The hospital room was painted a soft, forgettable white.
Not the kind of white that felt clean. The kind meant to be ignored.
Machines whispered quietly around the narrow bed—steady, patient, merciless. Tubes ran from his arms like thin, transparent veins. The heart monitor blinked in slow, tired rhythms, each beep echoing a little too loudly in the empty room.
Outside the window, the city moved on.
People laughedש laughed. Argued. Lived.
Inside, time was running out.
He was twenty years old.
And his body had never truly been his.
From the moment he was born, it had betrayed him—muscles that refused to strengthen, lungs that drank in pain with every breath, bones that cracked too easily. Doctors used long words to disguise short truths. Weak constitution.Degenerative failure.Uncertain lifespan.
He had outlived every prediction.
Barely.
Yet even now, as his vision blurred and strength leaked out of him like sand through open fingers, his lips curved into that same familiar, arrogant half-smile.
"Tch… figures…"
On the small table beside his bed lay his real life's work.
Not trophies.Not medals.Not memories with people.
Books.
Stacks upon stacks of them.
Worn comic volumes from Marvel Comics and DC Comics, their spines cracked from being reread so many times. Manga volumes piled beside them—heroes screaming their dreams into impossible worlds, warriors training beyond human limits, gods bleeding under mortal fists.
Graphic novels. Science textbooks. University-level physics and biology books far beyond what his fragile body had ever allowed him to formally study.
He had read them all.
And remembered every word.
Photographic memory.
A brain that could absorb universes while his body barely survived a flight of stairs.
He turned his head weakly to the sketchbooks stacked next to the books. Dozens of them. Every page filled. Every line precise.
Superheroes frozen mid-flight. Explosions captured in perfect anatomy. Muscles, motion, impact—things his own body had never known.
He didn't copy by tracing.
He copied from memory.
A single glance at a page once, and it lived forever behind his eyes.
"I memorized entire worlds," he murmured hoarsely to the empty room.
His voice was thin, but the pride in it was real.
Worlds where people like him didn't die quietly in hospital beds.
Worlds where power answered effort.
Physics books lay open near the edge of the table. Equations scrawled in the margins in shaky handwriting. String theory. Quantum vibration. Cellular regeneration. Molecular bonding. He had never treated science as fantasy.
Science was simply another set of superpowers waiting to be understood.
If only he had possessed a body that could keep up with his mind.
"If I'd been born right…" he whispered, staring at the ceiling. "If this damn body wasn't made of glass…"
A quiet laugh escaped him, bitter and amused at the same time.
"I'd have been unstoppable."
The heart monitor slowed.
His vision dimmed, but his mind remained sharp to the very end.
He thought of heroes flying across skies.He thought of scientists rewriting the rules of nature.He thought of art that turned imagination into immortality.
He did not think of death with fear.
Only with irritation.
"So this is where it ends, huh?"
No friends beside his bed.
No family holding his hand.
Only the universes he had collected inside his head.
The monitor's tone stretched longer.
Longer.
Flat.
The machines continued their work, unaware that the soul they had tried so hard to preserve had already moved on.
In the quiet white room, a genius with infinite imagination and a useless body passed away without an audience.
Alone.