2026-09-02 16:02:03Cold water struck Elias's face.
He jerked awake, gasping greedily for air. For a few seconds, he had absolutely no idea where he was. His throat still burned, his chest felt tight, and a sickening exhaustion pinned his body down. A weak fluorescent light flickered above him, casting harsh shadows across a stained ceiling.
Then, someone nudged his leg with the toe of a heavy boot. "Get up."
Elias blinked. He realized he was lying on a narrow bench inside what appeared to be a security room. A battered desk occupied one corner, surrounded by monitors displaying various sections of the institute. A metal cabinet stood against the wall, and the air in the room smelled like a stale mix of coffee, sweat, and disinfectant.
A security guard towered over him, holding an empty plastic bottle that dripped the last of its water. "You awake?"
Elias slowly pushed himself up to sit. His first thought upon opening his eyes wasn't about this room. It wasn't about Adrian Kaelen. It wasn't even about the System shackling him.
"Marcus."
The guard's expression hardened. "There you go again."
Elias stared straight at him. "Marcus Vance."
"Stop saying Professor Vance's name with your filthy mouth."
Elias merely stared without blinking. The guard crossed his arms over his chest in an arrogant posture. "Professor Vance is one of the most respected people in this institute. Show some respect."
Elias remained silent.
The guard stepped closer. "What?" Elias continued to stare with a piercing, hollow gaze. The man's jaw tightened. "What are you looking at?" Still no answer. The guard leaned down slightly, trying to intimidate him. "You challenging me?"
Elias's gaze remained as cold as ice. He had spent ten years of his life learning to read body language, facial expressions, and microscopic changes in human behavior. The guard was angry because Elias wasn't giving him the fear or submission he expected. But Elias had absolutely no energy left to waste entertaining him.
Before the situation could escalate into a physical altercation, another security guard sitting behind the desk reached into a paper bag nearby. "Just get rid of him." The man tossed a plastic-wrapped sandwich across the room. It landed squarely on Elias's chest. "Eat that and get out of here."
The first guard pointed roughly toward the door. "And don't ever come back."
Elias looked down at the sandwich. For a few seconds, he didn't move. Then, he slowly picked it up. He stood tall. His legs trembled slightly under his own weight, but he steadied his balance against the wall before walking toward the door. Neither of the guards tried to stop him.
Elias walked away without saying a single word.
The afternoon air felt increasingly cold and biting as he walked down the sidewalk. Elias moved slowly, the brim of his cap pulled low to hide his eyes. The sandwich was still in his grip. He hadn't eaten anything since waking up in this fragile body.
Eventually, he tore open the plastic wrapper and took a bite. It was hard and dry. Cheap bread, leftover processed meat, and a single leaf of wilted lettuce. It tasted bland, like chewing on dust.
He kept walking. His mind drifted elsewhere.
Marcus.
Every revenge scenario Elias had imagined always ended with Marcus. However, confronting him directly today had proven to be a failure. That damn System had prevented him from revealing his true identity. Worse, Marcus had simply walked away as if Elias's accusations were nothing more than the ramblings of a madman.
And yet, something else lingered in his mind. That final look. The moment Marcus turned back before disappearing at the end of the corridor. The fear that flashed for a fraction of a second in the man's eyes.
Elias wasn't hallucinating. Marcus realized something. Perhaps the man hadn't immediately recognized that the corpse of Elias Thorne was standing right there, but he sensed an anomaly. That fact proved one thing: Marcus's armor of composure had a crack. There was a weakness. Elias just didn't know what it was yet.
He needed information. Not emotion. Not wild assumptions. Empirical information.
He needed to understand what had actually happened after his death in the St. Jude autopsy suite. Who had officially declared him dead. Which pathologist had dared to autopsy his body. What evidence had been fabricated and collected. What was written in the autopsy report. And most importantly, he needed to know, step by step, how Marcus had manipulated a premeditated murder to look flawlessly like a natural death.
Elias's steps slowed. His gaze swept across the street, and a small, dimly lit sign caught his attention.
INTERNET CAFE
He stopped walking. For a moment, he merely stared at the sign. Then, he turned and crossed the street toward the entrance. The first thing he needed to do right now was not physically hunt Marcus down. It was to find out exactly how Elias Thorne had been recorded in the history of his own death.
Elsewhere, Marcus Vance sat alone in his spacious office.
The double doors of the room were shut and firmly locked. The blinds were drawn halfway across the windows, leaving a muted, silent afternoon light. His expensive jacket had been removed and draped neatly over the back of his leather chair. His tie remained perfectly straight and precise.
However, his expression was now vastly different.
There was no smile. No warmth. Not a single trace of the charismatic professor who had captivated an audience of hundreds less than two hours ago.
Marcus glared at his computer screen. A high-resolution personnel database filled the monitor. At the very top, a portrait photo was displayed.
ADRIAN KAELEN
Marcus leaned closer to the screen. His eyes moved slowly, tracing every line of text on the page. Age. Date of birth. Academic history. Residential information. University enrollment status. Marcus's index finger rested tensely on the edge of his mahogany desk. Then, he read one line aloud in a low voice.
"Currently enrolled at..."
He stopped reading. His eyes narrowed sharply.
The silence in the room felt increasingly heavy and suffocating. Marcus leaned back slowly, letting his spine sink into the soft leather of his chair. For a few seconds, he stared straight at Adrian Kaelen's name. Then, he looked again at the photograph of that pale, weak face.
"Adrian Kaelen. That woman should know."
Then, Marcus picked up his smartphone, scrolled for a specific contact, and made the call.
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Chapter 16
The number stayed with Elias long after he returned to the suffocating quiet of his dormitory.3.It was stamped into the back of a piece of metal that had once belonged to him.Not Adrian Kaelen. Not some faceless stranger.Him.E. THORNE.Elias placed the scratched identification tag on his desk, letting it rest beneath the pale, harsh circle of his reading lamp.For several minutes, he didn't touch it. He simply looked.The metal was cold, scored with years of use, and slightly bent along one edge. The black engraving had faded in places, but the name remained entirely unmistakable.His old identity. His old life.And beneath it—MERCER — 3Elias finally picked it up. He turned it over, his thumb brushing the smooth surface.Nothing else. No department initials. No date of issue. No hospital registry number. No hidden compartment. Just three words.He placed it back beneath the light and examined it the way he would have examined physical evidence at a fresh crime scene.Scratches.
Chapter 15
Elias barely slept.By morning, the laptop was still sitting exactly where he had left it, its dead, black screen reflecting the faint gray light leaking through the dormitory curtains. His phone remained face up on the desk beside it, displaying the same two messages that had kept him awake for most of the night.Stop looking for the man you used to be. He already failed once.Elias had read them so many times he no longer needed to look at the screen to remember every syllable.He picked up the phone again.He wasn't interested in the threat itself. He was interested in how it had been delivered.Elias opened the message details and examined everything the device would allow him to see. Sender information. Transmission data. Timestamps.Nothing useful.The number had been masked through a service that exposed almost no useful sender information. There was no recoverable carrier data, no obvious geographic origin, nothing that would allow him to simply point at a map and say, There.
Chapter 14
Memory was an unreliable witness.Evidence wasn't supposed to be.So Elias stopped asking himself what he remembered. He started asking what could be proven.The dorm room was pitch black except for the cold, pale glow of the laptop screen. It was well past two in the morning, but Elias had barely moved a muscle since reading the final, terrifying message from the System.[You were already investigating it.]Daniel Mercer.The name now sat dead center in the middle of everything.Not because Elias remembered the man. He didn't. That was the problem.He remembered his own murder with agonizing, unbearable clarity. He remembered Marcus. The sterile chill of the St. Jude autopsy suite. The glint of the syringe. The liquid fire of the poison entering his bloodstream. The suffocating helplessness.But Daniel Mercer was a complete blank space in his mind.If Elias Thorne had truly been investigating Mercer before his death, then there was a massive, critical part of his own life that Elias
Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen — The Dead Tell No LiesMarcus had not forgotten him.Elias was almost certain of that now.The question was no longer whether Marcus remembered the erratic student who had confronted him outside the conference hall.He did.Elias had seen the recognition flash across Marcus's face during that brief, suspended moment when their eyes met at the beginning of the lecture. He had seen it again in the deliberate, calculating way Marcus had singled him out during the discussion.What Elias could not determine was what exactly Marcus remembered.Was Marcus looking at Adrian Kaelen—a strange undergraduate who had suddenly developed an unsettling interest in Elias Thorne's death?Or was he looking past the young man's face, searching for something far more impossible?A ghost.A dead pathologist.A man who should have been buried months ago.Neither of them could afford to make the first mistake.The lecture hall had nearly emptied when Marcus closed his leather-bound notes an
Chapter 12
Marcus Vance began the lecture as if nothing unusual had happened.That demeanor, more than anything else, unsettled Elias.There was no hesitation in Marcus's movements, no lingering glance in his direction, no sign whatsoever that the professor standing at the front of the room had any reason to remember the young man sitting among the students.The man simply continued."Forensic pathology is not the art of finding an answer," Marcus said, pacing slowly in front of the projector screen. "It is the discipline of determining whether the available evidence permits us to reach a conclusion."The students listened with rapt attention.Marcus dissected the material effortlessly. He discussed blunt force trauma, toxicological interpretation, postmortem redistribution, decomposition, and the dangers of relying too heavily on a single finding. Every explanation was sharp and precise. Every case example was chosen with a high degree of care.It was a near-perfect presentation.And Elias abso
Chapter 11
Before he knew it, Elias had spent the better part of the week acclimating to the monotonous and suffocating life of Adrian Kaelen. The coursework was trivial. His dorm room was nothing more than a tolerable prison cell. The System remained irritatingly silent as long as he didn't cross the line. But the university itself was beginning to become a nuisance, particularly the people who, for whatever reason, felt entitled to his time. Leo was the chief offender among them. They sat across from one another in the campus cafeteria, enveloped by the midday cacophony of overlapping conversations, scraping chairs, and the mechanical hum of vending machines. Elias held a paper cup of black coffee, his expression perfectly flat, while Leo absentmindedly picked at the remains of his lunch. "So," Leo said around a mouthful of fries, "what are your plans for this weekend?" "Something." Leo looked up, raising an eyebrow. "That sounds highly suspicious, like an answer specifically designed to
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