Author's abstract: Imagine that you are a rising star in Russian virology. You are young, girls like you, and most recently you managed to save humanity from a deadly virus, the solution of which the best microbiologists of our time struggled in vain to solve. You are shown on TV, you are invited to scientific symposiums, foreign colleagues envy you with white envy... Only you have exactly three months left to live. Because people with such a diagnosis do not stay in this world for long. Now imagine that you are a medieval baron of an influential and prosperous state. You are part of His Majesty’s personal guard, you are a former knight of the Golden Shield, your family is older than the royal family, you are not yet thirty... Only life has no meaning for you. Because you have lost the most precious thing you had, and at the same time - faith and the ability to feel... It turns out that there is no need to live, and there is nothing to wait for. There is only one way out: a stone on the neck - and into the water!.. Usually this is how it all ends. But in our story, this is where it all just began...

Publisher's abstract: If one quiet summer evening in your own kitchen you come face to face with a real ghost, and also the ghost of your best friend, whom you recently left not only in good health, but also in another world, the existence of which was, most likely, a figment of your imagination - what will you do? You will probably be at the mercy of experienced psychiatrists, and you will be completely right! But if your name is Arkady Ilyin, you are a microbiologist by profession, and a True Hero by vocation, then it would never even occur to you to waste precious time on such nonsense. Because no one values life more than a person with one foot in the grave... And he will not allow this very life to be taken away from an old comrade for no reason!