2025-10-06 22:37:49White light.
The steady rhythm of a heart monitor, too perfect to be real.
Richard stared at the ceiling. The antiseptic smell was clean but heavy, the kind that hides something underneath.
Dr. Frost entered quietly, her coat whispering against the tiled floor. “You’re awake,” she said, almost smiling. “How do you feel?”
“Alive,” he murmured. “I think.” She pulled up a chair. “That’s more than we expected last night.” He watched her expression, calm, composed. “Where am I, really?”
She tilted her head. “Saint Alaria General Hospital. Sub-wing C.” He frowned. “I’ve worked at Alaria before. There is no Sub-wing C.” Her smile didn’t falter. “Most people don’t need to know it exists.”
A cold tremor ran through him. “Then I shouldn’t be here.”
“Oh, you should,” she said gently. “You were dead for exactly four minutes. When your heart restarted, your blood chemistry changed. We’re trying to understand how.”
Richard looked at his hands, pale, unscarred. “I remember… touching someone. Then”
“One lived, one didn’t,” Frost finished for him. “You did something extraordinary, Mr. Walter.”
“I killed him. ”She folded her hands. “You reacted. There’s a difference.” “Tell that to his family.”
A long silence hung between them until Frost stood. “Follow me. There’s something I want you to see.”
The Observation Wing
She led him through a sterile corridor that looked like any hospital hallway, until the air cooled. The lights dimmed one shade too low, and the floor shifted from tile to polished metal.
A door marked Authorized Personnel Only hissed open at her card swipe.
Below, a laboratory spread like an underground cathedral of glass. Dozens of monitors, tanks filled with faint blue light, and people in coats moving like ghosts behind the glass walls.
“What is this?” Richard whispered.
“Research,” Frost said. “Into post-traumatic awakenings. You’re not the first person to come back changed. But you are the first to do it without external catalysts.”
“External catalysts?”
“Enhancers. Serums. Controlled Qi exposure.” She gestured to a table where another patient lay unconscious, wires mapping their body. “We’ve been studying latent energy in human cells, the potential to repair tissue, or destroy it. You demonstrated both.”
“I don’t want to be your experiment.”
Frost met his eyes. “You already are.” He stared at her, trying to find humanity in her tone. “So, what happens now?”
“You learn control. If you don’t, that energy will eat you from the inside out.”
The Test
They stood in a small isolation chamber surrounded by mirrored walls. Frost tapped a tablet.
Richard obeyed. The panel glowed beneath his palm, faint, golden. A ripple of warmth climbed his arm, quickening his heartbeat.
“Breathe. Focus on the memory of healing.”
He closed his eyes. The memory of the wounded paramedic flashed: panic, blood, the desperate wish to save him.
The glow brightened. “Good,” Frost said. “Now redirect it.”
“How?”
“Intention. Will it outward.”
The energy pulsed. The metal under his hand melted in a perfect circle, smoke rising. Frost didn’t flinch. “Interesting. You shifted polarity mid-stream.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you turned healing into destruction.”
He stepped back, shaking. “You said control, this isn’t control.”
“It’s a start.”
Voices Through the Glass
Later, alone in a holding room, Richard stared at his reflection. The mirror’s surface quivered faintly. He pressed his palm to it. Warm.
A whisper bled through.
He froze. The voice wasn’t Frost’s. “…the Director wants results before the next incident.” The mirror went cold again.
He sat down slowly. Subject 13. That meant there were at least twelve before him.
Frost Returns
She entered carrying two mugs of coffee. “You look pale.”
“You were listening?” he asked.
“Always.” She set a mug in front of him. “Caffeine stabilizes the surge. Helps ground the nervous system.”
He didn’t touch it. “How many others are there like me?”
She sighed, setting the tablet down. “Few survive long enough to ask that question.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Because you wouldn’t like it.”
“Try me.”
Frost met his eyes. “Thirty-two. Across four facilities.”
He stared. “And the others?”
Her silence said enough.
Richard exhaled. “You’re running a program.”
“A necessity,” she replied quietly. “If uncontrolled awakeners roam free, people die. We study them to prevent that.”
“Or to weaponize them.”
Her expression tightened. “Do you think you’re the first to suspect that?”
“So what am I now? A test subject, or a soldier?”
“Neither,” she said. “For now, you’re a patient. The rest depends on how honest you are with me.”
He looked at the untouched coffee, steam curling like a question mark. “And if I’m not?”
Frost’s eyes softened. “Then someone else will take over your treatment. And they won’t ask.”
Midnight Experiment
Hours later, Richard couldn’t sleep. The room lights dimmed automatically, but the hum beneath the bed didn’t stop, a low mechanical heartbeat.
He swung his legs down, padded to the wall. The air-vent grille hid a faint blue glow. When he pressed his ear against it, he heard murmurs, muffled, desperate.
“…increase dosage… he’s rejecting it…”
“…tell Frost we’re losing the host”
A sharp beep cut the feed. Silence.
Richard stepped back, pulse racing. He moved to the door. Locked. Of course. He scanned the ceiling camera lens in the corner. He faced it and whispered, “If you’re watching, I want answers.”
Nothing.
Then the speaker crackled. Frost’s voice, calm as ever:
He froze. “So you are watching.”
“For your safety.”
“There’s someone dying down there!”
Silence, then softly: “Not everyone can be saved.”
The line went dead.
Power Unleashed
Anger surged, hot and electric. His vision flickered. The heart monitor spiked. The air shimmered around his hands, a gold-and-black aura twisting like smoke.
The lights flickered.
The door’s magnetic lock clicked, once, twice, and released.
Richard stared. “No way.” He pushed it open. The hallway beyond was empty, humming with the sound of hidden machines. He followed the faint blue glow down a stairwell marked Maintenance Access.
At the bottom, another door, this one glass. Behind it, a row of capsules. Inside each, a person floated in viscous light. Tubes, sensors, silence.
One capsule flashed red. The patient inside convulsed.
Richard slammed his hand against the glass, a surge of energy burst outward. The alarm wailed. The patient inside gasped and fell still… breathing.
He had healed him.
Footsteps thundered behind him.
“Richard!” Frost’s voice echoed. “Step away from the chamber!”
He turned. “They’re alive, you’re experimenting on them!”
“We’re saving them!” she snapped, approaching slowly. “You don’t understand the magnitude of what’s happening here.”
“Then explain it!”
“I can’t. Not yet.”
He clenched his fists. The air shimmered again.
“Calm yourself,” she ordered. “You’re destabilizing the grid.”
The floor lights flickered violently. A monitor exploded. Sparks rained down.
Frost grabbed his wrist. “Richard, look at me!” Their eyes locked. For a moment, everything stilled, the alarms, the noise, even his heartbeat.
Then a whisper in his mind: “She’s lying.” He jerked his hand away. “Who said that?”
Frost frowned. “What?”
“I heard a voice”
“Residual feedback,” she said quickly. “Ignore it.”
But he could still feel it, like someone else inside his pulse, breathing with him.
Containment Breach
The lab doors sealed automatically. Frost barked an order into her comm, “Initiate lockdown protocol!”
Guards poured in, weapons trained but unsure.
“Stand down,” she commanded. Richard backed against the wall. “You said you wanted to help me.”
“I still do,” she said, eyes sharp. “But if you can’t control that energy, everyone here dies.”
“I don’t believe you anymore.”
“Then believe this, ”She lifted her palm. For the first time, light gathered there too, a pale, silver hue.
Richard stared. “You have it?”
“A fragment,” she admitted. “Enough to contain you.” The energy in the room built, two forces humming in opposite frequencies. “Don’t make me do this,” she warned.
He shook his head slowly. “Too late.”
The collision lit the hallway like sunrise.
Aftermath
When the light faded, Richard was gone. The glass wall to the stairwell was shattered outward. Frost stood amid the wreckage, breathing hard, one sleeve burned away. Her earpiece crackled.
“Report,” a cold voice said.
She looked toward the hole in the wall where rain spilled in from the street above. “He’s loose,” she said quietly. “And his power is evolving.”
A pause. Then the voice replied, “Then find him. Before the others do.”
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CHAPTER 188 — THE SILENCE THAT TEACHES
Silence arrived like a presence.Not sudden, not loud, but insistent. It had weight. It shaped movement, slowed footfalls, and made the city’s pulse uneven. In Echo City, where alerts and responses had once defined reality, the absence of action became the most active force.Kael felt it first in the residential clusters. People no longer reacted immediately to signals, they paused. Hesitated. Even the small alerts for minor needs flickered longer than usual, like holding their breath before deciding whether to act.“It’s different now,” he said to Lina, standing at a high observation walkway. “People aren’t just not responding, they’re listening.”Lina nodded. “Silence is teaching them what we never could.”They watched a woman in District L kneel beside a cracked pavement tile. She reached into the fissure, hesitated, then withdrew her hand, leaving a small stone in place as a marker. No system prompted her. No one expected her to act. She merely did what felt right in the gap betwe
CHAPTER 187 — WHAT PEOPLE DO WITH SPACE
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CHAPTER 186 — THE SHAPE OF ABSENCE
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CHAPTER 185 — WHEN NO ONE ANSWERS
The hardest moments in Echo City were no longer the loud ones. They were the unanswered ones.A signal went out from a residential block in District H, low priority, human-generated, non-emergency. The kind that once would have been swallowed by automated triage and quietly resolved before anyone noticed. Now it lingered.A woman stood in her apartment doorway, palm resting against the frame, staring at the soft glow of her interface. Request acknowledged, it read. Nothing followed.She hadn’t asked for rescue. She hadn’t declared distress. She had only marked available to talk, a small flag, tentative, almost embarrassed. Minutes passed. Then ten. Then twenty.The city did not escalate the request. It did not reroute attention. It let the signal exist without interpretation.The woman swallowed, heart racing. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent it, she thought. Maybe this was stupid. She lowered her hand, preparing to close the door.That was when footsteps stopped at the end of the corridor
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CHAPTER 183 — THE COURAGE TO RELEASE
Echo City learned something quietly dangerous. Letting go felt like failure. Not collapse. Not betrayal. Failure.People had grown used to intervention, first automated, then human, then consensual. But release? Release carried no applause, no proof of virtue. It left behind only uncertainty.And uncertainty had teeth.Lina stood on a pedestrian overpass at dawn, watching the city wake unevenly. Some districts surged early, eager and restless. Others lingered in half-light, lights dimmed by choice, streets left open and empty like unanswered questions.The city was no longer synchronized. It was honest. “Look at that,” Kael said beside her.Below them, a group of volunteers dismantled a temporary support station, carefully, deliberately. No crisis had triggered the removal. No emergency had resolved itself.They were simply done. One woman hesitated before disconnecting the last light strip. “You sure?” she asked the others.A man nodded. “They know where to find us.”The woman swallo
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