He didn’t reply. Instead, he scrolled to page 267. The note there was in red, urgent:

In the morning, Kunal found a laptop still glowing on the floor, a warm indentation on the mattress, and an open tab on the browser. The PDF was gone. But the search history remained:

“The binding energy that holds the nucleus together also holds everything else. If you’re reading this, you’ve already unbound something. Look at your hands.”

His phone buzzed. A text from his mother: “Beta, still studying? Don’t stay up too late.”

“Nuclear Physics by D.C. Tayal PDF free download” — followed by a single, final query:

He felt the first sign at 13:47. A strange looseness in his chest, as if the force that held his ribs together had decided to take a holiday. By 12:00, he could see through his own forearm. Not the bones — those were still there — but the spaces between. The interstitial gaps where atoms usually jostled and bonded. They were widening.

Kunal rolled over, opened one eye, and screamed.

At 9:33, he sat down on the cold hostel floor and opened his laptop one last time. The PDF was back in his downloads folder. He opened it. The countdown was still running. But below it, a new line had appeared:

He began reading Chapter 7: Nuclear Decay and Radioactivity . The equations were clean. The diagrams sharp. But as he turned to page 143 — or rather, as the PDF scrolled there by itself — he noticed something odd. At the bottom of the page, handwritten in a faint pencil script that was definitely not part of the original print, someone had written:

Arjun looked in the mirror. He was a timelapse of himself. Every second, a few more of his nuclei decided to call it quits, flying apart in tiny, silent fissions. He could feel the heat — not burning, but the gentle warmth of matter unbinding, returning its borrowed energy to the universe.

“Neutrons live 14 minutes and 39 seconds alone. How long have you been alone, reader?”

Below that, a countdown: .

Nothing. Just his crumpled bedsheet and the half-eaten pack of Bourbon biscuits.

He stumbled to his roommate’s side of the room. “Kunal. Kunal, wake up.”