After Life

I had everything money could buy and build. Skyscrapers, armed security, power..everything you could think of—except the one thing keeping me alive: time. Behind high walls and electric fences, my spine was calcifying into shattered glass, a grinding fire that no doctor could extinguish.Then came the desperation. In a moment of raw agony, I prayed not for wealth, but for more years. The answer didn't come from a physician or a miracle. It arrived through encrypted messages that dissolved into air, visions of the deceased, and a haunting figure standing inside my locked study with a two-word warning: It's time.Driven into the pre-dawn darkness to a decaying public hospital, I found a ward and a dying stranger flat lining on a wheezing monitor. But as I reached for her bedrail, the silence took over and her eyes snapped open, to tell me about the prophecy.My prayer might have been heard. But what answered was not mercy, and the price for more time was a debt written in my past sins.