2026-03-08 18:40:01Adrian Cole opened his eyes to white walls and the steady beep of a machine. His body felt like it had been put back together with scrap metal. He had pains in places he didn't know could hurt. His skin felt tight and was covered in bandages where the fire had burned him.
He blinked at the bright lights, trying to remember what happened. The fall. The black void. The red words. The deal. "What was that? I must be going crazy," he said to himself. A nurse walked in with a clipboard. She looked kind but tired. "Mr. Cole? You're awake. That's good. You’ve been asleep for three days. You have smoke in your lungs and broken ribs, but strangely, you are recovering very fast. You are lucky to be alive." Three days? Adrian sat up quickly, but a sharp pain hit his side. "My family. Where are they? Elena? Maya? Beatrice?" The nurse looked at the door and hesitated. She put her clipboard down slowly. "They... came by the first day. They left some papers for you. I think you should rest before—" "Papers?" Adrian’s voice cracked. "What papers?" She sighed and pulled a thick envelope from a drawer. "A divorce paper. And... a DNA test result for your daughter." Adrian stared at the envelope like it was a bomb. His hands shook as he opened it. The words felt like knives. Elena wanted a divorce. And the DNA report said 0% match. Maya was not his daughter. The room started to spin. Seven years. He had scrubbed floors on his knees while Beatrice watched and mocked him. He had cooked meals and gotten slapped for it. He had signed away his house and his future for them. And Elena… he remembered her going upstairs with Julian while he was sent away. He had suspected it, but he stayed for Maya. Now he knew Maya wasn't even his. He wasn't a father. He was nothing. The nurse, Sarah Miller, touched his shoulder to comfort him. As her fingers touched his skin, time stopped. The world froze. A red holographic screen appeared in his vision. ALCHEMIST LEDGER TARGET FOUND Name: Sarah Miller Age: 46 Death: Stabbed by a thief Time Left: 00:04:58 Trade Value: $100,000 Then a vision hit him. He saw Sarah walking into the hallway. A man jumped out from the stairs, eyes wild, holding rusted scissors. He stabbed her in the neck. There was so much blood. He could smell the copper scent of it. He watched her collapse, clawing at the wound. A clock on the wall ticked down the last seconds. The screen vanished. Time started again. Adrian jumped back, gasping for air. Sarah frowned. "Mr. Cole? Are you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost." "I... yeah. Just a shock, I think." His voice was rough. His mind was racing. She nodded. "You'll be okay. Just rest." She turned and left the room. Adrian’s heart hammered. What was that? He remembered the fire and the red words: ALCHEMIST LEDGER. He had said "Yes." Was it a dream? But it felt too real. Suddenly, a loud shout came from the hallway. He heard a wet, choking sound. Then, red blood started sliding under his door. The door burst open. Sarah lay there, scissors in her throat. Her eyes were wide and empty. The thief stood over her, shaking and covered in blood. He looked at Adrian. "Damn," Adrian muttered as the man stepped forward. Adrian tried to move back, but two security guards tackled the thief from behind. They wrestled him to the ground while alarms started screaming. In the middle of the mess, Adrian stared at Sarah’s dead body. Red words appeared again. ALCHEMIST LEDGER TRADE COMPLETE Sarah Miller - $100,000 claimed What? The words faded as more doctors arrived. Adrian stared at the blood. He had seen it happen. He had let it happen. And now... money? "What is going on?" An hour later, he demanded to leave. The doctors told him to stay, but he lied and said he was fine. He signed the papers with a shaking hand and walked out. Outside, the cold December air hit him. The streets were full of shoppers. Adrian walked without a plan. "What am I now? Some kind of monster? Do I trade souls for cash? How did I get here?" His phone buzzed. It was a message from his bank. $100,000 had been put into his account. Before the fire, he only had $23.47. Now he was rich. "Oh my God," he whispered. It was real. His mind raced. If one death was a hundred thousand, ten would be a million. People died every day. He could touch them, see how they die, and just watch it happen to get the money. There would be no blood on his hands. Or he could be a hero and save them. But what if he saved someone? He didn't know what would happen. He shook his head and walked through the crowd. Up ahead, in the middle of the street, he saw a glowing shape. It was a woman, but she was see-through. Cars drove right through her. Adrian rubbed his eyes, but she was still there. It was Sarah, the nurse. She was pale, and blood still stained her clothes. She didn't make a sound, but he heard her voice in his head: "You let me die. I'm coming for you." Then she vanished like smoke. Adrian couldn't speak. He was terrified. Was he still the same Adrian Cole? He stumbled and almost fell. A teenager on a scooter clipped his leg. "Watch it, man!" the kid yelled, stopping his scooter. The kid was about seventeen. He had messy hair and a backpack. Their eyes met, and the kid touched Adrian's arm to balance himself. Time froze again. The red screen appeared. ALCHEMIST LEDGER TARGET FOUND Name: Jordan Reyes Age: 17 Death: Hit by a delivery van Time Left: 00:00:29 Trade Value: $25,000 In a vision, Adrian saw Jordan drive into traffic. A van ran a red light and smashed into him. He saw the kid's body fly over the hood. He saw his head hit the road. The vision ended. Adrian’s heart was thumping. Twenty-five grand? It was easy money. All he had to do was walk away. But something hurt inside him. What if Sarah and Jordan both haunt me? He couldn't watch another person die. He reached out and grabbed Jordan’s arm. "Hey, let go!" the teen yelled. Adrian pulled him back hard. Just then, a large van roared past them. It went right through the red light, missing them by an inch. Jordan turned pale. "Whoa. That... that would have killed me." "Yes," Adrian said. "It would have." Jordan got off his scooter, shaking. "Thanks, mister. Seriously." He pushed his scooter onto the sidewalk and walked away. Red words appeared: ALCHEMIST LEDGER SAVE REGISTERED Jordan Reyes - Trade denied BALANCE: LEDGER BAR - RED: 1 | GREEN: 1 Suddenly, a massive wave of pain hit Adrian. It felt like a train had actually hit him. His heart stopped for a second. His chest felt crushed. He fell to the ground, gasping. He felt the pain the kid was supposed to feel: the crash of the van and the hard hit on the road. It felt like an eternity of agony. Slowly, the pain started to go away. He sat up, sweating. A police officer walked over. "You okay? Do you need a doctor?" Adrian waved him away and stood up on shaky legs. He didn't need to be told how this worked. If he lets a person die, he gets money, but their ghost haunts him. If he saves them, he feels their death in his own body. He was losing his life force. He felt years older already. But his anger was stronger than the pain. As he walked down the street, he started making a plan. He would find Madam Beatrice first. He would touch her and see how she dies. Then he would tell her every scary detail and watch the fear on her face. Then he would find Julian, the man who stole his wife and his life. He would whisper their fates to them like bedtime stories. He would make them suffer before the Ledger claimed them. He didn't care if his life was miserable now. He would live just long enough to see them broken. Revenge came first. The curse could wait.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 124: The First Snow of the New Era
The frost that dusted the thatched roof of the mountain cottage was only the vanguard. By midnight, the wind shifted entirely to the north, howling down through the high stone pass like a chorus of long-forgotten trumpets. It brought with it the true winter—a heavy, relentless snowfall that blanketed the Capital Basin in three feet of quiet, untracked white. When morning broke, the horizon was no longer marked by the distinction between earth and sky. Everything had become a single expanse of silver and ash-grey, softened at the edges where the ancient pine forests met the valley floor. In the old stone guardhouse by the river, William the printer sat wrapped in two heavy wool blankets, his breath rising in small white clouds as he tended a small iron Brazier filled with glowing oak charcoal. His fingers, stiff with the damp cold, worked methodically over the wooden type-cases. The ink on his stone ink-slab had grown thick and viscous, refusing to sprea
Chapter 123: The Hearth at the Margin
By the fifth autumn after the printing press arrived in the valley, the high timber pass to the north had developed its own quiet rhythm. The snows came earlier now, dusting the grey granite peaks in late September, but the valley floor remained temperate, shielded by the horseshoe curve of the northern ridge. In a small clearing two miles above the rowan grove, where the ancient oak forest met the high stone pastures, a new homestead had taken root. It was not built to imperial specification. There were no square foundation stones stamped with a surveyor’s mark, no heavy iron window grills, and no oak-beamed roof designed to withstand a military siege. It was a low, wide house built of fieldstone and thick river clay, its roof thatched with heavy mountain reeds that smelled of dry earth and summer sun. Elena stood in the doorway, her hands dusted with coarse flour as she watched the sun slip behind the jagged teeth of the Western March.<
Chapter 122: The First Map of the Unnamed
The summer after the wooden press was installed in the old guardhouse, three travelers arrived from the southern headwaters. They did not carry weapons, trade-goods, or the velvet-bound portfolios of official surveyor-generals. Instead, they carried rolled sheets of stiff, un-bleached hemp paper, long brass-bound sighting rods, and small leather bags of red ochre.They were cartographers—or what remained of the cartographers' guild after the central registry offices had dissolved into grey pulp.They stopped at the foot of the hill where the river split into two broad, shallow branches around a gravel bar. The leader of the three, an old woman named Maren whose left eye was cloudy from fifty years of peering through brass lenses at high-altitude trigonometric stations, unrolled her largest sheet across the top of an old oak barrel.The paper was largely empty. There were no sharp crimson lines marking provincial boundaries, no golden crests declaring the personal holdings of the Grand
Chapter 121: The Unbound Ink
The first winter after the silver trader traded his mules for salt pork brought a blizzard that buried the old tollpass five feet deep. For three weeks, no foot traffic moved between the Capital Basin and the Western Courts.When the snows finally receded under the pale yellow light of an early March thaw, it was not an army or a tax-collector that came over the ridge. It was a single, lean horse pulling a two-wheeled cart covered in oiled canvas.The driver was an old man named William, formerly a journeyman printer from the lower ward of the Coastal City. His hands were permanently stained a dark, metallic purple around the cuticles—the indelible mark of forty years spent setting lead type for the Grand Sovereign Gazette.He brought the cart to a halt at the wooden trough where the old highway vanished into the clover. He didn't carry a ledger, nor did he look for a registration office. From under the canvas, he pulled a broad, flat wooden frame holding
Chapter 120: The Unwritten Book
Ten years after the High Court turned to grey dust, the road to the Capital Basin was no longer called the Imperial Highway. It had no name at all.Where three-inch slabs of dressed granite had once been laid by conscripted labor to bear the iron wheels of the state’s artillery, wild chicory and pale mountain oats now pushed through the widening fissures. The grand tollgate at the crest of the northern pass—where three generations of merchants had surrendered four-tenths of their grain to the Prime Minister’s clerks—had collapsed into a low, moss-covered heap of dry-stacked stone.A stranger walking down the pass on a summer afternoon would not have found a border guard, a tax post, or a notice board pinned with imperial execution warrants. They would have found only a wooden trough fed by a cold mountain spring, and beside it, a low bench carved from a single log of white oak.Sitting on the bench was a boy of no more than nine years, his legs swinging idly above the grass as he pare
Chapter 119: The Unmapped Horizon
The silence that followed the collapse of the High Court was not the silence of a grave; it was the quiet of a blank canvas before the first stroke of graphite.Outside the fractured gates of the inner citadel, the Capital Basin lay bathed in the cool, clear light of an un-demarcated dawn. The air no longer smelled of sulfur, burning coal, or the chemical ink of the registry offices. It smelled of wet earth, river silt, and the clean, wild wind blowing in from the northern forests—forests that were no longer legally leased, cataloged, or scheduled for clearance.At the foot of the palace steps, where the grand marble avenue had once met the high iron gates of the lower tiers, the five hundred thousand citizens of the Capital stood in a vast, sprawling crescent.They did not shout. They did not carry flags of rebellion, nor did they crowd the steps with the desperate hunger of a mob seeking bread. They simply stood, their faces turned upward toward the ruin
You may also like
King of succubus
Golden_raise95.2K viewsVengeance of The Reborn Heir
Cindy Chen20.0K viewsDestroyer of the Dao
Evanscapenovel66.6K viewsXianXia : Sovereign of the Gods
kalki_gsk20.4K viewsTHE SHATTERED LEDGER
Tan clipps142 viewsThe Borrowed Time System
abundance ke316 viewsTHE VEIL PROTOCOL
YOUSSEF ELOUIZARI360 viewsTHE FALLEN CELESTIAL SOVEREIGN: I AWAKENED AFTER ELEVEN LIFE
CHICHI141 views