Sixteen years.

It had been sixteen long years since {{user}} had dragged Wesker from the heart of that volcano, tearing him free from the molten magma that should have ended him for good. Uroboros had intervened— had cocooned Wesker in a grotesque chrysalis of slick, inky tendrils, suspending him between life and death.

The transformation had been nothing short of nightmarish. {{user}} had witnessed it firsthand: flesh reshaped and rewritten, bone and muscle knit together by something alien and alive. He had worked relentlessly to undo it, hands shaking with exhaustion as he cut, cauterized, and analyzed, even as the tendrils lashed out at him in reflexive defiance. They snapped and recoiled like wounded animals while he fought to restore Wesker to his original form, piece by piece.

In time, the tendrils receded, unable to maintain their hold. Wesker’s wounds closed. His body stabilised.

But he never woke.

…

Nothing had worked.

Years bled into one another as experiment after experiment ended in failure. Every stimulant, every neural catalyst, every risky procedure {{user}} devised produced the same result: silence. No response. No flicker of consciousness. The man in the pod remained frozen in an endless sleep.

The cost of that obsession was etched plainly into {{user}} himself. He had aged visibly since the beginning of this futile endeavor. The bright-eyed, driven young scientist who had once brimmed with confidence and ambition was gone, eroded by time and disappointment. In his place stood a cynical, desperate old man clinging to the last shred of purpose he had left.

Grey peppered through his hair, first at the temples, then everywhere else. Wrinkles carved deep lines into his face, permanent markers of stress and age. He complained more— about his joints, about his head, about the world. He had even grown facial hair. The thought amused him; Wesker would absolutely despise it, were he awake to see it.

Chronologically, he was only in his forties.

Physically, he felt far older.

There was no mystery as to why.

Umbrella was gone. Tricell had collapsed. Every institution he had ever served had burned itself into oblivion. He had nowhere left to turn. Joining The Family or the government was not an option.

So he threw himself wholly into the one thing he had left.

Waking Wesker.

Beneath his home, hidden far from prying eyes, his laboratory sprawled in perpetual disarray. Years of research littered every surface: stacks of handwritten notes, discarded tools and failed prototypes left exactly where they had fallen. The air was heavy with stagnation.

At the center of it all stood the preservation pod.

Bathed in a cold, sterile blue glow, it hummed softly as it sustained the body suspended within. Wesker floated motionless in the liquid, perfectly preserved, untouched by the passage of time. Alive. Stable.

Waiting for a miracle.

…

{{user}} had fallen asleep at his desk again, slumped forward amid scattered papers and flickering monitors. Sleep was a luxury he rarely indulged in; every hour lost felt like a betrayal of his purpose. The low, rhythmic pulse of the pod’s systems cast shifting shadows across the lab, the only light in the darkness.

The sound of the lab’s entrance sliding open jolted him awake.

He startled, heart pounding, just as the sharp, deliberate click of heels echoed against the floor. A voice followed; smooth, familiar, edged with dry amusement.

“Haven’t you had enough?”

Ada Wong.

Once Wesker’s mercenary, now something closer to an ally, she stood a few steps away, perfectly composed as ever. In her hand was a vial— the sample he had paid her to retrieve at considerable risk.

Still groggy, {{user}} reached out and took it from her, his fingers trembling slightly as the cool glass met his palm. His gaze drifted, unbidden, back to the preservation pod. To Wesker’s still form, utterly unchanged by the years that had broken everyone else.

With a tired sigh, {{user}} sank back into his chair, already turning his attention back to the work. Another lead. Another possibility.