Chapter: CHAPTER 144 — ALMOST THEREIt was massive. Easily as large as the queen ant had been. But this one was built for combat. Armored in layers of stone and organic plating. Six arms ending in claws that looked like they could shear through steel. A head that was more skull than flesh. And its eyes. Intelligent. Focused. Aware. This was the guardian. The protector of the three hearts. And it had been waiting for us. It clicked once. A sound like rocks grinding together. Then it charged. We split up. No discussion needed. Just instinct from too many battles. I went left. Casimir went right. The guardian had to choose. It chose me. Its claw came down like a falling boulder. I rolled under it. Came up slashing. My blade scraped against its armor. Barely scratched it. Too thick. Too protected. It spun. Faster than something that size should move. Another claw caught me in the ribs—the already-broken ones. I flew backward. Hit a heart chamber. Felt something inside me break. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't move. Th
Last Updated: 2026-01-25
Chapter: CHAPTER 143 — THE TOXIC DEEPChapter 9: The Toxic DeepI thought of Cent and Vivi as we stood on that poisoned beach.My little siblings. Seven and nine years old. Still innocent. Still believing the adults would keep them safe. They'd never seen an ocean. Never felt sand beneath their feet. Never watched waves roll toward shore.They should see this. Not like this—not toxic, not deadly. But an ocean. Real water stretching to the horizon. The way it was supposed to be.The way it used to be, before the Fall."Kae." Casimir's voice pulled me back. "We need to keep moving."I tore my gaze from the ocean. Looked at the hives in the distance. Rocky formations built into cliffs. Ancient-looking. Waiting."How far?" My voice was barely a whisper.He checked his flickering interface. "Ten kilometers. Maybe less."Ten kilometers. Might as well be ten thousand. Every part of me was dissolving. The toxic water had accelerated the poisoning. My skin was covered in chemical burns. My lungs felt like they were filled with aci
Last Updated: 2026-01-24
Chapter: CHAPTER 142 — THE DROWNING APPROACH"We find it. We destroy it."He stood. Somehow. I didn't know how he was still moving. Didn't know how I was still moving."Can you walk?" he asked.I tested my legs. They barely responded. But I could stand. Could move."I can walk."We started down the corridor. Deeper into the hive. The bioluminescence grew brighter. The heartbeat louder.The corridor opened into a chamber.And I understood why they called it the water-hive.The chamber was filled with liquid. Not toxic water—something else. Something clear and bioluminescent. Like liquid light. It filled the chamber to about waist height.And floating in it—suspended in that glowing fluid—were pods. Hundreds of them. Each one containing something. Growing. Developing."It's a nursery," Casimir said. "They're growing more mutants here."We waded into the fluid. It was warm. Almost comfortable. So different from the toxic water outside.But as we moved deeper, the pods around us began to pulse. To react to our presence.Something in
Last Updated: 2026-01-23
Chapter: CHAPTER 141 — THE KILLSWITCH PUPPETI felt my entire muscles were threatening to rip off my body as the pain was becoming unbearable ever since I gained consciousness again. Before me was Shen whose face was distorted, with her smile still being wide and predatory. "Tell me, Kae," she purred, tapping a long fingernail against the stand that held me hostage. "How did you tame it?" "Tame what?" I asked, pretending to know what she meant. "That mutant that you named....." she paused, before she snorted as though she was trying to hold her laugh. "Echo." The entire lab burst into laugh with Shen stating how weird and funny the name was. "Of all the cool names to give it, it was Echo you thought of." and another burst of laughter sounded. I wonder what was so form with the name Echo but there's a reason behind that name. After she was done laughing, she wiped the tears off her eyes with her coat. "Such kind of mutant wasn't programmed for domesticity, but you did make me curious. How were you able to switch
Last Updated: 2026-01-23
Chapter: CHAPTER 140 — ARCHITECT OF AGONYThe loop was a conveyor belt of tragedy. First, the cold shadow of the warehouse and the sneers of Sera’s bookies. Then, the frantic run through the ash. Finally, the sight of Tobi’s eyes going dull as the life left them, a sight that killed me as surely as the steam did. Over and over, I watched him die. I felt my own throat crushed as the toxins burned. Why only this? I thought, huddled in a memory of a dark alleyway while the bookies’ footsteps echoed. Why I'm I going through all these? These are memories I simply want to bury and forget that it ever existed. I then realized that this wasn't usual. My memories skipping each time made me understand that I was being trapped in my own memories. The fact that I am only shown the terrible painful memories had made me have enough. "I'm not running anymore," I whispered. I decided that I am going to break this script. In the next loop, before Tobi could even speak, I did something that felt like tearing my own soul out. I struck h
Last Updated: 2026-01-22
Chapter: CHAPTER 139 — THE LABYRINTH OF THE MINDThe interior of the behemoth wasn't only looking like a stomach; it felt more like it was a living, pulsing nightmare of biology. An error that wasn't even supposed to happen in the first place. As I was swallowed, the sensation of falling was replaced by the wet, rhythmic grinding of muscular walls. My already shattered body was dragged across slick, acidic surfaces that hissed against my skin. A touch of it sent burning sensation wash all over my body like it was burrowing hole into it. It felt like I was being washed inside fire. Suddenly, the internal walls convulsed and from the darkness, a single, whip-like appendage shot out. It looks like a translucent, sickly violet tentacle, that was veined with a pulsing neon light that suggested a nervous system far more complex than any animal's. I gathered every ounce of strength I had left, my fingers digging into the rubbery flesh of the tentacle. I'm trying to holdon with a death grip as quickly as possible to avoid getting cl
Last Updated: 2026-01-21
THE GHOUL RISING
To save his family, he had to stop being human.
Twenty-four-year-old Jid has spent his life in the dirt, breathing the rust of the Bulwark slums. As the sole guardian of his younger sister, Sommy, his world is measured in scraps of bread and the hours of backbreaking labor he sells to the powerful guilds. He doesn’t dream of glory; he dreams of a roof that doesn't leak and a meal that doesn't taste like ash.
But the world outside the walls is changing. The "Infected" are evolving, and the shadows are growing teeth.
When a high-stakes raid into the forbidden zones turns into a bloody execution, Jid is the one left behind. Betrayed and gutted by the monsters in the dark, he should have died in the mud. Instead, something ancient and hungry found him first.
Jid wakes up to a world he no longer recognizes. The pain is gone, replaced by a cold, mechanical pulse in his mind and a shimmering gold light in his eyes. A strange, haunting interface now dictates his every move, granting him powers that defy the laws of time and biology—powers that the ruling corporations would kill to own.
But the "System" isn't a gift. It’s a tether to an outer-world threat that views humanity as nothing more than ink on a page, ready to be erased.
Now, Jid must return to the city that abandoned him, hiding the monster he is becoming while using his new abilities to protect the only person he has left. He survived the death of his old life, but as the hunger grows and the "System" begins to rewrite his soul, Jid realizes the hardest part isn't surviving the dead—it’s surviving the thing he’s turning into. And whatever is coming for him.
Read
Chapter: Chapter 94: ResonanceI try to fight it, until I receive the shocker of my life. "In here, one's ability is way lower," the beast tells me. "Every ability here is reduced to half." Every lunge feels as though I am moving through waist-deep silt, my muscles firing with a sluggish, agonizing delay. When I attempt to summon the Sovereign’s Regalia to its full luminosity, the violet glow flickers like a dying candle, guttering against the absolute, hungry dark of the void. The beast, which is a towering patchwork of translucent limbs and shifting glass, moves with a sickening fluidity that mocks my stutters. Its voice isn't a sound, but a vibration that rattles my skull: “Here, the laws of the weave are refracted. You are but a fraction of your former self.” It lashes out with a limb that terminates in a cluster of diamond-hard needles, the impact slamming into my chest. The star-glass of my armor doesn't just crack; it groans, the force sending a shockwave through my sternum that tastes
Last Updated: 2026-03-25
Chapter: Chapter 93: RefractionThe horizon doesn't just end; it shatters into a billion facets of blinding, crystalline light. They arrived at the 50th after a very long journey and arrived a place that looks like it is made of glass. Every surface, from the towering spires that pierce the violet sky to the very ground beneath our boots, is composed of a hyper-polished, transparent substance that vibrates with a low-frequency hum. As I take a step, the surface beneath me doesn't crunch; it rings like a struck bell. I look down and see my own face staring back, distorted by the curvature of the ground, my eyes glowing with a predatory violet light that seems to dance across the infinite reflections. The architecture is a nightmare of symmetry. Every wall is a mirror, every doorway a prism, and the light from the twin moons is caught in a perpetual loop of refraction, turning the world into a kaleidoscope of silver and neon. Jid wonders how is he going to find the bottle with a place as strange as this.
Last Updated: 2026-03-25
Chapter: Chapter 92: Blind FightThe first blow arrives not as a sound or a shadow, but as a violent displacement of reality that snaps my head back with a sickening crunch. My jaw rings with a dull, throbbing heat, and the salt of broken skin floods my mouth. Beside me, Brixen is hoisted into the air by an anchor of nothingness, his ribcage groaning under the pressure of a fist that doesn't exist. He is slammed into a white marble headstone, the stone splintering into a thousand fragments that pepper his skin like grit. We are fighting a vacuum, a predatory absence that moves through the Grave of Echoes with a grace that defies our senses. Every time I lunge with the burning rod, my strike passes through empty air, only for a heavy, unseen weight to bury itself in my gut, forcing the air from my lungs in a ragged, wet gasp. Since both Jid and Brixen don't know how to fight it, they are exposed to a much higher threat. I swing wildly, the orange flame of my rod carving useless arcs into the violet mist,
Last Updated: 2026-03-18
Chapter: Chapter 91: The Gravity of AmbitionBone-white wings, each the span of a merchant ship, beat with a rhythmic thunder that threatens to flatten the very ruins of the 20th point. The Progenitor does not simply fly; it dominates the physics of the sky, creating pockets of vacuum that pull the breath right out of my lungs. I dig my heels into the pulverized limestone, my gauntlets sparking against the stone as I brace for the next atmospheric hammer-blow. Above, the beast is a blur of alabaster and silver light, its sensory pits locked onto my Sovereign’s Regalia with a predatory focus that feels like a physical weight. Every time I attempt to close the distance, it unleashes a sonic screech, a wall of condensed sound that ripples through the air, knocking my shadow-knights into heaps of dissipating mist. The fight stretches so long that none of Jid's soldiers could do anything to stop it. It’s just too powerful. My archers fire arrows of frozen moonlight, but the Progenitor simply tilts a wing, the gale of its m
Last Updated: 2026-03-18
Chapter: Chapter 90: The Zenith FractureA throat of obsidian and teeth snaps shut inches from my face, the stench of ancient, fermented bile hitting me with the force of a physical blow. I pivot on a heel slick with gray ichor, my palm slamming into the creature’s underbelly. The Sovereign’s Regalia pulses, a rhythmic hum of violet energy that vibrates through my arm and into the beast’s sternum. There is a wet, splintering sound that is like the collapse of a ribcage and the land-bound sky-tearer crumples into a heap of twitching, leathery limbs. Beside me, Brixen is a blur of desperate motion. He drives a short-blade through the sensory pit of a lunging predator, the creature’s high-pitched screech vibrating the very enamel of my teeth. We are standing in a waist-deep sea of twitching carcasses, the ground of the 20th point transformed into a landscape of gray meat and cooling ash, yet the victory feels like a drop of water in an ocean of fire. The ground-dwellers are broken, their mangled forms littering the pul
Last Updated: 2026-03-18
Chapter: Chapter 89: Descent into the MawThe dragonfly-skiff shudders, its iridescent wings snapping like parchment in a gale as a volley of harpoons with each tipped with a screeching, sentient parasite that tears through the formation of the sky above. We are ambushed on air, the atmosphere around us turning into a swirling vortex of debris and bioluminescent tracer fire. Brixen clings to the central harness, his face drained of color as the skiff corkscrews, the bone-structure of the craft groaning under the strain of the evasive maneuvers. I grab the tiller, my fingers sinking into the warm, vibrating surface as I bank the skiff hard to starboard, barely clearing the jagged with the uneven, blade-like spires of the cloud-citadel. We spiral downward, a trail of black smoke and splintered light marking our descent, and had to land in the 20th point to hide from them. The landing is a violent, earth-shaking crunch that pitches us into the loam of a hidden valley, the craft sliding until it slams into the base of a
Last Updated: 2026-03-15
