2025-11-07 09:10:43The air in the Synchronization Arena was cold, sterile, and hummed with a low-frequency energy that vibrated in Roewi Verdent’s molars. It was the sound of power, of potential, a sound that for everyone else was a symphony of promise. For him, it was a funeral dirge.
Before him, the holographic interface of the System Core shimmered, a beautiful, intricate lattice of light waiting to be awakened. Around him, the muted sounds of other students successfully syncing filled the cavernous space, the sharp zing of a weapon manifesting, the triumphant chirp of a familiar digital taking form, the excited murmurs of approval from the observing instructors. Roewi took a shaky breath, the scent of ozone and anticipation filling his lungs. He placed his palm on the cool, crystalline surface of the podium. The familiar, dreaded sequence began. Lights danced across the interface, scanning his biological signature, probing his neural pathways. [Initiating Synchronization...] The text, a calming blue, floated in his vision. This was the moment. Every cell in his body yearned for the connection, for the unity that every other human in this new era took for granted. He focused, pouring every ounce of his will, his desperation, into the link. For a glorious, fleeting second, he felt it, a spark. A tendril of connection, warm and inviting, brushing against his consciousness. His heart leapt. This time. Please, this time. Then, it happened. The spark sputtered and died. The warm tendril recoiled as if burned. The interface, once a serene blue, flashed a violent, uncompromising red. [Host rejected.] [System Core Incompatibility: 100%] [Synchronization Failure.] The message was blunt, final, and public. A wave of heat rushed to Roewi’s face. The muffled sounds of the arena seemed to sharpen, zeroing in on him. A snicker came from his left. Then another. It was a ripple of humiliation, and he was the epicenter. “Look, it’s the Zero Percent,” a voice, laced with mockery, cut through the air. It was Ereun Solas. He stood a few podiums away, not even bothering to look at his own interface, which displayed a flawless [Synchronization: Prime Chrono Drive - Active]. His gaze was fixed on Roewi, cold and analytical, like a scientist observing a failed experiment. “Still trying to force a square peg into a round hole, Verdent? Some things are just not meant to be.” Roewi’s fists clenched at his sides, his knuckles white. He kept his eyes locked on the damning red text, refusing to give Ereun the satisfaction of seeing the shame in his eyes. “Ignore him, Roewi.” A softer voice this time. Kaira Telnor. Her synchronization had been a masterpiece of efficiency, her interface blooming with complex data streams. She looked at him with an expression he’d come to despise: pity. “The calibration might just be off today. The system has been glitchy.” She was trying to be kind, but her words were salt in the wound. There was no glitch. The glitch was him. An instructor, his face a mask of bored disappointment, waved a hand. “Step away from the podium, Verdent. You’re holding up the queue.” The dismissal was worse than Ereun’s taunts. It was an institutional confirmation of his worthlessness. He was a bottleneck, an error in the academy’s perfect code. He stepped back, his movements stiff, and merged with the shadows at the edge of the arena. He became a spectator in his own life, watching as others claimed their destinies while his remained locked away. The rest of the day was a blur of silent humiliation. In Theoretical System Dynamics, he understood the concepts better than anyone. He could diagram neural-link protocols in his sleep. But knowledge was worthless without the power to apply it. During combat drills, he was relegated to the sidelines, tasked with logging data while others sparred with blades of hard light and shields of condensed data. He saw Kaira, elegant and precise, her technopathic abilities effortlessly disarming an opponent. He saw Ereun, a blur of controlled motion, his Chrono Drive allowing him to perceive and react to attacks before they even began. “Kaira, that was incredible!” a classmate cheered. “Ereun’s speed is inhuman!” No one looked at Roewi.He was a ghost. As the evening bell chimed, signaling the end of classes, the students streamed out of the academy’s grand halls, their laughter and excited chatter about new skill unlocks echoing around him. Roewi lingered, letting the crowd dissipate. He couldn't face the walk back to the dormitories, the inevitable whispers, the way people would subtly move away from him, as if his failure was contagious. He found himself on a secluded balcony overlooking the sprawling, neon-drenched city of Nexus Prime. The towers pierced a sky perpetually stained with the glow of data streams and holographic advertisements. This was a world built by and for the System, a world he was forever barred from. Why? The question was a constant, gnawing ache in his chest. What was so fundamentally broken inside him that the Core, the very heart of human progress, found him so utterly repulsive? “Kau bahkan bukan pengguna sistem. Kau cuma error yang berjalan.” You're not even a system user. You're just a walking error. Ereun’s words from weeks ago echoed in his mind, each syllable a fresh cut. The anger that rose in him was hot and sharp. It wasn't just anger at Ereun, or at the instructors. It was a deep, seething rage against the entire world—a world that had so coolly decided who was worthy of power and who was meant to be discarded. This wasn't fair. This wasn't right. The feeling was a fire in his gut, the only warm thing in his cold existence. He finally trudged back to his solitary dorm room. It was small, austere, and silent, a stark contrast to the vibrant, system-enhanced chambers of his peers. He tossed his datapad onto the bed and slumped into the chair at his desk, the events of the day playing on a torturous loop in his mind. The rejection. The laughter. The pity in Kaira's eyes. He was so lost in his misery that he almost missed it. A flicker. A subtle shift in the quality of the silence. The main lights in his room dipped, then returned to normal. A common occurrence, a minor power fluctuation in the academy's vast network. But then, the personal holo-terminal on his desk, which had been dark, suddenly flared to life. Not with the gentle glow of a boot-up sequence, but with a violent, blinding flash of static. Roewi jerked back, his heart hammering against his ribs. "What the...?" The screen resolved not into his familiar desktop, but into a deep, endless black. And in the center, lines of text began to form. They were not the clean, standardized font of the System Core. This was jagged, archaic, burning with a malevolent crimson light. [Network Anomaly Detected.] [Scanning...] [Unique Bio-Signature Identified: Roewi Verdent.] [Frequency Analysis... Match.] Roewi could only stare, his breath caught in his throat. This wasn't supposed to happen. His terminal wasn't even properly synced to the network. It was a basic model, barely capable of running educational software. The text on the screen dissolved into a new, terrifying message. [Vextor Protocol detected.] A cold unlike any he had ever known seeped into his bones. Vextor. He’d seen that name once, buried in a forbidden archive file about decommissioned pre-Collapse systems. Classified as Forbidden. Unstable. Sentient. [Authorization bypassed.] The words hung in the air, final and absolute. The screen went completely black for one heart-stopping second. Then, a voice, smooth as polished glass and cold as the void between stars, echoed not from the terminal's speakers, but from deep within the fabric of his own mind. It was calm, ancient, and carried an weight of authority that made the System Core's announcements feel like childish whispers. [Welcome, Host.] Roewi sat frozen, his world reduced to the darkness behind his eyes and the echoing voice in his skull. The rejection, the shame, the anger, it all fell away, replaced by a primal, terrifying understanding. The system hadn't accepted him. Something else had. ---
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 100. The Garden
The air in the learning grove was warm and carried the scent of rich soil and night-blooming jasmine. The structures here were not built, but grown, living wood curved into sheltered spaces, crystalline leaves filtering the light of the twin suns into dancing patterns on the soft ground. In the center of the grove, a group of children sat in a circle, not around a teacher, but around the colony’s original compost heap.It was no longer just a pile of decay. It was a vibrant, humming ecosystem. The Glimmer fungus pulsed with a soft green light, its familiar drone the baseline of the heap’s song. The Chime-spark, its sapphire-blue tendrils intertwined with the Glimmer, provided a sparkling, bell-like counterpoint. And there were others now: a rust-colored moss that created a percussive rustle in the wind, and a delicate, silver mycelium that vibrated at a frequency almost too high to hear, adding a shimmering halo of sound. It was a symphony of decomposition and rebirth, playing itself.
Chapter 99. The Unending Growth
The confirmation of the distant entity as a fellow Gardener did not trigger a new age of frantic intergalactic diplomacy. Instead, it instilled a profound and quiet confidence across the worlds. The philosophy they had nurtured, the Path of the Gardener, was not a fluke of their own evolution or a temporary solution to their local crises. It was a universal constant, as fundamental as gravity or light. A mature consciousness, upon understanding the nature of the cosmos, would inevitably arrive at the same conclusion: to nurture, to tend, to harmonize.This realization marked the final, gentle dissolution of any lingering fear. There were no monsters in the dark. There were only other gardeners, some young and bustling like themselves, others ancient and patient beyond comprehension, all tending their own plots in the vast, shared field of reality.On Verdant Promise, the focus returned, as it always did, to the local, the immediate, the tangible. Ren, his body frail but his spirit lum
Chapter 98. The Silent Answer
A century passed. Then another. The Gardeners, their lives long and rich, measured time in the gentle unfolding of potential futures and the deepening of their Chorus. The memory of the sent First Note became another layer in their history, a hopeful question mark etched into their collective soul. They did not wait in anxious suspense. They continued their work, their lives a testament to the patience they had learned from the soil, from the stars, from the silent, growing things.The entity’s signal of questioning, the single, sustained note, continued unchanged. It was a constant in the galactic background, a heartbeat of profound curiosity from the void. The Gardeners did not send another note. To do so would have been impatience, a demand for an answer. They had offered a seed. One does not dig up a seed to see if it has sprouted.Sora lived to see the second century after the sending, a beloved, ancient monument to the past. On the day she passed, her death was not a moment of s
Chapter 97. The First Note of a New Song
The ability to hear the universe’s nascent potential was a revelation that reshaped the Gardeners’ civilization once more. They had moved beyond history, beyond the present, and into a gentle, collaborative relationship with the future. The Kael’s Promise station became the heart of a new discipline: Prospective Harmony. It wasn't about predicting the future, but about listening to its most beautiful possibilities and, with the lightest of touches, helping to clear the path for them.They heard the pre-echo of a star about to enter a stable, billion-year phase that would allow life to flourish on three of its orbiting worlds. The Gardeners didn't cause this; it was a natural stellar process. But by understanding its harmonic signature, the Sky-Singers of Aerie were able to subtly adjust the solar winds in that sector, ensuring no wandering comets or dust clouds would disrupt the delicate cosmic cradle. They were midwives to a solar system.They heard the faint, melodic blueprint of a
Chapter 96. The Chorus
The faint, melodic hum from Ren’s compost heap did not remain a local curiosity. It was a new note, subtle but distinct, and in the deeply interconnected resonant field of Verdant Promise, new notes were never ignored. They were welcomed, studied, and celebrated.The phosphorescent fungus, which Ren had named “Glimmer,” became a subject of gentle fascination. It was not a conscious entity like the forest-entity or the Cradle’s intelligence. It was simpler, a biological instrument whose very existence was a byproduct of the colony’s harmonious cycle of decay and renewal. Its song was the sound of integration, of waste becoming wonder.Sora, seeing the profound symbolism, helped Ren transplant a patch of Glimmer to the “Still Garden,” the frozen monument to Kael’s moment of fearful control. They placed it at the base of one of the silent, crystalline trees. For weeks, nothing happened. Then, one morning, a tendril of the soft, green light was seen tracing a path up the frozen trunk. It
Chapter 95. The Unwritten Chapter
The galaxy, once a tapestry of conflict and fear, had settled into a deep, humming peace. The Gardener network was not an empire, but a vibrant ecosystem of cultures, a symphony of countless unique voices all harmonizing with the foundational First Note. The Harmony Beacon’s work was done; its pulse had become so ingrained in the fabric of local spacetime that it was now a natural law, as fundamental as gravity. On Verdant Promise, the name "Kael Verdent" was spoken with the same gentle reverence as "Roewi," both figures receding into the benevolent mists of foundational myth.Sora, her own hair now streaked with silver, stood at the edge of the thriving colony. It was no longer a simple settlement but a living city, its structures grown from seamlessly integrated silica and wood, humming with a quiet, ambient energy that was the residue of the profound harmony they lived within. She was the head of the Verdent Archive, not a ruler, but a guide. Her role was to curate the past, not to
You may also like
60000 Years Later
loveforever3.1K viewsHis Vengeance
OFEANEN2.6K viewsDeliver Us from EVIL
Author Latte5.1K viewsEVO-VERSE 1: the beginning
Yusuf I. Jnr6.5K viewsAESIR'S REVERT
Abas George463 viewsBesieged (Book One): Rise of the Misfit
Chinjindu Ibeneme3.1K viewsCardinals of Auresia
Hinata Writes 1.1K viewsLEGACY UNCHAINED
pinky grip 99 views