Chapter 41The door opened with a whisper of memory, and light poured into the crystal hall like a flood.Adrian stepped forward, heart pounding, as the sealed chamber unfolded around him not a place, but a moment, suspended in eternity.It was his old lab. Earth. Clean metal tables, humming monitors, walls plastered with schematics and data projections. He stood there, observing himself his past self working with obsessive intensity.Then the door burst open.Three men entered, their faces grim, weapons drawn. Adrian remembered none of this. But he felt it. The betrayal.“You shouldn’t have dug that deep, Adrian,” one of them said, raising a silenced pistol. “You tore something open. And now they want you silenced.”The shot rang out.And Adrian fell, bleeding onto the floor of his legacy.Outside the memory, Adrian collapsed to his knees. Seraphina caught him before he hit the ground.“No... no, this isn’t real,” he gasped. “I never”“It’s real,” Lyrixa said quietly. “You were kille

Chapter 43The silence that followed Seraphina's disappearance was more deafening than the chaos around them.Adrian stood frozen before the now-dormant dimensional nexus, his outstretched hand trembling, the fading echoes of her final look burned into his mind. He felt as though the universe had hollowed out a part of him and left nothing behind but numbness and ash. Around him, the world continued to fracture and reform in violent bursts of energy and shifting physics, but none of it seemed to matter anymore.Lyrixa placed a hand gently on his shoulder. "She knew what she was doing, Adrian.""Doesn’t make it right," he muttered, voice low. "Doesn’t make it acceptable."He pulled away and stormed through the ruins of what used to be a building fused with arcane machinery, gathering remnants of technology and spirit-infused materials. Travis watched from a distance, not daring to interrupt. Lyrixa, however, followed him.Adrian worked feverishly, assembling a jury-rigged dimensional p

Chapter 45The skies above the fractured realms dimmed, not with clouds, but with a creeping shadow that had no shape, no source only hunger. It was not like the Void’s sterile cold or the Light’s blinding dominance. This presence was… primal. Beyond duality. Beyond comprehension.Adrian stood beside Seraphina and Lyrixa on the edge of a cliff that hadn't existed yesterday a place where the mortal realm bled into fragments of the spirit world and arcane constructs from forgotten ages floated through broken skies. Behind them, the survivors mages, soldiers, dragons, machines, and mortals tried to build semblances of order amidst the chaos.But peace was an illusion. Because now, something far worse than the war loomed."The Ancient Hunger..." Seraphina's voice was hushed, yet it echoed louder than thunder.Adrian turned to her. Her hair was streaked with gray now, her eyes deeper, stranger. Her decades of isolation in the time-prison had changed her. Not just aged her but marked her. S

Chapter 47The moment Adrian’s dragon disappeared into the breach, sealing it with a roar that echoed across dimensions, the silence that followed felt like a physical wound. He fell to his knees, the air knocked from his lungs, as if part of his soul had been ripped away.The battlefield was still. Survivors from the spirit realm beasts, mystics, ancient spirits watched in solemn reverence, their eyes turned toward the now-stabilized rift in reality. Lyrixa reached for Adrian, but he was unresponsive. His eyes were wide open, staring into nothing. His breathing slowed. Something was happening.A glow emerged from his chest a flickering, pulsing light in the shape of a scaled wing. Then, a searing pain surged through Adrian’s spine. He screamed, clutching his chest as an ancient presence poured into him, not alien, but familiar. His war beast his partner was not gone.The dragon’s essence fused with his. Not a resurrection, but a transcendence.Visions flooded his mind: time running l

Chapter 49Adrian stood at the heart of unraveling creation, his soul ablaze with borrowed starlight and dragonfire. Around him, the remains of reality cracked and splintered like brittle glass, and every shatter peeled away a memory, a name, a face.Seraphina knelt beside him, blinking in slow confusion, her identity dissolving like ink in water. Lyrixa’s voice had grown flat, her usual fire gone, as she murmured fragments of sentences that led nowhere. They were slipping. Drowning. Becoming fragments of some cruelly clean slate.The Ancient Hunger loomed over it all silent, impassive, patient.But something stirred deep in Adrian’s core. Even as their names faded from their own lips, something held fast. A thread. Fragile, yes but real.He closed his eyes and felt it: Seraphina’s laughter in the memory of a star-garden, Lyrixa’s fury as she stood defiant against impossible odds, Travis’s bitter jokes masking deep loyalty.They weren’t just moments they were patterns. Woven into him.