hentai. Out of all possible fates… it had to be this.
Adrian stared at the old man, mouth dry, palms clammy. "W-wait, so… hentai really killed me?"
The old man raised a hand, stroking his silver beard. His voice echoed through the mist, calm but sharp.
"Not entirely."
Adrian blinked. "…Not entirely?"
The god's eyes narrowed. "Half. Half of your death belongs to hentai. The other half belongs to your own stupidity."
Adrian sat upright, offended. "Bruh, what do you mean half-half? That doesn't even sound like a medical condition."
The old man sighed. His robes rippled like smoke. "Listen carefully, Adrian. Your brain is extraordinary, your memory unmatched, your intellect… beyond human limits. But even such a brain rests inside a body. A very average, human body."
He tapped his cane against the ground. A faint glow rippled through the mist, forming shapes—images of Adrian himself, hunched in bed, phone in hand, laughing so hard his whole chest shook.
"You laughed," the old man said. "And you didn't stop. Continuous laughter, especially from the diaphragm, compresses the chest cavity. Your heart accelerated, your blood pressure spiked. Combined with your complete lack of sleep, dehydration, and your frankly disgusting choice of late-night snack—"
"Wait, you saw that?" Adrian's eyes widened.
The god ignored him. "…Your heart faltered. Then it stopped. Not because hentai itself killed you… but because you lost control of your body while indulging in it."
Adrian slumped back, staring at the glowing images of himself. "So you're telling me… I basically laughed myself into a cardiac arrest… over moans written in hiragana?"
The god's expression didn't shift. "Precisely."
Adrian covered his face with both hands, groaning. "Bruh. That's not even a dignified death. That's… that's like Darwin Awards material!"
The god's lips curled faintly. "Consider it… poetic irony. A man who could remember every word ever written, undone by the repeated vowels of a fake woman's moans."
Adrian winced. "Bro, you didn't have to phrase it like that. That's… that's cold."