"You look like a corpse crawling out of a grave, Axel," Mr. Hen, the neighbor next door, greeted him as they crossed paths in the dim apartment hallway.Axel’s steps halted for a moment. He pulled the hood of his jacket lower, hiding the dullness of his skin and the deepening wrinkles on his face. Mr. Hen stepped back, his face paling in horror at the sight of Axel’s dimmed gaze. Axel did not respond. He continued dragging his heavy feet toward the emergency stairs. His knee joints creaked painfully with every step on the concrete. To him, every second wasted felt like the last grains of sand in an hourglass running out. He had to leave before those heavy footsteps in the corridor found the door to his unit.The night air greeted him with a biting chill that pierced through his thin jacket. Axel got into the old car he had prepared in the dark alley behind the building. His hands trembled violently as he gripped the steering wheel. The rearview mirror reflected the image of a stranger

“Father, can you hear me?” Vayu asked, his voice trembling with both emotion and anxiety.The glass of the incubation tank shattered into pieces. The cold chemical preservative flooded the laboratory floor in an instant. Dr. Adrian collapsed onto the wet concrete with a dull thud. Vayu rushed forward, ignoring his own safety. He paid no attention to the sharp shards of glass slicing into his knees until they bled, all for the sake of embracing the body of his father who had just risen from ten years of death.“Talk to me, Father, it’s me, Vayu,” he said, holding the old man tightly.Dr. Adrian made no sound at all. His pitch-black eyes merely followed Vayu’s movements without the slightest trace of recognition. There was no glimmer of love or emotion in them. The figure only stared blankly, like a machine that had just been powered on without complete software. Axel stood a few steps away, his breathing uneven. His head felt as if it had been struck by a massive hammer as the bionic i