The One Percent That Cheated Death
In a world that worships success, General Kang believed in failure.
Not because he loved losing—because he understood a simple truth: success is only failure repeated until reality grows tired of resisting.
He was one of the top three military authorities in Korea. A man who rarely raised his voice, yet a single quiet order could reshape a room. A commander who treated war like an equation, loss like a number to be corrected, and survival like an art no academy truly taught.
But behind that steel… lived another man.
A man who sat at night before a screen, watching heroes, laughing at himself for still believing in miracles at his age.
Marvel wasn't just entertainment to him. It was a silent challenge:
Why must imagination stay imaginary?
In his youth, he tried—again and again—to drag what he saw on television into the real world. Suits. Devices. Materials. Theories. Experiments burst, tools burned, people mocked. But every failure left a sliver of knowledge behind. Every collapse added a line to a book only he was reading.
Only one percent of his attempts ever worked.
But that one percent… was enough.
It led him to the project he'd carried for half a century:
the Super Soldier Serum.
At seventy-two, the results finally stood on the edge of success. Equations stabilizing. Reactions balancing. Hope forming slowly inside a room nobody knew existed.
He dreamed of an army that could not fall—not for conquest, but for the day nations would fail to protect their own people.
But fate never negotiates with ambition.
On a quiet night—just before he could witness his dream made real—his heart stopped.
No screaming. No tragedy. Only a strange sensation that the story ended before its best chapter.
Then darkness.
And in the darkness, a whisper that belonged neither to life nor death:
"Resource… is the root of civilization."
He opened his eyes… to a sea he had never seen before.