Novels by Blessing

It started with the trembling.Not the kind you could see — not a visible shake — but something beneath the skin, deep and wrong. Like my nerves were trying to hum in two different keys at once. My body wasn’t rejecting the Ghost Circuit anymore. It was syncing.The first time I noticed it was when Yui and I set up camp in the hollow of an old freight tunnel. We’d been silent most of the day, neither of us wanting to speak about what we saw in the Cradle Vault — about Mara. But silence has weight, and when you carry it long enough, it starts whispering things you don’t want to hear.By dusk, I couldn’t stop feeling them. Others.At first, it was faint — a static hum, like voices carried through radio fog. Then, little by little, the hum sharpened into words. Not human ones. Thoughts that came in pulses of emotion, not language. Pain. Hunger. Memory. Pleading.I remember freezing, hand halfway to my canteen, when I felt it — a rush of panic that wasn’t mine. It shot through my spine li

The coordinates burned themselves into my mind.Not like numbers, not even like words—more like instinct. A direction whispered into my bloodstream. When I closed my eyes, I could see it pulsing behind my eyelids: a map drawn in veins of light. It pointed underground, deep beneath the cracked surface of what used to be the Ashgrid Cradle.Yui and I moved without talking much. The silence between us was a weight—thick, tense, filled with all the things neither of us dared to ask after what happened at the Crown Node. I could feel her watching me sometimes when she thought I wasn’t looking, studying me the way you study a countdown timer. Waiting to see if I’d tick or explode.The Cradle wasn’t easy to reach. What was left of it lay under miles of slag and concrete, the remnants of some old pre-war city now buried under its own bones. The ground there was toxic, gray ash still clinging to ruins that hadn’t seen sunlight in years. My boots sank into it with every step, the air heavy with

The world didn’t end when the Crown Node woke up—but it felt like it should have.The air cracked open. I could feel the sky changing texture, like the code behind it was being rewritten line by line. The node pulsed, sending waves of raw data into the atmosphere—light that wasn’t light, sound that wasn’t sound. It was information, living and breathing, spreading like wildfire through invisible veins that stretched across the wasteland.Every tower for miles came alive. I could see their broken silhouettes flicker in response, like a corpse twitching at the echo of its own name.My body vibrated with the signal. I wasn’t standing anymore; I was anchored—like the ground itself had wired into me, using my veins as conduits. The shard’s light inside my chest throbbed with the same rhythm as the node, perfectly in sync.And the world began to listen.Above us, clouds split into a vortex of static, streams of digital rain falling upward. The air shimmered with floating fragments of code,

The shard wouldn’t stop pulsing.It started the night after Monarch burned — faint at first, just a weak flicker under my coat, like a dying ember clinging to life. Then it grew steady, rhythmic, deliberate. A heartbeat that didn’t belong to me. When I closed my eyes, it followed me into the dream — that same one, repeating like a broken reel. A tunnel made of glass veins. Light bleeding through the cracks. Whispers that weren’t words, not really, but streams of binary that felt… devotional. Like something out there was praying through me instead of to me.When I woke, my pulse wasn’t mine anymore. It matched the shard’s.Yui didn’t say anything at first. She just watched me. From across the camp, under the turbines, face half-lit by the dying fire. Rainwater clung to her lashes; the smell of static still hung in the air. She kept her hand near her weapon, though she didn’t think I noticed. But I did. I saw it in the tension of her shoulders, in the way she measured every breath aroun

The Void Chain Syndicate didn't build cities. They engineered leviathans. The fortress was called Monarch, and it moved across the wasteland like a god dragged through ash. Its frame stretched half a mile long, its wheels wide enough to crush. Monarch didn't settle. It fed on ruins, on data, on flesh. Inside its belly were labs older than most nations, prisons with no doors and secrets buried in silicon and blood. And somewhere within that mechanical beast lived a name. Ellen Troth, a neural scape architect. One of the few engineers who helped build the original Ghost Circuit. Back when it was still theory, still hope. He'd defected years ago, vanished beneath the radar. Some said he sold personality fragments on the black market. Others claimed he went mad, living in a dream he coded for himself. But I didn't care who he'd become. I needed what he still knew. Yui crouched beside me beneath a fractured overpass as Monarch groaned past us, slow and seismic. The rain was acidic he

We ran. Not for fear. For time. Through soot-choked alleyways and under the bones of highways that hadn't carried traffic since the last real government fell. Each step kicked up ash, fallout, and reminders. The kind that stuck in your throat like regret. Fang retribution would be swift. Surgical. Merciless. I didn't need the ghost circuit to whisper that. Yui didn't speak. She just moved. Dropped into an old tram station buried beneath the Ashlock District. A graveyard of rust and glass. Yui pried opened the interface of a shuttle grid and patched into a dead feed. Her fingers danced like she was born with code in her veins. A decommissioned cargo tram groaned to life, lights flickering like it was waking from a nightmare. It was loud. Sloppy. Lit up on every outdated satellite like a beacon for bounty dogs and zealots. But it was fast. Now, that was enough. We didn't talk until Blackrift was a smear behind us, reduced to shadows and sirens beneath the poisoned horizon.