Ghosts of Eternity

Back home, Seohan reclined his chair as far as it would go and let his head fall back.

His body felt strangely drained of strength.

After several minutes passed, the familiar emptiness rose from deep within his chest once again.

Seohan understood all too well the root of this void.

He wanted someone in his life, yet a private frustration lingered beneath that desire: perhaps, at his age, he had already waited too long.

Having feelings wasn't the problem. The true origin of that emptiness was the contradiction of craving what felt out of reach.

The reason he couldn't answer Seoyoon Baek's question was simple.

The moment he became conscious of how he appeared to her, even uttering a single ordinary word became difficult.

Seohan despised that fact about himself.

Years of solitude had left him unable to handle even ordinary emotions without dissecting them first.

"...My data is messed up."

Shaking his head, Seohan opened Reddit and went to the biohacking subreddit.

A refuge for people willing to use their own bodies as test subjects outside the established system.

His scrolling grew faster.

Behind their recklessness, Seohan saw desperation—the desire to defy aging and the obsession with becoming stronger.

[Six-Month Update After Myostatin Antibody Injection]

The biohacker in the photo was showing off his triceps.

The muscle bulged in a way normal training rarely produced, its contours almost unnaturally dense.

"He only checked the muscle and didn't even monitor his tendons or heart."

He moved to the next post. This time, it was a trending thread in the 'Longevity' category.

[N=1 Experiment: Self-Injection of Viral Vector for Telomerase Expression]

Introduction: Death is a disease that must be cured. I decided to edit my own genes.

Method: Telomerase gene delivery using AAV vector. Targeting liver and skeletal muscle.

Progress: Two months post-injection. Vision seems brighter. HRV restored to my baseline from my twenties.

Seohan opened the attached files first.

Graphs of HRV before and after the injection were uploaded, but neither the measurement times nor sleep durations were consistent. The baseline data was taken at dawn, while the post-injection data was measured in the afternoon. There were no logs of caffeine intake or exercise that could influence heart rate.

The statement about his vision brightening was even more meaningless.

There was zero documentation confirming whether the AAV vector had actually reached the target tissue or if telomerase was expressed. Neither anti-AAV antibody responses, liver enzyme levels, nor tumor-related markers had been measured.

"This isn't data; it's a journal entry."

Yet hundreds of comments had gathered beneath the post.

It wasn't because people believed in the efficacy. The sheer fact that someone had actually crossed the taboo and injected it into their own body was drawing people in. Even a record of failure served as a trace telling the next person what to avoid.

It wasn't accurate.

Yet it didn't stop.

Seohan checked the upload time of the post. Three months had already passed since the author posted their last update.

The comments repeated the exact same questions over and over:

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

• Are you alive?

• Update your liver values.

• Did you take the next dose?

There was no answer from the author.

Seohan bit his lip and scrolled the mouse wheel. Crude self-experiment reports continued to fill the screen.

His finger came to a halt.

Click.

His gaze settled on a dense Excel sheet and a low-resolution video that stuttered every few frames.

'Day 800 battling rare mitochondrial myopathy. Zero approved drugs on the market. Sourced research-grade SS-31 analog and sharing self-administration data.'

The title was dry, but the post carried the accumulated desperation of eight hundred days.

Seohan lightly rested his chin on his hand and hit play.

A video recorded in a dark room began.

The man on the screen was gaunt, as though skin had merely been draped over a skeleton.

Without a walker, he braced himself against the wall and managed a single trembling step. His joints were visibly deformed.

Even without sound, the cost of those eight hundred days was unmistakable.

The text scrolling beneath the video read:

I can’t wait five years for promised clinical results while my muscles keep wasting away. I can already see the day when I won’t be able to breathe on my own. Even one month without progression would be enough. I’ll try anything.

It was less a medication report and more a record of a scream. The screen carried the desperation of people running out of time.

With every scroll of the feed, different records of despair followed.

A young man whose vision was narrowing into a tunnel from refractory neuropathy documented his intranasal use of a nerve growth factor derivative sourced through unofficial channels after it appeared in a preprint.

He stared into the camera with bloodshot, tense eyes.

There was also a video of an autoimmune patient without a single standard treatment option infusing an unverified immunomodulatory protein into his own vein.

Though shivering with chills, he held a thermometer and a blood pressure monitor in one hand, checking his vitals in real time.

They were not rebels. They were people choosing danger over the certainty of decline while regulation and approval moved too slowly to save them.

They chose the dangerous chance offered by illegality over the safe death permitted by law.

"In the end, they're hostages to time."

Seohan let out a quiet sigh as his dry lips parted.

While global pharmaceutical companies struggled through Phase 2 and Phase 3 under enormous capital requirements and bloated bureaucracy, self-experimentation was already happening everywhere, indifferent to official timelines.

The slower laws and institutions moved, the more desperate the demand for something that worked became.

Just in case, Seohan typed 'IL-11' into the search bar. Astonishingly, biohackers had already begun experimenting with IL-11 antibodies based on published research.

[DIY Anti-IL-11: Week 3 Post-Injection Report]

Seohan's eyes narrowed.

21 days post-injection. Morning joint stiffness reduced by 70%.

Note: Mysterious low-grade fever persists at night.

Conclusion: It seems to have some effect, but long-term monitoring needed. Planning to lower the dose for the next cycle.

Seohan unconsciously rested his chin on his hand. The comment section erupted with fierce debate:

• Do you have purity data? If it's bulk from China, worry about contamination before efficacy.

• Stop if the fever persists. Did you check CBC, AST/ALT, and CRP?

Seohan opened the poster's previous threads in reverse order.

He hadn't made the antibody himself. Based on information from open patents and papers, he appeared to have commissioned a research-grade antibody from a private synthesis company registered in Eastern Europe.

Payment was made in cryptocurrency, the ice packs inside the box were completely melted upon arrival, and there was no temperature log for the shipment. The Certificate of Analysis (COA) stated a purity of 97.8%, but lacked any mention of the analytical method used. No batch number or manufacturing date was listed.

Below, comments from people who had used the same supplier lined up:

• Mine formed a brown precipitate.

• Same label, but the viscosity is different from the last batch.

• The molecular weight on the COA doesn't match the expected value in the paper.

• I paid for refrigerated shipping, but it came via regular mail.

Seohan's expression hardened.

This went beyond efficacy.

Nobody knew whether they were injecting a target-binding antibody, an endotoxin-contaminated denatured protein, or little more than an impure protein mixture.

Such substances were flowing all over the world under a single label reading 'For Research Use Only.'

Seohan opened posts from other sellers as well.

Peptides, viral vectors, growth factors, antibodies of unknown origin. The sellers differed, but the structure was the same: flashy websites, flimsy analysis sheets, missing or untraceable batch records. When issues arose, the seller account vanished, only to reappear days later under a different name.

It wasn't a market lacking demand.

It was a market lacking a trustworthy supplier.

Seohan straightened his posture in his chair.

Elsewhere on the feed, bodybuilders chased muscle growth with peptides from unverified laboratories, while biopunks injected compounds of unknown purity simply to prove that the system could be defied. Different motives, same problem: no reliable manufacturing, no traceable batches, and no one accountable when something went wrong.

"They're selling this as medicine..."

A cold mutter escaped Seohan's lips.

What they needed was a product sold outside the legal system but manufactured to standards the underground market had never seen—something whose identity, purity, and batch history could be verified before anyone risked their life on it.

At the very bottom of the screen, the final post from the young man who was losing his sight completely flickered:

Anyone, please... just sell something real.

Seohan stared at that sentence for a long time.

He could not guarantee efficacy. But he could guarantee identity, purity, and storage conditions.

If the market could not be stopped, then at the very least, fakes would no longer define it.