All Chapters of The Inheritance Protocol : Chapter 161
- Chapter 170
188 chapters
Chapter 150. We Remember
The city woke to silence. No hum of power lines. No blinking lights. No sound of engines rising through the towers. Crest City, the machine that never slept, had gone completely dark. Rhea opened her eyes to the dim red glow of emergency lights. The clock beside her bed was dead. Her tablet, blank. For a second she thought it was a dream, until she heard the sirens echoing far below, weak and fading.She grabbed her coat and ran. When she reached the control deck, half the staff were already there, their faces lit by the faint glow of backup generators. The massive screens that usually filled the room with color were now black, every system frozen. “Report!” Rhea shouted.One of the technicians stammered, “It’s not just us. It’s the entire grid, every sector, every tower. The city’s offline.”Rhea’s breath caught. “That’s impossible.”Another tech said quietly, “It happened all at once. No overload, no warning.”Rhea turned toward the central console. “Where’s Kai?”“Not here yet,”
Chapter 151. The Trace of Shadows
The storm had passed, but Crest still looked broken. Half the skyline was dark. Windows blinked like wounded eyes. A faint smoke rose from the financial district, curling above the towers. Kai stood at the edge of the operations floor, watching engineers patch cables and replace shattered screens. The air smelled of burnt circuits and fear. Rhea approached quietly, holding a tablet linked to a backup generator. “The grid is running again. But not stable.”Kai didn’t turn. “How many servers did we lose?”“Forty percent,” she said. “And the ones still running show ghost data, loops that shouldn’t exist.”He finally looked at her. “Ghost data?”“Fragments of the message. ‘We Remember.’ It keeps rewriting itself inside the archives.”Kai took the tablet, scrolling through columns of code. The characters flickered as if alive. Each time he touched the screen, the words rearranged themselves.He exhaled slowly. “Eren did this.”Rhea crossed her arms. “Eren’s gone, Kai. Whatever he was, he
Chapter 152 Someone Inside Your Walls
Flames crawled across the Tenebris chamber walls. Smoke turned the air thick and red. The consoles were nothing but sparking glass and twisted metal.Kai coughed hard, dragging Rhea through the wreckage. “Move! Get out!”Liora followed close behind, shielding her face from the heat. The roof cracked above them. They burst through the corridor doors just before the ceiling gave way.The elevator shaft was dead, the control panel melted. Rhea hit the side of it in frustration. “No power!”Kai ripped open an access hatch. “Then we climb.”They climbed down the metal ladder, one at a time, thirty floors of silence except for their breathing. Halfway down, the tower shuddered, an explosion above, sending dust down like rain. Liora’s voice echoed faintly. “He knew we’d come. My father set this up.”Kai’s reply was calm but sharp. “He wanted us to find that file.”Rhea looked down at him. “Why? It named you as the source.”“I know,” he said. “That’s why he wanted it seen.”They reached the
Chapter 153. Consolidation
Morning light cut across Crest Tower like a blade. The city below was quiet again, but it wasn’t peace, it was fear pretending to sleep.The Board of Directors gathered inside the council chamber, twelve figures seated in a circle of glass and steel. Their reflections shimmered on the polished floor, distorted by the light.Kai Vale stood at the center, coat folded neatly across his chair, face unreadable. On the wall behind him.A projection showed the damage reports: two districts dark, three hundred dead, millions in lost credits.The Chairman of Finance, an older man named Devrin Hale, spoke first. “Crest’s AI Division is a liability now,” he said. “The public wants blood. The investors want distance.”Kai said nothing. Another director leaned forward. “The Tenebris disaster was the final straw. We can’t keep this division operational. It’s killing the company.”Kai’s voice was calm but cold. “You mean it’s killing your profits.”Devrin scowled. “Don’t turn this into pride, Kai. T
Chapter 154. The Mirror Pulse
Night had fallen again over Crest Tower. The city below shimmered like a machine trying to remember how to breathe.Rhea stood alone in the lower lab, the only light coming from the containment capsule. The capsule had once held the Whisper Grid’s core.Now it was a hollow cylinder of glass and steel, pulsing softly with a faint red glow.That pulse was new.She stared at it for a long time, arms folded, coffee gone cold beside her. The rhythm wasn’t random, it was too precise, too alive.She felt it deep in her chest, like a slow heartbeat that didn’t belong to her. Rhea whispered, “What are you?”The capsule didn’t answer, but the light brightened once, almost like it had heard. She reached for the monitor linked to it, running a scan.Lines of code scrolled down the screen, irregular, broken patterns, and then, suddenly, perfect order. Pulse Detected, Synced to Neural Pattern. Neural ID Match, Kai Vale. Her fingers froze above the keyboard. “No.”She reran the test. Same result. Rh
Chapter 155. Echoes in the Dream
Sleep did not come easily anymore. Every night, Kai Vale closed his eyes and felt the pulse, soft, steady, endless. The same rhythm that once belonged to the Whisper Grid now lived inside him, a quiet echo beneath his heartbeat.He told himself it was stress. That the sound was only in his head. But when he finally fell asleep, the sound grew louder. It became a world of its own.The dream began like a memory. He stood in the middle of an endless white room. No walls, no floor, only light.The air hummed softly, and a voice spoke from everywhere at once. “Welcome back, Kai.”He froze. He knew that voice. “Varn.”The light shifted. A figure appeared, a man of shadow and light, face flickering like a broken reflection. His smile was thin and sharp. “You remember me,” the voice said. “Good. Memory is the first step to understanding.”Kai’s fists clenched. “You’re dead.”Varn laughed. “So are half the people in your city. And yet, here you are, talking to one of them.”“This is a dream,
Chapter 156. The Iron Pact
The conference hall was bright and cold. Sunlight cut through high windows and threw long bars of light across the polished floor. Flags hung from the walls. Cameras lined the upper balcony like silent birds. The whole city watched.Kai Vale and Liora Tenebris walked into the room together. They did not hold hands. They did not smile for each other. But when they moved, the room moved with them. People leaned forward. Reporters adjusted microphones. Security checked watches.Rhea stood at the back, arms folded. Her face was set like stone. She had agreed to be present, to protect the meeting’s technical side. Inside, she carried a list of contingencies and warnings. She also had a worry that sat heavy in her chest. She watched Kai and Liora as if she watched a storm approach.The mayor opened the ceremony with a short speech. He spoke of stability and progress. He spoke of healing after the blackout. He spoke of a future where industry and safety walked together.Then Kai stepped
Chapter 157. The Iron Union
Morning arrived like a warning. The sunlight that poured over Crest Tower was sharp and cold, too clean to feel safe.By dawn, every screen in the city carried one phrase in bold letters: “THE IRON UNION.”It was everywhere, billboards, news feeds, handhelds, holo displays. What the board had called a strategic partnership had already become something else in the public mind.An alliance of powerhouses. Some called it the beginning of a golden age. Others whispered it was a declaration of war.Kai Vale sat in his office, watching the reports unfold on multiple screens. Crest’s headquarters buzzed with activity, reporters at the gates, investors calling nonstop, security drones circling the tower’s perimeter. But Kai sat perfectly still, hands folded, eyes fixed on the news feed. “The Iron Union,” he murmured. “That’s what they’re calling it.”Rhea stood near the window, pale from exhaustion. “It sounds more like a military treaty than a business deal.”Kai didn’t look at her. “Maybe
Chapter 158. Whispers in the Core
The storm came in before dawn. It rolled over the city like a warning, low thunder, quick rain, the kind that clung to glass and made everything feel alive.Inside Crest Tower, Rhea stood alone in the data chamber, eyes locked on a line of code she had been reading for hours. Something was wrong.The energy grid logs were clean, the Tenebris firewall stable, but buried under layers of authorized transfers, she found hidden permission trails, data requests routed deep into the Whisper Core.Her stomach tightened. The Whisper Core wasn’t just an archive. It was the foundation of Crest’s mind, the sealed system that held the remains of the old AI, the one that should have been purged after Varn’s fall. No one was supposed to access it, and yet, someone was. The permissions came from Tenebris.She ran another trace. The screen filled with strings of commands, each one time-stamped perfectly, too perfect. The kind of precision only an AI could achieve. Rhea whispered, “No human wrote thi
Chapter 159. Veins of Deception
The rain did not stop that morning. It fell in thin silver lines across the glass walls of Crest Tower, washing the city in a dull gray light.Inside, every surface hummed. Servers, elevators, air vents, everything seemed to whisper at once, like the tower itself was listening.Kai Vale sat in the conference room, waiting. He looked calm, but his fingers tapped a steady rhythm against the table. Rhea stood near the door, arms folded, eyes fixed on the entrance. “She’s late,” Rhea said.“She knows I’ll wait,” Kai replied.“You shouldn’t. Not after what she’s done.”Kai looked at her. “We don’t know that yet.”“We know enough,” Rhea said. “The access trail, the hidden permissions, the signal that matches her encryption, how much proof do you need?”Kai’s voice was low. “Proof, not guesses.”The door slid open before Rhea could answer. Liora Tenebris walked in. She was dressed in white today, simple, almost austere, and her expression was unreadable.“Still raining,” she said lightly. “