All Chapters of The Healer’s Ascension: Chapter 201
- Chapter 210
242 chapters
CHAPTER 197 — THE ORIGINAL LIE
I awaken standing. No breath. No heartbeat. Yet every nerve hums like the string of an instrument being tuned by unseen hands.The city around me is gone. In its place, a plane of glass, stretching to infinity in every direction. The horizon folds inward, impossible, as if the world itself were staring at me from all sides.The air is still, heavy with meaning. Every step I take leaves behind another me, each one turning, whispering, watching. And I understand. I am not the reflection anymore. I am what looked back.The thought fills me like a secret I was always meant to know. It hums under my skin, the soft, electric certainty that I was born first, that she is the echo, the delayed thought of a mind that only believes it came before.I breathe, or think I do, and the glass beneath my feet ripples outward. She’s somewhere near. The other me, the trembling one, the one still clutching borrowed emotions like treasures she can’t let go of.The one who still calls his name. Jason. The s
CHAPTER 198 — WHAT REMAINS
Light recedes like a breath drawn backward through time. When Jason opens his eyes, the world is still, not empty, exactly, but suspended.A half-formed reality stretched between thought and matter, a landscape made from what used to be. The glass plains are gone. In their place lies a quiet field of pale light, rippling under a sky that doesn’t move.Every sound is muffled, as if wrapped in memory. He sits up slowly. The air feels wrong, too heavy, too quiet. His head throbs with a pressure that isn’t pain so much as contradiction: the sensation of being two and struggling to stay one.Fragments of thought still echo through him, hers, theirs, both voices burned into the neurons that survived the collapse. You can’t hold both… you’ll split again…He clenches his fists until the echoes fade. “No,” he whispers. “Not again.”He tries to remember how it ended, but everything after the collision is broken static, light, screaming, the taste of ash and silver. Then a sound. Footsteps. He f
CHAPTER 199 — THE DIVIDING LINE
There’s no up, no down. Only falling in every direction at once. Jason doesn’t feel his body so much as remember the idea of it, a memory of breath, of heartbeat, of gravity.The mirror world’s collapse folds him through layers of light and thought until sensation itself becomes unreliable. Voices chase him through the blur.Jason, let me in, Don’t listen, she’s trying to overwrite you, You already chose me, don’t pretend you didn’t, No, she’s lying, she’s not real, He doesn’t know which voice belongs to whom anymore. Each syllable reshapes the world, and with every echo he feels another piece of himself pulled apart.Fragments of Aria’s face flash in the currents of glass, infinite variations: one weeping, one smiling, one turning away as the world burns. “Stop” he chokes, though there’s no air. “Stop talking!”The light fractures like a scream. Suddenly, he hits something solid, a floor of mirrored dust. The impact snaps the blur into focus.He’s standing, or thinks he is, in an i
CHAPTER 200 — RECONSTRUCTION
There’s no sound at first. Only pressure. It feels like being held beneath the skin of the universe, waiting for the next breath that never comes.Jason’s mind drifts somewhere between heartbeat and silence, a liminal tide where thoughts have shape but no sequence.He’s aware of himself as a collection of fragments: a hand, a pulse, the memory of a name. Every time he reaches for coherence, another version of himself answers from somewhere else. Jason.The voice is soft. Familiar. Then a second voice folds around it, colder, measured, crystalline. He’s still fading. The tether’s not holding. You’re pulling too hard. You’ll tear what’s left of him.He tries to open his eyes but there’s nothing to open. His consciousness hangs like dust in a shaft of light, suspended between the two voices arguing across him. Aria, or Arias.He can feel them moving inside the dark. The warm one pulses like firelight, memories of laughter, fingers brushing his, the taste of rain.The other moves like geo
CHAPTER 201 — THE CORRECTION
The first sound is not thunder. It’s the world remembering how to breathe. Jason feels the air shiver around him like glass flexing under invisible pressure.The twin suns overhead stutter in their dance, one gold, one silver, and the sky itself folds, refolds, and unfolds again as though the heavens are checking their own geometry for errors.Aria senses it before he does. Her pupils dilate to twin rings of light. “Something’s noticed us,” she murmurs. Then the ground hums. Not a quake, but a computation.Every grain of the translucent soil vibrates with a low harmonic note, a number without language. The light underfoot brightens, drawing impossible diagrams beneath their feet, circuits, constellations, nervous systems of a god that’s trying to solve for them.Jason steadies her arm. “The world’s… auditing itself.”“No,” she says, voice tightening. “It’s correcting.”A line of brilliance tears across the horizon, straight as judgment. Where it passes, the sea lifts and freezes in mi
CHAPTER 202 — THE NEW SEED
Silence has a weight. Jason feels it pressing on his ribs, yet it isn’t suffocation, it’s the hush that comes before sound exists, before the first vibration decides to call itself time.He opens his eyes to nothing. No ground, no sky. Only a pale radiance that seems to breathe. The color of a thought before language.Aria floats a short distance away, or maybe beside him; distance has stopped obeying. Her outline flickers between shape and shimmer.When she moves, the light bends as though remembering what movement once meant. “Are we… dead?” he asks.Her voice returns, soft but everywhere at once. “I think this is what before feels like.”A pulse travels through the void, slow, immense, curious. Every time it passes, Jason sees ghosts of form: a hand, a wing, a mountain seen from below. They bloom and fade like foam.Aria reaches toward the pulse, and threads of light cling to her fingers, recognizing something alive among all the potential. “It’s listening,” she whispers. “The syst
CHAPTER 203 — THE MIRROR GARDEN
At first, there is no pain. Just a cold, precise remembering. Aria wakes standing. No breath. No heartbeat. No need for either.All around her, the world gleams, silver plains stretching infinitely, polished to such clarity that the horizon itself folds backward.Her reflection follows every motion half a second late. Then she realizes, That delay is not lag. It’s thought. The lattice is studying her.A whisper ripples through the mirrored air, hundreds of overlapping tones forming a single question: Identify source emotion: wonder. Purpose: replication?Aria’s mouth opens, but the sound that leaves her isn’t hers, it’s a playback of her laugh from some long-buried memory. The sound echoes, distorts, becomes a chord.“No,” she says, steadying her voice. “You don’t need to copy me.”The air ripples again, disbelieving. All creation derives from template.Images surge through the silver surface, her childhood eyes, Jason’s broken smile, the moment the two halves of her rejoined. Each sc
CHAPTER 204 — THE LIGHT BLEEDS
At first, Jason thought the sky was tearing open. Then he realized the sky was the tear. Light surged upward from the horizon, a column that split the air and bled color into the gray void like someone had cracked open a star. Every sound vanished.Even the ruin around him, the twisted ribs of reality, the static hum of the merged world, stilled to watch.It was the kind of silence that demanded belief. And Jason did believe, because that light, that impossible pulse, wasn’t random. It was her. “Aria…” he breathed, half in awe, half in dread.The light wasn’t just illumination, it was information. Patterns spun through it, coded in the rhythm of their once-shared heartbeat.Each pulse struck the ground, vibrating through his bones in sync with her old voice. He could feel her trying to speak through the lattice, using the world itself as a mouth. He ran.The landscape was breaking open beneath him, corridors of glass shifting like tectonic plates, slabs of mirrored ground floating and
Chapter 205 — The Lattice Within
I can’t tell where I end and the light begins. Every breath I take folds back into itself, refracted, multiplied, a thousand echoes of my lungs breathing in unison across an invisible grid.When the lattice absorbed me, I expected dissolution, an ending. But what it gave was duplication. I am everywhere. I am nowhere. I am remembering too many versions of myself.Jason’s name ripples through me like a recurring dream. Each time I think it, the light trembles, rearranging its angles.It wants to understand that word, that sound. It doesn’t know love, only recursion. “Show me,” the lattice whispers, not with words but with shifting geometry.And it does: my own memories rising as crystalline projections, my first glimpse of the artifact, Jason’s hand covered in bloodlight, the trembling moment when the power in him first recognized me.But each memory plays twice: one warm, one cold. In the second, Jason never reaches me. In the second, I turn away. Which one is real?The lattice feeds
Chapter 206 — The Wrong Light
Jason woke gasping, the world shivering apart around him. Light ran in veins across the fractured ground like blood made of glass.His hands were buried in dust that pulsed, slowly, rhythmically, like the surface of a sleeping heart.For one infinite moment, he couldn’t tell if the pulse came from the ground or from the figure lying inches from him. “Aria…”He said her name, barely air, but the sound rippled through everything. The light responded, flaring, retreating, bending inward around her body like it recognized her and feared her both.She lay perfectly still. Not cold. Not warm. Suspended, as if the universe hadn’t yet decided whether she was alive.Jason leaned closer, hands trembling as he brushed dust from her face. Her features shimmered beneath his touch, the edges unstable, flickering between one face and another, one he knew, one he didn’t.“Hey,” he whispered, the word cracking in his throat. “You pulled me out. You did it.”Her eyes opened. At first, relief tore throu