The body of Kang Minjae twitched once more… then stopped.
His last heartbeat was swallowed by silence. The machines monitoring him powered down one by one, obeying the protocol he'd written himself: no witnesses, no trails, no mistakes.
Seo Raon stood over the corpse—his own former self. Where most would feel grief or relief, he felt only satisfaction. The calculations were complete. The vessel was stable.
He moved through the lab like a ghost, his every step purposeful.
One by one, the chambers holding the failed bodies hissed and began to melt down. Acid flooded the glass tubes. Fireproof steel crumpled like paper. Decades of horror burned away under Minjae's last invention: a full facility wipe.
The AI, still obeying its master, asked in a calm tone,
"Final command?"
Raon didn't hesitate.
"Erase all logs. Format every backup. Then self-destruct the mainframe in sixty seconds."
"Understood."
He picked up a single object: a metal capsule no bigger than a pen, implanted behind his neck. A portable quantum archive—holding a backup of his life's work, stripped of incriminating data.
Everything else? Ashes.
As he walked toward the surface elevator, flames consumed the lab behind him. The underground facility—buried deep beneath a forgotten factory—collapsed inward. The fire would burn for days, but no one would ever find bones. No records. No identity.
Kang Minjae was gone.
Seo Raon emerged under a moonless sky, wearing a pristine uniform tailored to his new name, carrying forged documents, and smiling with the face of an angel.
Tomorrow, he would enter the world as a prodigy.
No one would question the miracle of his birth.
No one would see the monster inside the masterpiece.
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