The doctor sat beside me and placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
"Don't worry," he said calmly. "According to our policy you must be compensated with eighty-five percent of the market value of the years you attempted to donate. You chose to donate six months, which equals…"
He turned toward his assistant, who had already opened a tablet and started calculating the value.
She stepped forward a moment later and glanced at the screen before speaking.
"That equals seventy-five thousand three hundred and fifty-five dollars."
My face lit up instantly — I knew the situation wasn't normal, yet the excitement of suddenly receiving free money had already taken control of my thoughts.
I hadn't lost any time — and I had still gotten the money.
What better outcome could my day possibly have offered?
Without wasting another second I rushed home as fast as I could, only to find my father already sitting at the dining table waiting for me.
"Justin, where were you?" he asked while standing up slowly and folding his arms across his chest.
I shouldn't tell him about this, I thought immediately. The last thing I wanted was more people knowing about what had happened, so I simply shrugged and answered casually.
"I was with Anthony and William — we were playing air hockey at the ground."
He studied my face for a moment before nodding and gesturing toward the table.
"Dinner's ready, Come and sit".
Before dinner he handed me a sanitizing pill, and I rubbed it across my arms while the thin coating instantly spread across my skin and cleaned it within seconds.
As we ate, my mind refused to stay still.
What would I even do with that much money?
Maybe I could plan a secret trip with my friends — somewhere far from college, far from routine.
Or maybe I could finally buy an 8D gaming console and stop borrowing William's every weekend.
The ideas kept colliding inside my head, racing faster and faster until my thoughts almost felt uncontrollable, although I convinced myself that it was probably nothing more than excitement.
We finished dinner quietly, and after clearing the table I went to bed.
Yet just like every other night — sleep did not come easily.
Something had been troubling me for years, something that returned every single night no matter how hard I tried to ignore it.
And it was something I simply couldn't let go.
That night the nightmare returned once again.
Ever since childhood the same dream had followed me whenever I fell asleep, repeating itself with cruel consistency until waking up stopped bringing relief.
In the dream I always saw the same scene.
A woman being dragged away by two people whose faces I could never see. Their bodies looked like shadows moving through a long corridor while the woman struggled and shouted as they pulled her forward.
At the end of the corridor stood a man holding a small child in his arms while tears flowed down his face as he watched the woman disappear.
Every night the same dream.
Every morning the same guilt and pain.
That had been my life for as long as I could remember - But that night something was different.
For the first time in my life the dream had color.
The woman was wearing white. The corridor reflected a faint blue glow, and the two figures dragging her were dressed in dark green clothes that moved through the dim light like living shadows.
I couldn't believe it.
Since childhood every version of that nightmare had been colorless — nothing but dull shades of grey, like an old memory fading away. Yet that night every detail appeared sharp and real.
Something about it felt strange.
When I woke up the next morning, the feeling still hadn't disappeared.
The clock beside my bed showed that I had woken up two hours earlier than usual.
That alone was unusual for I had always been a deep sleeper, rarely waking up before ten hours of sleep, yet that morning I had opened my eyes after barely eight.
Lying there in silence, I stared at the ceiling while a single thought slowly formed in my mind.
It had to be connected.
Receiving forty extra years wasn't something that could happen without consequences.
Something inside me had definitely changed. And for the first time since the incident at the Chrono Hub, I began to wonder if those extra years had come with something else attached to them.
As usual, I went to college the next morning. When I entered the campus I saw Anthony standing near the entrance, which wasn't surprising because he had a strange habit of arriving earlier than everyone else, but only in college. Otherwise, he would be the last person to arrive on a trip or hangout. I found that pretty weird but that's how the guy was.
I actually liked that about him — although his bright clothes irritated my eyes more than usual that day.
"What's good Justin," he said while walking beside me. "How much money did you make?"
I told him everything — how the extraction had failed, how the Chrono Hub couldn't take my years, and how they had compensated me anyway.
While we were talking, William noticed us from across the corridor and walked over while adjusting his glasses.
"Yo Will," Anthony said immediately. "This guy got free money yesterday."
William looked at me with curiosity.
"Is that true, Justin?"
"Yeah," I replied.
Before we could continue the conversation, the professor entered the classroom and everyone quickly settled into their seats.
It was our physics class — and yes, it was the same professor who also taught us history. Even after months I still found that combination strange.
That day the lecture was about fields and wave interactions. I remember the class very clearly because what followed the next day would become impossible to forget.
Toward the end of the lecture he wrote three equations on the board and assigned them as homework.
The questions involved calculating interference patterns between overlapping electromagnetic fields and determining how different wave frequencies interact when they collide inside a confined space.
At the time it seemed difficult, but not impossible.
The next day, however, something unexpected happened.
No one had completed the homework-Not even me.
The previous day had been strange for me — my mind kept racing with thoughts I couldn't control, and after struggling for hours I had simply given up and gone to sleep.
When the professor realized that no one had done the assignment, his reaction shocked all of us.
"Are you serious?" he said while staring at the class in disbelief. "Was it really that difficult?"
For a moment it looked like he might explode with anger, but he forced himself to calm down before continuing.
"I'll give you the entire weekend," he said firmly. "If I don't see those equations solved by Monday, then don't bother complaining about your grades."
Without waiting for any response he grabbed his tablet and walked out of the classroom, clearly frustrated.
It was the first time I had ever seen him that angry.....Usually no one wanted to upset him, and I had always assumed I was the only one struggling with the assignment.
But when I finally opened my tablet and looked at the questions again, I immediately understood why nobody had solved them.
The equations weren't ordinary homework.
They described something far more complex — something that would soon become the first real clue to understanding what had gone wrong with me.