The heart monitor was the only thing in the room that seemed to care if Henry Lukas lived or died. It chirped with a rhythmic, mechanical loyalty, a steady beep... beep... that felt like the ticking of a countdown clock.
Henry stared at his hands. They were resting atop the thin, bleached hospital sheets, looking like two withered autumn leaves. The skin was translucent, stretched tight over brittle bone, mapped with a spiderweb of bulging blue veins and liver spots.
To any passerby peering through the glass of the isolation ward, these were the hands of a man who had survived nine decades of hardship.
In reality, Henry was just 20 years old.
Progeria. It was a word that had defined his existence since he was a child, a genetic glitch that turned his own DNA into a predator. His body was sprinting toward the finish line of life at ten times the speed of a normal human.
While his former classmates were currently sitting in university lecture halls, worrying about midterms or wondering who to ask to the spring formal, Henry was struggling to keep his lungs from collapsing under the weight of their own exhaustion.
He tried to shift his weight, but the simple movement sent a jolt of agony through his hips. His joints ground together like rusted iron gears. Every breath felt like inhaling powdered glass, a slow, scraping reminder that his internal organs were failing one by one.
"Water," he croaked.
His voice was a thin, papery rasp, stripped of any youthful resonance. He sounded like a ghost even before he had the decency to become one.
Heartbreakingly , no one answered.
The white walls of the ward offered no comfort. There were no colorful "Get Well Soon" cards taped to the cabinet. There were no wilting flowers in cheap plastic vases.
His parents had been gone for eight years, taken by a car accident that Henry had survived only to endure this slow-motion execution. The relatives who had initially visited, wearing expressions of forced pity and "brave little soldier" smiles, had long since drifted away.
After all, It was hard to look at a dying old man and remember he was once a nephew or a cousin.
Eventually, the calls stopped. Then the cards stopped. Finally, the silence became absolute.
He was a biological anomaly, a boy trapped in a decaying shell, waiting for his heart to simply give up the ghost. He was a burden that society had quietly filed away in a corner of the municipal hospital to be forgotten.
Henry turned his head slowly, his neck muscles straining with the effort. Outside the window, the sun was beginning to dip below the horizon, painting the sky in bruises of purple and gold. He thought of Aluna.
Aluna had been the only girl who had ever looked at him without immediate revulsion.
Back when he was fourteen and only looked thirty, he had gathered the courage to tell her how he felt.
She had been sweet, her eyes soft with a kindness that felt like a knife to his chest.
"I have to focus on my career, Henry," she had said apologetically. "No time for love or any of that stuff. I’m sorry."
He had believed her. He had cherished that rejection because it was polite. It was dignified.
But a year later, while being driven to a specialist appointment, he had seen her. She was outside a love hotel with her arms wrapped around a tall, athletic man with a jawline carved from granite.
That memory echoed painfully than the fever currently cooking his brain. She hadn’t been "busy." She just hadn’t wanted him. She hadn’t wanted the "old man" kid.
The world didn’t want the broken things. It wanted the beautiful, the strong, and the lucky.
"It’s not fair," Henry whispered to the empty room, and single tear tracked through a deep wrinkle on his cheek.
"I didn’t even get to start. I never got to live."
Reality was a cruel, mocking stage.
He had spent the last 3 years of his bedridden life escaping it. He had drowned himself in light novels and manga, losing himself in worlds where the weak became strong, where the forgotten were chosen by destiny, and where loyalty was an unbreakable law.
He envied the protagonists of those stories. They had systems. They had magic. They had a reason to wake up.
But he, Henry Lukas, had a bedpan and a morphine drip.
A sudden agonising pain erupted in his chest and he screamed like a madman:
"Arghhhh! Pain... Too much pain."
It wasn’t the usual dull ache he was used to. This was like a cold iron fist squeezing his heart until it felt ready to burst.
The monitor’s steady beep suddenly accelerated into a frantic, panicked chirping.
Beep-beep-beep-beep!
"Kill me...already. Let me be free."
Henry cried in earnest.
He tried to call for a nurse, but his throat blocked.
But a figure arived.
Through the haze of his fading consciousness, he saw the door to his room creak open.
It wasn’t a doctor. It wasn’t a nurse coming to resuscitate him.
This figure stood at the foot of his bed, draped in a glowing dark silk hood that seemed to swallow rest of the light itself.
She didn’t belong in this clinical environment. Not at all.
She looked like a shadow carved out of the night sky, ancient and terrifyingly vibrant.
As Henry’s heart gave a violent, irregular thump, the woman stepped closer.
She leaned over him, her face coming into focus. She was devastatingly beautiful, her skin the color of moonlight and her eyes holding the chaotic swirl of a thousand dying stars.
She didn’t offer a prayer. She didn’t offer a comforting hand.
Instead, her lips curled into a sharp, amused smile. She looked at him the way a child looks at a struggling insect under a magnifying glass. She was enjoying this. She was savoring the spectacle of his final, pathetic moments.
"So this is the one? The boy who aged a lifetime before he ever tasted it. How delicious." she murmured in amusement.
Henry wanted to scream. He wanted to spit in her face, to demand why she was mocking his agony. He had lived a life of misery, of being stared at and ridiculed, and even in death, he was being treated as a joke.
But the oxygen was gone. His lungs were useless sacks of lead.
The woman reached out, her long, slender fingers hovering just inches from his forehead.
"You hate them, don’t you? The ones who looked away. The ones who lied. The world that discarded you like trash."
Henry’s eyes widened, his pupils dilating as the coldness of death finally claimed his limbs.
With one final, agonizing shudder, his heart stopped.
The long, continuous drone of the flatline filled the room.
Henry Lukas was dead.
But why did it felt like he was... Free?
Darkness welcomed him.
It wasn’t the darkness of sleep, nor was it the peaceful void he had imagined.
It was a heavy silence that felt like being submerged in deep water.
He had no body, no weight, no pain.
For the first time in twenty years, the torment of his old bones had ceased.
At last, a flicker of light appeared. Not the light at the end of a tunnel, but a glowing, translucent screen:
[ Congratulations! The Goddess of Mischief has selected you as a Dimensional Journeyman ]
[ System Initializing... ]
[ Analyzing Host Soul... ]
[ Status: Bitter. Resentful. Deprived. ]
[ Perfect Candidate Found: The Taboo One. ]
He should be in fear, but oddly enough Henry felt invigorated. The voice seemed familiar, too familiar.
[ You have been granted 1 Random Aspect as a beginner’s gift ]
[ Random Aspect will be in effect upon selecting Journeyman’s Route ]
[ Journeyman’s Possible Routes: ]
Dual Leveling in the Apocalypse
Description: Return to a world overrun by monsters. Devour the souls of the fallen to regain your youth and surpass the heavens.
Heaven’s Descent
Description: Reincarnate as a fallen prince. Reclaim your throne by crushing the nobles who betrayed you.
Rebirth: Dual Cultivator
Description: Enter a realm of martial arts and immortality. Use the essence of the world and its women to fuel your rise.
Combat Slave Harem
Description: The world of your favorite novel. A chaotic realm of supernatural races. Gain power through the loyalty and subjugation of exotic beings. Be the master you never could be.
Re: Vampire and Dragon
Description: Awake as a hybrid of the two most feared races. Hunt the humans who once pitied you.
Henry looked at the fourth option.
Combat Slave Harem.
The very story he had been reading to escape his miserable reality. A world where he wouldn’t be the one ignored. A world where "loyalty" wasn’t just a word people used before they left you to die in a hospital bed.
The face of the beautiful woman from his deathbed flashed in his mind. The Goddess of Mischief. She had laughed at him. She had found his death funny.
Fine. Let her watch.
If life was a game, he had lost the first round without ever being given a controller.
But this time, the rules were different.
He didn’t want a quiet life. He didn’t want "average." He wanted everything the world had denied him: strength, youth, and a devotion so absolute it couldn’t be broken by disloyalty.
Henry’s soul whispered into the void,
"I choose the world that gave me peace when I had nothing else. I choose DOMINATION."
[ Route Selected: Combat Slave Harem ]
[ Initiating Soul Transfer... ]
[ Random Aspect Rolling... ]
[ Result: ____ ]
He vision returned, and for the first time, he didn’t see the white ceiling of a hospital.
He saw a crimson sky.