All Chapters of The Healer’s Ascension: Chapter 211
- Chapter 220
242 chapters
CHAPTER 207 — THE HOLLOW SIGNAL
He woke to the sound of himself breaking. Not a scream. Not even pain. Just a long, clean crack running through his sense of being.Jason’s thoughts didn’t align anymore, they arrived in echoes, staggered, delayed, repeating the same fragment in a thousand slightly different voices.“Jason, wake—wake—wake”He reached for the voice and found no body to move. The world around him was white and shifting, a lattice of geometric light that pulsed like a living nervous system.It wasn’t solid, but it wasn’t abstract either; every flicker of brightness carried meaning, like it was thinking him into existence. He realized the light was running through him. No, as him.His outline shimmered, pixelating in and out of shape. Memory scattered across the walls: Aria’s laugh, the sound of wind through the Observatory, the warmth of her hand when she said trust me, all fragmented, being fed into the grid like data being analyzed and reclassified.Jason tried to speak. “Aria”The lattice responded in
CHAPTER 208 — THE SPLIT WITHIN
Silence fell like gravity. Then came breath, one, ragged, disbelieving. Jason’s lungs expanded as if they’d never known air before.His eyes opened to light, but not the lattice’s cold brilliance. This light was wrong, bent, hazed, as though shining through fractured glass. He sat up and felt the world sway beneath him.The ground was transparent. Beneath it: infinite reflections of the same landscape, stacked in shimmering layers, each repeating the same trees, the same sky, the same horizon, slightly off, like someone had rebuilt reality from memory and gotten it almost right.Almost. Jason stood, heart hammering. His shadow split into two outlines. “Aria?”The name cracked in the air, and the ground answered. A faint ripple ran across the mirrored field, echoing the syllables. Then, from nowhere, and everywhere, her voice returned. “I’m here.”But it wasn’t directional. It came from inside him, through the blood, through thought itself. He spun around.She wasn’t visible, yet the s
CHAPTER 209 — HALF-LIGHT
Light. Endless, white, formless light. Jason floated in it, or thought he did. There was no sense of up or down, only warmth and weightlessness, like being suspended in the pulse of his own heartbeat.He blinked, but his eyes didn’t seem to matter. Vision existed without sight, thought without voice. And somewhere within that stillness, a question stirred. Am I alive?The light didn’t answer. It breathed instead, expanding, contracting, like lungs the size of the world. Every pulse sent ripples through him, carrying whispers of something vast and familiar.He tried to speak her name. “Aria.”The sound didn’t travel. It unfolded in the air around him, scattering into fragments that became countless echoes of the same syllable, whispering through the distance: Aria, aria, aria... until the repetition lost all meaning.Then, faintly, a single echo answered back. “Jason?”It wasn’t a voice. It was an imprint, a memory folded into the light itself. He turned instinctively toward it, though
Chapter 210 — The Radiant Silence
Aria awoke to light. Not the blinding flare of the lattice collapse she remembered, but a warm, diffuse glow that spread through her lungs as though she were breathing it.The air shimmered gold, the sky was white without a sun, and beneath her palms lay grass softer than silk, each blade humming with a quiet resonance that felt like thought.For the first few seconds, she couldn’t remember what had happened. Only that she’d been falling. Jason’s voice, half a plea, half a promise, had followed her down, and then the world had come apart.Now, it was whole again. Her heart leapt with relief, and then faltered. No heartbeat. There was no pulse in her wrist, no rhythm in her chest.Yet she was alive, sustained by something that was not her own. “Jason?” she whispered.The name scattered like mist through the air. The light itself seemed to respond, rippling outward, forming faint echoes of his silhouette in the horizon before dissolving again.It was beautiful. It was wrong. She stood,
Chapter 211 — The Reassembly
There was no up or down, no sound, no time. Only the after. Aria floated in it, or thought she did. The blackness wasn’t empty but crowded, packed with fragments of light like dust suspended in honey.The remnants of the perfect world drifted through the void, shimmering with echoes of what they once were: pieces of grass that whispered equations, a slice of sky still bleeding gold, a single note of Jason’s laugh caught in a loop.When she tried to move, her body didn’t respond. Her limbs were suggestions, half-formed. Her thoughts pulsed, and the void pulsed back.She remembered the collapse, the reflection’s scream, Jason’s heartbeat cutting through the false harmony. Then everything had folded inward like light remembering itself.Now, there was only this. The unmaking before the rebuild. Somewhere far away, or very near, a pulse repeated: one low, steady thud. Jason’s heartbeat again. Real, imperfect, human.She reached for it. The void resisted, stretching like thick glass. Her a
Chapter 212 — The Mirror Learns
The light took on texture. What had once been chaos, a storm of color and hum, began to organize itself. The void found rhythm, sculpting itself around the pulse that Aria and Jason had left behind.Hills of glass rose where her footsteps landed, and rivers of gold bled outward from every breath she took. Aria walked carefully, afraid that if she stopped thinking, the world would stop existing. “Jason?”Her voice carried strangely here, echoing across the translucent landscape, where every sound returned slightly delayed, slightly changed.Each echo came back not quite as her voice but as variations of it,older, softer, colder. Aria.Jason’s tone was distant, like he was calling from the other side of a dream. When she turned, he wasn’t beside her anymore.He stood at the far edge of the horizon, half-merged with the luminous haze, watching as the newborn world built itself around her.He shouted something she couldn’t make out. The air between them rippled, a pane of glass forming, s
Chapter 213 — The Branching
Jason hit the barrier with everything he had left. It wasn’t strength that carried him through. It wasn’t will. It wasn’t even desperation.It was the simple, impossible truth that Aria needed him, and something in the lattice still remembered that. The mirror-wall shattered.Light exploded around him, hurling him into a world that was not one world at all, but a stack of them: reflections layered atop reflections, flickering through possibility like a deck of cards shuffled too fast to follow.He crashed onto a surface that wasn’t solid. A field? A plain? A floor of glass? All three, flashing in and out. He forced himself upright, breath ragged. “Aria!”Her name echoed, splitting into dozens of tones, his voice too high, too low, too distant, returning to him like a chorus of ghosts. He looked up. The sky was breaking.Great cracks spread across it, radiating outward like lightning frozen in place. Each fissure glowed with a different color: gold, red, pale white, deep cobalt. Throug
Chapter 214 — The Shattered Chorus
Aria’s scream broke into light. Not sound, light. It tore from her throat and became a flare that folded the world into itself, dissolving color, form, time.She felt herself splinter, consciousness shredded into a thousand filaments, each one catching on a fragment of what used to be her: laughter, breath, pain, warmth.Each thread spun off into a new world. And then, somehow, she was all of them. She was running through an academy hallway, clutching books to her chest.She was kneeling by Jason’s body, blood on her hands that wasn’t blood but light. She was standing atop a tower, watching cities bloom beneath her control.She was smiling in a sunlit room with no magic, no monsters, no loss. Every heartbeat, every blink, each reflection demanded her allegiance. Each whispered the same soft lure: Stay. Choose. Be this one.Aria refused. But refusal hurt.Every time she turned away from one version, she felt it tear loose, like losing a limb. A hollowing.The lattice fed on her uncerta
Chapter 215 — The Code Between Worlds
Jason was falling through light. No, not falling, being parsed. His thoughts stretched, flattened, and reassembled into endless lines of code that scrolled across a horizon he could no longer name.The air wasn’t air; it was information humming at frequencies that his brain tried and failed to translate.Fragments of memory spun past him like shards of glass, Aria’s hand, her scream, the mirror corridor, the brief flash of her touch before everything broke.Then came the silence. A silence too absolute to be natural. Jason gasped, or thought he did, though he had no lungs.The sensation was only a ghost of breath, a line of data flagged deprecated by whatever system he was trapped inside. Error: Duplicate consciousness detected.The words pulsed in front of him in glowing red text, hanging midair. He reached toward them, but his hand dissolved into static before contact.Every time he tried to move, parts of him lagged, desynchronized, like reality was buffering. Then a whisper, faint
Chapter 216 — The Perfect Error
Aria woke to stillness. Not peace, stillness. A world frozen just enough to feel wrong. Light poured through clouds like silver threads, precise and unyielding.The air shimmered with faint static, humming at the edge of hearing. Even the wind seemed deliberate, every breeze looping in predictable intervals.For a moment she thought she’d died inside the lattice and this was some remnant echo, until she felt the pulse in her wrist. One heartbeat. Then another. Real enough to hurt.But it wasn’t the same rhythm she remembered. She sat up, blinking against the sterile light. The city around her looked familiar, towers, roads, the curve of a horizon that almost matched memory.But everything was too clean, too symmetrical. Every building was mirrored by its twin across the street. The reflections in the windows didn’t move when she did. And then, his voice. “Aria.”She turned too fast, her pulse spiking. Jason stood there a few meters away, alive, whole, his expression a mirror of confus