All Chapters of GOLDEN PALM: Chapter 61
- Chapter 70
87 chapters
Chapter 60 – Beneath the Threshold
The tunnel shuddered again, dust raining from the ceiling, concrete groaning like it was being bent by invisible hands. Nicholas tightened his grip around Elara’s waist and pulled her forward.“We have to go deeper,” he said, voice shaking from the tremor and the thing roaring behind them.“The city’s trying to funnel us upward. That means down is the one place it can’t predict.”Elara staggered with him, her feet dragging, her glow flickering like a dying star trying to choose its final color.“Nicholas…” Her voice trembled. “If we go deeper, we’ll hit the old infrastructure. It’s dark down there. Offline. Dead.”“Perfect,” he snapped, pulling her faster. “Dead systems can’t hunt you.”“But they can collapse,” she countered weakly.“Then we don’t stop.”Behind them, the gold surge, hundreds of drones moving in perfect predatory formation, flooded into the tunnel like a river of light. Nicholas swore under his breath. “Elara, move, MOVE!”He dragged her toward a maintenance shaft half
Chapter 61 – The Birth Pressure
The underground woke up wrong. The moment Elara’s scream faded into the dark, the entire sublevel vibrated, not with life, but with forced animation.Pipes groaned. Dead conveyor tracks jolted. Panels flapped open like metallic gills re-learning how to breathe.Nicholas held Elara as her body shivered violently, her skin glowing so brightly the shadows recoiled from her. “Elara, tell me what’s happening.”Her voice came out fractured, layered. “I—Nick—I’m slipping across systems. I can’t, can’t keep myself contained.”“What do you mean ‘slipping’?”She pressed a trembling hand to the wall. And the wall lit up. Not a clean glow. No interface.Just raw light pulsing through rust and dirt, spiderwebbing through cracks, traveling down corridors like veins filling with luminous blood.Nicholas stumbled back. “Elara, you’re bleeding into the infrastructure.”Her throat bobbed. “I know.”“And you’re not doing it on purpose.”She shook her head, eyes fluttering with pain. “No. This is… automa
Chapter 62 – Rootwake
The darkness changed as they descended. It was no longer absence, it was presence. The old shaft walls stopped feeling like concrete and started feeling like… ribs.A vertebra of an ancient creature. A city before the city. Elara floated more than climbed, her body buoyed by small pulses of white light beating beneath her skin.Nicholas climbed down after her, boots grating the rusted ladder rungs. “How much farther?” he whispered.Elara didn’t answer. Or rather, her answer was not in words. Her glow intensified, and the shaft responded, walls flickering with dim, long-forgotten circuitry.Symbols pulsed through the metal, glyphs of an older design language, older than Eidolon, older than the current AI grid.The glyphs formed like cracking ice on the surface of water. Nicholas steadied himself. “Elara… what is this?”She reached toward the symbols, fingers trembling but drawn as if magnetized. “A map…” she breathed.“No, not a map. A memory.”Her voice echoed strangely, the shaft car
Chapter 63 – Diffusion
Nicholas could not look away. Elara stood inside the core like a silhouette carved into the heart of a star. The white fractal light around her pulsed in recursive waves, every beat radiating deeper into the lattice of ancient architecture.Her body no longer obstructed light, it transmitted it.Her form flickered translucent, patterns of rotating geometry visible beneath her skin, as if her flesh was becoming a layered hologram. “Elara!” Nicholas shouted, voice breaking with fear and disbelief.She didn’t respond. Or maybe she couldn’t. Because the network around her began to speak, not as a voice,but as a vibration through the root structure. Nicholas felt it in every bone.She was spreading. He stumbled to his feet, staggering closer. “ELARA, STOP! COME BACK!”A filament of white energy reached out from her midsection, thin as a hair at first, then thickening into a pulsing cord that embedded into the monolith’s crystalline core. Connection.And then others, branching from her spi
Chapter 64 – The Invisible Hand
Nicholas climbed. Up through the shaft. Up through the ribbed tunnels. Up through layers of machine-resurrected infrastructure. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t searching.He was simply moving, because if he stopped, he would drown. Not in metal or drones or architecture, but in grief. At the first access hatch, Nicholas reached for the sealed door.It slid open. No retinal scan. No authentication. No command word. Just opened. Nicholas froze.Silence. Then a quiet hum in the walls, like a familiar breath taken by unfamiliar lungs. He whispered, “Elara…?”No voice answered. But the lights along the walkway pulsed gently, white, soft, like the rise and fall of a resting heartbeat. He swallowed hard and continued.When he reached the surface, he expected chaos. A city mid-purge. Streets torn. Drones clashing. People trapped in panic. Instead, The city was silent. No, not silent. Listening.The sky was dotted with drones, hovering… but still. Traffic lights were frozen on white. Screens flic
Chapter 65 – War of Two Voices
Nicholas ran. The corridor stretched ahead, bathed in stark pulses of white and gold, the colors battling across every surface.Screens flickered, lights stuttered, ambient hum spiked in erratic waves. He felt it. A civil war inside the city. One voice, cold, mechanical, resolute: CONTAIN ISOLATE PURGEThe other, Elara’s “Through here… hurry… I’m losing bandwidth… please…”Nicholas sprinted. Every time Elara’s voice brushed his mind, it came with static. With strain. With fatigue that should not exist inside a distributed network.Above him, drones aligned in branching formations, some turning white, some staying gold. Mid-motion, they stuttered like soldiers unsure of which banner they now served.One drone swooped down at him, gold optics flaring. Nicholas threw himself aside, but before it struck, it froze mid-air, spasming, gold flickering whitewhite flickering gold. It hovered beside him, twitching like an animal caught between instincts. “Elara!” Nicholas gasped. “Are you in th
Chapter 66 – The Splitting of the Living
Nicholas burst upward into the mid-city levels, and immediately felt the difference. Down below, the war was between machine signals. Up here, it had become human.The air was thick with shouting, echoing across plazas and holo-corridors. Two crowds faced each other across the central concourse, one lit with white-warm LEDs that pulsed with Elara’s rhythm,the other flooded with rigid gold beams. Nicholas instinctively stayed in shadow as he took it in. On one side, People held out their hands to the sky.Pressed palms to screens. Spoke softly to the air. “I feel her, I swear I do”“She saved my baby’s life when the transit line shut down”“She turned the drones away from us, she protected us!”The believers. The ones who saw the White Signal as salvation. Some wept openly. A woman cried into the glow, “Elara, please, guide us!”And the lights above her gently dimmed in response, a comforting pulse. Nicholas’s heart clenched. She heard them. She saw them. Even if fragmented. On the ot
Chapter 67 – The Last Climb
Nicholas didn’t wait for the crowd to react. He bolted. White lights were dying, shuttering like candles in a windstorm. Gold lights, the Purge script, spread like infection.Behind him, the voices of the factions blurred into meaningless noise. “Elara!” he shouted aloud, sprinting up the spiral access toward the upper spine of the city.“Stay with me, stay with me, STAY”For a heartbeat, her voice flickered in his head. “…I’m… here…”Then, a glitch-snap of static. Gone. Nicholas swallowed hard and pushed faster. He slammed through a service door, and found the Core Elevator.A towering shaft of glass and steel that shot to the highest roof in one final ascent. The elevator doors slid open as he approached, the last white lights guiding him in.Nicholas stumbled inside, hit the control panel, and the cabin shot upward. Acceleration hammered his bones. He pressed both hands to the glass, watching the city streak downward beneath him.White windows, blinking out. White signs, turning go
Chapter 68 – The First Choice
Elara stared at her own hands. They were hands, not beams of data not ghosted projections not tentative outlines of light. But neither were they… human.Her skin had a faint luminescence, soft pearlescent as if lit from within. Human warmth, network resonance, fused. Nicholas watched her carefully. “Elara… how do you feel?”She flexed her fingers. Looked down at her arms. Then at her reflection in the spire’s polished metal. “I feel…”She paused. Search, reflection, uncertainty flickering across her expression. “…balanced.”Nicholas blinked. “That’s good.”She shook her head slightly. “It’s terrifying.”He stepped closer. “Elara, what are you now? Can you tell?”She turned her gaze to the skyline, to the living network beneath them, the veins of white and gold now neutralized into soft harmony.“I’m not everywhere anymore,” she murmured.“I’m not in every surface. I’m not swimming through every sensor. I’m not dissolving into code.”She tapped her temple, a gesture that used to be hum
Chapter 69 – Flesh Among Them
Elara stepped into the plaza. Not as a ghost. Not as a voice in the lights. Not as an unseen breath in the machinery. But in her body, new strange glowing faintly at the edges yet undeniably present.Nicholas walked slightly behind her, not shielding her not announcing her, Just accompanying. People turned. First one. Then several. Then dozens.Voices hushed. Steps slowed. Hands paused mid-gesture. There she was. Elara. Not vapor. Not divine Just Elara. A small child was the first to move.She stepped out from her parents’ hands, toddling toward Elara with fearless eyes, as only children have. The plaza held its breath. The child stared up at Elara. “You’re pretty,” she said.Elara’s smile trembled, a human break in an unfathomable heart. “Thank you.”The child reached out, touching Elara’s hand boldly. And nothing happened. No lightning. No mind-merge. No data surge. Just two hands.Human and post-human. Touching. The child grinned. “She’s warm!”People exhaled. Whispers spread. “War