2025-09-11 00:33:19
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 20: The First Truth Restored
The hush that came after Dr. Thorne's cut-off threat was the most profound Alexander had ever experienced. It wasn't an absence of sound; it was a presence. It was the silence of a line drawn in the sand, a slamming shut of a door on a future of gilded compromise. He had threatened war on a giant, and for a long, breathless moment, the only thing he could hear was the sound of his own defiance echoing.Then the world began to change.It started as a vibration, a low, subsonic hum that reached him not through the air, but through the earth itself. It rose up through the soles of his feet, a sympathetic frequency that caused his bones to sing. The walls of his hut began to shine with a soft, inner radiance, the mud bricks glowing as though they were packed with ground crystal. Outside, he heard the villagers cry out—not in fear, but in awe.He stumbled towards his door. The entire village of Oakhaven was radiating a light. The thatch on the roofs, the soil of the green, the leaves on th
Chapter 19: Test of the Healer
The revelation of the deliberate epidemic placed Oakhaven in a whole new, more acidic context. Every meeting, every look, was now charged with the knowledge of the plot they were struggling against. Alexander doubled the guard, scheduling shifts to guard the village perimeter and, most importantly, the water system. Those humble hand-washing stations he had dreamed up now appeared as front-line checkpoints.He had spent hours immersed in The Archive, his clearance now permitting him to dig deeper. He studied schematics for early warning systems capable of detecting airborne pathogens, diagrams for community-level quarantine methods that didn't include barbed wire and soldiers, and herbal remedies capable of bolstering the immune system against a host of synthetics toxins. He was not just a doctor anymore; he was a general mobilizing his men for biological warfare.It was on one of those deep dives that the test arrived.The Obelisk's warning was a soft chime in his head, rather than i
Chapter 18: Shadows of Greed
Elara slowly regained. The neurotoxin had weakened and quiveringly attacked her hands, but the light in her eyes was restored. The attack, however, had irreparably changed the mood of Oakhaven. The new confidence was now tempered with cautious paranoia. Trust that was once freely extended to Alexander was now a spent medium. Every stranger was a potential threat, every gift a potential Trojan horse.Alexander knew. His Truth-Sense thrummed with their mutual fear, a continual background thrum of dissonance. He had promised them safety, and his promise had been revoked by a sugar-savoring poison. His failure stuck to him, a blight he could not shake.But desperation was a luxury he could not afford. Hale's words haunted him: "They are digging in the dark places." The attack was not a threat of terror; it was a record in a database. His enemies were discovering him. They had probed his defenses and his response. To counter them, he has to know them better. He has to move from reaction he
Chapter 17: Whisper of Forgotten Plagues
Alexander haunted Oakhaven for three days. He called on Elara, frail but healing with the strength of a child. He stood guard over the Earth Kidney. He spoke little. The villagers gave him space with an open circle, their admiration now tempered with a healthy fear. They had seen the cost of his power on his face.He slept uneasily, his visions a crazy combination of dead patients, crumbling concrete, and the unforgiving, critical eye of the Obelisk. In one vision, he was holding a scalpel that was also a bolt of lightning, and he never knew if he was healing a patient or dissecting them.On the fourth night, sleep was not possible. The green-tinged foam on Elara's lips was too vivid. The weight of the city's suffering was too crushing. He wanted… something. Guidance. A sign. Not from the calculating mind of the System, but from the wisdom once his. He recalled Professor Hale, his mentor. The man had been an island of ethics in a sea of compromise.As if the pain of his longing had a
Chapter 16: The Weight of Healing
Elara's small body was a battlefield, and Alexander was lagging behind.The Healing Truth's energy pouring out of his hands was a searing, desperate gold, grasping her small heart pounding, forcing her lungs to attempt ragged, poor breaths. But it was damming back a flood. The artificial toxin worked its way into his nervous system, a smooth, calculating malice that bypassed his energy's attempts to neutralize it, cutting at the very junctions where her nerves attached to her muscles. It was a poison synthesized in a lab, an exercise in cold artifice that his reality-based healing couldn't comprehend, much less defeat."Charcoal!" Alexander bellowed, his voice straining with exertion. "I need activated charcoal! Now!"Blank, white faces greeted him. Activated charcoal was de rigueur in any emergency room, a basic antidote. In Oakhaven, it was as foreign as a spaceship.His mind, screaming through the Truth-Sense's alarm and the drain of incessant healing, fought its way through The Ar
Chapter 15: Resisting in the Shadows
The city didn't forget Oakhaven.In a high-tech, air-conditioned office on the thirty-fifth floor of the Aethelred Pharmaceuticals building, Liam Creed sat sipping a glass of good whiskey and looking at a satellite image on his wall screen. It was a thermal overlay of the valley east of there. Most of the heat signatures were weak, scattered. But one cluster, massed in and around the village of Oakhaven, burned with a hot, fierce yellow.It was an abomination.He sipped slowly, the alcohol not burning away his fury. The "routine survey mission" had been a failure. Voss was dead, his body ravaged by an alkaloid strain of cholera so deadly it had turned his internal organs to liquid in forty-eight hours. Creed himself had lived only because he'd been in another, walled compartment for the majority of the return, and because he'd had the connections to arrange an immediate, experimental Aethelred antibody cocktail the instant he experienced the initial cramp.The cover-up was a tragic ac
You may also like
Ethereal Adventure System
Dark Crafter39.9K viewsLevel Up With My Bastard System in Fantasy World
Oceanna Lee25.6K viewsGetting a Technology System in Modern Day
Agent_04755.4K viewsLord Of The Ultra Billionaire System
Author_Danny22.7K viewsMy Almighty Werewolf System
Cephas Bliss 162 viewsRise of the system magnate
Unique 10.2K viewsBounce Back With The Spin System
Pein2.6K viewsDetached Truth of demon
The Sinner Of Time1.1K views