Corpus-Vanum Hall: The Doctor’s Final Pulse
The moment the heavy, bronze-plated door to Corpus-Vanum Hall was carefully pushed open, the air rushed out—cold, dense, and heavy with the pervasive, unsettling odor of dry linens, mineral dust, and the sharp scent of heavy metals. The name, combining body/flesh with empty/vain, perfectly captured the manor’s function: a physical space dedicated to achieving the ultimate truth of biology, now embodying its own absolute termination of life. This abandoned Victorian house was structured not for ordinary living, but for unwavering, controlled physiological study, its internal layout a bewildering maze of small, isolated clean rooms, pressure-regulated surgical theaters, and meticulously designed atmospheric controls intended to eliminate all external variables that might affect a pure biological state.
The final inhabitant was Physician Zero Vita, a brilliant, but intensely reclusive master physician and biological theorist of the late 19th century. Doctor Vita’s profession was the study of life, the perfection of the human form, and the eradication of all disease, seeking to codify a single, unified, and perfectly consistent state of non-suffering. His singular obsession, however, was the creation of the ‘Zero State’—a single, perfect, flawless biological condition that would, through the absolute synthesis of all known medical principles, reveal the ultimate, objective truth of the organism, free of all decay, mutation, or need for external support. After realizing that the very condition of being alive necessitated chemical and physiological imperfection, shattering his faith in absolute biological purity, he retreated to the manor. He dedicated his final years to resolving this single, terrifying goal, believing that the only way to achieve the Zero State was to understand the ultimate absence of all vital activity. His personality was intensely systematic, fearful of inconsistency, and utterly consumed by the pursuit of physiological finality.
The Vital Chamber
Doctor Vita’s mania culminated in the Vital Chamber. This secure, sealed room was where he spent his final days, not healing, but deconstructing the act of living itself, attempting to define the ultimate objectivity by isolating the point that offered no detectable vital sign. His journals, written in a cramped, precise hand that eventually gave way to complex equations concerning thermodynamic equilibrium and the theoretical limits of organic inertia, were found sealed inside a hollow metal thermometer casing. He stopped trying to maintain the perfect health and began trying to define the un-living, concluding that the only way to achieve the Zero State was to eliminate the need for any biological function whatsoever. “The pulse is a fluctuation; the breath is a decay,” one entry read. “The final health requires the complete surrender of all vital signs and all motion. The truth must be a single, self-evident, unstated conclusion, contained in a fundamental, perfect stillness.”
The house preserves his clinical rigor structurally. Many internal passages are fitted with small, precisely calibrated pressure seals and environmental isolation units built into the walls, now all rusted and frozen, remnants of his attempts to create a universal, absolutely fixed and non-reactive environment within the manor.
The Final Diagnosis in the Abandoned Victorian House
Physician Zero Vita was last heard working in his laboratory, followed by a sudden, intense sound of heavy metal snapping and glass shattering (from the electrocardiograph and vats) and then immediate, profound silence. He did not leave the manor. The next morning, the laboratory was cold, the vital chamber sealed, and the man was gone. No body was found, and the only evidence was the singular, physical alteration to his final philosophical work.
The ultimate chilling clue is the small hole in the waxed linen. It is the final pulse—the Zero State achieved, representing the cessation of all biological activity and the perfect, objective truth found in a single, un-dimensioned point of pure, absolute nothingness. The broken stethoscope and blank linen ensure no further attempt could be made to chart the flawed, living world. This abandoned Victorian house, with its silent laboratory and broken tools, stands as a cold, imposing testament to the master physician who pursued the ultimate, pure form of existence, and who, in the end, may have successfully defined the Perfect Non-Life, vanishing into the un-moving, objective finality that he engineered as his final, terrifying statement of pure existence.
