Chapter 1: Realization

They say that it's only possible to have five momentous events in your life. Events that changed your life for better or worse in ways never thought possible. Impact that can never be measured truly in all its repercussions.

The first event being birth.

Basically, when a boy and a girl like each other a lot they- alright fine, way too far back.

It's said when one stares at the abyss, the abyss stares back. My abyss was the dilated pupils of my father as he first laid eyes on me. The sheer amount of love present was intimidating now that I look back to it. He looked at me with such passion that it still awes me because I don't believe I could do the same. How could you? I mean having such love for something you just met, It's concerning if you ought to ask me.

How do I remember this? Wrong question. The better question is how you don't? Loser, imagine not having photographic memory. Wait, I actually can't.

I also can't ever remember not having money, so that's cool too.

Most people would think that having the richest people in the world as parents would be great, you would be spoiled, you could get away with anything you ever wanted, right??

YOU'RE DAMN RIGHT IT IS.

I would know, I was born with a diamond spoon after all. I was that kid, the real life 'Richie Rich'. 5 star hotels were the minimum, A5 Japanese Kobe was the standard, and the world was my birthright.

Of course there were some drawbacks, I had my whole life decided for me, the moment I was born. The illusion of the perfect life grafted on me by the whole world, yet it was an illusion that was barely skin-deep.

Crowned as the best CEO and owner of Hunt industries before I could even walk. It was all so foolish.

But, I was, Man I was. I was smart, scary smart to the point where I single-handedly took the Hunt family to top. So humble, I know.

However, I had the results. Single-handedly owning 38% of the world economy is something anyone would flex daily. Governments useless, Armies worthless, It didn't matter who they were. They crossed me and I destroyed them with surgical precision, the ex-royal family of Angria being a good example.

Limiting my access into the energy sector was a dumb decision. I remember, it took me 3 days to destroy everything they had. They had dirt and I hounded them for it. It's amazing really how far humans are willing to go for a few extra bucks. Apparently they had a few off-site fishing companies, now normally I wouldn't care because they're isn't a single politician that hasn't done anything illegal, including me. But since they wanted to keep it such a secret that they used pentagon level firewalls to keep anyone out, I got curious and boy, did I strike oil.

Pun intended.

This so-called fishing company was actually a cover so they could supply heroin to major gangs/cartels around the world and according to their records, they sold a total 25 tons of pure addiction. That was 8 tons larger than the largest drug transport ever caught in history.

Even then, I couldn't help but revel in their stupidity. Such high-level servers but forgetting about the workers was crazy. However, paying the workers nothing but cents compared to the amount being transported was crazier. So all I had to do was flash a hundred dollar bill and they spilled.

These were the times I was thankful for intellect, which by the way is an IQ of 185. One of the most important families in the world for hundreds of years and their fall of grace? Benjamin Franklin's dashing smirk on a green paper

They were the only real opposition, afterwards it was easy. I had a great foundation, all I had to do was to donate a few million to charity and flash a smile to the paparazzi doing it. That was life for me, what was there to be excited about when you can get it anytime.

It was so boring.

Until that one day, my lucky stars dimmed in the most unexpected manner that day.

She was stunning, a supermodel whose pictures adorned billboards, her beauty was akin to a pretty flower. Alas, the flower had some thorns.

As I sipped the drink she handed me, the world began to tilt. My breath shortened, a subtle but deadly warning. Type 2 diabetes had taught me to listen to my body's whispers, and this scream was deafening. I knew instantly—poison. A cold sweat broke as I quickly got up and tried to run, but she was quick. I saw the flashing of a kitchen knife catching the light as it came down in the corner of my eyes.

I'd been trained to negotiate boardrooms and hostile takeovers, not fend off knife attacks. The blade skewered my flesh, a hot, searing pain grounded my high-flying existence into a stark reality. My own blood, a sight usually confined to controlled charity blood drives, now spilled across my Italian marble floor.

Adrenaline surged, and I grasped her wrist, fighting back with a strength born of desperation rather than skill. The struggle was brief, chaotic—an inelegant brawl that ended with a knife in her chest. The mansion, usually a hive of servitude and sycophancy, was eerily silent.

As I dialed for help, clutching the wound to stem the flow, a realization dawned on me. For all my power, for all my control, I was as vulnerable as anyone. My ego, that impenetrable fortress, had been breached by someone I dismissed as a non-threat. It was a bitter pill, harder to swallow than any poison. It was a lesson in humility, a brutal testament that life could be upended by the smallest of oversight.

I was a better man since that day or at least I tried to be. Started waking up at 4AM to go on runs, started to journal my thoughts, and even tried combat sports. It built discipline that I needed and it was all good. I found a passion for science, and went to Harvard Med school as a researcher.

I tried to help the little guys out, did more charity events, tried to fight for some actual good changes in the world. Hell, I even eliminated diabetes.

But as I approached my mid-thirties. It all just felt so pedantic. There was no excitement to anything. I had eaten the greatest food known to man, I fought like an ancient gladiator in UFC arenas and became lineal champion in over 3 divisions, I made love to the most beautiful women all over the world.

I was respected, I was loved, and I was at the top of the world. But, it all felt so monotonous. There was no mystery to explore, no real challenge to overcome that I was interested in.

That day was a weird day, I don't know why that realization just randomly clicked. It was weird and it was weirder that I just went to my lab afterwards because I was bored. But, I'm happy I did. It led to the single greatest invention of my mortal life.

In the midst of routine health monitoring—a practice more due to habit than necessity—I stumbled upon an anomaly. A routine scan of my blood revealed something... off.

A blip on the screen, an irregularity that piqued my curiosity. It was a fragment, a shard of biological material that did not match any cellular structure known to man or medicine.

Under the microscope, it appeared as a discrete, shimmering membrane, but it bore no hallmarks of the familiar plasma membrane. No lipids, no proteins, no cytoplasm; it was as if I was looking at the ghost of a cell rather than any cell itself.

My initial confusion gave way to an insatiable hunger for answers. What was this membrane? Why was it in my blood? How had it eluded the detection of countless physicals and tests over the years? It was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, floating in the plasma of my own veins. I could not have known then that this discovery would consume the decades to come, an obsession born from a fragment too small to see with the naked eye, yet too complex for a mind steeped in the known sciences to unravel.

The membrane defied everything I knew about biology, chemistry, physics – it was as if I'd stumbled upon an artifact from an alien world. The edges of the membrane shimmered when observed indirectly, as though its true form was just beyond the grasp of my perception.

Its resistance to any sort of penetration was baffling; no scalpel could mark it, no chemical could dissolve it, and even the most concentrated laser left it unscathed, merely warmed to the touch.

Days turned into months, months into years, and those years stretched into decades. I found myself aging, not just in body but in spirit, as the enigma of the membrane haunted me.

It became my white whale, my Everest, my lifelong quest that no amount of wealth or influence could conquer. Laboratories around the world, staffed with the brightest minds I could hire, worked tirelessly.

We tested theories that bordered on science fiction, employed equipment that had to be invented just for these tests – all for naught.

The membrane was impervious, timeless, ageless – while I was not. I was forced to confront my own mortality, the one thing that my status could not shield me from.

Each failed experiment was a reminder that some things might be beyond human understanding, a humbling thought for a man who controlled a significant part of the world.

On a cold, silent night in my lab, surrounded by reams of data and failed hypotheses, the truth finally settled in. This membrane, whatever it was, represented a boundary – not just a physical one, but a philosophical one as well. It was a frontier I might never cross, a puzzle I might never solve. The frustration that should have consumed me gave way to a sense of peace. There was a beauty in the unknown, an allure to the unsolvable. Perhaps it was the universe's way of teaching me that the pursuit, the journey, was the true essence of life, not the control or the destination.

That peace lasted two seconds. Before, I lost it. I was pissed. I started breaking my lab equipment, I yelled and screamed while repeatedly punching the computer screen. It was dumb, the jagged edges of the glass ripping my skin was especially keen on reminding me that.

By a stroke of luck, blood dripped down my hand into the sample. I didn't care, the membrane was present in every human in the world. I found out after a few days of the initial discovery. So it didn't matter if it was contaminated.

Yet, suddenly I had a thought.

As the droplets of my own blood mingled with the sample, the membranes began to interact in a way that defied all my expectations.

"Born of blood and undone by blood." I didn't know what possessed me, but I whispered those words as simple idea came to mind.

As if fulfilling the prophecy of some ancient and cryptic saying, I watched, transfixed, as the once impenetrable membranes started to grind against one another.

Over the incoming days I had commissioned multiple pieces of equipment to test my hypothesis: could these membranes be coaxed into self-destruction through their mutual abrasion?

Weeks of anticipation had accumulated, and as the custom-made apparatus whirred to life, I could sense something momentous was on the brink of occurrence. The two membranes were being forced together by nearly several hundred tons of force. Suddenly, a singular crack echoed across the room. I ignored the irregularity of how something microscopic can create sound like that.

I was too busy staring at the first golden light of the membrane's breach, it seemed as if time stood still, encapsulating the moment between triumph and catastrophe. Suddenly, the peculiar sensation of static filled the room—my body became a living conduit, every hair standing in silent salute to the impending disaster.

In the mere space of a heartbeat, the atmosphere convulsed with energy as if in answer to the unnatural phenomenon unfolding within my laboratory, a bolt of divine fury struck cleaving through the high-rise with the wrath of an Old Testament plague. It was a split second of awe and horror, the world both luminous and terrifyingly clear.

Then, in a blink, I was no more. The building snapped like the spine of the earth itself, the top half cascading towards the ground with the slow grace of a felled giant. Pedestrians below blinded and screaming in horror as a charred building fell upon them. An easy death toll of hundreds of people and thousands injured.

My last thought, a fleeting echo of realization, confronted with the profound irony—the membranes, present in every human, harbored a force that none should harness and should have remained undisturbed.

(What do you think. Let me know and see y'all next time.)