All Chapters of The Healer’s Ascension: Chapter 171
- Chapter 180
241 chapters
Chapter 167 — The Voice in the Glass
For a heartbeat, Jason thought the light had gone silent again. Then he realized it was breathing.The air itself was pulsing with rhythm, faint, steady, deliberate. Every flicker of light seemed to exhale with his heartbeat. And every time he drew breath, something in the reflection breathed with him.Then it started whispering. At first it was soft, like echo. A shimmer under his voice. But then the words became clear, identical tone, identical cadence. “You’re too late.”Jason froze.His reflection stared back from the shattered silver sea, no longer mimicking his movements, but standing just slightly off-beat, as though it existed half a second ahead of him.He swallowed hard. “No.”The reflection tilted its head, smiling faintly. “You broke the labyrinth, Jason. You broke her, too. Why shouldn’t you break yourself?”Jason’s pulse slammed through him. He stepped closer to the glass. “You’re not me.”“Then why do I remember everything you do?” the reflection murmured. “Why do I fee
Chapter 168 — The Shape of Unmaking
For a long moment, Jason couldn’t move. The world around him wasn’t fire, it was reflection pretending to burn. Flame that gave no heat, smoke that looped itself like thought.Everywhere he looked, mirrors hung in midair, fragments of himself, of Aria, of the battles they’d survived. Each fragment replayed a moment, flickering on a loop: his hand reaching for hers, her eyes closing, light swallowing them.Now the loops were rewriting. Each cycle changed, tiny shifts. Her expression softening. His hand missing hers by an inch. The wound on her shoulder healing wrong.Every repetition bent the memory further from truth, until even the echoes no longer obeyed what he remembered.Jason tried to move, but invisible weight crushed him to his knees. The glass beneath him flexed like liquid, cold seeping into his bones.And above him, two silhouettes hovered in the churning light: his mirror self, haloed in emberfire,and the fused Aria, half silver, half human, every breath pulsing through t
Chapter 169 — Fractured Lives
He woke to the sound of a heartbeat. Not one, a thousand. Each thud came from a different direction, a different tempo. Every beat was his.Jason opened his eyes and saw five skies layered atop each other like torn veils. In one, dawn bled gold. In another, the sun had already burned out.Between them drifted silhouettes, his own, walking through worlds that didn’t belong together. He tried to move and split. The motion fractured him into a dozen selves, each stepping into its own timeline.He blinked and stood inside a sun-washed city. The smell of herbs, the hum of street vendors, children laughing under banners of peace. His hands were steady, gloved, clean.A nurse brushed past him. “Doctor Miller, the stabilization wards are holding!”He froze. Doctor Miller. On a cot near the window, Aria slept peacefully, human, whole. Her hair glowed in the soft light, no trace of mirrored silver.He felt warmth bloom in his chest, a life where she had never been broken, never divided. Where h
Chapter 170 — The World That Wouldn’t Die
Jason woke gasping into a city that didn’t know what moment it was. Light bent wrong. Buildings shimmered between ruin and rebirth, some still smoking from fires that hadn’t started yet, others already rebuilt by hands that no longer existed.Every breath tasted of ash and memory. He pushed himself up. The ground was mirror-glass and cobblestone in the same heartbeat.When he blinked, the street rewound, cars sliding backward, people laughing in reverse, then lurched forward again, a broken film strip of reality trying to replay itself.Fragments of voices bled through the air.“Doctor Miller, she’s stable”“Commander, hold the line!”“Jason, you’re late for class”Each line came from a different life, looping over the others. His mind reeled. All of them survived the collapse. All of them are bleeding into one.He staggered to a window, his reflection flickered through twelve versions of himself, one healer, one soldier, one stranger. “Not again,” he whispered. “I ended this. I chose
Chapter 171 — The Body That Was Two
He woke without breath because the lungs weren’t his alone. Each inhale caught on another rhythm. Each blink arrived a fraction too soon, as if two people were trying to use the same set of nerves.The world came back in pulses of light, first red, then gold, then the faint shimmer of glass under his skin. He sat up. The movement felt rehearsed and wrong, every muscle arguing about direction.Jason, said the voice in his skull. Stop moving. You’re tearing the seam. He froze. “Aria?”Yes, and no. Don’t talk. We share the same throat now. He touched his face. Smooth, unfamiliar. When he looked down, the hands staring back were both of theirs: long-fingered, callused, a faint tracer of light running beneath the veins like circuitry and blood. A body half-made of ember and reflection.The ground beneath him was liquid stone, mirroring a sky that had no horizon. Cities bloomed and collapsed in silence at the edge of sight, rippling like dreams trying to remember themselves.This was not a
Chapter 172 — The Girl Who Stepped Out of His Heart
At first, he thought the echo was an illusion, one more trick of the broken glass world. But then the horizon breathed.A ripple passed through the mirrored plain, light bending toward a single shape forming in the distance. Jason’s pulse stuttered; his own heartbeat matched the rhythm of that light.With each throb, the air thickened, heavy with the sound of something being born. He forced himself to stand.The ground trembled underfoot, reflections warping around his boots. His body still felt fractured, every movement trailed an afterimage, as if pieces of him lagged a heartbeat behind. He clenched his fists. “Aria?”The word barely made it out. The world heard it anyway. The shimmer on the horizon pulsed brighter, unfurling into a storm of color. A silhouette stepped out, slowly, as if pushing through layers of time.For a second, it looked like her. For the next, like something else wearing her shape. Jason’s breath caught. “No…”Aria emerged barefoot from the glass sea, each ste
Chapter 173 — The One Who Shouldn’t Exist
The silence hit first. No sound. No wind. Just a pulse that wasn’t quite heartbeat, wasn’t quite thunder, slow, deliberate, echoing through the air like the ticking of a dying clock.Jason froze where he stood, staring across the fractured sky. And there, stepping out of the burning horizon, was him.Same eyes. Same stance. Same quiet rage under the skin. But colder. Perfect, almost mechanical, like someone had rebuilt him from memory and stripped out everything that made him human.Aria stood between them, barefoot in the glass dust. The light that lived under her skin pulsed unevenly, half gold, half shadow, flashing faster the closer the two Jasons came to her.Jason’s throat felt dry. “That… thing”The double tilted its head. “is what you were meant to be,” it finished, speaking in his voice. Every syllable vibrated like it came from somewhere behind his ears. “The version that didn’t hesitate.”The world rippled at his words. Reflected cities flickered into existence and died aga
Chapter 174 — The Mirror’s Bride
The air between them shimmered like heat over broken glass. Jason didn’t move. Couldn’t. Every breath felt like it might tip the fragile stillness into shattering.Two Arias stood before him, identical, impossible. One glowed with that golden warmth he knew too well, light tracing every line of her face like sunrise caught in skin.The other was carved from mirror and smoke, her edges soft but shifting, her eyes perfect wells of reflected light. And when they both spoke, it was his name, overlapping, wrong.“Jason.”It was unbearable. Same tone, same inflection, the only difference was temperature. The golden one’s voice pulled at his chest.The mirrored one pressed against his mind, cold and invasive, like thought being rewritten. He whispered, “No. No, this isn’t possible”The golden Aria stepped forward, trembling. “Jason, it’s me. Please. Don’t look at her.”The mirror Aria smiled. “He already did.”The world trembled. Jason’s instincts screamed to run, but his feet felt buried in
Chapter 175 — The Heart of the Gate
There was no impact. No sensation of falling, only stretching, like every cell in Jason’s body was being pulled into a thread and woven through fire.He gasped, but his lungs filled with light instead of air. Each breath carried a sound: fragments of Aria’s voice whispering his name in a dozen tones, overlapping until meaning dissolved.Don’t fight the thread… let it choose you.He stumbled forward. The ground was translucent, veins of color pulsing beneath his feet. Above, an ocean of mirrored stars swirled slowly, each reflection showing a different scene: Aria laughing on a rooftop, Aria dissolving into ash, Aria standing over his own corpse.He reached toward one, the rooftop version, and the star flared, burning his fingertips. The vision screamed, “Not this one!” and vanished.Every light recoiled. Jason realized the stars weren’t memories; they were possibilities. And the gate wanted him to choose.He took another breath and nearly collapsed. The air here was too heavy, full of
Chapter 176 — Reflections That Breathe
Jason woke to the sound of his own heartbeat, but it was wrong. It echoed too loudly, too deep, as if it came from somewhere beneath him instead of within.He opened his eyes, blinking against the glare of a sky that looked… mirrored. Clouds drifted beneath him, not above, their reflections shimmering across the ground. The air was clean, too clean, like it had never touched anything alive.He pushed himself upright, palms sinking into what felt like glass covered in thin soil. His reflection stared back from beneath the surface. For a moment, he thought it was just light playing tricks.Then the reflection blinked a second too late. Jason froze. “...No,” he whispered. “Not again.”He leaned closer, studying the mirrored ground. The other Jason did the same, every movement a perfect echo, until it wasn’t. When Jason drew in a slow breath, the reflection smiled. You look awful.Jason’s throat tightened. “You’re”You.The reflection’s voice came from inside his head, smooth, confident, c