2026-05-28 22:41:14The morning sun started roasting the Jakarta asphalt, which still had some puddles left from last night's rain. Hanan strolled through the crowd of people rushing to work. In his eyes, they all looked like worker ants following some invisible pheromone trail stuck in their routines, piled-up bills, and scared of what tomorrow brings.
He stopped at a busy intersection. Above a building, a massive digital billboard was blasting the emergency morning news. Hanan's face, from an old photo before the accident, filled the screen. The news was reporting the mystery disappearance of a paralyzed guy from the tenth floor of his apartment, complete with a clip of Sarah sobbing her eyes out for the cameras, playing the role of the heartbroken wife perfectly.
Hanan just stared at the screen. No anger. No satisfaction. That cheap drama on the screen felt like some TV show from another planet that had nothing to do with him anymore.
"This world is seriously good at lying to itself," Hanan whispered, his voice getting swallowed by the roar of traffic.
"And you're just starting to figure it out," The ancient voice in his head echoed back. This time, it didn't sound as condescending as the night before. There was this heavy vibe of anticipation. "That old jerk from last night was right, Hanan. You're not the only creature who broke the chains in this world. You're finally out of the sheep pen."
Hanan looked away from the billboard. The hunger that woke up in the park last night—that spark of new ambition replacing his empty emotions was now thumping harder in his chest. It beat in sync with the cracks in his Limiter, which kept pumping hot energy through his veins.
"Who are they? And why didn't you tell me from the start?" Hanan asked in his head.
"Because before this, you were just a baby crawling out of the cosmic womb," the voice mocked him. "You were way too busy crying over your lost emotions and playing around with some low-level revenge on mortals. If I told you yesterday, you would've just run away scared. But now... you've got a will. You've got the instinct to survive in a whole new food chain."
Hanan closed his eyes, ignoring the car horns and the noise all around him. If this world was some giant system with algorithm codes he could read whenever he wanted, then he just needed to tweak his search filter. He stopped wasting energy reading heartbeats, the lies of beggars, or the odds of the regular people on these streets.
He took a deep breath, then forced his consciousness to dive deeper. Right through the layers of this boring physical reality.
Suddenly, everything around him flipped. The city colors faded into a thick grey, leaving behind bright gold energy webs tied to every person walking by. Those were their Limiters—metaphysical chains designed by the universe to keep humans mortal, weak, controlled, and safe.
Hanan dialed up his perception radius. One kilometer. Five kilometers. Ten kilometers. His brain, which was now working better than the most high-tech supercomputer, processed billions of data points in a split second.
Look for the gap. Find another crack.
And then, he caught something.
About seven kilometers south, right in the heart of the capital's business district packed with glass skyscrapers, Hanan spotted an anomaly. In a sea of uniform, neat gold threads, there was a spot where reality looked totally distorted.
A dark purple energy glow with savage neon flashes throbbed like a second heart. The gold threads around that glitch were snapped, twisting all over the place, getting sucked into that energy vortex like a tiny black hole.
Someone over there wasn't tied down. Someone in that elite area had a crack just like him.
"Found you," Hanan muttered. He opened his eyes, which were now glowing with a cold, deadly gold light.
"Watch out what you're chasing, Limit Breaker," the ancient voice warned. "The ones who broke their Limiters before you might have sacrificed way more of their humanity. In their eyes, you—who is still clinging to bits of this 'boredom' are just fresh prey. You can actually die, Hanan. And this time, your death will wipe your soul right out of existence."
Hanan gave a thin smirk, a smile that had zero warmth in it. "In that case, let's see who's gonna be the prey today."
Hanan took one step forward. Space and time around him warped a bit. In a blink, his body flickered and vanished from that crowded intersection. He moved way past the speed of sound, leaving nothing but a blast of wind that swept up street dust and made a few pedestrians stumble around, totally confused.
The void in his soul wasn't completely gone yet. But at least this morning, Hanan had a new game to play. A bloody game where the stakes weren't just about getting back at some cheating wife, but keeping himself alive among these messed-up, self-made gods.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
31. Static Syndrome
The smell of burnt ozone clung to Hanan’s hair, and his skin felt like it was being sandpapered by microscopic bits of data. He sat on the floor of an abandoned electronics shop, his back against a shelf full of empty hardware boxes. Outside, the streets of Jakarta were shivering. Not vibrating, not trembling—shivering, as if reality itself was cold and trying to huddle up against the inevitable arrival of the Void.Hanan gripped his left wrist. He couldn't feel his pulse. Instead, he could feel a rhythmic, mechanical hum pulsing against his bones—a steady, 60-cycle vibration. The Static Syndrome."Stop it," Hanan hissed at his own limb. He wasn't talking to his skin, but to the reality-construct he had foolishly folded into his own nervous system to save the data drive."You look like shit, boss."Hanan looked up. His 'pet' Glitch—a lingering anomaly of code he had partially shackled to his existence—was hovering in the corner of the room. It had fashioned a semi-humanoid shape,
30 : : A Whisper from the Void
The pavement under Hanan’s boots felt less like solid ground and more like a suggestion he had to repeatedly convince into existence. Each step he took required a subconscious calculation a subtle manipulation of local coordinates just to ensure the street didn't dematerialize under his weight.Beside him, his thrall—the glitched, shadowed humanoid was flickering with frantic urgency. It twitched, its silhouette tearing at the edges like burnt parchment, sensing the proximity of something fundamentally "other."The Whisper didn't start as a sound. It started as a pressure in Hanan’s teeth, a subsonic frequency that turned his spit into dry metal. Then came the voices. Thousands of them, overlapping like radio stations fighting for a signal, yet all carrying the same tonal despair."The Scaffold is fraying, Architect," the whisper leaked from the very air, vibrating against the storefronts. "The mortar is turning to sand."Hanan didn't break his stride, though his heart hammered a fran
The Empty Architecture
The silence inside the former headquarters of Elysium was more oppressive than the sound of static outside. It wasn't just a lack of noise; it was the absence of a future. Hanan kicked through a layer of dust that turned out to be microscopic, degraded plastic fragments of server chassis. The sleek, ultramodern lobby of the Elysium facility once the pinnacle of humanity’s digital evolution looked like the skeleton of a prehistoric beast. Wiring hung from the ceiling like desiccated veins, and the walls, stripped of their decorative glass, revealed the ugly, porous concrete underneath.He kept his hand on the handle of the revolver he carried, not because it could stop a Glitch, but because the cold, heavy steel felt more real than the ghost of his own arm. His companion—the tamed Glitch-Walker—lurked near the entrance, a smear of agitated shadows that seemed to shudder whenever Hanan’s stability spiked or dipped."Keep a lid on it," Hanan murmured, glancing back. The creature didn't
Glitch-Walker
The street beneath Hanan’s boots was no longer concrete; it was a patchwork quilt of memory and failing logic. Where gravity had returned, reality didn't just snap back, it shuddered, leaving jagged fissures in the air that looked like spiderwebs made of black light."Revoked?" Hanan spat, ignoring the phantom pain vibrating in his core. He kept his eyes locked on the Surveyor, but his peripheral vision screamed danger. Something moved in the cracks. Shadowy, translucent shapes detached themselves from the walls of a half-collapsed department store. They were Glitch-Walkers the inevitable fallout of the deconstruction. They didn't have lungs to breathe or muscles to move; they were predatory manifestations of unfinished thoughts and broken physical laws, drifting through the gaps in the world like predators through tall grass."Permits are for bureaucrats, not gods," Hanan said, stepping back, his hands glowing with the soft, failing blue light of the Universal Core he’d partially a
When Gravity Decides to Retire
The shift didn’t happen with a roar. It happened with a sigh a weary, low-frequency oscillation that rippled through the central business district of Jakarta like a pebble tossed into a still pond. One moment, Hanan was mid-fall through the folding architecture of space; the next, he slammed onto the pavement of Jalan Sudirman. The transition wasn't smooth. His molecules lagged behind, his boots feeling heavy enough to crush the asphalt while his skin felt light, airy, and prone to scattering in the wind.He scrambled to his feet, but his balance was a lie. The ground beneath him didn't pull down; it felt optional. Across the street, a parked delivery truck tipped gently, not from a collision, but because gravity had simply decided to stop working. The vehicle drifted upward, rotating in the mid-morning air like a dead buoy in an ocean current. A driver, trapped in the cab, let out a throttled scream that rose in pitch as he floated past the third story of a glass-clad office buildi
The Sound of Static
The hum was everywhere. It wasn’t a sound you caught with your eardrums; it was a frequency you felt in your marrow, like the vibration of a subway train rumbling beneath an empty house.Hanan sat on the edge of the broadcast tower’s antenna, his legs dangling five hundred meters above the glowing sprawl of Jakarta. The city lights flickered—a strange, jagged rhythm that didn't sync with the hum of the power grid. To anyone else, it looked like a flickering fluorescent bulb. To Hanan, it looked like a dying heartbeat."You're hearing it too, aren't you?" Hanan didn't turn his head. He knew the voice. It wasn't Rendy, not exactly. It was the phantom scrap, the leftover recursive loop of the Trinity that he had foolishly kept when he absorbed the dimension's core. It sounded like glass sliding over wet marble."I’m hearing a mess, Rendy," Hanan muttered, picking at a loose thread on his hoodie. The fabric looked solid, but under his thumb, it distorted, briefly showing the sub-atomic c
You may also like
The Charismatic Charlie Wade
Lord Leaf64.9M viewsWISH TO BE RICH
South Ashan79.6K viewsBack From Prison!
KMyay180.3K viewsThe Billionaire Husband in Disguise
Banin SN192.0K viewsThe Hidden Heir's Stunning Revenge
Starlight355 viewsAshes of the forsaken bride
S. Nova176 viewsBecoming A War God: Rise Of Darius Holloway
Morning Star96 viewsBurned Clean
Bert93 views