Eternum

It was nine years ago. A child covered in blood on his hands and face had come to the old hospital in town. When Henry saw him, he immediately took him in for an examination. While the child was waiting for the examination, Henry went to the registration desk to make his hospital record, but someone was waiting there for him. Mark was waiting for Henry. When Henry saw him, he knew what he wanted.

"Did you really think about registering him?"  Mark asked.

"I'm going to do what's necessary. We can't use a child we know nothing about for our experiment."  Henry was worried.

"No. We need to take our chance, Henry. I don't know if you're aware, but we've laid the foundation for a discovery that could change the world. I know it's unethical, but we have to test this on the child."  Mark was doing everything he could to convince Henry.

Henry was reluctant after the recent events, but he was convinced for one last chance. Their discovery was so significant that it could truly change the world. Everything began about six months earlier, when a 12-year-old homeless boy, severely injured in a traffic accident, was brought to the emergency room. Henry and Mark were both present during the boy's surgery, and Mark injected the boy with a liquid he had developed for use on large cuts and wounds. The boy came out of the surgery in excellent condition and recovered quickly.

However, a few days later, Mark noticed that the boy began watching him from a distance whenever he left the hospital. One day, he approached the boy as he was leaving the hospital. Every second he got closer to the boy, something began to go wrong with his body. When he reached him, he asked for his name. His name was Jeremy. Mark took Jeremy by the hand and led him to the lowest floor of the hospital, to the room where they conducted experiments. Henry was busy examining the liquid Mark had developed. Henry was surprised when he saw the boy. But suddenly, Mark stabbed Jeremy right in the center of his forehead. Henry watched in shock. However, Jeremy was still standing; he was still alive. He looked at Mark with a devilish grin.

"You are cursed, Anderson,"  Jeremy said.

Realizing that the boy hadn't died, Mark pulled the knife out of his forehead and this time stabbed him in the heart. The boy fell to the ground and appeared to be dead. Mark's goal was to examine the boy's body. They noticed that the boy's blood had turned into a gray-white tone. This blood was cursed. Henry took a small tube of the boy's blood and injected it into a test rat. He then cut the rat in half. The rat continued to live for about 4 minutes before dying. This was impossible. With this discovery, they could become immortal. They named this discovery "Eternum." However, to fully obtain Eternum, they needed a large quantity of blood. Since it was impossible to extract this blood from themselves, they would need to kill others to obtain it.

After a while, they began investigating the homeless people who came to the hospital. Two homeless individuals, a 32-year-old and a 14-year-old, needed lung surgery soon. Henry and Mark agreed to perform these two surgeries separately. Both individuals were given the initial form of Eternum. Four days after the surgeries, they learned that the 32-year-old had died of a seizure. But the 14-year-old girl was always lurking around the corners of the hospital. Just like he did with Jeremy, Mark approached the girl and took her to the experiment room.

When they reached the room, they tied the child to a bed. Henry had stored nearly all of Jeremy’s blood and transformed it into Eternum. Mark was ready to sacrifice everything they had. They injected all the tubes into the child, and the child passed out. Henry had learned the child’s name by looking at the hospital records. Her name was Charlotte. Despite Henry calling out to her by name several times, she didn’t wake up. But when Mark suddenly shouted her name, Charlotte woke up. However, she awoke with such ferocity that she managed to free herself from the bed. It was as if she had the physical strength of a bull. She got up and approached Mark.

"I was the one you shouldn't have cursed,"  Charlotte said with extreme calm.

But her voice sounded entirely like that of a cursed monster. Mark was terrified and immediately grabbed the knife he had used to kill Jeremy. Charlotte attacked Mark, but he dodged and managed to cut Charlotte's arm. Something strange was happening. Charlotte’s arm started to regenerate on its own. Seeing this, Henry was extremely frightened and hit the girl on the head with a heavy test tube. But Charlotte wouldn’t fall. Just as she was about to turn and attack Henry, Mark suddenly lunged, grabbed her by the head, and slit her throat. Charlotte still refused to die. She seemed like she was about to regenerate, but Mark attacked again and severed her head. They were in complete shock. Charlotte’s body began to disintegrate and, shortly after, vanished completely.

After this event, Henry and Mark took leave from the hospital and distanced themselves from everything for a while. While Henry cleared his mind, Mark was in torment. He began to see the children who had died because of their discovery in his nightmares and was starting to lose his sanity. After they returned from their leave, Mark talked to Henry about everything they had experienced. Mark had documented everything in reports and wanted to give them to Henry to continue the experiments. Henry firmly refused to take the reports. However, he agreed to continue the experiments. The idea of immortality appealed to him. The thought of a life in which he could evolve and improve himself forever... For a while, they continued to develop and study Eternum. One day, when a boy covered in blood on his hands and face arrived at the emergency room, their lives would change completely.

Henry didn’t register the boy and instead went with Mark to the examination room. The boy was crying.

"Kid, do you know your mother’s or father’s number?"  Mark asked.

"There’s no need,"  the boy said through his tears. "Even if you called them, they wouldn’t come."

"Why?"  Henry asked.

"They’re dead... I killed them,"  said the boy.

Henry and Mark were shocked. But in a way, Mark was also pleased. A child like this was the perfect candidate for the final stage of their experiment. Henry understood Mark’s thoughts about the boy from his expression. Without drawing any attention, they took the boy by the hand and led him to the experiment room. The experiment room was in the lowest part of the hospital, in a place that didn’t even appear on the building's floor plans. They arrived at the room without difficulty. Henry tied the boy to the bed and waited for Mark to arrive. Mark took out 20 tubes of Eternum from a locked chest he had placed in the room. When Henry saw these tubes, he went mad. 20 tubes meant the equivalent of two entire people’s blood. Mark turned to Henry and told him to keep quiet. Henry was too shocked and angry to speak. He thought Mark had gone insane. He had killed two children without telling him. Then, the news articles about the two missing children came to his mind. The puzzle pieces in his head were coming together. Mark prepared a syringe and injected 15 of the tubes into himself and 5 into the boy.

The child couldn't even make a sound out of fear. Mark's intention was clear. He was curious about how two people injected with Eternum would interact. After a while, he began to feel adrenaline coursing through his entire body. He couldn't control himself and started having hallucinations. Behind the child lying on the bed, there were two ghosts. It was as if those ghosts were protecting the child. Every time Mark tried to approach the child, something was stopping him, as if those ghosts were pushing him away. While this was happening, Henry only saw Mark shouting into the void and wrestling with the air. Mark's body suddenly began to crack and fade, but as it faded, it kept returning to its original state. Clearly, his body couldn't handle this dose of Eternum, but thanks to Eternum, it was regenerating. This was immortality. After a while, Mark came to his senses. He stood up and saw a white light in the child's heart. He focused on the white light and pulled it toward him with his hand. He now held a white light in his palm. This was the soul of the child lying on the bed. Within that white light, he saw a ghost similar to the ones he had just seen. However, Henry also saw that white light.

Henry couldn't take it anymore and left the room, leaving his lab coat behind. He went upstairs, wrote his resignation letter on the first piece of paper he found, and handed it to the administration. Mark, on the other hand, shattered the soul with his hand and released it. He too left the child's corpse there and went upstairs. After that, Henry neither saw nor spoke to Mark. Following that incident, every week there were news reports of a kidnapping. A man in a coat who had been hiding for years was abducting children from random places. But after a while, he was suddenly caught in the act and shot by the police, with news reports declaring him dead to the public.

Using his influence, Henry obtained permission to examine the body of the person who was killed. But while examining the body, he was absolutely certain that this person was not Mark. The height, weight, and the famous burn mark in Mark's eye... None of it matched. Henry, however, never pursued this matter any further to avoid implicating himself. He was only focused on protecting his own son. He suffered from his regrets. Being one of the people who created this curse brought him nothing but pain.

However, years later, despite all his precautions, the kidnapping of his son was a sign that it was time for him to take action. And he would do so by using Joe and Oliver.