All Chapters of System Rebirth: The Rise of Jace Ronan : Chapter 11
- Chapter 13
13 chapters
Chapter 11: Crown Node Reborn
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,
Chapter 12: The Cradle Core
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
Chapter 13: The Ghosts of Flesh
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