All Chapters of The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World: Chapter 201
- Chapter 210
298 chapters
Chapter 202. The Shattered Monument
It was a child who found the first fragment, not a prophet or a warrior, but a small boy named Eli scavenging for unbroken bricks in the shadow of the shattered Obelisk. His fingers, grimy and small, closed not around rough clay but around something smooth and strangely warm. He pulled it from the dust, a sliver of pure black stone, no larger than his thumbnail, which held within its depths a soft, pulsating silver light, like a captured heartbeat.He didn't scream or run. He felt a quiet hum through his skin, a sensation that was both foreign and deeply familiar, like a lullaby half-remembered from a dream. The frantic, gnawing hunger in his belly, a constant companion since the plague began, seemed to quiet, not gone, but soothed, held at bay. He clutched the shard in his palm and ran home to his mother, not with a treasure but with quiet wonder.News spread, not in a roar, but in a whisper, a rumor of light amidst the ruins.They were everywhere. Tucked into the roots of a lightnin
Chapter 203. Sophia’s Burden
The weight was not a crown. It was a yoke, carved from memory and expectation, and it settled onto Sophia's shoulders the moment the last echo of Amelia's healing light faded. No one had elected her. No one had to. When the people looked for direction, their eyes, lost and hopeful, found her. When a dispute over shelter broke out, the cry was, "Fetch Sophia!" When the distribution of seeds from the Council storehouses grew contentious, it was, "Let Sophia decide."She became the default setting for the city. The Healer’s lieutenant. The one who was left.And every time they said her name, she felt the ghost of Amelia's absence like a physical blow. How could they look at her, a nurse, a woman who had been broken by chains and saved by a sacrifice, and see a leader? She was a placeholder, a fragile vase holding the water of a people's hope, and she was certain she would crack.Her days were a relentless parade of problems. She moved from dawn until deep night, her feet aching, her voic
Chapter 204. Ethan's Guilt
The city was healing. It was a fact, as undeniable as the clean water in the pipes and the absence of the Pox’s rattle in every breath. Ethan worked tirelessly to make it so, his mind, once the Council’s sharpest logistical weapon, now devoted to the mundane miracles of reconstruction. He coordinated supply chains for timber and glass. He mapped out the most efficient routes for clearing rubble. He was a ghost in the new machine, his fingerprints on every successful project, his name on none.And with every load of debris cleared, with every family resettled in their repaired homes, that feeling of guilt had dug its roots even deeper inside his soul.It was a quiet, parasitic thing. It didn't scream; it whispered. It waited for him between tasks in the silence of his small, barren room. It spoke to him in the language of ledgers and cause-and-effect.You wrote the resource-allocation memo that starved the clinics.You helped set the ground for Project Chimera.Your actions of the past
Chapter 205. The Rival’s Vow
Before the plague, before the war, before the legend of the Healer Queen, there was Doctor Kaelen. He and Amelia had been contemporaries, top of their class at the Citadel’s Academy of Medicine. Where Amelia was intuitive, brilliant, and relentlessly compassionate, Kaelen was precise, methodical, and believed in protocols. He saw her methods as messy, emotional, and unscientific. She saw him as cold, rigid, and blind to the patient behind the symptoms.Their rivalry was the stuff of medical school legend. He had written a scathing critique of her thesis on psychosocial factors in immune response. She had publicly shamed him for his refusal to treat a group of impoverished factory workers, citing "quarantine regulations." When the Weeping Pox broke out, he had been one of the first to endorse the Council’s containment zones, seeing it as a tragic but necessary triage. He had watched, from his secure clinic in the Spire-district, as Amelia’s "unsanctioned" practices in the ruins became
Chapter 206. The First Healing Shard
The boy's name was Finn, and he was a creature of the new silence. Orphaned twice over-first by the Pox that took his parents, then by the Plague Cannon that incinerated his makeshift home and the old woman who had taken him in-he existed on the edges of the rebuilding city. He was small, quiet, and fiercely self-reliant-a mouse scurrying through the foundations of a new world.A week ago, he’d gashed his leg on a piece of rusted rebar while scavenging for usable scrap. It was a stupid, mundane injury, the kind that happened every day. But in the absence of anything resembling proper medicine, it had festered. Now, the wound on his calf was an angry, swollen red, streaked with ominous tendrils of purple. A fever burned behind his eyes, and a deep, throbbing ache had become the rhythm of his existence. He hid it, of course. To show weakness was to risk being left behind. It was the oldest law he knew.He was limping through a sector of the city known as the Weep, a place of old sorrows
Chapter 207. Rise of the Pretenders
The story of Finn’s healing was a flame, and the city, starved for miracles, was dry tinder. The tale grew in the telling. By the time it reached the outer districts, the boy hadn’t just healed a festering wound; he’d regrown a lost limb, cured a dozen cases of the Pox from memory, and been bathed in a celestial light. The shards were no longer just tools or comforting echoes; in the public imagination, they were master keys to the kingdom of health, and everyone wanted one.And where there's desperate want, there are those who'll manufacture supply.The first Pretender was a man named Silas, who set up a stall in a bustling market square. He was a weasel of a man with quick, clever hands and a voice that could sound soothing and authoritative all at once. He didn’t have a glowing shard. He had a piece of green bottle glass, carefully heated and shaped, which he’d rub with a chemical that gave off a faint, eerie luminescence in the shade.“Behold!” he would cry, holding up his “Sun-Sh
Chapter 208. The Cult Returns
The first sign was the graffiti. It appeared overnight, scrawled in a substance that looked unsettlingly like dried blood on the pale, new-plastered walls of a rebuilt bakery. It wasn't a name or a symbol, but a question:WHERE IS YOUR HEALER NOW?These words were the poison dart into the fragile peace of the city. People stopped and stared as cold unease settled in their stomachs. They had been so focused on the Pretenders, the charlatans selling false light, that they'd forgotten the purveyors of a different, older darkness.It turns out that the Cult of the Final Bloom had not been eradicated; it was only hibernating, its nihilistic roots driven deep by the Weeping Pox, waiting for the soil to become fertile once more. And Amelia's disappearance was the perfect fertilizer.They resurfaced not with a roar but with a whisper campaign, a virus of doubt. Their agents in simple, undyed robes moved through the markets and the new communal gardens. Their faces were calm, their eyes burnin
Chapter 209. The Shadow Prophet
The Cult of the Final Bloom had been a philosophical nuisance, a whispering dread. Then it became a physical plague with the arrival of the Shadow Prophet.No one knew his name or his face; he appeared at the cult's gatherings shrouded in robes of grey so deep it seemed to drink the light, a featureless porcelain mask hiding his features. His voice, when he spoke, was a distorted, echoing thing, filtered through some device hidden in the mask. Gone was the old air of serene acceptance that had characterized the cult previously; it was cold, sharp, and held the absolute certainty of a falling blade.He didn't preach about beauty in decay; he commanded it."The stagnation of the False Healer must be broken," the distorted voice would rasp from the shadows of the Justice Block. "Her artificial peace is a cocoon, and we are the moths who will tear it open. The world must be reminded of its true nature. It must be shown the path it has been denied."He held up his tool: a shard. But it was
Chapter 210. Whisper of the Healer
Exhaustion was a leaden blanket, smothering Sophia into fitful sleep. Behind her eyelids, the images of the day played like a grim tapestry: Elara's blackened arm, the crumbling Shard-Library, Leo's face contorted with helpless rage, the Shadow Prophet's featureless mask. She was drowning in problems with no solutions, a steward of a kingdom crumbling under a poison nobody understood.Then, the dream shifted.And then the crushing weight lifted. The grim images dissolved into a soft grey mist. She was standing nowhere and everywhere, a silent, boundless space filled by a gentle, pervasive light. It was the light of the Quiet Dawn, but muted, internal. And in the centre of this peace stood a figure.It was Amelia. But not as Sophia had last seen her—not the hollowed vessel, nor the radiant, self-immolating queen. This was Amelia from the early days of the clinic. Her face was weary, but her eyes held their old, fierce compassion. She wore her simple, stained tunic. She was whole.“Soph
Chapter 211. Sophia's Mission
The last echoes of the dream had faded, leaving not a memory but a mandate branded into Sophia's soul. The warmth of Amelia's presence was gone, replaced by cold, clear air-a responsibility that dwarfed any she had thus far carried. Leading the people, managing supplies, settling disputes-that had been the stewardship of a mayor, a manager of survival. This was different. This was the stewardship of a soul. Not just Amelia's, but the soul of the city itself, now inextricably woven into the glowing fragments scattered across its body.She stood before the growing pile of shards in the plaza, a mountain of captured moonlight and whispered promises. The hum in the air was a physical pressure against her skin, a silent, gathering power that both comforted and terrified her. People moved around her in a reverent hush, adding their shards to the collective light, their faces full of a fragile, desperate hope. They looked to her, their Steward, and she knew with a certainty that chilled her