Chapter 183
Michael felt the temperature increase by the second as his own body heat, brought by rising panic, was exchanged with the limited air in the small, confined space. The glass fogged up, small droplets of water forming on its smooth surface like on a car window after being shut inside for too long.
The c...
2025-07-24 17:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 182
There were several seconds of utter stillness. The underground warehouse had been full of moving machines and noises, trucks with roaring engines, soldering bots welding parts together in showers of sparks, grinders breaking down pieces, blocks of asphalt being loaded up and down by tall cranes that almost r...
2025-07-22 17:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Hi everyone,
i have decided to be much more consistent with my releases. It will be hard, I have a full time job and family and friends, but I will try my best to publish chapters 3 times a week!
You will be able to enjoy them for the same price as always, of course.
Release times will be Tuesday, Thursday a...
2025-07-20 15:30:44 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 181
The next few days passed at a glacial pace. Michael was slowly getting better, and when he didn't feel feverish and weak, he set out exploring.
He learned that while the city was empty of people, this didn't make it completely empty or immobile and static. The truck and car he had seen on his first day...
2025-07-17 14:18:39 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 180
The car sped towards Michael, its faulty headlights flickering in the rain. It didn’t show signs of slowing down; instead, the roar of its engine pierced the sound of the rain, then moved past where he was hiding. The car kept speeding down the large road, turning right at a ninety-degree junction and almo...
2025-07-16 08:29:13 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 179
When Michael turned his gaze back towards where Infy had been standing, all he saw was the copse of trees and the sparse undergrowth of the clearing. The sun was high in the sky, its warmth a welcome change from the cold that had crept into his bones.
His jaw hurt, and his hands were bloody. Pulses of ...
2025-07-12 13:42:27 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 178
“What promise are you talking about?” Michael asked the figure.
They had stopped before the portal, mostly because Michael was wary of following a strange figure wrought in shadows through a portal leading who knows where, when he had no power to defend himself.
The figure laughed. “You ask...
2025-07-11 14:18:59 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 177
Blackness.
A man floated in a sea of darkness, pitch black so deep that it swallowed everything.
It had even swallowed his body, for he had no limbs nor sensations coming from his flesh. He had memories of having a body, but those memories felt like they belonged to a place that was very far away...
2025-07-10 13:39:37 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 176
“It's clear that this is not working.”
Michael paced around the laboratory, watching yet another experiment yield no result. The absence of magic, the nothingness where the Sanctum once resided, had been a burning hole at first. Over time, the pain had faded and with it, the memory of how it felt t...
2025-07-05 14:57:05 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 175
“Perhaps you should go back to the lab, where it’s safe.”
With a single sentence, Michael had been effectively thrown out of the loop. Of course he still had the undying loyalty of Johanne and Icarus, and with them he could exercise his will and take back control of Unity in a matter of hours if ...
2025-07-05 14:38:43 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 174
“What?” Travis said while laughing, “you thought that we would–”
His words were cut off by a powerful hand lifting him and body-slamming him into the reinforced wall. Surprisingly, it had not been Johanne but David. The man had risen to his full height, and was holding Travis by the neck so t...
2025-07-05 14:30:50 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 173
Michael drifted in the empty space, watching the ruin of what had been the foundation of all his power grow smaller and smaller. All that he had built was gone, replaced by chaos itself.
Complex emotions fought for dominance. He understood that it had not been the System and its red lines making him un...
2025-07-05 14:26:51 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 172
After he was done catching up and doing the rounds with everyone, Michael rushed to the dungeon. It was a critical time, with a storm brewing at the horizon, but it was not on their heads yet and he thought he could afford to take ten minutes to sort out his own problems. His outward appearance was fine, but...
2025-07-05 14:22:21 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 171
“With the bullshit out of the way,” Michael announced as soon as Trevor and Jennifer arrived. “Let’s actually start this strategic meeting. We have wasted more than enough time and I'd hate to see it get sidetracked again. First order of business!”
He snapped his fingers. Everyone looked at h...
2025-07-03 16:46:16 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 170
“That’s the big boss, huh?” a young man, perhaps in his late twenties, asked.
They were sweeping through the Site, as ordered.
“That’s him,” the leader of the team of three said.
“He must be what, twenty?” the third person said with a scowl. “You’re telling me we have to...
2025-07-02 12:25:43 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 169
Ducking, Michael narrowly dodged a bullet that had been shot his way. It flew past him, breaking a window and smashing tableware in an empty apartment with a vista. Ignoring the damage to somebody’s second home, he climbed onto the elevated portion of the roof above the apartment and then lunged to the nei...
2025-06-30 17:21:15 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 168
Compared to the vastness of the Sanctum, the area affected by the detonation was minimal. It was a fraction of the huge, empty rock space that encompassed everything. What was more, it was the portion farthest from all the skill fractals, since Michael had elected to start from there and work his way inwards...
2025-06-26 06:33:56 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 167
A small flicker of light was all Michael could see. A pinprick in the distance, white and blinding against the dark dome of sky above him. Getting up, he realized quickly that he was not in his own body anymore, lacking any sensations coming from it. He knew from his experience inside the Sanctum that he was...
2025-06-24 16:44:23 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 166
Deep in the catacombs below the city of Rome, the tendril of energy that Michael had been following seemed to take on the form of a flowing river of magic. The flow was visible as Michael walked right into it, the magic parting around his aura without much resistance.
If his hunch was right, the genera...
2025-06-21 10:50:13 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 165
As soon as he was out of the oppressive shallow depths of the Roman catacombs, which he never would have guessed could be accessed via a random shop on the street, Travis began barking orders. He assessed the situation quickly, and realized that in true Italian fashion his plans had been derailed by the most...
2025-06-19 17:29:49 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 164
The red lines were everywhere. They were like the logic pathways of a motherboard, all straight lines and sharp ninety-degree turns. They lined every single inch of the seemingly infinite walls of the sanctum, but it was around the skill fractals that they were the most concentrated. It was a tangle, a mass,...
2025-06-16 17:40:56 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 163
The airport runway sped past them as the plane accelerated and took flight. The moment of turbulence that followed lasted for longer than usual, and the passengers reacted to it in the usual fashion of a crowd: panic.
Michael stared lazily out the window, thinking about the long flight ahead. He had pl...
2025-06-16 12:48:08 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 162
“Will David grace us with his presence?” Travis asked.
Michael shook his head. “Nah. He’s running around the country all the time, doing his stuff.”
“I noticed,” Travis deadpanned. “Doing what exactly?”
There was an implicit meaning in the question. Travis had asked Icarus...
2025-06-12 10:00:13 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 161
“I finally managed to gather all my old Uni friends,” Michael said with a nod aimed at his phone. “All it took was some rather… hands-on manipulation from Icarus to make it happen. I never thought normal people would have such busy schedules. I understand now why friendships shrivel and die when peop...
2025-06-10 13:21:08 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 159
Millions of the things. Tiny beings, little critters that were everywhere. Looking at them could render a person insane, or kill them. They lined the tunnel, they were on the walls and in the walls, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Their shape was hard to pin down, like a blur of double-visi...
2025-06-06 06:18:58 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 158
There was no standoff, nothing. The moment the younger David saw that Travis was about to attack him, he sprang into motion. Travis, who had realized who this younger man was and had aborted his attack, had to scramble to do something.
His eyes widened at the sight of David’s savagery. He didn’t he...
2025-06-01 15:07:59 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 157
Michael’s fists pounded on the ground, cracking the strange concrete-like material and digging small craters.
“How dare you die on me!” he screamed.
David was a fallen giant, his body lying to the side with long limbs like gnarled tree branches. He was a statue: ponderous and immobile.
<...
2025-05-31 10:54:32 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 156
A girl sat, alone at night, staring at her computer screen. Her parents weren’t home. They never were these days, it seemed. They had better things to do than to spend time with their teenage daughter who just refused to go out and play with the other girls her age or do whatever it was that teenagers did....
2025-05-29 18:03:20 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 155
Michael jumped to the side, avoiding a projectile and then weaving out of the way of the vicious whipstrike that followed. He spun into the air, jumping several feet high thanks to his stats granting him monstrous power. He created a Hycean Ice bullet that he shot towards the boss monster, then retreated and...
2025-05-29 12:20:04 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 154
“That old fool,” Travis muttered.
Michael watched him idly. He would be surprised if the man hadn’t dug a trench in the concrete floor by the time David returned, with his frantic pacing back and forth.
“He wants to be a hero,” he went on, “We only have one serum and the doctor still ...
2025-05-25 16:16:32 +0000 UTC
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