2025-06-13 00:08:31The medallion hovered in the air, spinning slowly, its stormy core casting strange shadows across the walls of the cottage. Alan stared, frozen between awe and terror.
His fingers tingled, no, burned, as energy surged through them in waves, too raw to control. Sparks of red and silver light licked across his skin, dancing up his arms and curling into the air like smoke.
The medallion pulsed once, then fell softly into his open palm. The moment it touched him, the storm inside dimmed... as if recognizing its master. Alan clenched his jaw. “What… are you?”
No answer. Only the quiet crackle of power in the air.
He stumbled back to the stool, heart pounding, trying to think. This wasn’t just an object. It had shown him visions. A battlefield. A god. His father.
The medallion had belonged to him, or had he been its servant? Alan looked down at his hands. Faint trails of glowing sigils shimmered along his skin, like ancient tattoos drawn in starlight. As he watched, they faded, but not completely. A mark had been left.
Later that Night…
Alan barely slept. The energy within him stirred constantly, never settling. It felt like he had swallowed a storm.
By morning, he could hear whispers, not voices, not quite. More like instincts. Echoes. Urges. Telling him how to breathe differently, how to feel the chi around him. How to draw it in, not from the air like normal cultivators, but from within.
He sat cross-legged, imitating a posture he’d seen the sect disciples use during training. He shut his eyes.
And this time, unlike every other attempt in the past , he felt something. A flicker. A spark.
His breath deepened, slowed. Chi moved inside him, not like water flowing but like fire coiling. It danced between his ribs, around his heart, and down to his lower dantian, his core.
Suddenly, a sharp snap echoed in his chest. Alan's eyes flew open. A dim glow radiated from his abdomen. A perfect sphere of spinning red and silver light. His spiritual core had formed.
He had awakened. No... he had ignited.
.The Next Morning.
"Have you heard? Alan Smith fainted again after the Awakening. Probably ran off crying."
"Pathetic. Should’ve been sent to the mines years ago."
The boys from the training field laughed, but Elder Thorne didn’t join in.
He was staring toward the east path, where faint black smoke curled into the sky above Alan’s house.
“Go back to your drills,” the elder barked, and walked away with a dark frown.
Alan’s House
Alan stood in front of the fireplace again, sweat dripping down his brow. Around him were scattered pages from his parents’ old journals. He had found one name scribbled over and over:
Nihros.
He flipped to a torn page:
“If the seal ever breaks… the Nihros Line will awaken. Chaos magic cannot be trained, it must be endured. He must never find the Eye. Gods help us if he does.”
Alan clenched the medallion in his hand. “It’s too late.”
He turned to the door. He couldn't stay here, not with the power crackling beneath his skin, not with the questions building like thunder.
He packed a bag: the medallion, the journals, dried rations, a dull iron dagger, and a worn cloak.
He needed answers. About his parents. About Nihros. About himself.
He stepped outside into the morning mist and didn’t look back.
That Evening — Forest of Murmurs
Alan had only traveled half a day when the sky darkened too fast. A storm. No worse, The air turned cold and sharp. Birds fell silent. The ground shivered. And from the trees ahead, shadows emerged.
Three of them. Robes of deep gray. Faces masked in silver bone. One held a blade curved like a serpent's fang.
“Alan Smith,” the tallest said. “You have something that doesn’t belong to you.”
Alan’s breath caught. “How do you know my name?”
“The Eye calls out,” the masked man hissed. “You bear the legacy of Nihros. That power was sealed for a reason.”
Alan tightened his grip on the medallion. “Who are you?”
“We are the Order of Binding. Guardians of the Lost Seals. And you, boy, are a threat to the balance of the realm.”
Alan backed away. Power sparked along his arms. “I don’t want trouble”
“Then die quickly.” The shadows attacked. The first slash came like a blur.
Alan raised his hand, and instinct kicked in. A shield of red light erupted before him, deflecting the blade with a crack like lightning.
The masked man staggered. Alan blinked. He hadn’t even thought. His body had just moved.
The second assassin came from the left. Alan twisted, planting his foot the way the whispers taught him. His palm struck out.
A bolt of silver fire burst forth. The attacker was blasted backward into a tree.
The third didn't hesitate. He leapt, sword raised. Alan screamed.
The medallion pulsed. And from Alan’s body erupted a storm of light and flame, throwing all three attackers into the forest with a sound like shattering glass. Silence fell.
Alan stood alone, chest heaving, the storm receding. He looked at his hands, scorched, glowing, trembling.
The forest burned around him. He had just fought trained killers. And won.
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Chapter 119: Shadows of the New Order
The world had shifted, subtly but unmistakably, in the wake of Alan’s absence. The skies still bore the marks of the war, the land still carried scars of battle,but the absence of the Flamebearer was a wound far deeper than any physical scar. It was as if a heart had stopped beating, and though the body of the world still moved, it did so with a faltering rhythm, uncertain of its own survival.At the center of this new uncertainty was the Council of Dawn, the hastily re-formed governing body made up of surviving lords, scholars,and mystics who had banded together to keep order after the final confrontation. Their meetings, once filled with fiery arguments and desperate solutions, were now subdued affairs, cloaked in the weight of silence.Everywhere, whispers filled the streets:“Where is Alan Smith?”“Wasn’t he supposed to return?”“The Flamebearer doesn’t die… he can’t die.”Yet days had turned to weeks, and no trace of him had surfaced. In the great hall of the Dawn Citadel, the
Chapter 118: A World Without Alan
The silence after the shattering of the crystal was unlike any silence the world had ever known. It was not emptiness, it was suffocation,the weight of a thousand unspoken laments pressing upon every soul across the continents. Where once the pulse of Alan Smith’s existence threaded the veins of creation, there was now… nothing.The world trembled. Not from earthquakes, nor storms, nor celestial cataclysm, but from the raw absence of a presence so deeply woven into the tapestry of fate that reality itself staggered to find balance without it.In the Sacred Citadel, where moments before Alan had stood at the center of converging destinies, the place was barren. Only fragments of broken light hovered in the air like shards of forgotten memory.His companions, Mira, Kael, Seraphine, and Darius, stood motionless, their eyes wide, their mouths half-open as though frozen mid-breath.It was Seraphine who moved first. She stumbled forward, reaching toward the space where Alan had been, her h
Chapter 117: The Editor Arrives
The battlefield was silent. The last fragments of the True Author’s ashes scattered into the void, each particle glowing faintly before dissolving into nothing. The quill he once held, the weapon of his dominion, was gone.Alan lay in Calla’s arms, unconscious but alive, the glow of the forbidden name still pulsing faintly within his chest. His hand twitched around the rebuttal quill. It should have been over. It wasn’t.The stranger’s arrival was like the flip of a page in a book none of them had ever opened. She stood where the True Author had perished, framed in the collapsing remnants of erased realities.Wings of rejected endings arched from her back, shimmering, broken fragments that bled sorrow and fury.She was beautiful and horrifying all at once. Her armor was a mosaic of contradictions: the final death of a hero in one shard, the confession of love cut from another, the betrayal that never made it to print across her gauntlet.Her eyes glowed the cold silver of editorial in
Chapter 116: The Name That Unwrites
The beam of null-ink ripped through the sky like divine lightning, Alan tackled Proto-Alan out of the way, shielding the fragile boy with his own body as the blast hit the ground behind them and unwrote the land itself. Trees blinked out of existence. Stones became blank spaces.Even the concept of time stuttered. Yet the name, the one carved into the cracked ground, remained. Alan had seen it. He couldn’t remember it. But he had felt it, and his soul now shivered beneath its weight.Calla pulled him up. “Alan! Are you alright?!”Alan staggered, blinking rapidly. “I… I saw everything. But it’s gone.”Mira crouched near the carved name, reaching for it, but her fingers passed through the letters like smoke.“It’s receding,” she said. “He’s trying to delete even the memory of it.”Proto-Alan was trembling. “He’ll find us. He’ll come himself.”Codex, now a pulsating prism of fragmented knowledge, whispered, “The True Author is rewriting Volume Zero as we speak. If we stay too long, we’ll
Chapter 115: Volume Two Begins
The impact shattered everything. The throne room’s marble tiles cracked as radiant glyphs spilled from the open tome behind the True Author.Worlds collided, not physically, but conceptually. The rules of their reality twisted, mutated, and fractured as the structure of the multiversal storyweb was revealed.Alan screamed, not in pain, but in resistance. He was not ready to lose. Alan and his companions were yanked upward, out of the Archive, through the spiraling light of the Bastion’s broken ceiling, and hurled into a swirling nexus of realities.They landed atop a transparent platform suspended in the void. Below them floated hundreds of realms, each a story, each with a protagonist, each with a war, Some were dark and violent, Others gleamed with romance.Some were empty. All were bound by the True Author’s hand.Before them, floating just beyond the veil of space, hovered reflections of Alan and his team, alternate versions from alternate Volumes.One Alan was a tyrant in obsidia
Chapter 114: The Redraft War
For one heartbeat, the Archive stood frozen. No wind. No breath. No thought. Even the sun, that stubborn narrator of time, dimmed like a forgotten sentence. The word “Redraft” rippled across existence. And then, reality fractured.From the seams of the Archive, two versions began to emerge. One shimmered with familiar warmth, the world as it was, the flame-scorched battlefield, Calla’s trembling form, Mira’s defiant tears, Codex’s flickering light. The other?The Author’s Redraft. Perfect lines. Clean arcs. No anomalies. No rebellion. It was lifeless. And yet, it was overtaking everything.Alan’s companions began to glitch. Calla looked down at her sword, now reformed into a ceremonial dagger. “What… is this?” Her voice was flatter.Mira looked at her hands. The scars from the Soulfire Trial were gone. “I don’t remember… why I’m angry.”Codex panicked. “They’re being overwritten! Their prior selves are being erased and replaced with idealized variants.”Ilien screamed as his laughter
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