2025-04-30 00:47:48Frank Elroy stood at the edge of the city, eyes fixed on the towering skyline that mocked him with every blinking light. Three degrees, two honors, one brilliant mind—and yet, he was holding a brown envelope of rejections that felt heavier than any burden.
The wind cut across his coat as he walked past the marble walls of WrenTech Industries, the multinational tech empire that seemed to run half the city. Behind its glass façade, men in tailored suits rode elevators to executive floors. Frank couldn’t even get a receptionist to glance at his resume.
He had tried everything—government labs, think tanks, banks, startups. “Too overqualified,” some said. “No room,” others claimed. One interviewer had even asked why someone “so smart” couldn’t find a real job already.
That one stung.
Frank turned into a quiet diner, the same one he used to visit in high school. He ordered coffee he couldn’t afford and slid into a booth near the back. His fingers trembled as he unfolded yet another rejection letter.
“You always frown when you read, you know.”
Frank looked up. A warm smile greeted him—soft hazel eyes framed by caramel-brown curls. Ella.
“Ella?” he blinked.
“In the flesh,” she grinned, setting her cup down. “You look like you lost a war.”
“Feels more like I lost twenty,” he muttered.
She sat across from him without asking. “Still chasing those genius dreams?”
He smiled bitterly. “Trying. Mostly just running into walls.”
They talked. About high school. About life. About how the world didn’t quite make room for people like him. Ella listened—really listened. When she finally pulled a small flier from her bag, Frank didn’t know whether to be grateful or insulted.
“A janitor?” he asked, brows rising.
“They pay well,” she said quickly. “It’s WrenTech. My dad’s company. Full benefits. Internal opportunities.”
Frank stared at it. Scrubbing toilets in the same building where tech billionaires played gods? It felt like a cruel joke.
But he needed rent. He needed food. He needed... hope.
Three weeks later, he had a blue uniform with “Facilities” stitched across the chest and a badge that said "Temporary." He swept the marble floors of WrenTech by day and tried to study old algorithms at night.
He didn’t speak much. No one spoke to him.
Except Ella.
She found him sometimes during late shifts, bringing sandwiches or cracking jokes in the empty lobby. They weren’t best friends, but Frank found himself looking forward to seeing her.
One day, the cleaning crew was assigned to Floor 29—the executive boardroom level. No janitors were allowed up there except on special clearance. Today was one of those days.
Frank moved silently, mop in hand, when a loud voice from behind a glass door caught his ear.
“...then you crack it, Corbin! You all want to sit here and drive fleets of cars, but none of you understand the backbone of this company!”
Frank froze near the boardroom.
Another voice: “It’s impossible. The Chinese encrypted the T9Space code with layers even our best analysts can’t touch.”
The CEO’s voice thundered again: “Then we’re done. Sell the company. If no one here can unlock it, I’m done running a circus of suits!”
Footsteps stormed toward the door. Frank tried to move, but it opened before he could blink.
Winston Wrenford—the CEO and Ella’s father—stood in front of him.
“What are you gawking at?” the man snapped. “Clean up that mess.” He shoved a stack of shredded documents into Frank’s chest before brushing past him.
Frank exhaled as the boardroom emptied. The last to leave was a tall man in a three-piece suit with a serpent's smile. Mr. Corbin. Their eyes met for a second—just enough to chill Frank’s spine.
He stepped inside and began cleaning, careful not to disturb anything. But one document caught his eye—torn in half but still legible.
“Asset protocol embedded in T9 layer…”
Frank’s breath caught. He knew that name. T9Space. A theoretical security algorithm so complex, it was dubbed “The Code That Could Think.”
His professor had mentioned it once, long ago. No one had cracked it. Many believed it wasn’t even real.
Frank’s eyes drifted to the laptop still open on the table. A cryptic interface blinked. Symbols rotated on the screen. Patterns... familiar ones.
Something clicked.
He backed away slowly, heart racing. That night, he couldn’t sleep. He barely touched his food. All he did was stare at the symbols he scribbled down from memory.
He started trying to solve it.
Weeks passed. The code consumed him. Ella noticed the dark circles under his eyes.
“You okay?”
He lied. “Just tired.”
Late into the night, he worked in his small apartment surrounded by ramen cups and old textbooks. He failed. Again and again. But he couldn’t stop.
One evening, as rain tapped softly on his window, he slammed his laptop shut in frustration. “This is a waste of time,” he muttered. “This code doesn’t even exist.”
He stood, ready to trash everything.
Then, a voice echoed in his memory:
"Sometimes the most hidden thing is right in front of you."
Frank blinked.
He sat down.
He tried one more time.
The screen blinked. A new string appeared. His hands trembled. A sequence emerged from the madness—one word hidden in plain sight.
His voice cracked as he whispered,
To be continued…
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Chapter 276: The One Who Followed
It didn’t breathe. It didn’t blink, It simply stood behind Callen, its feet hovering inches above the ground, its body draped in smoke that didn’t billow or rise, but hung around it like memory too heavy to leave.Eyes like burn holes in paper. Not black.Absent.Amari was the first to speak, Not a whisper, Not a warning. Just one word, ripped out of her like a curse:“Hollowborn.”Savi stumbled backward, Skov dropped into a low stance, Callen turned, swaying, blood running from his nose again, and froze. He knew what it was. He’d seen it in the Rift.But it hadn’t followed him. It shouldn’t have been able to. And yet, It had. Witnesses panicked.Some screamed and ran. Others dropped to their knees, spiral stones pressed to their chests, murmuring old Driftline prayers. The First was gone. The Second had vanished with the rupture.There was nothing now to guard them. Except Ember. And she was nowhere to be seen. Callen’s breath came ragged. “Where’s Ember?”No one answered, He stagger
Chapter 275: We Are the Ones Who Stay
The breach snapped shut like a mouth that had swallowed its last name, And with it, Callen was gone, Not dead, Not screaming. Just erased.Ember stood barefoot in the churned earth, mud clinging to her ankles, blood streaked up her arms, and a rawness inside her that didn't come from the Rift.The kind of rawness that meant something was missing, Not a limb, Not a stone, A person, Behind her, the Witnesses rose in silence. Some bowed. Some turned away. None dared speak her name.Skov walked toward her slowly, like someone approaching the center of a battlefield littered with traps. “Ember…”She didn’t look up. Just whispered, “He chose me.”Skov stopped. He had no answer. There wasn’t one, In the infirmary tent, Amari hovered over Callen’s body. Technically: not a body anymore. His vitals were gone. Pulse. Breath. Neural trace. Spiral groove completely burned out.But the skin was warm. The lips slightly parted. And his right hand still curled into a fist, like it was holding on to so
Chapter 274: The Echo That Stayed
When Ember collapsed, it didn’t feel like a fall, It felt like being unplugged.Cut off from the current she hadn’t even realized she’d been riding, Callen’s breath, the tether, the fractured echo-field. All of it snapped out of her at once, like a trapdoor yanked out from under her soul.Her body struck the mud hard, Eyes open, But the light inside her was off, Skov was the first to move. He ran.Dropped to his knees beside her and rolled her onto her back. “Ember. Look at me.”She didn’t blink, Savi was behind him a second later, spiral band scanning her vitals, but the readings flickered, pulsed, then flatlined “No pulse.”Skov’s voice cracked. “That’s not possible.”Amari knelt over Callen. “It is if she gave it back.”And she had The breath. The Root fire. The spark that wasn’t hers, She’d given it to Callen, But Callen wasn’t moving either.The Circle formed tight around them. Silent, No panic, Just stillness the kind that came after the end of a storm, when the damage couldn’t
Chapter 273: Breathing Borrowed Fire
The moment Ember opened her mouth and Callen’s breath passed through her lips, the world shifted, Not visibly, Not with tremor or collapse, But inside the air itself, as though the Riftline rewrote gravity to obey something ancient, something feral.Skov froze mid-step, Savi dropped her spiral band as if it suddenly burned, Amari went pale, whispering something no one could hear, The First scattered, not gliding fleeing.The Second’s hum surged so loud the Witnesses collapsed to their knees, And Ember… wasn’t breathing anymore, The breath in her body didn’t belong to her, It moved in rhythms foreign to her lungs slow, measured, thick like tar exhaled in pulses.Her eyes stayed open but unfocused, One hand still gripped Callen’s limp wrist, The Circle held its breath, Waiting, Watching, Not one dared touch her. Inside her chest, Ember was awake. But not… present.She stood in a space layered with pulse and echo. The floor beneath her flickered with overlapping memory, a thousand spiral
Chapter 272: A Body Not Yet Ash
When the light vanished, silence reigned, No pulse, No static, Not even the old hum of the Second threading through the Driftline Just blackness. Thick, hot, and wet.Like breath trapped inside lungs that had forgotten how to exhale, Ember blinked, Nothing, No walls, No sky.Her hand, the one that caught the blade, hung limp at her side. Spiral stone gone. The groove that once hummed beneath her skin was burned away. Just flesh now. Raw and quiet.Callen lay beside her, Chest rising, Barely, Face bloodied, eyes closed, whispering something so faint it could’ve been breath or memory. The voice returned.Not the rig. Not the siphon. Something older, Older than Emotia, Older than MARROW, Older than hush.It whispered not into their ears but into the empty places between thoughts, where memory couldn’t reach, and forgetting had already claimed its price. “Two touched the cost. Only one may return. Choose.”Ember’s knees sank into the strange ground, not stone, not mist, not soil. It felt
Chapter 271: Pulled Into the Breach
Callen's boots didn’t scrape as he was dragged backward, They lifted, ripped from the ground as if the very air behind the gate had opened its jaws and decided his name tasted like fire.The mist split in two, The siphon’s shattered coils snapped wide again like they’d only pretended to fail, and now they wanted him back. Ember’s scream ripped from her throat before she knew she’d opened her mouth. “CALLEN!”But he was already gone, One blink, A red smear in the mist. Then nothing. Skov dove forward, spiral stone in hand, fury in his teeth, but Amari tackled him before he could hit the breach. “You go in like that, it eats you.”“She’s going in!” he shouted, jerking his head toward Ember.But Ember hadn’t moved, She was kneeling in the mud, spiral stone trembling in her fist, mouth clenched so tight her molars cracked, The First hovered inches above her shoulder, flickering red for the first time since the Driftfall.The Second’s hum dropped to a frequency so low the air shook, A warn
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