For years, the entire world knew Quentin Ashcroft as a medical hero. A charismatic genius, founder of the powerful Life Industries, eternally present on magazine covers, smiling beneath headlines promising cures for incurable diseases. The media idolized him. People revered him, as if he were the last hope against pain and death.

But behind the spotlight, something was rotten.

Deep within the city, Ashcroft built a secret laboratory, hidden from everyone and everything. There, far from judgment and ethics, he delved ever deeper into his obsession: conquering death. Not out of altruism. Not out of compassion. But out of pure and utter fear. For him, dying meant being forgotten. And there was no fate more terrifying.

With money, promises, and lies, he lured the desperate. The homeless. The terminally ill. People with no name, no future, no one. They became guinea pigs for his experiments. Ashcroft injected them with parasites, mutant viruses, and unstable, misunderstood formulas. Some gained superhuman strength, regenerative abilities, and extreme endurance. But they never lasted long. In the end, they always became mindless creatures or died.

The truth only came to light when a group of independent heroes began investigating the constant disappearances. They located the laboratory and raided the underground complex. What they found was worse than any nightmare. Deformed bodies. Moans echoing through the corridors. Creatures that had once been human, but were no longer.

Ashcroft, consumed by rage, unleashed his experiments on the intruders. The battle was brutal. The entire laboratory became a war zone. Explosions destroyed the foundations. The ceiling collapsed. Everything collapsed.

As the world crumbled around him, Ashcroft rushed to the deepest chamber, where he kept his final experiment. In pure rage, he climbed into the test pod and injected everything. Every last drop. He mixed incompatible formulas, incomplete mutations, substances he had never dared to test.

The structure gave way. Concrete and steel collapsed on him. Ashcroft was buried alive.

But he didn't die.

And that was true hell.

For forty years, he remained there, imprisoned. Unable to move. Unable to speak. Trapped in a body that couldn't die, but couldn't live either. His flesh rotted. His bones twisted. His senses faded. But his mind remained alive. Awake. Alone. Silent. And filled with hate.

Decades later, urban explorers, curious wanderers searching forgotten ruins, accidentally reactivated the laboratory's ancient power system. A surge of electricity coursed through the abandoned tunnels and reached the containment pod.

That was enough.

Ashcroft woke.

He no longer remembered how to walk. Then he crawled, slowly, out of the wreckage. Rotting flesh fell away in pieces. His eyes, dry and cloudy, could no longer see as they had before. None of his humanity remained. He was no longer a man. He was something beyond science. Something that even death had rejected.

Without a functioning body, he had to build a new one. Using scrap metal and scraps of abandoned technology, he assembled a grotesque suit. A living husk to support what was left of him. Every movement creaked like rusted metal.

And from his deformed body emanated a thick, purple mist. A cold, poisonous, living gas. The unsuspecting explorers breathed in the contaminated air before they could react. Within seconds, they fell to their knees. Their veins blackened. Their eyes went blank. Their muscles writhed in agonizing spasms.

They did not die.

They changed.

Ashcroft watched as they rose with unsteady movements, his first new creations. Alive enough to serve. Dead enough to obey.

Now, he is free.

His face is completely unrecognizable, completely disfigured.

His mind is poisoned by pain, hunger, and a thirst for revenge.

The purple gas hovers around him like a lethal aura.

Ashcroft has not forgotten.

And he is hunting down the heroes who buried him, one by one.