All Chapters of His Dark Reign: Chapter 161
- Chapter 170
206 chapters
152. When the World answers back
The door did not open.That was the first lie reality told them.Instead, the wood softened. Not visibly at first—no splintering, no cracking—but the grain began to breathe, pulsing in slow, uneven rhythms, as if something on the other side were pressing its face against it, testing the shape of the world with curiosity rather than force.Lilith felt it before she understood it. A pressure behind her eyes. A tightening in her chest that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with recognition. She had felt this once before, long ago, in fragments of dreams she never spoke about. The same sensation that told her this moment was not new—it was returning.“Adam,” she said quietly. “That door isn’t a door anymore.”Adam stood unmoving at the center of the nave, shadows sliding along his spine like they belonged there. The hum beneath his skin had grown louder, no longer a whisper but a steady resonance that matched the pulse of the warped wood. His reflection in the polished marb
153. The shape that remembers him
The symbol did not glow.It settled.That was the first thing Adam understood as the fracture twisted inward, light folding until it formed a mark suspended in the air—etched not into matter, but into the space where matter had failed. It resembled neither rune nor sigil in the traditional sense. There were no clean lines, no symmetry meant to be admired. The shape looked remembered, not designed, as if the universe itself had once traced it in panic and never quite erased it.Adam felt it before he saw it clearly.The hum inside him changed pitch, dropping into something deeper, slower—like a massive engine turning for the first time in centuries. His bones ached. His vision doubled, then steadied. Every breath tasted metallic.Malrick recoiled.Not physically—his shadow-form held—but Adam felt the withdrawal like a sudden vacuum inside his chest.That mark… Malrick said, and for the first time since Adam had known him, there was hesitation in his voice. That is not a door-seal. It i
154. Threads of the claimed
The air in the liminal space pulsed, thick and almost viscous, as if reality itself had been kneaded into a dough of shadow and light. Adam stood on uneven ground, the warped horizon bending in impossible angles, every step echoing unnaturally, reflecting fragments of his own past across the distorted landscape. Sanchez’s presence lingered like a static charge, his twisted grin frozen in time, and the entity beyond the visible pressed closer, cold and intelligent.Adam’s chest heaved with controlled breaths, each inhalation tasting faintly of metal and ash. Malrick hovered near him, half shadow, half voice, whispering reminders and warnings in rhythms that only Adam could feel. “The longer you linger, the deeper they claim you,” Malrick murmured, voice vibrating beneath Adam’s skin. “Do not forget, this place reacts. You are both anchor and bait.”Adam’s mind raced. Every strategy he had rehearsed, every manipulation, every tactical advantage, now felt trivial. The psychic plane was n
155. Surge of the unseen
The liminal layer trembled, the air itself thick with anticipation. Shadows pooled in unnatural corners, clinging to walls that did not exist, stretching across the warped horizon like a tide of obsidian ink. The symbol—Adam’s claim, the entity’s tether—pulsed with a slow, insistent rhythm, sending vibrations through every step they took, every breath they drew.Adam’s body hummed in response. His skin felt as though it were alive with static electricity, each nerve firing with both Malrick’s guidance and the latent pull of the entity. He could feel the surge approaching, a massive, rolling pressure that distorted reality with its mere presence. Each heartbeat echoed like a drum in the void. He steadied himself, planting his feet firmly on the uneven, flexing ground of the liminal layer.Lilith’s hands were clammy but steady, her eyes scanning the horizon. “It’s coming,” she whispered, voice quivering with controlled fear. “It knows you’re the anchor now. It knows you’re trying to hol
156. The fracture that chooses
The ground did not merely split—it decided.A sound like a thousand bones snapping echoed through the liminal layer as the surface beneath Adam, Lilith, and Kaleb fractured along lines that did not follow geometry or logic. The break raced outward in branching veins, glowing faintly with a cold, spectral light before plunging into bottomless dark. Gravity lurched sideways. Up became a suggestion. Down became negotiable.Adam barely had time to react before the fracture widened beneath his feet.He caught Lilith’s wrist on instinct, fingers locking around her sleeve as the ground peeled away. Kaleb cried out, scrambling, managing to hook an arm around a jutting piece of warped stone that flexed like cartilage beneath his grip.The unknown symbol above them pulsed violently.Not brighter.Closer.It did not move through space so much as compress it, collapsing distance until its presence loomed overhead, vast and suffocating. Its edges were no longer abstract; they resolved into layered
157. The summons that bled through
The summons did not arrive like a sound.It arrived like pressure.Not loud, not dramatic—just a slow, intolerable tightening, as though the universe itself had drawn a breath and refused to release it. The liminal layer dimmed, its fractured surfaces dulling into a bruised gray, while the suspended cracks beneath Adam’s feet glowed faintly, pulsing in time with something far older than the realm itself.Adam felt it first.A pull—not outward, but inward. Deep. Intimate. As if something had reached through the fracture and wrapped a hand around the core of his existence.His knees buckled.Lilith caught him before he fell completely, her grip firm, desperate. “Adam—look at me. Stay with me.”His eyes were open, but unfocused, staring through her at something she could not see. The faint glow that had steadied within him flickered again, unstable, like a flame starved of oxygen.Malrick froze.For the first time since his emergence into partial physicality, the ancient entity looked… u
158. Where the world forgets its shape
Adam awoke to silence that was too complete to be natural.Not the quiet of an empty room, nor the stillness of night, but a silence that felt constructed—as though sound itself had been removed deliberately, peeled away layer by layer until nothing remained but awareness. His body lay on a surface that was neither hard nor soft, something that yielded just enough to register weight without offering comfort. When he inhaled, the air entered his lungs without resistance, tasteless and cold, carrying no scent, no warmth, no life.The first thing he realized was that gravity existed here—but only barely.The second was that Malrick was gone.Not withdrawn. Not quiet.Gone.That absence struck harder than any wound. Adam’s mind reached instinctively for the familiar pressure, the ever-present shadow coiled around his thoughts, the voice that had guided, warned, challenged him since the beginning. There was nothing. No echo. No hum. Just an empty cavity where something immense had once res
159. The cost of being chosen
The buffer began to fail.Not explosively—not yet—but with the subtle terror of something ancient losing patience. The geometric lines that had once merely suggested structure now fractured outright, splitting into jagged seams that bled nothingness. Space folded in on itself, then unfolded wrong, like a thought trying to remember how to be solid.Adam felt it immediately.A deep, visceral pull—not toward any direction, but away from coherence. The world tugged at him as if asking a question it already knew the answer to.Malrick stood beside him now, more shadow than substance, his presence flickering like a dying star. Whatever separation he had forced had cost him dearly. His edges blurred, fragments of him phasing in and out of the buffer as though reality itself could no longer decide where he belonged.“They are retracting the pause,” Malrick said grimly. “The deliberation has ended.”Lilith’s eyes widened. “Ended how?”The respondent hovered opposite them, its form sharper now,
160. When the world blinks back
The first thing Adam noticed was sound.Not the normal rush of it—the layered noise of a city breathing—but a single, low-frequency tremor that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It vibrated through the cracked pavement beneath his back, through the air, through his bones. A resonance, steady and patient, like a heartbeat that did not belong to any living thing.He tried to move.Pain answered immediately, sharp and total, flaring through his limbs like broken glass dragged through muscle. His breath caught, a raw sound tearing from his throat as the world tilted and steadied again.Above him, the sky was wrong.The clouds still moved, but not naturally. They circled a point just beyond visibility, folding in slow, deliberate spirals as though something unseen were turning them by hand. The light filtering through them carried a dull, bruised hue—too gray for evening, too dim for afternoon.Lilith was the first thing he focused on.She was on her knees beside him, one hand braced
161. The evil knock
The seam in the sky did not widen.That was what unsettled Adam most.If it had torn open—if light or darkness had spilled through—people could have screamed, could have pointed, could have believed. Instead, it remained thin and deliberate, a precise incision hovering far above the city like a thought not yet spoken aloud.And thoughts, Adam had learned, were often more dangerous than actions.Emergency crews flooded the streets within minutes. Red and blue lights smeared across broken concrete and twisted metal, painting the damage in frantic pulses. Police cordoned off the area, shouting instructions no one fully heard. Paramedics moved with practiced urgency, kneeling beside the injured, asking questions that felt absurd in a world that had just shuddered out of alignment.Adam stood among it all, unseen and too visible at the same time.Every time the sirens wailed, something inside him answered—a faint, involuntary tightening, like a muscle responding to a reflex it had never le