This is a full-length, novel-style draft of Chapter 1 in native English. To reach the substantial length you requested, I have expanded the internal monologues, ad
The drizzle falling over London that Tuesday morning wasn't just weather; for Dr. Julian Thorne, it was a targeted tactical strike. To the average commuter emerging from the Baker Street station, the mist was a minor inconvenience, a quintessential British backdrop. To Julian, it was a frictionless lubricant applied to the pavement with the sole purpose of testing the structural integrity of his tailbone.
Julian had woken up at 5:30 AM, not by the grace of his alarm clock, but because a disoriented wood pigeon had slammed into his bedroom window with the force of a feathered brick, only to fall unconscious onto his balcony. Julian lay there for a moment, staring at the hairline crack in his ceiling that vaguely resembled the map of Italy. He didn't curse. He didn't sigh. He simply acknowledged that the universe had checked in for its morning shift.
He had replaced his alarm clock three times this month. The first had suffered a localized electrical surge that melted its internal circuitry. The second had spontaneously reset itself to Tokyo Standard Time for no discernable reason. The third, the current one had simply decided to die in its sleep, despite being plugged into a brand-new surge protector.
"Good morning, world," Julian whispered to the empty room. "Do your worst. We both know you're going to anyway."
He swung his legs out of bed, and with the practiced precision of a man cursed by the gods, his big toe found the sharp corner of his Victorian iron bedframe. A sickening thwack echoed in the room. Julian didn't scream; he merely squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the white-hot throb of the nerve endings to settle into a dull, manageable ache.
Limping toward the kitchen, he attempted to brew a cup of coffee. His espresso machine,va high-end Italian model that cost more than his first car made a sound like a gravel lung, shuddered violently, and then hissed a jet of scalding steam directly at his chin. It bypassed the waiting ceramic mug entirely, vomiting a thick, oily puddle of caffeine onto his pristine hardwood floor.
Julian stared at the mess. He didn't clean it immediately. Experience had taught him that if he fought back too early in the morning, the day only grew more vengeful. Instead, he retreated to the bathroom for a shower.
The water started at a pleasant lukewarm, but as soon as he had lathered his hair with expensive sandalwood shampoo, the heater decided to retire. The temperature plummeted to a bone-chilling glacial flow. He spent the next three minutes rinsing his eyes in what felt like liquid nitrogen, shivering so violently he nearly slipped on the soap dish, which had mysteriously migrated from its holder to the floor.
By the time he was dressed, the omens were undeniable. As he buttoned his crisp, sky-blue Oxford shirt, the top button popped off and vanished into a vent. When he reached for his white lab coat, freshly dry-cleaned and encased in plastic, he discovered a fountain pen had leaked inside the breast pocket. A massive, Rorschach-blot of black ink stared back at him, looking remarkably like a silhouette of a man falling off a cliff.
The Commute from Hell
Julian chose to walk to St. Jude's Hospital. It was a mere six blocks, and history had proven that Julian Thorne and public transport were a volatile chemical reaction. The last time he'd taken a bus, the engine had spontaneously combusted. The last time he'd braved the Underground, a signaling failure had trapped him in a tunnel for four hours with a man who insisted on explaining the "hidden geometry" of pigeon droppings.
However, the sidewalk was no sanctuary.
As he rounded the corner near Regent's Park, a delivery lorry hit a massive, hidden pothole filled with rainwater. A tidal wave of grey, oily sludge rose up like a predatory beast and doused Julian from head to toe.
He stood there, dripping. A piece of wet newspaper clung to his thigh. His glasses were so smeared with grime that the world looked like an Impressionist painting of misery.
"Magnificent," Julian muttered, wiping a streak of street-grime from his cheek.
He reached the hospital's revolving doors, looking less like a world-class neurosurgeon and more like a shipwreck survivor. Arthur, the veteran security guard, looked up from his desk and winced.
"Rough start, Dr. Thorne?"
"A standard Tuesday, Arthur. Did the hospital survive the night, or is there a localized earthquake I should be aware of?"
"Not yet, sir. But Lift 4 is acting up again—it's taking people to the basement when they want the cafeteria. Oh, and Dr. Sterling is looking for you. He looked like he'd just swallowed a wasp."
Julian closed his eyes. Alistair Sterling, the Head of Neurosurgery, was a man who believed luck was a result of discipline and that misfortune was a character flaw. To Sterling, Julian was an irritating anomaly: a surgeon with the most stable hands in Europe, yet possessed of an aura that could trigger a small apocalypse in a ten-meter radius.
The Theatre of War
In the scrub room, Julian felt a fleeting sense of safety. The Operating Theatre was a controlled environment. Physics was supposed to behave here. The air was filtered, the floors were non-slip, and the staff were professionals who didn't believe in ghosts—though most of them had started wearing "evil eye" charms when assigned to Julian's team.
"Patient is Mr. Henderson, forty-five. Massive, unstable berry aneurysm in the Circle of Willis," reported Sarah, the scrub nurse. She was the only one brave enough to lead Julian's team consistently. She wore a small crucifix, a hamsa, and a rabbit's foot under her scrubs. She called it 'diversifying her portfolio.'
"Let's get this done before the building is struck by a meteor," Julian joked, though his voice lacked conviction.
As he stepped up to the operating table, the overhead surgical lights flickered. Julian froze. Sarah clutched her necklace. The lights stabilized.
Julian began. When he worked, the curse seemed to lose its grip. His hands moved with a preternatural grace that defied his daily clumsiness. He navigated the delicate, pulsing structures of the brain as if he were walking through a familiar garden. In the realm of the microscopic, he was a god.
"Clip," he requested.
The assistant handed him the instrument. Just as Julian moved to secure the ticking time bomb in Mr. Henderson's brain, a one-in-a-billion event occurred. A common housefly—having somehow bypassed three layers of high-efficiency particulate air filters and two pressurized airlocks—flew directly into Julian's left nostril.
Julian's entire world narrowed down to the tickle in his nose. Every instinct in his body screamed at him to sneeze. A sneeze would move his hand a fraction of a millimeter. That fraction would tear the aneurysm. Mr. Henderson would be brain-dead before the sneeze finished echoing.
Julian held his breath. His face turned a deep shade of crimson. His muscles locked. He entered a state of Zen-like agony, staring through the surgical microscope as the fly explored his sinus cavity. For forty-five seconds, time stopped.
Finally, the fly exited. Julian exhaled, a slow, controlled hiss, and placed the clip with perfect accuracy.
"Done," he whispered, a bead of sweat the size of a pea rolling down his forehead.
But the universe wasn't finished. As Julian stepped back to allow his assistant to begin the closing sutures, his heel caught on a stray piece of plastic backing from a suture pack—something that shouldn't have been on the floor.
Julian's feet went out from under him. To avoid falling onto the patient, he instinctively reached out to steady himself. His hand caught the edge of the instrument tray.
The tray flipped with a deafening metallic crash. Dozens of stainless-steel instruments flew into the air. One pair of forceps bounced off the lighting rig, struck the cardiac monitor, and managed to hit the 'Hard Reset' button with the precision of a master sniper.
The monitor went black. Emergency alarms began to blare throughout the surgical wing as the central system detected a total power failure in Theatre 3.
"DR. THORNE!" Sterling bellowed from the observation gallery, having just walked in to see what looked like a crime scene.
Julian stood there, surrounded by scattered scalpels and clamps, while technicians scrambled to fix a machine that wasn't actually broken. The patient was stable, but Julian's reputation was, once again, in tatters.
A Culinary Disaster
Julian spent his lunch break in the corner of the cafeteria, attempting to be invisible. He had ordered tomato soup, a "safe" choice. It required no cutting, no complex maneuvering, and was served in a deep bowl.
He sat at a wobbly table in the far corner, away from the other doctors who were whispering and glancing at his ink-stained coat. Just as he took his first spoonful, the wall-mounted television switched to a "Breaking News" bulletin.
"Breaking News: A small bolide meteor has just entered the atmosphere over North London, causing a massive sonic boom..."
The shockwave hit the hospital a second later. It wasn't enough to cause damage, but it was enough to rattle the windows violently. Startled, Julian inhaled a drop of soup the wrong way. The resulting coughing fit caused his knee to jerk upward, catching the underside of the table.
The wobbly table gave way. The bowl of hot tomato soup performed a perfect somersault and landed directly in Julian's lap.
He sat there, staring down at the spreading red stain. To anyone walking in, it looked as though he had been shot in the intestines.
"Doctor! You're bleeding!" a young intern shrieked from across the room.
"It's Campbell's," Julian said, his voice flat and devoid of hope. "It's just tomato soup."
He stood up to leave, but his foot tangled in the chair's leg. He stumbled forward, directly into the path of a catering trolley laden with desserts. The trolley tipped, sending thirty bowls of sticky toffee pudding into the air.
One of them landed squarely on top of Julian's head.
The cafeteria fell into a dead silence. Julian Thorne sat on the floor, drenched in "blood-red" soup, with a crown of warm cake and toffee sauce sliding slowly down his forehead and onto his glasses. He looked up at the ceiling, waiting for the heavens to provide a punchline.
The Archives of the Damned
By late afternoon, Julian had retreated to the basement archives the most stable, boring place in the hospital. He needed to pull old records for a research paper, and he figured that being surrounded by dead paper was safer than being around living people.
The basement was a labyrinth of dust and silence. But even here, the shadow followed him. As he reached for a file on a top shelf, the entire shelving unit, bolted to the wall by regulations groaned. The bolts, weakened by a microscopic flaw in the steel, snapped simultaneously.
Julian dived backward just as a ton of medical history cascaded toward the floor, a literal waterfall of paper and cardboard.
As he crawled out from under a pile of 1970s appendectomy reports, he saw it. A thick, yellowed envelope that had been lodged behind the shelving unit for decades. On the front, in elegant, fading calligraphy, was his name: For Dr. Julian Thorne.
Julian's heart hammered against his ribs. It was impossible. This envelope looked fifty years old. He hadn't even been born when this paper was manufactured. With trembling fingers, he tore it open. Inside was a single sheet of vellum.
"Your misfortune is not random, Julian. It is a shroud. The universe tries to break you because you are a 'glitch' in its design. If the world stops trying to kill you, it means you have finally become irrelevant. Do not die yet. Patient 402 is coming, and only a man who has survived everything can save him."
The air in the basement suddenly turned cold. Julian felt the hair on his arms stand up. Who was Patient 402? And what did it mean to be a "glitch"?
Suddenly, the lights in the archive went out. This wasn't a flicker. It was a total kill-switch. In the absolute darkness, he heard the sound of footsteps. They weren't the soft squeak of nurses' shoes or the hurried clip of a doctor. These were heavy, rhythmic, tactical boots.
Julian realized with a jolt of pure adrenaline that his life hadn't been a comedy of errors. It had been a distraction.
He tried to stand, but in the darkness, his foot caught on a fallen file box. He went down hard, his chin hitting the concrete.
"Dammit," he hissed. But for the first time in his life, the word wasn't a complaint. It was a declaration of war.
The archive door creaked open, a sliver of light from a tactical flashlight cutting through the dust. The beam swept across the room, searching through the wreckage of the fallen shelves.
Julian pressed himself against the cold stone wall, clutching the letter to his chest. He was covered in dried soup, his hair was matted with toffee, and his toe was likely broken. He was the unluckiest man in London.
But he was also the man who had survived a thousand "accidents" that would have killed anyone else. He was the most resilient man on earth, forged in the fires of constant catastrophe.
The flashlight beam stopped inches from his boots.
"Julian Thorne," a deep, gravelly voice echoed through the stacks. "We aren't here to kill you. We're here because the world finally needs your brand of luck."
Julian wiped a smear of toffee from his eye and looked into the light. "Could I at least get a clean lab coat first? This one is ruined."