All Chapters of The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World: Chapter 261
- Chapter 270
298 chapters
Chapter 264. Ethan's Dilemma
The Citadel had become a palace of lies. Polite, necessary lies, but lies nonetheless. The official story, murmured in corridors and proclaimed in the streets to keep panic at bay, was that Lady Amelia was in deep communion with the world-Song, seeking a subtle, harmonic solution to the Crimson Sickness. A narrative of serene, cosmic effort. A comforting fiction.Ethan knew the truth. He saw it in the way Amelia moved—a slow, careful precision, as if her body were a cracked vessel she was afraid would spill. He heard it in her voice, the resonant hum now frayed at the edges, stretched thin over a void of despair. She wasn't seeking a solution. She was hiding from the magnitude of her failure, and from the horrifying truth of what the sickness truly was.His own recovery had left him with a paradoxical clarity: the Shadow was gone, but the experience of having his mind used as a laboratory had honed his perception. He saw patterns where others saw chaos. He heard the silences between t
Chapter 265. The Mentor's Weapon
The Crimson Sickness had been a subtle knife, whittling at the world's will; Alaric's stolen, tormented essence, the Prophet, proved to be a patient strategist with an entire arsenal. And so, when he saw that the plague, for all its horror, had not fully broken Silverhold's spirit, when he saw Amelia's failure had perversely managed to galvanize a grim, human stubbornness in the survivors, he unsheathed a blunter instrument.He let loose his army.They came from the north, out of the bright-scarred heart of what used to be Veridia. They did not march; they flowed in a tide of twisted flesh and corrupted magic that darkened the horizon. These were not the shambling, mindless Blessed Affliction of the earlier attacks. Nor were they the fanatical, willing converts of the city uprising.These were the Shard-Twisted.The final, horrific experiment of the cult. They had taken the broken, the dying, the prisoners of war, and they had done to them what they had tried and failed to do with the
Chapter 266: Shards in Rebellion
The end of the battle brought no respite, only a siege of another kind. The silence in Amelia's chambers was a physical pressure, thick with phantom screams of the dying and corrosive residue of corrupted magic. She stood right in the center of the room, her back to the door, her body rigid. The serene posture, saintly to so many, was gone. This was the raw architecture of a being under catastrophic stress.Yet within, her soul was at war.It started as a heat, a wrongness deep in her marrow. That unified core of her being, the glowing essence which was the fusion of all seven shards, was not now a harmonious sphere: it was a star in violent, internal collapse.The Shard of Will, a fragment of her own unyielding determination, was the first to fracture. It burned with a furious, righteous gold, screaming for action. It remembered Kaelen’s steadfastness on the walls, the simple clarity of meeting force with force. It wanted to march out and scour the land with purifying fire, to break
Chapter 267. A City Devastated
Port Seline, the jewel of the Free Cities, was built on wealth and pragmatism. Its walls were not ancient stone, but modern, reinforced concrete. Its guard was not a hereditary knighthood, but a well-paid, professional force. Its leader, Lord Valerius, had built his power on a foundation of cold, hard reason. He had feared Amelia’s power, yes, but he had also respected it as a variable in a complex equation. He believed in walls, in contracts, in quarantines, in the tangible.The Crimson Sickness had already taken its toll, culling the population with that brutal, mathematical precision. The city was reeling, but it was not broken. The streets were quieter, the markets subdued, but order was maintained. The sick were isolated. The dead were burned. It was a grim, managed crisis.It came an hour before dawn.There was no warning. No scouts reported an approaching army. No magical sensors flared. One moment, sentries on the reinforced walls watched a quiet, star-dusted plain. Next, the
Chapter 268. The Healing War
The annihilation of Port Seline was a lesson written in fire and blood. The old ways were dead. Walls were a trap. Armies were a liability. The enemy was not some foreign host to be met on a field of battle, but a cancer woven into the body of the world itself, dormant in every sickbed, awaiting the signal to metastasize.In the stunned silence that followed, a new, desperate strategy was born. It was not Kaelen who proposed it, nor General Yvaine with her tactical acumen. It was Sophia, her voice raw from the smoke of the funeral pyres, her bandaged arm a constant reminder of her own futility with a spear.“We cannot fight his army,” she said, her eyes sweeping the grim council. “We can only deny him its source. He uses the sick. So we will heal them. Faster than he can corrupt them.”A skeptical silence met her words. The successor to Lord Valerius, a pale, shaken man named Faren, scoffed. "Heal them? With what? Your power is gone. Lady Amelia's power is… unstable. The physicians ar
Chapter 269. Ethan’s Revelation
The Healing War was a stalemate, bought with sweat and willpower. They were saving lives, denying the Prophet his army, but they weren't winning. The Crimson Sickness still burned through populations, and the work of holding it back was leaching the life out of Amelia, drop by precious drop. The gray light of her carvings was a constant, worrying reminder of the immense strain on her. She was a shield, but a shield can take only so many blows before it shatters.Ethan, still too fragile to fight on the physical fronts, fought his war in the archives. His battlefield was data, his enemy, ignorance. He was consumed by one thing: the "how" of the final plague. They knew it was a perfect, mathematical weapon. They knew it was a delivery system for corruption. But how did it work? What was its fundamental principle? To defeat a thing, one must first understand it.He surrounded himself with everything they had: physicians' notes on the progression of the fever, Lyra's analyses of the corru
Chapter 270. Sophia's Choice
The Healing War was a grinding, soul-wearying stalemate, but it was a stalemate they were learning to live with. They had established a brutal rhythm: Amelia would create a pocket of stability, Sophia's healers would flood in, and they would wrestle death for every single life. They were saving people. It was enough. It had to be.But each day wore on, and the strain was etching deeper into Amelia. The grey light of her carvings, once a steady glow, now flickered like a guttering candle. She moved slower. Her responses were delayed by fractions of a second that felt like eternities. She was a shield, yes, but a shield of glass, and everyone could hear the cracks spreading.It was a crisis that came not from any new army, but from a single, desperate decision.A huge caravan of refugees, fleeing a collapsed settlement, had been caught in a spring storm. They came to Silverhold's gates drenched and freezing - and, unbeknownst to the gate guards, carrying a fresh, virulent strain of the
Chapter 271. A Cure in Blood
Amelia's chamber was a tomb of silence. She lay on a humble cot, hardly breathing to stir the air. The obelisk carvings were like dark, inert scars on her pale skin. She was an extinguished star, her absence casting a long, cold shadow over Silverhold. The victory at the barracks was a pyrrhic one, a whisper of salvation drowned out by the roar of their impending loss.In the wake of her collapse, a frantic, desperate energy seized the city. The Healing War continued, but it was a rearguard action now, a fighting retreat against the inevitable. The Prophet's silence felt heavier, more assured. He was waiting for the last light to go out.It was in this atmosphere of gathering doom that a discovery was made, not in a library or a scrying pool, but in the crowded, noisy halls of the main orphanage. The children rescued from the cult, the ones who had been living vessels for the shards, had been placed there for their safety and recovery. They were quiet, haunted children, but they were
Chapter 272. Sophia Protects Them
The Citadel had become a pressure cooker of desperation. The discovery of the orphans' immunity was a spark thrown into a room full of kindling. Lord Faren’s faction, now bolstered by terrified merchants and military pragmatists, grew bolder by the hour. The word "harvest" was no longer whispered in secret councils; it was spoken aloud in the corridors, a grim, utilitarian solution to an unsolvable problem.And then Sophia became a wall. She stood before the entrance to the orphanage's wing, a silent, unmoving sentinel. She was no longer the Dawn-Bringer, the wielder of shards. She was just a woman with tired eyes and a will of forged iron. Kaelen, understanding the line that was about to be crossed, placed two of his most steadfast guards at her side, their loyalty to him outweighing whatever fear of the plague they may have had.The confrontation came at noon. Faren arrived with a contingent of his own household guards and a physician carrying a case of gleaming, silver instruments.
Chapter 273. Amelia's Collapse
The grey, post-dawn light filtered into Amelia's chamber, illuminating a scene of quiet, desperate industry. She sat propped up in her bed, skin pale and waxy, the obelisk carvings still dark. Before her, on a low table, lay a complex diagram of interlocking frequencies-her attempt to map the "resonance of endured wholeness" she had sensed in the children. The air hummed with the faint, silvery ghost of the Shard of Understanding, a threadbare veil of power she was using to hold the concept in her mind.Sophia watched from the corner, her heart as tight as a knot of fear within her chest. This was another kind of stress, not the explosive, world-breaking power that had swept through the barracks, but a delicate, precise expenditure somehow more terrifying. It was like watching a master watchmaker with trembling hands try to reassemble a priceless chronometer: one slip and everything would shatter.“The pattern is… there,” Amelia whispered in a dry rustle of breath. A trickle of blood