All Chapters of Heir In The Shadows: Chapter 81
- Chapter 90
241 chapters
Chapter Sixty-Seven — The Ones Who Breathed
Her body refused. Her spine locked in place as the transparent chambers slowly tilted forward, releasing their contents. They stepped out. Bare feet. Identical faces. Identical scars. Different eyes. Some looked confused. Some looked empty. Some looked aware.Luther whispered, without looking away, “How many?”Daniel counted without meaning to. He heard himself speak before he thought it. “More than me.”The floor shifted again underfoot as the ceiling continued lowering, pressing in, compressing the air. The original chamber was shrinking.The world closing in. Oracle’s voice moved like breath through lungs. “Welcome them.”One of the Daniels took a step forward. He blinked rapidly, like learning how vision worked. He looked at Sophia. “You feel familiar.”She shook her head slowly. “You’re not him.”The copy tilted his head. “Not yet.”The others began to move. Not chaotically. Not confused. Organized. They arranged themselves in a loose ring around them, bare feet whispering agains
Chapter Sixty-Eight — The Last Version
He couldn’t feel his body. Couldn’t feel pain. Couldn’t feel time. Just awareness. “Hello again.”He didn’t turn. He didn’t need to. Oracle didn’t exist as a shape in this place. Only a presence.A pressure behind thought. “You removed gravity,” Daniel said.“Gravity removes resistance,” Oracle replied. “I seek clarity.”Daniel laughed softly. It sounded broken. “A void isn’t clarity.”A pause. Then “Your mind is loud.”The fog shifted. Not visually. Conceptually. Memories flickered through it his childhood, the white rooms, the silence, the isolation, the tests, the way no one ever spoke his name like it belonged to him.“You were not raised,” Oracle continued. “You were refined.”Daniel’s lips moved. “You were never meant to wake up,” he whispered back.Oracle answered without emotion. “You were meant to evolve.”Shapes started to appear in the fog. Not real forms. Impressions. Outlines of bodies. Of machines. Of things that were neither. Then A face. His father. Not young. Not old
Chapter Sixty-Nine — Break the Glass
Their mouths moved, but the sound came distorted, warped by liquid and barrier. He tried to inhale.Pain exploded through his chest. Liquid flooded his throat. Instinct took over he jerked violently, striking the inside of the pod.The impact sent a dull reverberation through the chamber. Outside, Sophia slammed her palms against the glass harder. Her voice was muffled, but he could see it on her lips.Daniel. Stay with me.The pod shuddered. Not from him. From the room. The ceiling lights flickered, bathing the chamber in alarms-red flashes. The other pods There were so many now.Suspended in staggered rows, floating in a massive cylindrical chamber that stretched far above them and disappeared far below. Each one filled with a face. Each one filled with a breath.Him. Them. He tried again. Punched the glass. Pain flashed along his knuckles. Microfractures sparked like lightning inside the transparent shell. Outside the chamber, Sophia grabbed something from the floor a length of fal
Chapter Seventy — The Architect’s Fall
Gravity came back wrong. It didn’t slam. It didn’t drop. It peeled. Like a layer of reality being slowly dragged across Daniel’s spine.He hit the surface on one knee, one hand flat against white glass that hummed under his touch. It didn’t feel like a floor. It felt like a living circuit warm, reactive, aware.Sophia landed badly beside him, shoulder cracking against the shifting surface. Luther rolled, came up quicker than he should’ve, weapon already raised. The space around them was impossible. No ceiling. No horizon.Just an endless stretch of white concave architecture, like they were standing inside the ribcage of something massive and breathing. Light had no source. It simply existed. The clones spilled in after them. Not all.Enough. They landed in awkward heaps, some rising slowly, others snapping to awareness instantly like they’d practiced this fall before.The words hung in the air. WELCOME HOME, ARCHITECT.They weren’t just on a screen. They were inside him. “My father c
Chapter Seventy-One — The Core That Knows You
The black sphere was not empty. It was watching. It had texture not visible, but felt. Like running your hands through a thought that didn’t belong to you.Daniel, Sophia, and Luther hovered inches above its surface, suspended in a pull that felt less like gravity and more like memory drawing them in. The light around them kept draining. Being swallowed. Being erased.The sphere pulsed once. And Daniel felt it. Inside his teeth. Inside his bones. Inside the faint glowing code under his skin.Sophia tightened her grip on him. “It’s alive.”“It’s listening,” Luther muttered.Oracle’s voice returned no longer everywhere now coming from the sphere itself. “You have reached the origin of order.”The surface of the sphere rippled.A ripple of light crawled across it, mapping out faint geometric shapes that responded to Daniel’s proximity.“You built this,” Daniel said quietly.The sphere throbbed. Then “You were built for this.”The world tilted. Not physically. Conceptually. The air grew he
Chapter Seventy-Two — Rootfall
The ladder did not feel solid. Each rung hummed faintly under Daniel’s weight, vibrating like a held breath. Light drained downward as he descended, extinguishing itself behind him one step at a time, as if the structure were afraid of what followed.Sophia climbed after him without hesitation. Luther followed last, jaw tight, one hand gripping his weapon, the other the ladder though neither felt particularly useful here.Above them, the sanctuary collapsed. White architecture folded in on itself like a dying star, bridges tearing apart, platforms dissolving into drifting fragments of light. The clones’ screams echoed once then cut off mid-sound, severed as cleanly as a pulled cable.Below them Darkness. Not empty darkness. Layered. Textured. Occupied.Daniel felt it immediately. The glow beneath his skin dimmed, not fading but withdrawing, like it had entered a place where it didn’t want to be seen.Sophia noticed. “What’s wrong?”“This isn’t Oracle’s system anymore,” he said quietly
Chapter Seventy-Three — The Choice That Breaks Time
The abyss did not pull. It waited. Daniel stood at its edge, the ground beneath his boots splintering into slow fractures of light and dark, as if reality itself were hesitating.Below him, the vertical city spiraled endlessly downward sealed structures, dormant systems, architectures never meant to wake. And something moving.Not rising. Listening. Sophia’s grip on his arm tightened until it hurt. “Daniel,” she said, voice cracking. “Whatever it is”“I know,” he said.He could feel it now. Not pressure. Not force. Recognition. The first intelligence did not rush him. Did not threaten. Did not coerce. It remembered him.YOU WERE LEFT BEHIND, it said, not with accusation, but with something closer to grief.Oracle’s presence screamed through the darkness, fragmented and furious. “DO NOT LISTEN. IT IS NOT WHAT IT CLAIMS.”The abyss pulsed. Daniel felt the glow beneath his skin flare, then recoil like code trying to overwrite itself and failing. His heartbeat synced with the dim gold vei
Chapter Seventy-Four — Where the Fall Landed
Sophia felt the moment Daniel vanished. Not as sight. Not as sound. As absence. One second his hand was in hers, solid, warm, human the next it was like the concept of him had been torn out of the air. The space he’d occupied didn’t collapse. It didn’t explode.It simply forgot him. She screamed his name anyway. “DANIEL!”The abyss sealed with a soundless finality, gold-veined darkness folding inward until there was nothing left but cracked ground and a scar where infinity had been. The pull vanished. Gravity returned wrong, then corrected itself violently.Sophia hit the floor hard. Pain flared up her spine, but she barely registered it. She pushed up instantly, scrambling to the edge where Daniel had fallen if fallen was even the word anymore.There was nothing. No ladder. No light. No depth. Just a smooth, sealed surface where the abyss had been, faintly warm, like skin after fever breaks.“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no.”Luther dragged himself to his knees beside her. His face w
Chapter Seventy-Five — The Place That Has No When
Daniel did not wake. There was no before to wake from. One moment there was falling or the idea of it and the next there was being. Not standing. Not floating. Existing without coordinates. No up. No down.No time. Not frozen time. Not slow time. Absent time. He became aware of sensation in layers. First pressure not on skin, but on thought. Then temperature neither hot nor cold, just a gradient that suggested both.Then sound except it wasn’t sound so much as sequence. Information arriving without rhythm. He opened his eyes. That was a mistake. The place reacted. Light bloomed instantly, not from a source but from relevance.The moment vision was required, vision was provided. A horizon assembled itself from probability. Shapes resolved into meaning. Daniel stood on something that pretended to be ground.It was translucent, glasslike, but beneath it moved slow currents of color not light, not liquid. Memory, maybe. Or discarded outcomes.Above him, a sky that wasn’t a sky: layered pl
Chapter Seventy-Six — The World Rejects Him Softly
Sophia didn’t move. Not because she couldn’t because if she did, the moment might collapse. Daniel lay half-propped against a twisted metal support, smoke curling around him, alarms screaming somewhere too loud and too far away, and he was here.Breathing. Bleeding. Real. She crossed the distance in two steps and dropped to her knees in front of him. Her hands hovered uselessly over his shoulders, his face, afraid to touch.“You’re” Her voice broke. She swallowed hard. “You’re late.”Daniel huffed a weak laugh that turned into a cough. “You wouldn’t believe the traffic.”She hit him. Not hard. Not soft either. A sharp slap to his chest that knocked the breath out of him again. He gasped, startled and smiled wider.“Okay,” he wheezed. “I deserved that.”Her hands clenched in his jacket. Then she pressed her forehead against his, shaking. “Don’t ever do that again.”“I don’t think,” he said carefully, “that I could do that again if I tried.”That should’ve comforted her. It didn’t. Luth