Kyne Fritz was standing still in his apartment.
More precisely, he was sitting at the kitchen table, holding a piece of bread that was already dry and hard at the edges.
In his other hand, there was a small cup of cold coffee, whose steam had ceased more than an hour ago.
It was hard to say what was going through his mind at that moment, but the gray eyes fixed on the empty wall suggested that it had nothing to do with the bread or the coffee.
Kyne was a simple boy, seventeen years old.
Or rather, in exactly ten minutes, he would finally turn eighteen.
The rain tapped softly against the window of the twelfth floor, creating a rhythmic pattern that normally calmed him.
Today, however, the sound seemed only to mark the passage of time. A clock counting the seconds until an adulthood he did not care much about.
What ran through his mind was a question that had haunted him since his first moments of consciousness.
What was the reason to still be alive if nothing he truly wished to do was possible?
Kyne had had a dream for as long as he could remember being a person.
It was not a common dream of wealth, fame, or love. It was something more fundamental, more important, yes, it was the abnormal desire for immortality. He wished to have an immortal body.
The reason, well, it was definitely a crazy reason.
In fact, Kyne was someone who recognized his own madness. In his mind, the most bizarre thoughts danced like unwanted guests at a party that never ended.
He wondered what it would be like to jump off a building without a parachute, what the exact sensation would be upon hitting the ground.
Not the impact itself, he could imagine.
But the microseconds before, the free fall, the acceptance of the end, and then the moment of truth where bones break and organs are crushed.
How would his body react to drinking a cup full of acid? Not a sip, not a taste. A whole cup.
What kind of pain would run through his esophagus? Would his stomach contract immediately? Would there be a specific taste before the nerves burned?
And poisons… there were so many kinds. Some caused paralysis, others convulsions, and others simply made the organs and the heart stop. What would it be like to feel each one of them?
He did not know. But he definitely wanted to know.
The only thing that prevented him was this mortal, fragile, limited body. If he tried to test any of his thoughts, only death would reach him.
And that was the paradox of his life. He did not really want to die. In fact, he wanted to live more than anyone else, he wanted to witness things that would lead any other person to death, but death itself was the obstacle in his plans.
When he was younger, he tried to perform one of his tests. At seven years old, he swallowed a stone he found in the backyard.
Not by accident, but to see what would happen.
His parents had to take him to the hospital as fast as possible, afraid of choking or something worse.
Kyne survived. The experience was as interesting as he had imagined before swallowing the stone.
The difficulty of swallowing an object so large, the sensation of it going down his esophagus, and the pain that came afterward.
But after almost dying and seeing the panic in his parents' eyes, he decided not to do any more of his tests. After all, he had only one life. A life that his parents had given him.
He looked to the side. At the back of the room, above a small cabinet, there was a cracked photograph inside the glass.
Kyne, together with his parents, all smiling on a sunny day at the park. The two had died in an accident three years earlier.
A truck, a sharp curve, on a rainy night like this one.
Now, Kyne lived alone, supported by a modest pension and the sale of furniture he could not keep due to a lack of emotional space.
The rain increased in intensity. Kyne heard the sound change from a light drumming to a constant pounding against the glass.
He stood up, leaving the bread and the coffee on the table, and approached the window.
From his floor, he looked down at the ground. Cars passed by with their headlights reflected in the water accumulated on the asphalt.
People ran from the rain, shielding themselves with their backpacks or bags, or simply quickening their pace.
The city seemed alive in a way.
But his mind had only a single thought. How would he feel if he threw himself from there?
"Damn." He murmured to his own reflection in the fogged glass.
"Shitty mortality of shit… I just wanted to be free to do whatever the hell I wanted. Is that asking too much?"
Suddenly, a thunderclap roared in the sky, distant but powerful. The lightning that followed illuminated the night for an instant, bathing Kyne's pale face in white-blue light. His gray eyes looked almost silvery in that moment.
Suddenly, his phone rang. An alarm he had set weeks earlier, without really knowing why.
He stepped away from the window and looked at the illuminated screen.
00:00.
Finally, the time had changed. Now he was eighteen years old. A legal adult, technically. He is free to make his own choices, make his own decisions, and ruin his own life.
It was at that exact moment that something unbelievable happened.
A metallic sound, like a bell being struck inside a deep tunnel, emerged from the depths of Kyne's mind. The pain was instant and sharp. A migraine appeared out of nowhere, making him clutch his head with both hands, his fingers white from the pressure.
At the same time, a translucent screen appeared in front of his eyes. It was not a projection on the wall. It was not an illusion. It was there, floating in the air, with clear, sharp letters as if they were made of solid light.
'Ding!'
[An immeasurable desire to become an Immortal has been detected.]
[Do you accept becoming an immortal?]
{Yes/No}
Kyne stared at the letters, his breath trapped in his chest. The world around him, the rain, the apartment, the headache, all of it faded into the background.
There was only that message. That question.
He did not need to think twice. Before he could even process the absolutely abnormal thing that was happening, his mind had already answered on its own.
"OBVIOUSLY YES!!!"
His voice echoed through the empty apartment, louder and more fervent than he had intended.
But it did not matter. It did not matter if this was a joke, a mental breakdown, or a hallucination induced by loneliness.
Only the word "Immortal" called to him, pulled at something primordial inside him that had been dormant for a long time.
The screen then flickered.
[Congratulations! You have been chosen by the Immortal Adaptation System]
New lines of text appeared below.
[To initialize the System, host. PLEASE, kill yourself!]
Kyne stared at the message for exactly three seconds. His heart raced, not from fear, but from anticipation. Was it real? Was it some kind of test? It did not matter.
His mind acted before conscious thought could interfere. He quickly looked around the environment, his eyes scanning the adjacent room.
Above the table, on a small shelf, there was a knife. The same one he had used to cut the bread hours earlier. A common kitchen blade, unassuming, with a blue plastic handle.
Kyne crossed the apartment in three long strides. He grabbed the knife. The blade reflected the faint light coming from the window.
He returned to the center of the room, holding the knife with both hands. The tip lightly touched the shirt over his chest. On the left side, where he knew the heart was.
Suddenly, fear arose. Not fear of death, since he had already accepted that as a possibility from the moment he saw the message.
But it was the fear that nothing would happen. Fear that everything was an illusion and that he was about to kill himself for nothing.
Curiosity struck harder.
Kyne decided to leave the thoughts for later. He could always think later. If there was a later.
He took a deep breath one last time, feeling the air enter and leave his lungs. Feeling his heart beating against his ribs. Feeling the life that was about to, perhaps, end.
With all his strength, he pushed the knife.
The sensation came in layers. First, pressure. The blade met the resistance of the skin, then the muscles. Then the pain, sharp, hot, like fire injected directly into his chest.
The burning spread, following the path of the blade. He felt something crack. A rib, perhaps. Or maybe it was just his mind trying to process the impossible.
His knees gave out. The knife slipped from his fingers, but it was already driven in deeply. Kyne fell to his knees, then to his side, rolling onto his back. The ceiling of the apartment spun above him.
Then the cold came next. Not the cold of the wooden floor, but an internal cold, starting at the extremities and moving toward the center.
His fingers tingled, then went numb. His vision began to blur and darken at the edges, as if someone were closing curtains around his eyes.
The last thing he felt was a strange satisfaction. At least now he would know. At least he had experienced that feeling.
Then, darkness.