2025-07-31 19:19:07The rain fell hard over Nyron City, slicking the pavement in a cold shimmer as neon signs flickered overhead. Beneath one of them, a broken red cross that once marked a local pharmacy. Kael Vale crouched beside a dumpster, clutching a cloth wrapped bundle of herbs to his chest.
His shift at the clinic had ended hours ago. Not that anyone cared. The other apprentices treated him like a shadow good for scrubbing floors and fetching medicines, but nothing more.
He was "the charity case," the "orphan with no aura," the boy who'd failed every basic Qi detection test since he was seven. But tonight...something felt off.
The wind whistled down the alleyway, pushing Kael’s soaked hoodie tight against his skin. His breath misted. Lightning cracked once, then again. A deep thrum pulsed under the concrete like a heartbeat slow, rhythmic, unnatural. That was when he saw him.
A man lay sprawled in the alley, half submerged in garbage bags, chest rising faintly. His robes were tattered but strange stitched with metallic thread and humming with a faint light.
A sword lay beside him, too elegant to belong in this part of the city. Kael’s eyes widened. He hesitated, instinct screaming to run. But then the man coughed wet, blood soaked. Kael moved.
He pressed his hands against the man’s chest. No heartbeat. Shallow breathing. But what caught his eye wasn’t the wound, it was the swirling black aura leaking from the man’s chest like smoke, Qi so dense and corrupted it twisted the air.
"You're dying," Kael whispered. "But your Qi..." "Help... me..." the man rasped, eyes fluttering open. One hand shot out, gripping Kael’s wrist with terrifying strength.
And then the vision came. A burst of images exploded behind Kael’s eyes. Mountains made of fire. Storms trapped in crystal. A tree with roots in the stars. A beast made of thunder, chained and roaring. And a flame a hollow blue flame, burning in total silence. Then darkness.
Kael gasped, pulling back, nearly vomiting. His vision spun. "Wh-What did you". The man let go. His body trembled violently, and a strange seal glowed over his heart, pulsing once... then again... before flashing toward Kael’s chest.
A searing heat pierced Kael’s sternum like a blade. He screamed. The world spun sideways. He collapsed. When Kael woke, it was still raining.
But the man was gone. Only the sword remained lodged into the ground, its hilt faintly glowing. Kael's chest throbbed. He pulled his shirt aside and stared. A faint seal, glowing with blue fire, now burned over his heart.
Later That Night...
Kael sat alone in the backroom of the clinic, shirt off, breathing shallow. The seal hadn’t faded. And when he touched the sword, it vanished. Not disappeared, but entered him. Like it had become part of his blood.
He tried to ignore it, but his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Until the herbs he'd carried all day began to glow. Faint, but real. Kael picked one up and held it to a cut on his arm. The moment it touched his skin, the wound closed.
He stumbled back, staring at his palm. That was when the door creaked open. An old man with hollow eyes and tattered robes stepped inside. His presence warped the air, like a void swallowing noise.
He looked Kael up and down. “So,” he said, voice like dry leaves. “The Flame chose you.”
Kael backed up. “Who are you?” The man didn’t blink. “Your master. If you survive.” Kael unknowingly inherits a seal meant for a powerful martial healer. But the seal is incomplete… and cursed. His life is now the target of those who want it back.
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Chapter 187 — The Third Flame
The abyss convulsed. Where Kael stood, the flames of his reflection and the light of Mira’s tether bent inward, collapsing into him but what spilled out was not either of them.It was something raw, older than fire, older than light. A current that burned without heat, shone without radiance.The Sovereign’s laughter cut short, replaced by a silence so vast it swallowed the void. The reflection staggered, molten cracks racing across its body. “What… what is this?”Mira, trembling on the broken stones of the throne, felt her tether snap taut like a string stretched too far.The golden thread shivered, threatened to unravel, but at the other end Kael burned brighter than ever. She whispered hoarsely, “Kael… what did you do?”Kael’s voice was ragged, every word drawn from the marrow of his bones. “I stopped choosing between pain and hope. Between rage and tether. This… this is mine.”The abyss rippled. Chains of Sovereign fire lashed at him, but the new flame devoured them without effort
Chapter 186 — Fractured War
The world around Kael fractured into mirrors. Each shard was a battlefield, each reflection a different Kael. Some bore chains that cut into their wrists, dragging them through fire.Others had eyes hollow and soulless, nothing but walking husks. Still others were wreathed in storm and flame, laughing as they burned everything in sight.And at the center two versions of him. One tethered to Mira’s hand, trembling but alive. The other blazing like a god, fire consuming his every step.They collided. The abyss screamed as the two Kaels slammed into one another, a clash of tether and fire.“YOU’RE WEAK!” the reflection bellowed, its molten fists crashing down. “You cling to others like a child! What happens when they’re gone? When she dies? When everyone dies?”Kael caught the blow, his arm shaking, flesh searing. His voice was hoarse but steady. “Then I’ll burn for them. I’ll carry them in the flame.”The reflection snarled. “Pathetic!”The battlefield erupted. Ash rained down in sheets
Chapter 185 — Ash Within the Hand
Darkness. Not the silence of the void. Not the crushing weight of the Sovereign’s throne. This was deeper denser.Kael floated in it, or perhaps he was falling. He couldn’t tell. His body was gone; only ash and fire remained. His thoughts came in fragments, each one burning away before it could settle.Am I still… me?The ember inside him flickered weakly. He tried to hold on to it, but the darkness was greedy. It pressed against him from all sides, whispering, gnawing, pulling at every spark of flame.A voice rose from the abyss. “Child of ember… you are undone.”The words were not spoken, they lived inside his skull, in his chest, in the hollow where his heart used to beat.Kael clenched his teeth, though he wasn’t sure he still had teeth. His voice cracked like burning wood. “You don’t get… to name me undone.”The darkness laughed. The sound folded on itself, infinite, an endless echo. “Names are nothing. You are ash. Ash cannot burn.”But the ember still flickered. And with it Mir
Chapter 184 — The Hand of Unmaking
The hand descended. Kael’s body convulsed as the pressure swallowed him. Mira screamed his name, her tether blazing like a sun, but even her light bent under the weight.The reflection hurled itself forward, flames flaring with suicidal fury, but the hand of unmaking did not slow. This was not the Sovereign. This was something deeper. A force that did not strike, it erased.The battlefield shuddered, fragments of broken realms collapsing into the mask’s approach. The god of unmaking pulled not only Kael, but all reality toward its hollow grasp.“KAEL GET UP!” Mira’s cry tore through the chaos. She shoved tether-light into him, strands wrapping his chest, his arms, his failing legs. The light steadied him, even as his ember cracked like shattered glass.Kael dragged himself upright, blood soaking his side, flames bleeding from every wound. His eyes blazed. He lifted both arms, fire screaming from his fists, and roared into the storm:“IF YOU WANT ME, COME AND BURN!”He unleashed everyt
Chapter 183 — Into the Absence
There was no falling. No motion. Only erasure. Kael gasped, but no air filled his lungs. Fire sputtered from his skin, yet it produced no heat, no light.He staggered, clutching himself, but even his body felt fractured like he was both present and absent, burning and extinguished all at once.The silence pressed closer. Not emptiness, but a living hunger, a will that gnawed at his ember, stripping memory from bone, meaning from breath.Faces flickered and died: Mira’s smile, the reflection’s burning gaze, the first flame he had ever kindled as a child. Each one was devoured the instant it surfaced.“No…” His voice cracked, thinner than ash. “You won’t take them.”The silence did not speak, but it answered. Pressure closed around his chest, crushing the ember within. His flames cracked like glass, shards of fire scattering and dissolving into nothing.And then a voice not sound, but imprint seared through his skull. “You were never yours. You were always mine.”Kael staggered, clutchi
Chapter 182 — The Thing Beneath
The shards did not fall. They hung in the void, jagged prisms suspended in an orbit of impossible symmetry.Each shard reflected Kael, Mira, the reflection, and the Sovereign yet none of the images matched the reality before them. Some showed Kael burning the world to ash.Some showed Mira lying dead at his feet. Others showed the Sovereign kneeling, broken, chains shattered into dust.And in one shard, Kael saw nothing. Not darkness. Not void. Nothing. The absence bled outward. From within that absence, a shape began to crawl.At first it was small a sliver of shadow, a ripple where form should not exist.But as the shards spun, the absence grew, consuming reflection after reflection until every shard showed only the same horror: a vast figure writhing out of the broken glass, its body stitched from silence, its face an unformed abyss.The Sovereign staggered, molten frame shuddering. Its laugh broke into a wheeze. “Yes… yes. Wake. Wake, my master.”Mira’s hand flew to Kael’s arm. He
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