All Chapters of The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World: Chapter 211
- Chapter 220
298 chapters
Chapter 212. Ethan’s Resolve
The city was singing. That was the only word for it. As the shards gathered in the plaza, their individual hums blending into a single, resonant chord, the very air seemed to vibrate with silent music. Ethan felt it in his teeth, in the marrow of his bones. It was the sound of Amelia's power, no longer a desperate, scattered cry but a gathering hymn.And he, the former architect of silence, knew that his place was not in the choir, but rather in the scriptorium.While Sophia became the general of light and Leo its steadfast shield, Ethan retreated. Not in shame, not in fear, but with a purpose that felt, for the first time, like absolution. He stood in the small, quiet room that had become his sanctuary, surrounded not by the tools of rebellion or the ledgers of logistics, but by the artifacts of memory. Blank parchments, salvaged inks, a collection of pens fashioned from scavenged nibs and gull feathers. On a shelf lay his most precious possession: the folio of his own damning Counci
Chapter 213. A Shard in Flames
The Glimmer was a lie. It was the name given to a cramped, airless warren of tunnels and collapsed buildings in the city's underbelly, a place the Quiet Dawn had touched but not transformed. Here, the clean light and the hum of the gathered shards were a distant rumor. Here, the old laws still applied: hunger was a constant, and power was something you took.It was in the Glimmer that a man named Roric found the shard. He was a hustler, a bottom-feeder in the new economy of hope, dealing in stolen food, salvaged scrap, and information. He wasn’t looking for a miracle; he was looking for a score. The shard was half-buried in the muck of a collapsed drainage pipe, glowing with a sullen, orange-gold light, like a captured ember. It felt warm, unnaturally so, even through the grime.Roric's eyes, sharp with avarice, did not see a piece of the Healer Queen but a currency. He had heard the stories. The green ones heal, the blue ones cool. This one was different. It pulsed with a latent, agg
Chapter 214. The Orphans' secret
They were the city’s quietest ghosts. The immune children. Those who had survived the Weeping Pox not through Amelia’s intervention, but through some quirk of their own biology. They had watched parents, siblings, and friends succumb to the rattling cough and the bloody phlegm, while they remained, untouched and bewildered. In the new world, they were a living mystery, a reminder of a horror they had escaped but could never forget.They stuck together, a loose-knit tribe of the spared, living in the interstitial spaces of the rebuilding city. Finn was their unofficial leader, not by appointment, but by the sheer force of his will and the famous green shard he carried. But there were others. A girl named Liana, who never spoke. A pair of twins, Pax and Lex, who moved with a silent, unnerving synchronicity. And Tamas, the boy who had been drawn to the Cult, now returned to the group, his slate always close at hand.It all started with a headache.It was Liana who felt it first, a day af
Chapter 215. Ambush in the Ruins
The Ashmouth district was a skeleton picked clean by vultures: older ruins, from some conflict long before the Pox, whose bones were bleached white by sun and scarred by fire. It was here, according to the faint, discordant hum in Liana's mind, that a cache of shards lay hidden, its song muffled by the weight of shattered history. A "cache," the children called it.Sophia’s team was small, a reflection of their stretched-thin resources. Leo led, his one eye constantly scanning the skeletal rooftops. Four of his most trusted fighters fanned out, their footsteps unnaturally loud in the profound silence. At the center walked Sophia, with Finn, Liana, and the twins. The children were pale, their senses turned inward, navigating by a map of pain only they could read.“The song is… tangled,” Finn muttered, brow furrowed. “Like threads knotted up. It’s close. In there.” He pointed into the gaping maw of a collapsed textile mill, interior a maze of fallen looms and rusted machinery.Leo raise
Chapter 216. The Rival’s Sacrifice
The Shard-Library was Kaelen’s sanctuary, his monastery of reason in a city increasingly governed by miracles and madness. Here, amidst the neatly labeled shelves and the meticulous charts mapping shard harmonics, he was still a scientist, a man of order. The chaos outside—the Cult’s whispers, the children’s pained sensitivities, the volatile nature of the shards themselves—could be held at bay by the simple, calming act of cataloging.The shard in question was his current obsession. It was a small, unassuming thing, the color of a deep, still lagoon. It didn't glow so much as it seemed to absorb light, holding it in a tranquil, azure pool within its heart. His initial tests had been baffling. It didn't heal wounds or purify water. It didn't encourage growth or soothe pain. Instead, when activated with a focused, calm intent, it seemed to create a localized field of profound stasis. Time, within its small sphere of influence, slowed to a crawl. A drop of water hovered for minutes. A f
Chapter 217. The Shard of Water
The sickness that afflicted the Ashmouth district was a creeping, quiet thing. It wasn't the violent necrosis of the Shadow Prophet's Seed-Sores, nor the psychic assault of the Cult's other weapons. It was a return of the mundane, made monstrous by context. The new well, dug with such hope and communal effort, was turning brackish. A slick, oily film clung to the water's surface, and those who drank from it suffered not immediate agony, but a slow, debilitating malaise—cramping guts, pounding headaches, a deep-seated fatigue that no blue comfort-shard could fully ease.It was a different kind of warfare. Instead of the dramatic blast, the Cult was poisoning their hope with a subtle, insidious drip. You dig your wells, but we will foul the water. You build your future, but we will sicken its roots.Sophia stood at the well's edge, her stomach churning with a mixture of rage and despair. They had tested the water with every shard they thought might work. Purification shards, like the on
Chapter 218. A Divided City
The great gathering in the plaza was meant to be a unifying act, a symphony of light. But to those watching from the sidelines, it looked more like a hoard. A mountain of power, guarded by Sophia’s inner circle and the strange, sensitive children. For every person who saw it as Amelia’s sacred trust, another saw it as a claim of ownership. The very act of centralization, born from a dream of defense, had sown the seeds of new suspicion.The first fracture appeared in the Foundry District. Here, the people were pragmatists-people whose hands had grown calloused rebuilding machinery and forging tools. Their leader was a woman named Brenna, the same one who had argued over the well. She had watched the gathering with a deepening frown. “She takes them all,” Brenna declared to a gathering of her own, in the soot-stained hall of a repurposed smithy. “Every shard we find, every tool that helps us survive, gets carried off to her plaza. What happens when a child here gets sick? Do we send a
Chapter 219. The Prophet’s Sermon
The summons was not a sound, but a cessation. It began at dusk, a wave of unnatural quiet that rolled out from the ruins of the Justice Block. The ever-present, hopeful hum of the gathered shards in the distant plaza seemed to falter, its frequency dampened by a growing, oppressive stillness. It was a silence that demanded to be filled, and the people, drawn by a morbid and fearful curiosity, came to fill it.They gathered in the shadow of the block’s scarred facade, a sea of anxious faces lit by the guttering light of a few torches. The air was cold, and the usual sounds of the rebuilding city—the distant hammers, the murmur of voices—were absent, smothered by the anticipation of the Shadow Prophet’s words.He appeared without fanfare. One moment, the raised dais of broken stone was empty. The next, he stood there, a slash of absolute blackness against the twilight. His grey robes seemed to drink the torchlight, and his featureless porcelain mask was a pale, expressionless moon. In on
Chapter 220. Carving of Shadows
Sleep was no longer a respite for Sophia. It was a battlefield of a different kind, a realm where the echoes of the shattered Obelisk pooled and swirled. Since the great gathering began, her dreams had been a tapestry of faint, overlapping whispers—the residual memories of a million healings, a thousand sorrows, all held within the glowing stones. But tonight, the tapestry tore.She stood once more in the boundless, grey mist, the dream-space she associated with Amelia. But the gentle light was gone, replaced by a deep, thrumming vibration that felt old, older than the city, older than the Obelisk itself. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and cold stone.Before her, the stump of the Obelisk appeared, not as a broken tooth, but as it once was—a needle of perfect, seamless black, piercing an alien, star-strewn sky. But it was under attack. Not from without, but from within.A shadow moved inside the stone. It was not the Shadow Prophet’s malevolent crimson, but a color her mind
Chapter 221. A Shard Map
The change in the children was immediate and terrifying. It began not as a gradual shift, but as a collective seizure. One moment, Finn, Liana, Pax, Lex, and Tamas were huddled together in their corner of the plaza, seeking solace in their shared sensitivity. The next, they collapsed.It was not faint. Their bodies went rigid, backs arching, eyes rolling back in their heads. A silent, synchronized scream was trapped in their throats. Liana’s hands clawed at the stone pavement as if trying to tear a hole in the world. The twins, usually a mirror of each other, convulsed in opposite, jerking rhythms. Tamas’s slate clattered to the ground, forgotten. Finn, his face a mask of agony, let out a single, choked word that was more a plea than a statement.“Everywhere.”Sophia and Leo were at their side in seconds. The gathered shards hummed placidly, their light unchanged, but the children were reacting as if being bombarded by a psychic tsunami.“What’s happening to them?” Leo barked, his han