All Chapters of The Healer’s Ascension: Chapter 181
- Chapter 190
241 chapters
Chapter 177 — The World That Remembers Too Much
The light was still inside him when he woke, searing, silent, endless. Jason gasped, clawing at the ground, waiting for the pain to stop. It didn’t.The world burned quietly around him, not in fire but in memory. Towers shimmered like glass caught in a storm. Trees were shadows painted on the air.Everything looked… familiar, but wrong, like two photographs pressed together and never aligned.He rose slowly. The sky was half-day, half-night. The sun bled into a moon that refused to vanish. He turned once, searching for her “Aria?”Nothing. Only his voice, echoed twice. Once in front of him, once behind. He turned again. The echo turned with him. It wasn’t his voice that followed, it was hers. Jason… don’t move.He froze. “Aria?” he whispered again. “Where are you?”No answer, just her voice bleeding through the light itself. Thin, like static threaded through a dream. He stumbled forward, every step crunching over the ground that seemed to shift textures, grass to glass to dust, back
Chapter 178 — The Line Between Them
The split runs through everything. Stone, sky, breath, even light chooses a side. On one half of the horizon, color blazes too bright; on the other, it drains away.Jason stands with one boot on living ground and one on its reflection, afraid that if he moves, the world will decide for him. Across the divide, Aria waits.She isn’t shining now. The light that once wrapped her has folded inward, like a candle remembering how to be flame. The air between them hums, thin and metallic, ready to cut. “Is this it?” Jason asks. “The end?”Aria’s answer is soft but carries. “The world keeps ending because you keep asking that.”A tremor runs through the air. When he exhales, it echoes twice, one sound from his throat, another from somewhere deeper, as if his other selves are still trapped beneath the skin.He takes a step forward.The line glows red and snaps him back. The shock burns through his ribs. She flinches as though she felt it too. “Stop,” she whispers. “Every time you reach for me,
Chapter 179 — The Sound That Shouldn’t Exist
There’s no light. No horizon. No gravity to tell him which way down is. Jason wakes as if surfacing from a black ocean. Breath tears its way into lungs that feel borrowed.The first thing he notices isn’t sight, it’s sound. A faint, rhythmic thud. Too slow to be his heartbeat. Too far away to belong to anything living.It comes again. thum, thum. He knows that pulse. He’s chased it across dying stars, through shattered reflections. Aria.He should be dead. He remembers the flash, the world folding, the moment every version of them blurred together. But death, apparently, still makes room for noise.“Aria,” he says, or thinks he does, there’s no mouth here, no air, yet the sound carries. It vanishes into the endless dark, swallowed without echo.The heartbeat answers once. thum. And he moves. There’s no walking here, no floor beneath him, but something in the void remembers the shape of motion.It yields when he wills it, trembling like ash disturbed by breath. Each step sends faint ri
Chapter 180 — The Threshold Between Names
White. It isn’t light. It’s everything, compressed, blinding, endless. A universe stripped down to a single note held too long.Jason can’t breathe, because there’s no air here. He can’t move, because there’s no distance to cross. He simply exists, suspended in brilliance that feels like being stared at by the beginning of time.Then, a whisper, soft and shuddering, threads through the silence. “Jason…”Her voice, trembling inside his skull. He flinches. “Aria?”No answer. Only the white hum, vibrating through his bones like the world’s heartbeat still echoing from before creation.He opens his mouth, if he still has one, and the sound comes out strange, cracked with distortion. “Where are you?”The light ripples, folding itself around him. Slowly, a shape begins to form: a figure, feminine, barely outlined against the glare, as though carved from the same radiance.She speaks, and her words tremble the fabric of the void. “Here.”He reaches for her, and for the first time, feels some
Chapter 181 — Echo in the Glass
The world after the light is a wound. Ash drifts where color used to be, falling upward instead of down. The ground has the texture of memory, solid one moment, translucent the next.Aria stands at its center, barefoot, her breath fogging the air that shouldn’t exist. Across from her, he waits. Jason’s face. Jason’s height.Even the little tilt of his head that meant he was trying not to smile. But the eyes, too clear, too still, make her skin crawl. For a long moment neither speaks. Then he says, in Jason’s voice perfectly steady, “You’re staring.”“I’m… making sure,” she answers. The words taste like metal.He steps closer. The motion is gentle, unthreatening, practiced. “Of what?”“That you’re real.”She forces herself not to retreat. “That he’s real inside you.”He chuckles. The sound rings like a cracked bell. “You’re looking for ghosts, Aria. He gave me everything. There’s nothing left for you to find.”The air trembles. She feels it in her bones, the echo of Jason’s pulse she o
Chapter 182 — “The Memory Between
There is no sound at first. Only a pulse. Not hers. Not his. Something older, slower, the heartbeat of the void itself. Aria opens her eyes and finds nothing to open them onto.Blackness stretches in every direction, yet it isn’t empty. It’s textured, alive with faint ripples that shimmer like veins beneath skin. Every ripple is a memory trying to breathe.She takes a step, and the darkness folds beneath her feet like silk. “Jason?”The name unravels across the void, absorbed rather than echoed. It’s as if the word itself has been stripped of meaning. Her chest tightens. That name once held the weight of whole worlds, and now it feels… blank.She kneels, touching the dark plane. Light flickers where her fingers brush, flashes of moments, their first fusion, the Source storm, the nights beneath shattered moons. But the faces are wrong.In one, Jason smiles too wide; in another, his eyes are empty mirrors. Every memory is slightly off, as though she’s walking through forgeries crafted b
Chapter 183 — “The World That Loved Too Perfectly
Aria wakes to warmth.A weightless warmth, gentle as breath on her skin. No pulse of the void, no static in her head, only sunlight pouring through gauze curtains that sway in a slow, salt-scented breeze.She blinks against it, confused by the softness. Her body remembers pain, fire, falling, yet now there is only a bed, linen white and clean, the faint hiss of a distant shore. Her first thought is Jason. Her second is peace.She sits up. The room greets her with impossible familiarity: their old apartment from before the war, every scratch in the wood restored, every photo perfectly framed.On the nightstand sits a cup of coffee still steaming, black the way she’d taught him to make it. The air hums faintly with the old jazz station they’d used to leave on overnight. Her pulse jumps. “Jason?”A voice calls from the kitchen, easy, alive, normal. “Morning. You finally slept.”She almost cries from the sound. He walks in wearing that careless grin that used to drive her mad, barefoot, m
Chapter 184 — “The Cage of Light”
He wakes to silence. Not the silence of peace, but the kind that presses against the bones, vast, crystalline, airless. Jason blinks, and the world around him sharpens into glass.Every direction stretches forever. A horizon made of mirrors. No sky. No ground. Only the echo of himself standing infinite in all directions. “Aria,” he breathes.The sound doesn’t carry. It folds in on itself, repeats, Aria… Aria… Aria… until it stops belonging to his voice. The reflections whisper her name back, slightly wrong, slightly delayed, like a thousand strangers pretending to remember her.He takes a step. The glass beneath him hums, alive, fragile, cold through his soles. He remembers her last words, If you’re in there, hear me. Then the world turning white. Then this. He looks down.In the reflection below his feet, the version of him looks up and smiles. The smile is wrong. He runs.Every step rings like struck crystal, ripples of light spreading outward. The mirrored world folds and unfolds
Chapter 185 — The Memory Doors
The mirror breathes. Jason stands before it, its surface trembling like water under moonlight. Light runs down its edges in thin veins of color, red for love, gold for loss, blue for everything that never had a name.His reflection watches him, expression unreadable, lips moving soundlessly. He’s still shaking from the last surge of energy.Every nerve burns; half his veins glow faintly, strands of molten glass threading through his skin. But the pulse in the mirror calls to him, steady, familiar, beating in perfect time with his own. Aria’s heartbeat.He takes a breath, then another. “If you’re really in there…”The surface ripples. “…then I’m coming.”He steps through. The first thing he feels is warmth, soft, human warmth. The light behind his eyelids turns from silver to gold.When he opens them, he’s standing under sunlight, real sunlight, for the first time in what feels like centuries.Wind moves through green fields. There’s the sound of laughter in the distance, the smell of
Chapter 186 — Shatterpoint
The cathedral screams. Not a sound, but a feeling, pressure splitting bone, tearing light apart. The mirrored walls buckle inward like glass breathing too fast, every reflection of Aria fracturing, merging, bleeding into one another.Jason’s boots skid across a floor that isn’t solid anymore, waves of molten reflection rising and collapsing beneath him. “ARIA!”His voice tears itself raw against the storm. She’s still on the throne, if it can even be called that now, a jagged crown of splintered glass rising behind her like wings.Light pours from the cracks running down her arms, her throat, her face. The sound of her name vibrates through her body, and for one dizzy second, her gaze flicks toward him.Her eyes aren’t just eyes anymore. They’re windows. And behind them, a thousand more Aria’s watching. “Stay back!” she screams, voice layered with echoes, one pleading, one commanding, one inhuman.Jason lunges forward anyway. Every step shatters something: time, gravity, memory. The a