Consciousness returned to Emma in a sickening, disorienting wave. One moment, there was nothing but the cloying sweetness of the handkerchief and a plummeting darkness. The next, she was lying on a surface that was both firm and yielding, her head throbbing with a dull, chemical ache.She blinked, her eyelids heavy. The light was wrong. It wasn't the warm glow of her bedroom lamp or the sterile fluorescence of her office. It was a cool, indirect blue-white, emanating from hidden strips along the edges of a ceiling that seemed too high and too smooth.She pushed herself up slowly, her palms sinking into a cream-colored upholstery. She was on a modern chaise lounge in the center of a room that felt... alien. The walls were a seamless, pale gray composite. There were no windows, no doors she could see, only sleek panels and subtle ventilation grilles. The air was still, temperature-controlled, and utterly scentless. It felt less like a room and more like a holding cell in some sterile,

Elizabeth’s phone slipped from her nerveless fingers, thudding softly onto the carpet. She didn’t hear it. All she heard was the roaring silence of a timeline that ended at seven o’clock.She was leaving.Four hours ago.The chill from the balcony was nothing compared to the glacial fear freezing her from the inside out. Every terrible possibility—the kind she’d spent years as a corporate wife learning to suppress—flooded her mind. An accident on the winding coastal road. A mugging in the city garage. Or worse, something deliberate, something linked to the crown, to the viper’s nest Emma had just been thrust into.Her gaze swept the room, landing on the family portrait from a decade ago—Richard’s arm around her, a young, smiling Emma between them. A perfect, painful lie. She was alone. Utterly alone with this terror.And then, unbidden, the most complicated, infuriating face of all surfaced in her mind: Ethan.She recoiled from the thought. Emma’s fury at him had been absolute, scorch

As Ethan drove to the Grand Physician’s the following morning, his hands tight on the wheel, his mind was a million miles away—or rather, decades.He wasn't navigating by GPS, but by muscle memory of a journey taken in a different life. The towering pines blurred into a green-grey wall, and with them, the present dissolved.“The focus is not to feel nothing, Ethan. That is the crude aim of a brute. The aim is to feel everything… and choose which sensation becomes action. The rest, you relegate to a silent room and lock the door.”The Grand Physician’s voice, dry as ancient parchment, echoed in his mind. He could see the austere training hall, the smell of sandalwood and cold stone. He’d been young, arrogant, flush with the early successes of the skills he’d already learned. The ‘Quieting’ had been presented as the final masterwork, the capstone. Not a new weapon, but the forging of an impregnable armory for the mind itself.And he’d walked away just before he could even get to underst

Ethan lowered himself onto the woven mat, the coarse fibers a tactile anchor in the surreal chamber. He crossed his legs, rested his hands on his knees, and closed his eyes. The weight of the stone room, the scent of earth, the profound silence—it all pressed in, not as an assault, but as an invitation to dissolve.This was the same thing he had run away from back then that he was now finding himself performing again.But what choice had he got? He needed to complete this before he could think of facing Nathan for the sake of Emma and his unborn baby.“Breathe into the stillness,” the Grand Physician’s voice murmured, not from across the room, but seemingly from within the stillness itself. “The Quieting is not an erasure. It is a re-ordering. You will see the tapestry of your life. The threads of joy, of pain, of choice and consequence. Do not cling to them. Observe them as patterns in the weave. You will have visions. Keep an open mind. The mind that judges is the mind that suffers

The drive back to the city was a tunnel of grim silence. The sleek car handled the curves of the mountain road with effortless precision, but Ethan felt disconnected from the machine, from the scenery blurring past, from everything except the seared-afterimage burned onto the back of his eyelids: two names on white stone under a dead sky.The Quieting held. The raw, screaming panic he’d felt in the vision was contained, analyzed, and filed away in the new, orderly structure of his mind. But it had been replaced by something colder, heavier, and more absolute: a dread that had crystallized into purpose. It was no longer a fear of losing them; it was the mathematical certainty of what would happen if he failed. The equation was simple, its solution non-negotiable.He arrived at the Wirtkov penthouse as night fully claimed the city. The elevator ride to the top floor was a silent ascent in a glass tube, the glittering skyline below looking fragile, a painted backdrop over an abyss.The