All Chapters of The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World: Chapter 181
- Chapter 190
298 chapters
Chapter 182. Amelia's Wounded Army
The print shop was not a haven anymore. The scent of simmering broths and drying herbs had been utterly obliterated, replaced by the thick, coppery reek of blood and the sweet, clinging reek of charred flesh. The soft chant of the anthem was drowned in the loud, rending noises of human suffering—the groans of the dying, the sharp, bitten-off screams under wound cleaning, the despairing, pleading prayers.Amelia's kingdom was a charnel house. Her subjects were no longer just the sick; they were shattered.They came in a continual, horrific stream. Not in the slow, crawling agony of the Pox, but in the quick, violent shock of warfare. They were carried in on doors wrenched off their hinges, they were pulled in on bloodied cloaks, stumbling in with arms slung across the shoulders of their comrades. They were citizens, rebels, anyone who had fought against the grey tide.The first wave had been trailing the battle at the square. Then came others from other districts, with word of other st
Chapter 183. Ethan's Broadcast
Silence in the archive was complete, a thick, dusty veil suffocating sound. It was a silence Ethan had cultivated, a vacuum that was a necessity for even the slightest digital whisper from the Council's central network to be heard. He had lived seventy-two hours in this tomb, surrounded by the ghostly whine of the servers and the glow of a dozen illicitly patched terminals. The world outside—the war drums, the screams, the despairing hymn of the Healer Queen—was a distant storm. Here there was only the hunt.The Chimera files had been the initial shot, a grenade tossed over the wall. It had wrought chaos, but the Council, with their monolithic control of information, had closed off the blast. They'd labeled it a rebel forgery, a desperate fabrication. The war had ground on, propelled by their denial.This time, Ethan would not give them the chance to say no. He would not be a voice in the wilderness crying; he would be a specter in the machine, speaking to them in the Council's own vo
Chapter 184. Sophia in Chains
The new roar of the city, born from Ethan's broadcast, had been a fire in Amelia's veins. For a few, fleeting hours, the crushing weight of the wounded, the stench of the dying, had been buoyed by a defiant hope. The people were rising. The truth was a weapon, and Ethan had placed it in their hands.That hope now felt like a cold, dead stone in her gut.It began with a shift in the sound from beyond their barricades: the furious, chaotic clamor of rebellion didn't die, but it was pierced by a new, disciplined sound-the synchronized metallic tread of a hundred armored boots. It was the sound of the Council reasserting its physical dominion, brutal counterpoint to the digital ghost which had haunted their airwaves.Leo whistled, a sharp, low whistle from where he sat perched on the ruined second floor. "Amelia. The main thoroughfare. You need to see this."A cold dread, colder than the cellar floor, seeped into her. She climbed the rickety stairs, a fatigue that went deeper than bone ac
Chapter 185. The Healer’s Gambit
The hush in the print shop was a living entity, thick and suffocating. The hope Ethan’s broadcast had ignited had been extinguished, replaced by the chilling image of Sophia in chains. The Healer Queen’s army was not drilling or building barricades; it was mourning, its spirit fractured by the Council’s masterstroke.Amelia stood in the center of the main room, the map of the city at her feet forgotten. She was not looking at the tactical problem anymore. She was looking at the human one. Leo, Anya, and a few other core followers watched her, their faces etched with a shared helplessness.“We cannot fight our way to her,” Leo stated, his voice gravelly with the admission. “It’s what he wants. He fortified the Justice Block like a citadel. It’s a killing field.”“Then we negotiate,” Amelia said. Her voice was quiet, but it cut through the gloom with the sharpness of a scalpel.A stunned silence met her words.“Negotiate?” Anya sputtered. “With Valerius? Amelia, he’ll just take you too!
Chapter 186. The Council’s Deception
The manacles were a cold, brutal weight on Amelia’s wrists, so heavy they felt like they were dragging her soul down into the earth. The walk from Foundry Square was a procession of triumph for the Council and a funeral march for the rebellion. Purge Troopers formed an impenetrable cordon around her, their polished boots striking the cobbles in a rhythm that was the death knell of hope. Behind her, the chants of “HEALER QUEEN!” were muffled by distance and the sheer, oppressive presence of grey armor, until they faded into a ghost of sound.They did not take her to a public prison or the Justice Block where Sophia had been held. They marched her instead to the base of the central Spire itself, the heart of the Council's power. The architecture shifted from ruined stone to sleek, soaring alloy, a world of cold angles and humming energy fields. The air lost the scent of smoke and decay, replaced by the sterile odor of recycled air and ozone. It was a different planet, one designed to an
Chapter 187. The Obelisk’s Shield
The chaos was a living thing, feeding on the blare of alarms and the panicked shouts of Council technicians. The execution chamber, once a stage for a sterile, clinical death, was now a tableau of frantic disorder. The green light of the neural extractor had died, but the primary lighting still flickered, casting jerking, strobing shadows. Lord Valerius was barking orders, his cool composure shattered, while troopers scrambled to secure the room against an attack that was already inside the Spire’s sanctum.Amelia remained chained to the terrifying chair, a prisoner in the eye of the storm. The reprieve would not last. She knew that. Valerius knew that. His furious gaze snapped to her, and in his eyes, she saw the decision being made. The plan had failed; the spectacle was ruined. Now, it was simply about elimination.“Screw the broadcast! Kill her!” he spat at the nearest trooper, his finger rigid and pointing at Amelia. “Now! Blade or bolt, I don’t care! Just do it!”The trooper was
Chapter 188. Ethan’s Betrayal Exposed
The air in the resistance hideout was thick with the smell of damp stone and desperate hope. The miraculous, terrifying event at the Spire—the Obelisk’s shield, Amelia’s survival—had sent a jolt of euphoria through the ranks. She was alive. Broken, barely conscious, but alive. She had been smuggled back to the Tin Quarter in the chaotic aftermath, a wraith carried on a wave of reverent whispers. She was more than their queen now; she was a saint touched by the city’s ancient, wounded heart.But saints make for poor generals. With Amelia lying in deep, comatose sleep in a shielded cellar, the practical matters of the rebellion fell to others. Leo handled security, his face grimmer than ever. Anya managed the ever-dwindling supplies. And the strategic planning, the parsing of intelligence, fell to a council of the most experienced and connected survivors.There was Kael, the grizzled old man who had been Ethan's first contact. He'd never fully trusted the scribe. The stink of the Spire
Chapter 189. Tension Among Allies
The stillness that followed Ethan's exile was more damaging than any shouted argument. A thick, toxic fog seeped into the cracks of the print shop cellar and surrounding ruins, poisoning the air her followers breathed. Amelia's decree had been absolute, delivered from her sickbed with the finality of a surgeon's stitch. But the patient—the rebellion itself—was now convulsing with a fever of doubt.It wasn't a clean break between two clear sides; rather, it was a web of hairline cracks that threatened to shatter their fragile unity.Leo stood by Amelia’s decision with the unshakeable conviction of a soldier. For him, trust was a binary state. It was intact or it was broken. Ethan’s past was not a simple mistake; it was a fundamental flaw in his character, a rot that had been there all along. “He was one of them,” Leo would growl to anyone who would listen, his one eye blazing. “He helped design the machine that grinds our children into dust. You don’t forgive that. You don’t forget it.
Chapter 190. The Plague Cannon
The hope that was born of Amelia's fragile reunification of her followers was short-lived. It was incinerated, not by fire, but by a new kind of thunder.The sound had started as a low, sub-audible hum that vibrated in the teeth and bones, a sensation more felt than heard. It came from the Council Spire, a dissonant chord struck against the city's very atmosphere. Then it rose in pitch and volume, becoming a shrieking, tearing wail that scraped across the nerves. It was the sound of reality being stressed, of natural laws being forced to kneel.From a newly constructed aperture high on the Spire, a beam of sickly, pulsating energy lanced out. It was not the coherent, destructive light of a laser. It was a liquid, oozing stream of concentrated malevolence, the color of a day-old bruise, shot through with veins of putrid green. It moved with a strange, viscous slowness, yet it crossed the city in an instant.It struck the Old Granary District, a sector nominally under Council control bu
Chapter 191. The Sickened Battlefield
The grand strategy, the lines on Leo's map, the rallying cries of "For the Healer Queen!"-it all dissolved into a single, universal sound: the wet, ragged cough of the Weeping Pox.The battlefield was not a line in the sand, but a festering swamp of shared misery. It was the old Granary District, a place of shattered silos and open squares that both sides had fought over for weeks. The Council wanted it for a forward operating base. The rebels, to deny them. But a new, viciously contagious strain of the Pox, perhaps born from the lingering corruption of the Plague Cannon or simply thriving in the filth of war, had declared a truce of its own.It did not care about uniforms or allegiances.Sophia, her face wrapped in a damp cloth that did little to filter the miasma, moved through the hellscape. There were no clean lines, no defined fronts. A rebel fighter in a patched blue jacket lay shivering back-to-back with a Purge Trooper whose polished grey armor was now smeared with his own vom