Chapter 191 :Billy knew something was wrong the moment he tried to stand and the world didn’t answer him.Normally, when he moved, the air reacted. Not consciously—he’d stopped thinking about it a long time ago—but the relic’s power always whispered through his muscles, steadied his balance, sharpened his senses. It was like gravity had been negotiable around him.Now?Nothing.His knee buckled, and he caught himself awkwardly on one hand, palms scraping against ash-coated stone. The impact sent a dull shock up his arm—real pain, not filtered, not softened.Billy froze.That hadn’t happened in years.Tyla stepped forward instantly. “Billy—”“I’m fine,” he said too fast, pushing himself upright again. This time he made it, but the effort left him breathing harder than it should have. His heartbeat thudded loudly in his ears, uneven and heavy.Owen noticed too. Of course he did. “Try again,” Owen said carefully. “Slow.”Billy clenched his jaw and focused—not on strength, but on reach.

Chapter 193 :They didn’t stop moving until the terrain flattened and the air stopped tasting like burned metal.By the time they reached the narrow ravine where Owen said they could lay low for a few hours, the sun was fully up—pale and weak behind a veil of ash-clouds that still hadn’t decided whether they wanted to clear or choke the sky forever. The world looked bruised. Like it had survived something and didn’t know how to feel about it yet.Billy dropped his pack and leaned forward, hands on his knees. His lungs burned. Not the supernatural burn he’d gotten used to—the clean, ordinary kind that came from pushing a body past what it wanted to do.He almost welcomed it.Tyla lowered herself onto a rock nearby, slow and careful. She still looked fragile, like one wrong movement might undo her again, but there was color back in her face now. Real color. Not relic-glow. Not rift-light.Human.Owen stood apart from them, scanning the horizon through binoculars he didn’t really need an

Chapter 195 :The first thing the shadow learned about having a body was pain.Not the clean, distant ache of collapsing dimensions or tearing rifts — but the small, irritating kind. A tightness in the jaw. A pulse behind the eyes. The slow burn in muscles that had been held tense for too long.It hated that.But it endured it.The man—the host—stood in the mirror of a public restroom, palms braced against the sink, breathing through his nose as if he could outrun the pressure building behind his thoughts. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. A faucet dripped somewhere behind him.Ordinary sounds. Ordinary place.Nothing about this moment would ever make the news.And that was exactly the point.“You’re real,” the man muttered, staring at his own reflection. His pupils were too dark. Too focused. Like something had adjusted the aperture of his mind and forgotten to dial it back.The shadow did not respond in words.It responded by settling.The sensation crawled under his skin—not

Chapter 197 :The idea landed badly.It didn’t explode. It didn’t spark an argument right away. It just sat there between them, heavy and wrong, like a truth nobody wanted to touch.“We destroy them.”Tyla’s voice was steady when she said it, but her hands weren’t. She’d been rubbing her thumb against the edge of a cracked relic shard for several minutes now, like she was trying to wear it down through friction alone.Billy looked at her, then at the shard, then back at her again. “You don’t mean lock them away.”“No.” She shook her head once. “I mean end them. Melt them. Shatter them. Whatever it takes so no one — not you, not the shadow, not anyone — can ever use them again.”Owen leaned back against the wall, arms crossed, watching both of them. He didn’t interrupt. He was good at that. Letting people hang themselves with their own thoughts before stepping in.Billy finally spoke. “That’s not how this works.”“That’s how it should work,” Tyla shot back, faster now. “Look at what th

Chapter 199 :They didn’t rush it.That was the first thing Billy noticed.For once, no alarms screaming, no ground collapsing under their feet, no relic pulling him forward like a leash. Just the forge sitting out there in the distance, humming beneath layers of stone, patient and waiting.It felt wrong.Billy crouched near the ridge, elbows resting on his knees, eyes fixed on the faint glow bleeding through the cracks in the earth. The relic inside him throbbed in a slow, deliberate rhythm—no pain, no frenzy. Just awareness.Like it knew this was coming.Behind him, Owen worked in silence. He moved the way he always did before something dangerous—not frantic, not hesitant. Methodical. He laid out gear on a tarp: scanners recalibrated for Luoshen interference, signal dampeners, compact weapons modified to fire through distortion fields.This was the version of Owen that reminded Billy he wasn’t just a man tagging along for moral balance.He was a police officer who’d seen what happen