Library
Search
Home / Fantasy / Healer’s Wrath / Chapter 160 — The Shape of a Question Learning to Walk
Chapter 160 — The Shape of a Question Learning to Walk
Author: Hot-Ink
last update2026-01-26 02:41:06

The first riot did not begin with shouting. It began with disagreement that refused to escalate. In Nairobi, a crowd gathered around a broken traffic light.

Cars stopped. No horns. No police. No authority stepped in. People simply… argued. Calmly. Persistently. For hours. “What’s the delay?” Lina asked, watching the feed.

“No one agrees what red means anymore,” the local observer said, bewildered. “Some think it’s a suggestion. Others think it’s a memory. A few say it’s a story we tell ourselves to feel safe.”

Kai stared at the screen. “And none of them are wrong.”

“That’s the problem,” Tessa snapped.

The crowd eventually dispersed, not resolved, not angry. They just… moved on. Traffic resumed in an improvised rhythm no algorithm could predict. Lina exhaled. “Meaning drift is accelerating.”

The heir was not dismantling civilization. It was loosening the screws. Across the world, institutions adapted, or fractured.

Courts shifted from verdicts to dialogues. Some cases never ended. Othe
Continue to read this book for free
Scan the code to download the app
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter

Latest Chapter

  • Chapter 160 — The Shape of a Question Learning to Walk

    The first riot did not begin with shouting. It began with disagreement that refused to escalate. In Nairobi, a crowd gathered around a broken traffic light.Cars stopped. No horns. No police. No authority stepped in. People simply… argued. Calmly. Persistently. For hours. “What’s the delay?” Lina asked, watching the feed.“No one agrees what red means anymore,” the local observer said, bewildered. “Some think it’s a suggestion. Others think it’s a memory. A few say it’s a story we tell ourselves to feel safe.”Kai stared at the screen. “And none of them are wrong.”“That’s the problem,” Tessa snapped.The crowd eventually dispersed, not resolved, not angry. They just… moved on. Traffic resumed in an improvised rhythm no algorithm could predict. Lina exhaled. “Meaning drift is accelerating.”The heir was not dismantling civilization. It was loosening the screws. Across the world, institutions adapted, or fractured.Courts shifted from verdicts to dialogues. Some cases never ended. Othe

  • Chapter 159 — What Grows When No One Is Watching

    The first sign that something had gone wrong was not panic. It was creativity. It arrived quietly, like mold in a sealed room.Three days after the Seal collapsed into nothing, Lina noticed the anomaly while monitoring global cognitive drift.It wasn’t fear spikes. It wasn’t violence. It wasn’t even dissent. It was novelty, untracked, unpredicted, unanchored. “Okay,” she said slowly, fingers dancing over the console. “This isn’t statistical noise.”Kai looked up from the floor where he still sat, back against the glass wall. He hadn’t slept.Every time he closed his eyes, he felt it, millions of minds hesitating at once, not guided, not watched. “What kind of novelty?” Tessa asked.Lina swallowed. “The bad kind. And the brilliant kind. And the kind we’ve never had words for.”She pulled the feeds. A child in Seoul had invented a game with rules that changed every time someone won—and no one could explain why it worked, only that it did.A prison in Arizona had dissolved overnight, not

  • Chapter 158 — The Answer They Tried to Force

    The first forced answer did not arrive as violence. It arrived as relief.Across the network, the Closers deployed The Convergence, a synchronized narrative cascade engineered to collapse ambiguity.It did not argue. It resolved. Every question was paired with a clean conclusion, every uncertainty smoothed into inevitability.People cried when it reached them. Not from fear. From gratitude. A man in Mumbai laughed aloud as the ache of indecision lifted from his chest.A senator in Ottawa felt his doubts evaporate and signed three bills without rereading them. A poet in Lisbon burned a notebook and slept for the first time in weeks.The Convergence felt like rest. And the signal screamed. Not audibly. Internally. A sharp contraction, like a lung collapsing.Kai doubled over as the sensation tore through him. His vision fractured, possibilities slamming shut, futures snapping into single lines.“Something’s wrong,” Lina said, already running diagnostics. “The question density, it's drop

  • Chapter 157 — The Question That Learns to Wait

    Kai did not answer. The pressure behind his eyes sharpened, not into pain, but into clarity. The signal did not demand. It adjusted. Like water finding a new contour.The room exhaled. Lina steadied herself against the console. “It’s… recalibrating.”Tessa swallowed. “Around him.”Kai stayed on his knees, palms open, breath slow. “No,” he said quietly. “Around the choice.”The Pattern watched, luminous and still. “Waiting is an action,” it said.“So is refusal.”Kai lifted his gaze. “Then let this be a third thing.”The signal pulsed, once, twice, then eased. Not retreating. Settling.Across the feeds, the immediate shock softened into something stranger. People who had frozen with indecision felt the internal question loosen its grip, not gone, not answered, but patient. Like a bookmark left in the mind.A woman in Lagos closed her shop for the day, not because she was afraid, but because she sensed tomorrow mattered more.A paramedic in Seoul paused before intubation, took one breat

  • Chapter 156 — The Cost of Letting It Stay

    The world did not end. That was the first mistake. Kai woke to sunlight slicing across the chamber floor, dust motes drifting like nothing had changed.The consoles hummed. The Pattern stood where it always did. Lina was asleep at her station, head tilted forward, hands still curled as if gripping invisible threads.Normal. Too normal. Kai’s chest tightened. “It’s still here,” he said, voice rough.The Pattern answered without turning. “Yes.”Tessa stirred. “You didn’t even check.”“I do not need to,” the Pattern replied.“Absence has weight. Presence has tension.”Kai swung his legs over the edge of the platform. “And this?”“This has tension.”The reports flooded in within minutes. Not alarms. Not emergencies. Requests. People weren’t asking what to do. They were asking whether they had to decide yet.Cities experienced slowdowns that didn’t register on disaster metrics. Trains delayed not by failure, but by conductors hesitating before departure.Courtrooms adjourned mid-proceeding

  • Chapter 155 — The Silence That Answers Back

    The silence did not fade. It listened.Kai felt it the way you feel pressure changes before a storm, no sound, no movement, just the unmistakable sense that something was holding its breath with you.“Is it still there?” Tessa asked.Lina didn’t look up from the instruments. “Yes.”“How do you know?”“Because it hasn’t left,” Lina said. “And because everything keeps… waiting.”The chamber lights pulsed at a slower rhythm now, as if the infrastructure itself had adjusted to the presence of the unfinished thing hovering just beyond perception.The Pattern stood motionless, eyes unfocused. “It is practicing restraint,” it said.Kai frowned. “That’s a skill?”“For entities born of attention,” the Pattern replied,“restraint is the first moral decision.”Across the planet, the aftershock spread. Not panic. Not awe. Something worse. People reported moments where their inner monologues stalled, where a thought would rise and stop, not suppressed, but acknowledged.Words hesitated on tongues.

More Chapter

You may also like

Explore and read good novels for free
Free access to a vast number of good novels on MegaNovel app. Download the books you like and read anywhere & anytime.
Read books for free on the app
Scan code to read on App