It's funny… I can hear the world sleeping. Literally. I can hear my dad snoring, the soft rhythm of my mom's breathing… and at the same time, on the other side of the planet, I hear someone crying. Starving children. Screams muffled by walls and forced silence. Bombs exploding in places I can barely pronounce the name of. All at once. How can anyone sleep with that in their ears?
At first… I just wanted to be a normal kid. Even with this second chance at life, I thought I'd live something peaceful, grow up again and enjoy childhood. Maybe even stay up late playing video games, fall in love again, slowly find my path. But now? Now I have heat vision, I can lift cars with one hand, hear every whisper of humanity. And worst of all: I know exactly what that means.
It's impossible not to compare. These powers… they're the same. The same ridiculous set I saw in comic books when I was alive before. Super strength, flight, heat vision, enhanced hearing, freezing breath… the damn Superman combo. Only he was fiction. A symbol. I'm just… me.
And yet, here I am. Real. With all this inside me. With a strength that could turn the world upside down.
At first, I didn't want to be a hero. It felt distant, almost cliché. I'd see the news, the local heroes with flashy costumes, interviews, sponsorships… and it all seemed hollow. Artificial. I thought: no, that's not for me. But now… now that I can hear the voices no one else hears, now that I know how much pain is out there in silence… how can I do nothing?
Standing still knowing I could stop it… that would be cowardice. It would be the same as saying all this — all this power, this second chance, this new body — is good for nothing.
I don't know if I'll wear a cape, or if anyone will ever call me a hero. But I know one thing: if I can help… then I must. Because with all this power, ignoring the world would be the worst choice I could make.
Maybe… maybe this is my purpose, after all.
Years later — United States, the Whitmore family property, rural and isolated Montana.
Since that night, when I was lying in bed hearing the whole world, I knew: I couldn't ignore what I am. And more importantly… what I can do.
My parents did everything they could to ensure I had a relatively normal childhood — or as close to that as possible. But the truth is, with each passing year, I became less "normal." And they knew it. They could no longer protect me from what was growing inside me.
So they made a difficult but right decision: at seven years old, they pulled me out of regular school and brought me to a private training compound, built with help from my father's company and some very discreet engineers. No connections to hero agencies. No exposure. The plan was simple: train me far from the world's eyes.
During the day, I trained with specialists hired in secret: physicists, biologists, ex-soldiers, scientists, martial artists. None of them saw the full picture. They only saw fragments of what I could do. My father said it was important to keep our cards hidden — even from allies. In the world of peculiarities, even trust can be exploited.
At night… well, at night I ran. Literally.
Speed was the first thing I fully mastered. By the age of nine, I could cross the country in seconds. I discovered I could study entire books in minutes, absorb information straight through my eyes. That's how I learned advanced science, philosophy, history, engineering, and… languages.
All of them.
Chinese, Russian, German, Arabic, French, Yoruba, Japanese, Korean, Indigenous languages, even nearly extinct dialects. I'd read them, hear them, and they'd just stick. My brain, accelerated like everything else, stores and decodes everything with frightening clarity. In less than two weeks, I spoke like a native in over two hundred languages.
It was around that time that I started sneaking out at night. Nothing big. Nothing that would draw attention.
Stopping a robbery in Brooklyn. Rescuing a woman on fire on a road in Arizona. Saving a child trapped in a collapsing building in India. I'd fly there, do what needed to be done, and disappear. No witnesses. No cameras. A ghost with glowing eyes vanishing into the wind.
Sometimes I'd hear people mention "an angel," other times "a demon from the sky." Once, a journalist in Bogotá wrote about the "lightning boy" who stopped a train from derailing. I wondered if I should stop.
But I didn't.
By age twelve, I had full control of flight, strength, thermal vision, and hearing. I learned to measure the reach of my super-hearing, to filter sounds, to focus only on specific voices — like tuning a radio.
At thirteen, I began studying medicine on my own. Quantum physics. International law. All part of a personal plan: be prepared. Because I knew the world wasn't just about rescues and plane crashes. The world is complicated, political, dangerous. Having power isn't enough — you have to know when to use it, how to use it, and why.
At fourteen, I tested my X-ray vision in depth. Learned to see heat patterns, identify diseases just by looking at people. I spent entire days examining medical images, then validating them with hospital records — again, in secret. I'd run through hospitals at night, read charts, memorize diagnoses, and study everything I could.
My mom still insisted on family meals, even though I ate more out of habit, like she did. My dad helped me with physical tests whenever he could. They pretended not to know about my nightly outings. But I heard them whispering, when they thought I was asleep.
"He's not a child anymore, Evelyn."
"I know… but he's still our son, Nathan. I just wish he had more time to be just that."
Now, at fifteen, my body looks older. My physical development doesn't follow normal growth patterns. Doctors say there's something in my metabolism — something that accelerates, strengthens, regenerates. They don't understand. No one does.
But I do.
I was made this way. Or reborn this way. And every cell in me seems to know it.
I still don't have a hero name. I haven't appeared in public. But the world has already seen me — even if it doesn't know it was me. And every time I hear a siren, a cry for help, a child weeping… I know I still can't stop.
Because with so much power, doing nothing is being an accomplice.
And if there's one thing I refuse to be, it's an accomplice to suffering.