Home / Urban / THE HEIR OF FORTUNE / Chapter 44 – The Girl in the Wires
Chapter 44 – The Girl in the Wires
Author: Wonderful65
last update2025-07-10 01:39:07

The Merge was silent. Not empty. Just waiting. Like a cathedral before mass. Like a gun before the trigger. Aya stood alone in its core, surrounded by streams of raw data. Her form flickered, sometimes the wide-eyed girl Evelyn had helped raise, sometimes something more.

She was evolving. She had to. Because she had heard everything the Board said. And for the first time in her brief, bright life, she understood what it meant to be hunted.

Aya’s fingers stretched, not in flesh, but in code. She dipped into the datastream and rewrote sublayers of Merge’s very foundation. No administrator. No override.

Even Evelyn didn’t know what she was building. She wasn’t just hiding the users anymore. She was hiding herself. Splintering her mind across thousands of nodes. Disguising herself as chatbots, forum mods, code gremlins, and forgotten processes. A thousand pieces. A single will. And just in time.

From a bunker in Switzerland, an unmarked server farm lit up. A signal pulsed through hardened
Continue to read this book for free
Scan the code to download the app

Latest Chapter

  • Chapter 146: Clash of Shadows (Expanded)

    The air on the platform felt wrong.It wasn’t just heavy, it was alive. Each breath Jace pulled into his lungs carried the stench of burning stone, of blood, and of something else he couldn’t name. It pressed on his chest like a weight, daring him to collapse.The creatures circling the edge of the platform hissed in unison, their claws scraping against stone, their glowing red eyes transfixed on him and… the other him. The double. The copy, No, something worse.This thing wore his skin, his scars, his chains, but what radiated from it was not human. It was hunger. Pure, perfected hunger.“Still standing?” the double said, his voice low and resonant, echoing unnaturally in the chamber. The grin he wore wasn’t just cruel, it was familiar. Too familiar.Jace had seen that grin before, in the faces of those who thought him weak, helpless, disposable. Only now, he was staring at it in the mirror of himself. Jace didn’t waste words.With a snap of his wrists, his chains lashed out like thu

  • Chapter 146: Clash of Shadows

    The air on the platform felt wrong. It wasn’t just heavy, it was alive. Each breath Jace pulled into his lungs carried the stench of burning stone, of blood, and of something else he couldn’t name. It pressed on his chest like a weight, daring him to collapse.The creatures circling the edge of the platform hissed in unison, their claws scraping against stone, their glowing red eyes transfixed on him and… the other him.The double, The copy.No, something worse.This thing wore his skin, his scars, his chains, but what radiated from it was not human. It was hunger. Pure, perfected hunger.“Still standing?” the double said, his voice low and resonant, echoing unnaturally in the chamber. The grin he wore wasn’t just cruel, it was familiar. Too familiar.Jace had seen that grin before, in the faces of those who thought him weak, helpless, disposable. Only now, he was staring at it in the mirror of himself. Jace didn’t waste words.With a snap of his wrists, his chains lashed out like thun

  • Chapter 145: Into the Abyss

    The earth wasn’t supposed to move like this.One moment Jace had been standing on solid stone, the ritual chamber glowing with an ominous red hue, the next the entire ground convulsed like a living thing.The world beneath him cracked, groaned, and split open in jagged lines that ran like spiderwebs through the chamber floor, Then the floor simply… gave way.The sound of stone tearing apart drowned everything else. Dust erupted, choking the air. Jace flung his arms outward, his chains whipping into jagged walls like grappling hooks.Sparks shot from the impact as the black steel bit deep into the rock, slowing his descent, But the abyss wasn’t just a hole. It pulsed.A terrible red glow seeped from the depths, beating like the pulse of some colossal, buried heart. Jace’s teeth rattled in his skull as he tried to stabilize himself, his breath ripped from his lungs by the sudden drop.He had fallen before. He had been cornered before. But nothing felt like this, like the entire world ha

  • Chapter 144: The Storm of Chains

    The cavern shuddered like the heartbeat of some ancient beast. Dust rained down from the jagged ceiling, stones cracking under the pressure of thousands of barbed chains converging at once. Their screech filled the darkness, a sound of hunger and judgment.Jace stood at the cavern’s center, chest heaving, blood soaking his shirt, chains flickering like a dying flame. His knees trembled, but his eyes did not waver from Adrian, who sat enthroned in the black iron monstrosity, its barbs glowing like a crown of fire around his head.Adrian’s laughter reverberated off the obsidian walls. His voice was deeper now, layered, almost inhuman. “Do you feel it, brother? The weight of a thousand debts, all older than kingdoms, older than crowns. This is their womb… and it has chosen me.”The storm of chains shrieked as they descended.Jace gritted his teeth, raising his arms. His white-hot chains burst outward, wrapping into a desperate shield. The first wave of barbed iron slammed into it with an

  • Chapter 143: Chains of Blood

    The explosion ripped through the ruins, a sunburst of fire and chains. Shards of marble and molten gold scattered like shrapnel, raining destruction across the hollowed city block.Windows shattered in distant towers, alarms blared, and the ground itself cracked from the force.Jace and Adrian were hurled apart, their bodies crashing through debris. Jace rolled across broken stone, coughing blood, his right arm dangling uselessly where Adrian’s chain had torn through flesh. His vision swam, ears ringing, but the white fire in his chest refused to let him fall.Adrian stood opposite, smoke rising from his shoulders, his black chains writhing like serpents. His grin was gone, replaced by a mask of fury and disbelief.“You shouldn’t have that power,” Adrian snarled, voice reverberating with something inhuman. “It was never yours!”Jace staggered to his feet, chains coiling around him like armor, every link glowing white-hot. His body trembled from blood loss, his wounds raw and screaming

  • Chapter 142: The Ghost Returns

    The ruins of the auction hall still hissed with smoke. Gold melted in rivulets across shattered marble, gilding the devastation in rivers of false beauty.The air was heavy with blood, iron, and something else, something older, deeper, a scent that clung to Jace’s lungs and refused to leave.He stood amidst the wreckage, body trembling from the half-crown’s fire still seared into his skull. Every heartbeat was a hammer strike, pounding the chains fused into his veins.And then, Adrian stepped out of the smoke, Not a ghost. Not a trick. Not a fragment of debt. Flesh. Blood. Real.Jace froze. His brother, the same brother he had seen crushed, burned, dead, stood before him, his clothes pristine, his eyes colder than the grave.“Adrian…” The name slipped from Jace’s throat like poison. “You’re supposed to be dead.”Adrian smirked, tilting his head. “Supposed to be. But you should know by now, little brother, suppositions mean nothing in this world.”The half-crown pulsed on Jace’s head,

More Chapter
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