2025-10-07 01:40:45Dr. Evelyn Frost stood before the observation glass, her reflection rippling across the tank. Inside, a body floated half-machine, half-man, veins glowing with the faint shimmer of residual energy.
Behind her, the chamber hummed like a slumbering beast.
“Subject Thirteen expired forty-two minutes ago,” said the technician, voice shaking. “Heart rate spiked, then flatlined. His cells couldn’t stabilize the Qi flux.”
“Couldn’t?” Frost’s voice was precise, not angry. “Or wouldn’t?” The technician hesitated. “We… we don’t know.”
Frost turned, her white coat swaying like a blade drawn from its sheath. “Then find out. Failure is not a data point I accept.”
She walked into the adjoining corridor walls lined with screens showing live surveillance. On one of them: Richard Walter. Blurry, rain-soaked, pulse racing.
“Still alive,” she murmured.
A man in a tailored suit approached, his shoes silent on the steel floor. Director Hawthorne, military liaison, Genesis’s financier.
“You told me Subject Nineteen was contained,” he said coldly. “Now he’s out there turning cars into craters.”
“He’s evolving,” Frost replied. “Containment was never the goal.”
Hawthorne frowned. “You’re playing with variables you don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand them perfectly.” Her gaze stayed on the screen. “You wanted soldiers. I’m building gods.”
The elevator doors opened with a hiss, revealing a vast subterranean hall the Core. Cylindrical pods lined the walls, each holding a body in cryostasis. Monitors flickered with bio-readings and fragments of neural maps.
“This is what you call understanding?” Hawthorne gestured at the rows of frozen experiments. “They look like corpses.”
“They’re prototypes,” Frost said simply. “Richard is the breakthrough.”
“Breakthrough?” His laugh was dry. “He’s a liability. The board wants results, not prophecies.”
Frost turned to him, eyes like surgical steel. “You think too small, Director. The Genesis Program isn’t about war. It’s about ascension.”
“Careful,” he warned. “That sounds like treason.”
“Only if you still believe humanity deserves to stay ordinary.” She stepped closer to the nearest pod. Inside was a woman with silver hair motionless, serene, aglow with the same faint energy that now ran through Richard.
“She was the first successful fusion of martial and medical Qi,” Frost said softly. “A healer who could stop a heart or mend it with a thought. Richard inherited that lineage.”
Hawthorne’s eyes narrowed. “Inherited? How?”
“By accident… or design. Fate has a sense of humor.” The intercom crackled. “Dr. Frost, anomaly detected in Sector Twelve.”
She sighed. “Show me.” A nearby monitor lit up, security footage of Lina’s dojo. Richard’s golden aura flaring, Lina carving the tracker from his body.
Frost watched in silence. “So, the girl survived,” she said at last. “Impressive.”
“Do you want a retrieval team dispatched?” asked Hawthorne.
“No,” Frost said. “Let them run.”
“Why?”
“Because prey teaches you more when it believes it’s free.”
Hawthorne leaned in. “You’re obsessed with him.”
Frost didn’t deny it. “He shouldn’t exist. The fusion rate in his cells exceeds theoretical limits. He’s rewriting the laws of balance itself.”
“Or breaking them,” Hawthorne muttered.
“Same thing,” she said. “Destruction is just another form of creation.” Her eyes softened for a brief second memory bleeding through composure.
“You lost someone to this project, didn’t you?” Hawthorne asked quietly.
Frost’s expression froze. “Loss is a scientist’s shadow.”
He pressed. “Who was she?”
She turned sharply, voice low and razor-edged. “My daughter.” For a heartbeat, the machines seemed to hold their breath.
“She was born with unstable Qi channels,” Frost continued. “Her body couldn’t contain the energy. Genesis was meant to save her. Instead, it took her.”
“You’re trying to bring her back.”
“I’m trying to make sure no one ever dies for being extraordinary.” Her voice cracked for the first time barely audible beneath the hum of the Core.
The technician reappeared, nervous. “Doctor… we analyzed the signal from Subject Nineteen’s tracker before it was destroyed. It transmitted to an external network.”
Frost’s head snapped up. “External?” “Yes, ma’am. Off-grid. Encrypted.”
Hawthorne frowned. “Rogue faction?”
Frost smiled faintly. “No. Rival division.” She walked toward the glass console, fingers dancing across holographic keys. A logo flickered on-screen: Project CRIMSON FIST.
Hawthorne’s jaw tightened. “I thought we terminated them years ago.”
“You can’t terminate belief,” she said. “You can only outgrow it.”
She turned back to the observation glass, eyes fixed on Richard’s image once more. “Track all Genesis survivors,” she ordered. “And prepare Protocol Seraphim.”
The technician hesitated. “That protocol… it hasn’t been approved.”
“It doesn’t need to be.”
Hawthorne folded his arms. “And what is Protocol Seraphim supposed to accomplish?”
Frost smiled, a ghost of warmth behind ice. “It will make Richard come home by choice.”
The lights dimmed. Alarms throbbed somewhere deep within the facility just one, faint and distant, as though the building itself were taking a breath.
Frost whispered to her reflection, “Every evolution begins with disobedience.” And as the camera zoomed in on her face, her pupils flashed briefly gold, just like Richard’s.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
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
Space did not stay empty for long. Not because someone filled it, but because people began using it.In Echo City, absence stopped being a pause and became a material. Something that could be shaped, ignored, crossed, or respected. People learned its texture the way they once learned schedules and systems.A plaza in District J became the first experiment.It had been marked three times in one week, signals unanswered, placards quietly noting presence without arrival. Instead of avoiding it, residents started gathering there at odd hours. Not to fix anything. Not to respond to signals retroactively.They gathered because the space felt honest. No performances. No guarantees. Just people sitting far enough apart to choose closeness deliberately.A man brought a chessboard but left half the pieces behind. “If someone wants to play,” he said, “they can bring the rest.”Sometimes no one did. Sometimes someone did. Both outcomes were accepted.Lina observed the plaza from a distance, leani
CHAPTER 186 — THE SHAPE OF ABSENCE
Absence developed a shape. It wasn’t emptiness. It wasn’t failure. It was something with edges now, felt, acknowledged, even anticipated.In Echo City, people began to recognize the difference between being unseen and being unmet. The city had stopped pretending those were the same.Lina walked through District K just after noon, past a row of closed kiosks and open doors. The absence there felt deliberate, like a held breath. Some shops opened only part of the day now. Some streets remained unlit at night, not from neglect, but from agreement.“We used to think absence meant loss,” Kael said beside her. “Now it feels more like… space.”“Space still scares people,” Lina replied. “Especially when they don’t know what it’s for.”They stopped near a public bench where a small placard had been bolted to the concrete. No logo. No directive.No one came here today. That matters. Kael frowned. “Does it?” “Yes,” Lina said. “Because we’re finally allowed to say it out loud.”The placards had a
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
CHAPTER 184 — THE SPACE BETWEEN HELP
Echo City did not collapse when help stepped back. It revealed something far stranger.Between the moment when one person released another, and the moment when someone else chose to step in, there existed a gap. A thin, unsettling interval where nothing intervened.The city had never known that space before. It had optimized around it. Erased it. Filled it with protocols, nudges, invisible hands.Now it existed. And it changed everything.Lina stood in a narrow corridor between two districts, a place that used to function as a seamless transfer node. Now it felt unfinished. Not broken, undecided.People slowed when they passed through. Some hesitated, checking overlays that no longer instructed them. Others closed their eyes briefly, as if bracing for a signal that didn’t come.Kael joined her, watching a woman stop mid-step. “She’s waiting,” he murmured.“For what?” Lina asked.Kael shook his head. “For the city to tell her she’s okay.”The woman inhaled sharply, then stepped forward
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
You may also like
Against Heaven'S Destiny
Djisamsoe 29.4K viewsThe Guardian of Evil Goddess
IEL36.6K viewsI AM DESTINY'S MISTAKE
Dere_Isaac16.9K viewsProgrammer in Another World
AmeronWerschrux_16.7K viewsThe King's Guard
Josephine-Caitlyn1.2K viewsThe Misadventure of Marvin The Magnificient
Oluwabiyi Raymond460 viewsThe rise of Jeremy Collins
Ayo _Writes304 viewsAwakening From Ashes
Quill1.7K views