The room was too white for death.
Sterile light buzzed overhead. Monitors blinked quietly, their rhythms echoing the last breaths of a man the world once believed untouchable.
On the private floor of a sky-piercing hospital in New Geneva, the richest man in the world lay dying, his empire reduced to a heartbeat and a history.
Arion Drayke, tech visionary, economic architect, global disruptor — was dying at 38.
Not from poison. Not from betrayal. From his own body. Nerve degradation disorder, they said. Rare. Incurable. He had bought islands, rewritten education systems, even funded a lunar mining operation. But not even all the zeros in the world could silence the final, cruel arithmetic of biology.
He'd expected something more. A final revelation. A chorus of angels or the whisper of code unlocking eternity.
But instead, there was silence.
Nurses outside the door. A few loyal aides praying he left behind instructions they could monetize.
On the wall opposite him was a screen showing the markets. Red and green. Still moving. Still hungry.
Arion chuckled — the last laugh from a dying man who had once believed he could fix the world by rewriting its logic.
He looked toward the window. Beyond it, the skyline shimmered under the dying light of dusk. Drones zipped between towers. Adverts danced across clouds. The world he'd helped shape... would move on.
"I didn't build enough," he whispered, the words dry against cracked lips.
"I didn't build far enough."
Memories came unbidden. Not of luxury or headlines — but of equations written in chalk, of strategy board games played at dusk, of the young boy who wanted to change systems, not just win them.
What good was power without permanence?
What good was vision... if it died with the visionary?
His fingers twitched. Not for help. For something more — an itch to write, to build, to sketch a plan that would never be finished.
But it was too late.
The machines flatlined softly.
No chaos. No storm.
Just...
an end.
The world would remember his name in stock tickers and textbooks.
But Arion Drayke had never been interested in memory.
He wanted legacy.
And the universe, in its strange cruelty or compassion, listened.
Just as his heart stilled, something pulled. Not down, not up — inward. As though time and space folded into themselves. The white walls dissolved. The pain vanished.
Then, darkness.
And then—
Light.
But it wasn't neon. Not sterile. It was sunlight, filtered through torn thatch and smoke.
He couldn't speak. Couldn't move.
Cold wind kissed raw skin.
The sharp wail of a newborn echoed through a mud-stained hut, somewhere far from anything that resembled technology.
A woman sobbed in relief.
A man whispered thanks to a god whose name Arion didn't know.
His mind, still brilliant, still alive, screamed in silence.
Reborn.
Weak.
Without a name.
But not without purpose.
"If I can't take the future with me... I'll build it from the dirt."