All Chapters of From Janitor To God: The System Chose Me: Chapter 201
- Chapter 210
224 chapters
THE EDGE OF THE NETWORK
The room had gone too quiet.Ethan felt it first—that familiar pressure behind his ears,a tightening inside his chest—as though the very air itself was bracing, waiting for something none of them could see yet.Maya noticed it too.She stepped closer to him, her voice low, tense.“Something’s slicing through our perimeter firewalls.”Three lines. Three breaths. Three seconds of silence.Ethan’s jaw clenched.“Specter?”“No.” Maya shook her head slowly. “This signature feels older… colder.”Ethan didn’t like the sound of that.Before he could respond, the wall-mounted holo-screens blinked—once, twice—and then the entire command centre dimmed into a ghostly blue.A presence seeped into the room.It wasn’t mechanical.It wasn’t digital.It felt… conscious.Like someone else had just stepped into the building without using the door.Tyler swore under his breath.“Boss, that’s Host-level intrusion. We’ve never had one break this far in.”Ethan didn’t move.Didn’t speak.Because he recog
THE CORRECTION PROTOCOL
The words refused to leave Ethan’s head.You were never meant to exist.They echoed like a broken bell—again, again, again—each repetition heavier than the last, each one twisting deeper into his chest.Maya stepped in front of him, her breathing unsteady, but her voice firm.“Ethan. Look at me.”He didn’t.He couldn’t.His mother…The purge…Host 001…Everything had folded in on itself too fast, like the world was collapsing from the inside out.Maya grabbed his shoulders, shaking him slightly.“Ethan!”His eyes finally flicked toward her.Just barely.But enough for Maya to exhale in relief.“Talk to me. What’s happening to you?”His voice cracked.“He said my mother broke the system. Maya… he said I wasn’t supposed to be born. He said the purge is coming back to—”He stopped.His throat tightened.Maya’s expression hardened.“Ethan, look at me properly.”He did.And she held his face with both hands, steady and sure.“You exist. You’re here. You’re real. Whatever the system think
WHEN THE DOOR BROKE
The first crack was small.Barely a hairline fracture spreading across the reinforced blast door—thin enough to miss if they weren’t all staring at it in terror.But Ethan wasn’t staring in terror.He was staring in calculation.Every tremor in the metal.Every micro-vibration shivering through the floor.Every system warning screaming across the walls.Maya saw that look on his face—a look she had only seen twice:When he first activated the Paragon system.And the night he turned Specter inside out.Her grip tightened around her gun, knuckles pale.“Ethan.”Her voice was steady, but her breath wasn’t.“Tell me you have a plan.”Another crack ripped across the blast door.Deeper this time.Tyler backed up until he hit the wall, rifle shaking violently in his arms.“Boss… I don’t think this door is gonna last two minutes—”A third crack.Longer.Louder.Like a bone snapping.Ethan didn’t look away from it.“It’s not the door they’re breaking.”Maya frowned.“What do you mean?”Ethan
WHEN CORRECTION FAILED
The room became a battlefield the moment Ethan crushed the cube.He didn’t even hear the sound of it pulverizing—everything was drowned beneath the explosion of white-hot system static that burst outward like a shockwave.The first line of constructs convulsed violently, their mirrored faces rippling like disturbed water. Their arms spasmed. Their joints cracked and twisted. The glowing veins across their bodies flickered as if their internal code was being rewritten in real time.But they didn’t fall.They didn’t stop.They adapted.Ethan saw it happening in less than a second:The Ghost Network had evolved.The constructs absorbed the distortion he released—and grew stronger from it.Maya cursed under her breath.“Ethan—whatever you just did—do it again but HARDER!”“That WON’T HELP!” Ethan shouted back.He could feel it—deep inside the system embedded in his spine.They weren’t correcting him anymore.They were consuming him.Tyler fired wildly into the swarm.Bullets bent in mida
THE SILENCE BEFORE THE BLOODSTORM
The corridors of the underground base felt wrong.Not dangerous.Not haunted.Just… wrong.Like the walls themselves were holding their breath.Ethan walked ahead of Maya and David in complete silence, each of his steps echoing through the dim metallic passageway. The lights above flickered in slow irregular patterns, as if struggling to stabilize around him.Or struggling because of him.Maya kept glancing at his back—her heartbeat loud enough to drown out the hum of the generators.Something was different.Something inside him.Something that hadn’t been there before.“Ethan…” she finally whispered, fearing her own voice. “Stop for a second.”He didn’t.He just kept walking, pace steady, jaw clenched, shoulders stiff as if carrying invisible weight. His energy signature pulsed subtly through the air—sharp, unstable, like a storm gathering inside his veins.“Ethan, please,” she repeated, louder this time.He stopped.But he didn’t turn around.David froze behind Maya, gripping his we
THE BLACK CORRIDOR WAR
The dust hadn’t even settled when Host 004 lunged.One moment the hulking exo-armor stood in the shattered doorway; the next, it blurred forward—a streak of black metal and red light, moving with terrifying precision.David screamed from the hallway:“CONTACT! CONTACT—HE’S BREACHING SECTOR THREE!”Alarms across the base wailed, bathing the corridors in harsh red light.Maya barely had time to pull Ethan back before Host 004’s fist crashed into the wall where Ethan’s head had been seconds earlier—shattering reinforced steel like cheap plaster.Sparks rained across the corridor.The sound shook the entire foundation.Ethan slid backward, boots scraping against the metal floor.“004… you shouldn’t be here.”The machine-filtered voice boomed:“ELIMINATION ORDER CONFIRMED. PRIORITY TARGET: ZERO.”Maya raised her weapon, but Ethan grabbed her arm.“No guns. They won’t scratch him.”Host 004 turned its glowing visor toward her.“SECONDARY TARGET IDENTIFIED: MAYA GRANT.”Maya’s pulse spiked.
THE BLACK VEIN ASCENSION
The corridor looked like a throat carved into the underbelly of some titanic beast—dark, trembling, smoking at the seams where Host 004’s attack had nearly collapsed the foundation.But now—Now even the walls seemed afraid.Because Ethan wasn’t standing like Ethan anymore.He stood hunched forward, his breath ragged, his fingers twitching like claws trying to remember their shape. The shadow behind him swelled—slow, deliberate, like something ancient crawling up through his spine.Host 004 steadied its stance.“CORRUPTION LEVEL: 37%,” it calculated.“WARNING: HOST ZERO IS EVOLVING BEYOND PREDICTED PARAMETERS.”Ethan lifted his head.His eyes were wrong.Too dark.Too deep.Too alive.“Come on…” he whispered, voice layered with a second tone beneath it—cold, serrated, something that scraped at the walls.“Let’s finish this.”004 activated its full combat mode.The sound was deafening—Chambers cycling.Thrusters igniting.Blades rotating with a high, metallic shriek.Maya shouted from
WHEN HUNTERS MEET
The corridor vibrated with a low, shuddering hum—like the entire underground wing was breathing. Dust drifted down from the cracked ceiling. Emergency lights flickered in wild, dying spasms, bathing the hall in flashes of red and shadow, red and shadow, red and shadow.Ethan didn’t blink.He didn’t move.He simply stared at Specter as the corrupted Host approached, step by slow step, dragging dark static along the floor like smoke. The smell hit next—sharp, metallic, like burnt circuitry mixed with blood.Specter stopped ten meters away.The shattered half-mask revealed a long split down his cheek, skin corrupted into a pulsing, glitching distortion. His right eye—the human one—was gone. In its place was a glowing, spiraling void that twisted with chaotic system data.Ethan’s pulse stayed steady.His breathing stayed measured.But the Paragon sigil on his palm began to burn—not painfully, but with a rising intensity, like a heartbeat preparing for war.Specter tilted his head toward E
DESCENT INTO THE BLACK LEVEL
The elevator shaft yawned open like the throat of a colossal beast—dark, bottomless, pulsing with faint echoes of old machinery buried deeper than any blueprint admitted existed.Cold air rose from the pit in slow, ghostlike breaths.Not air—something else.Something older.Something watching.Maya stood at the edge with her rifle drawn, red emergency lights flickering across her face. Dust still clung to her hair from the earlier collapse, but her eyes were laser-focused.“Sir… this is suicide.”Ethan didn’t respond immediately.He was staring down the shaft, his fingers tight around the broken railing, his chest still rising sharply from the fight with Specter. The walls of the elevator shaft vibrated faintly, as though machines far, far below were waking up.Maya took a step closer.“You saw the warnings. Black Level isn’t on the system map because the system refused to map it. Even the Architects sealed it.”“I know.”“Then why—”“Because that’s where Specter went.”Maya clenched
THE THRESHOLD OF THE BLACK LEVEL
The screaming didn’t fade.It deepened.Layered.Multiplied.As if the darkness beneath them had been holding its breath for centuries—and had just decided to exhale every nightmare it had swallowed whole.Maya tightened her grip on her rifle. Her hands were shaking and she hated it, but the tremor wouldn’t stop.Ethan didn’t turn around.He didn’t need to.“Stay behind me,” he said.His voice was calm.Too calm.The ground shuddered again, a pulse that rippled up the walls like the Black Level was a living organism stretching awake after a long hibernation.Maya exhaled sharply. “Sir, whatever is down there… if the first one was incomplete, then—”“The complete ones will be worse,” Ethan finished.Maya stiffened. “…you expected this?”“No.”He stepped toward the gaping corridor the broken Architect had crawled from.“I feared it.”⸻THE DESCENT CONTINUESThe hallway beyond was a long, industrial tunnel, sloping downward at an unnerving angle—steeper than any legal facility would allo