[STATUS UPDATE]Progress to Rank 11: 80%
Adrian had seen the message an hour ago.
He hadn't smiled. Hadn't said a word. Just stared at the notification as it pulsed quietly at the edge of his mind, like a heartbeat.
Now, as he walked alone through the stairwell of the Benevolent Mercy Medical Center, he turned the moment over in his head.
Eighty percent.
After two full weeks of nothing. Not even a single percent. Not even a flicker of advancement.
And then tonight a sudden leap.
He didn't need to guess why.
He exhaled through his nose, fingers brushing the smooth steel rail as he descended toward the 25th floor. The air was cooler here, quieter than the rest of the building.
His thoughts kept circling back to Olivia.
The screaming. The collapse. The moment she broke in front of him.
He hadn't stopped it.
He hadn't tried to protect her from the pain, or steer the conversation somewhere safe, or silence her terror with soothing words.
He had let her go through it.
Let her fall into it.
And when the spiral of trauma finally shattered what remained of her control he had reached out, not to fix her, but to steady her.
That was the moment the Scripture responded.
Not when she smiled. Not when she seemed stable.
But when she fractured.
When she bled her soul bare in front of him.
Adrian paused on the landing and leaned against the wall.
"What was I even doing these past two weeks?"
He let the question hang. It wasn't rhetorical. It was biting. Accusatory.
"I was a therapist in my last life. A psychiatrist in this one. And I'm only now realizing the obvious."
His hand closed around the railing, grip tight for a second.
"Healing isn't about fixing people. It's not about returning them to some imagined version of 'normal.' That's not how it works."
He looked down the stairwell, toward the faint hum of activity on the next floor.
"It's about walking with them. Through it. Through the pain. Not around it. Not above it. Through."
He clicked his tongue, quiet and bitter.
"How the hell did I forget that?"
He opened the stairwell door.
The hallway outside was loud too loud for this hour.
At first, it didn't register. His mind was still caught in reflection. But then the tension of the floor wrapped around him like a wire pulled tight.
The 25th floor was usually calm by nightfall. A few nurses. A couple of wandering patients. Staff closing out paperwork and checking vitals.
Now it looked like the beginning of a slow-building emergency.
Voices were raised. Conversations snapped short. A nurse darted past him without a glance. Two others huddled around the phone on the far wall. Someone wheeled a cart into the emergency prep room fast.
Adrian walked forward.
The lights flickered above, just once.
Not enough to raise alarms.
Enough to make him narrow his eyes.
He scanned for someone familiar and spotted Lauren at the far side of the hallway, standing near the nurses' desk, her posture tense. She lowered a call phone from her ear and turned just as Adrian approached.
He didn't waste time.
"Lauren," Adrian said, voice low but firm, steady in its demand for clarity.
She didn't answer right away. Her eyes didn't meet his.
Instead, she raised her wrist and tapped the face of her smartwatch.
11:00 PM.
Adrian glanced at the glowing digits, then looked back at her.
"I don't get it," he said.
No explanation came. Just a quiet nod not at him, but toward the windows lining the far end of the corridor.
His brow furrowed. He turned and walked to the nearest window, parting the curtain just enough to see outside.
And then he froze.
The city beyond was lit.
Not by cold white streetlamps. Not by emergency floodlights. Not by some hidden artificial rigging.
By sunlight.
Full, unbroken sunlight.
It poured across rooftops in golden sheets, stretching far over the horizon like it had every right to be there. The skyline shimmered under its touch glass, steel, and stone basking in a warm glow that belonged to a summer afternoon.
Adrian didn't move.
His breath hitched not in fear, but in recognition.
This wasn't a trick. This wasn't some malfunction in the lighting grid. No retinal illusion. No simulation error. He'd lived long enough to know what sunlight looked like. What it felt like.
And this was real.
Except it wasn't.
It was 11:00 PM.
He pulled out his phone to confirm. Same time. Same result.
11:00 PM.
Exactly the same as before.
The world hadn't advanced a second. The light outside hadn't dimmed. The golden haze still hung over the city like a curtain drawn too tight.
Then, like a drop of water breaking the surface of a still pond, the Scripture stirred in his mind.
A ripple. A pulse of quiet, internal motion.
And then a message not heard, not spoken, but understood.
[SYSTEM NOTICE] The Law of Darkness is gone.
His vision sharpened. The words pressed into his senses like cold metal.
Gone.
Not sealed. Not dormant.
Gone.
No anchor. No balance. No shadow.
No night.
A piece of the world a governing principle, a Law had simply ceased to exist.
Adrian turned away from the window slowly. His eyes settled on Lauren again.
"What else do you know?"
She shook her head, her voice subdued. "Only what I heard on the call just now. Central sent out a blanket notice to all departments. Realizer personnel are on standby. We're told to stay in place and await further instructions."
He looked past her, across the floor.
Orderlies were moving faster than usual. Nurses huddled over their comms. A few administrators were whispering in tight clusters near the elevators. There was no loud alarm, no formal declaration, but the tension in the air was thick.
Even without the words, everyone knew something had gone wrong.
He tilted his head upward, eyes locking on the digital clock above the nurse's desk.
11:00 PM.
Still.
No progression. No movement. Time was stuck, or meaningless. Or both.
And for a brief moment, Adrian had wanted to believe it was some kind of reward. A sign from the Law. Validation for everything he'd done today. That maybe the world was echoing his truth back to him.
But now, under this unnatural light, that clarity crumbled.
Something wasn't right.
Not just the sun. Not the delay. Not the whispers.
There was something deeper.
He glanced around the corridor again. Staff rushed past him, clipped heels and quick steps. Nervous eyes and clenched jaws. All of it seemed… off.
His stomach tensed.
I've been too focused.
It came quietly. Shamefully.
Too focused on people. Their tone. Their movements. Their lies. Always the behavior. Always the reading.
That had always been his strength. Behavioral patterns. Micro-expressions. Nervous habits. He could read them all like ink on paper.
But that wasn't enough now.
He had been watching people. Not the world.
He took a step back from the nurses' station, lips pressed into a line.
I forgot to look at everything else.
He lowered his gaze.
Then froze.
There was no shadow beneath him.
His polished shoes met the white tile floor. Clearly. Perfectly.
But there was no outline beneath them. No shape trailing his body. No contrast at all.
He spun in place slightly, scanning.
The countertop. The plastic chairs. The IV stand by the wall. The edge of the doorway.
All fully lit. All cleanly defined.
But none of them cast a shadow.
Nothing did.
Even the potted plant near the stairwell entrance perfectly still in its ceramic pot stood without even a hint of shading.
He blinked.
No flicker. No movement. No blur where a shadow should fall.
Just… light.
And nothing else.
He lifted his hand toward the overhead light, spreading his fingers wide.
No silhouette followed.
His hand was alone. Hanging in space. Unmirrored. Unanchored.
It wasn't just a visual absence.
This was conceptual.
A chill crawled down his neck.
Shadows are gone.
Not distorted. Not misplaced. Not hidden in clever angles.
Gone.
Like someone had reached into the rules of reality and deleted the code.
He turned his head, slowly now, with purpose.
Nurses moved like paper dolls. Brightly lit, fully visible but flat. Their forms lacked depth. Their bodies didn't anchor into the world.
A clipboard sat on a desk like it had been pasted there no depth, no weight.
This wasn't just unnatural.
It was wrong.
He whispered to himself, barely audible, "So even shadows were a gift."
The Law of Darkness wasn't just responsible for nightfall. It wasn't about the sky turning black or the moon taking its shift.
It was about contrast.
It was about shadow the thing that gave light its meaning. The thing that gave form to dimension.
Without it, the world lost depth.
It lost grounding.
It became too clean. Too bright. Too sterile.
And completely unreal.
He narrowed his eyes, activating his Realizer senses. Not just his natural perception, but the expansion granted by the Law of Contradiction.
The fracture pulsed in his chest.
Lines of contradiction, thought, and belief began to pull apart in his vision. He saw the edges of truth and lie fray. He saw the way reality tried to hold itself together, even now.
And in that space, he felt it again.
Not hunger.
Not power.
Awareness.
The Scripture of Fractured Truth was not pleased.
It was interested.
The world had changed.
And somewhere, something was responsible.
Adrian exhaled once. Long and slow.
His hand lowered.
He didn't say another word.
The world outside the glass was still golden. Still unmoving.
And the shadows were still gone.
The Law had vanished.
And now, nothing could stop the consequences from spreading.