The phone buzzed in his hand.
New message.
"you know i can see who looks at my stories right? đ"
TòumĂng's soul left his body. Just straight up evacuated the premises. His chest seized, vision tunneling, every molecule of blood in his system rushing to his face in the most catastrophic blush response ever recorded.
"Oh my god," he wheezed. "Oh my god. Cupid. Cupid, stop my heart. Just stop it. Let me die. Right now. Immediately."
"Can't do that."
"YES YOU CAN! You're literally my heart! Stop pumping! Cardiac arrest! End me!"
"I mean I physically can't. I don't actually manually pump your heart anymore."
TòumĂng's panic paused mid-spiral. "What?"
"Yeah, I haven't been doing that since like... the first day? Maybe day two? Honestly it got exhausting and also boring."
"Then how am I alive?!"
"Oh, that. SchrĂśdinger's Heart. The skill I got when you died in the mines."
The embarrassment was momentarily overridden by confusion. "What?"
Cupid's voice took on the tone of someone explaining something for the third time to a particularly slow student. "Remember when you died? Like, actually died? Heart stopped, brain bleeding, the whole thing? And I had to take over your body temporarily?"
"Vaguely. It's kind of fuzzy."
"Right, well, during that experienceâspecifically the moment when you were simultaneously dead and alive while I was forcing your heart to beatâI acquired a permanent skill due to the extreme emotional resonance and life-death threshold crossing. SchrĂśdinger's Heart. Your heart now exists in a constant superposition of beating and not beating, alive and dead, functional and failed."
TòumĂng sat up straighter, his mortification about the WeChat story views temporarily forgotten. "Wait, so what does that mean?"
"It means you're in quantum uncertainty. Your heart is both working and not working at the same time. The state only collapses into one reality or the other if directly observed in a specific way. Until then, you're effectively both alive and dead, which paradoxically means you can't fully die."
A grin spread across TòumĂng's face, slow and manic. "So I can't die."
"For the most part, yes. Butâ"
"I'M IMMORTAL!"
"It's not that simpleâ"
"I CAN'T DIE! I'M UNKILLABLE! THIS IS AMAZING!" TòumĂng jumped off the bed, pacing excitedly. "I can do anything! Jump off buildings! Fight gangs! Tell HÇtÄn to fuck himself! Nothing can stop me!"
"Okay, hold on. Slow down. It's not Type 3 immortality like Deadpool or Wolverine."
"What?"
"You know, the kind where you regenerate instantly from any damage. Where you can be blown apart and just grow back together in seconds. That's Type 3. You have Type 2."
"What's Type 2?"
Cupid's voice became very serious, very quickly. "Type 2 means you can't die from most damage, but you also can't regenerate quickly. Or really at all beyond normal human healing. So if you jump off a skyscraper, you'll hit the ground, your body will be completely liquifiedâbones shattered, organs ruptured, everything pulverizedâbut you'll still be alive."
The grin faltered. "That... doesn't sound good."
"And unless you get some kickass plastic surgery and reconstructive proceduresâwe're talking multiple surgeries over years, assuming you can even find doctors willing to work on someone whose anatomy has been reduced to soupâyou're basically a conscious puddle for life."
"A puddle."
"A living, aware, suffering puddle who can't die but also can't move or speak or do anything except exist in constant agony, I Have Not Bouth But I Must Scream tyshi"
The excitement drained completely. "Oh."
"Yeah. 'Oh.'"
TòumĂng sat back down on the bed, processing this. "So I'm unkillable, but I can still be permanently fucked up."
"Exactly. You've got damage resistance, not damage negation. Big difference."
"Okay. Okay, that's... still pretty good though, right? I mean, normal injuries don't matter as much. Stab wounds, broken bones, I'll heal from those eventually."
"Sure. But there are two other major caveats you need to understand."
"Of course there are."
"First: oxygen deprivation to the brain. If your brain is deprived of oxygen for too long say, someone strangles you, or drowns you, or suffocates you your heart won't stop because it's in superposition. But your brain will still suffer damage. Enough oxygen deprivation and you come back as a vegetable. Alive, but with the cognitive function of a houseplant. Forever."
The horror of that settled in. "Jesus."
"Second, and this is the big one: direct observation of the heart while it's being destroyed."
"What does that mean?"
"The superposition collapses if someone can see your heart while they're damaging it. So if someone rips you open, exposes your actual physical heart, and then crushes it or stabs it while looking directly at it, the quantum uncertainty resolves. The heart becomes definitively non-functional. Dead. And then you're just... dead. For real. Permanently. Buh-bye. Game over."
TòumĂng's hand unconsciously went to his chest, feeling the steady beat beneath skin and bone. "So someone could kill me if they opened me up and destroyed my heart while watching?"
"Yep. It's the observation that collapses the superposition. As long as nobody directly observes your heart being destroyed, you stay in quantum uncertainty and can't fully die. But the moment someone sees it, witnesses the destruction with their own eyes, the uncertainty collapses into 'dead' and that's it."
"That's... significantly less cool than I thought."
"Type 2 immortality is always a monkey's paw. You get to survive things that would kill normal people, but the survival comes with conditions and loopholes."
TòumĂng lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to wrap his head around being simultaneously unkillable and very much killable depending on specific circumstances.
"So I need to avoid: falling from extreme heights, prolonged oxygen deprivation, and anyone who wants to perform open-heart surgery on me without anesthesia."
"That about covers it, yeah."
"Could be worse."
"Could be better."
"Still gives me an edge though. Most people trying to kill me won't know about the observation requirement. They'll just stab me or shoot me or beat me, and I'll survive."
"Until they get creative."
"I'll deal with that if it happens."
TòumĂng's phone, forgotten during the immortality discussion, buzzed again on the bed beside him.
He'd completely forgotten about the femboy's message.
About being caught stalking his WeChat stories.
About the mortification that had triggered this entire conversation.