NOVEL NEXT Chapter 75 | Full Resonance
HEART SPRING. SOUTHEASTERN RIDGE.
Eathan's eyes slipped shut, consciousness diving inward, falling deeper into a quiet sanctuary that awaited within. Here, scattered golden lotus blossoms drifted, each petal a fragment of Qilin's scattered essence.
Golden lotus blossoms hovered, spreading across an infinite internal lake. At its center, Qilin's ethereal silhouette lingered, antlers reaching toward a distant sky. The ancient creature stood silently. Its ancient eyes held neither judgment nor demand, only patience.
"You're waiting for my answer," Eathan said.
Qilin inclined its head, a silent acknowledgment.
Eathan steadied himself, drew a last even breath, and set the terms without ornament. "I'm letting you in—willingly," he said. A thin band of gold lifted across his irises. "My body, your power. No locks. No hedge."
For one quiet heartbeat, nothing changed.
Then, like dawn dissolving night, Qilin stepped—and did not so much enter as dissolve along the edges of him. Their essences converged at once, two streams flowing together into a single current.
Eathan felt the resonance first as warmth blossoming deep within his chest; it flowered behind his sternum, the way sunshine finds dry stone.
He inhaled one time after another, keeping track of his own heartbeat. The pressure from the current was there, but with some effort, he could still keep his mind steady.
Keep it simple, he told himself.
It wasn't.
As the stream of warmth continued to expand outwards, it faltered abruptly. Something in him flinched. Not the Qilin—him. The human spine kept its old habit, bracing against the tide.
An invisible grip seized his chest, seizing him mid-merge. A primal, instinctive dread surged from within, and his mind recoiled. He faltered, heart racing as the warm glow of the Qilin shifted into something else. A cool, bald vastness opened where language usually lives, as if someone had removed the scaffolding of "Eathan" and invited him to walk out onto air.
Wait—
Blackness consumed him instantly, stripping away sound, warmth, and feeling. He tumbled into this abyssal emptiness, falling without end, the entirety of his being dissolving into apathetic nothingness. This was a familiar terror—one he'd known only briefly, yet enough to haunt his memory.
In that reduction, the hollow void of [Auspice Ignition] returned. It wasn't so much a monster in the dark, but the absence of a narrator. It greedily devoured every emotion, every memory of his entity. When no voice says I, nothing hurts—and nothing means.
A ribbon of text slid through the quiet:
[SYSTEM] NOTIFICATION:
Humanity trending down! Attempting to stabilize defocus...
Eathan stretched out instinctively, seeking stability, but his limbs grasped only emptiness. His thoughts fragmented, panic dissolving into quiet resignation. The world, the spring, even the faint trembling of the cavern felt impossibly distant. He was fading again, eroding silently, stripped clean of his humanity.
[SYSTEM] NOTIFICATION:
[Humanity] is rapidly decreasing!
59% → 55% → 51% → 48%
Warning! Host consciousness destabilizing!
He recognized the temptation now. The void offered relief from cost—no grief, no debt, no "you." It was tidy, even honest. If he yielded, the island would cease to matter, so would Team 001, so would he. The mind loves a clean exit.
The darkness swirled, then parted like gauze.
Eathan stood at the edge of a memory he knew all too intimately. The sky overhead was ash-grey, air heavy with chrysanthemums and winter air. Cemetery marble lifted underfoot, their surfaces gleaming like fragments of ice, engraved with the blurred names of his parents.
Eathan's breath hitched in his throat.
This scene again.
Except, unlike the previous moments, he'd expected this to happen. Beside him, a figure knelt, one slender hand extended toward him. Eathan turned slowly, gaze rising with the movement. Taeril's face was a blurred smudge, his expression unreadable. The outstretched hand loomed in silence, no longer offering comfort—but emanating something darker.
Something hostile.
Fear, raw and primal, surged through him.
No. This isn't right.
Even though he'd mentally prepared himself, Eathan found himself recoiling, stumbling back on his feet. This wasn't salvation—it was judgment.
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A lure.
But even as he retreated, the hand persisted, shifting with an animosity that turned kindness into menace. Every shadow, every whisper in the air twisted into threats. The ground tilted, head spinning as panic surged upward, strangling him with icy fingers.
Breathe.
Yet he couldn't. Eathan's chest tightened. The greyness of the sky pressed against his chest, crushing air from his lungs. His vision distorted, twisted reflections of tombstones encircling him, cutting off all escape.
For a second, his mind blanked out. Every instinct told him to flee. The figure—once a promise of salvation—now felt like a predator waiting to drag him down into the abyss.
Eathan's mind splintered, spiralling deeper. He wanted to run, but there was nowhere left to go; he wanted to scream, but no sound emerged. Amidst this flood of fear, apathy somehow seeped back in as well, numbing him simultaneously. Eathan realized bitterly he was trapped, drowning again, losing himself to the darkness once more.
[SYSTEM] NOTIFICATION:
[Humanity] at critical low!
35% → 32% → 30%
Imminent [Host] identity collapse!
His fingers curled weakly, knees hitting the ground beside his parents' grave. Emptiness expanded inside him, swallowing memories, hopes, emotions, one after another.
He could tell—he was being erased from existence.
He was unravelling, sinking deeper into infinite apathy.
Eathan closed his eyes.
It's doomed.
The thought whispered through his fading consciousness. It couldn't be helped. Fear had gripped him by the throat at the same time as it stripped him bare. He'd have to surrender. There was no other way around it. His breath slowed, world dimming at the edges.
"…"
But something else stirred in his chest—a new thought, fragile yet stubborn. It bud deep within his mind, pushing desperately against the numbness.
His eyes snapped open again, heart hammering in rebellion.
…Darn it.
He forced himself to stare at the outstretched hand again. Before, he had called that hand salvation. Later, he had feared it as bait. Now, he let himself look—really look. Not at the blur of a face the mind supplied, not at the story that wanted to close like a trap, but at small, stubborn facts: a callus on the forefinger where a pen rests; the faint white crescent of an old kitchen cut along the thumb. His own tells. The hostility was not in the hand. It was in his reflex to armour.
He could flee. He could freeze. yes, he could do all of that.
But he couldn't. Not this time.
Eathan clenched his fist and forced himself to stare into the darkness, finding that hand still extended, awaiting acceptance. His vision cleared slightly, finding himself alone with it. He stared deeper, breathing unsteady, pulse quickening with every fragile second.
Then, he reached forward. Fear screamed within him, warning him back, yet he ignored it, inching closer. His fingertips brushed the hand, and—
In that instant, the world shifted once more.
The dark hostility washed away layer by layer, replaced instead by warmth and recognition. The blurred figure stepped forward, shape shifting into something clearer, more familiar.
Eathan saw himself.
It wasn't exactly himself in the present. No, he was someone older, stronger. With spine long, breath unknotted, and a set of someone who had practiced staying when leaving would be easier.
The hand dissolved into his own outstretched palm, and the grip closed, not dragging him up but reminding him that he knew how to stand. Then, he saw it: a mirror of a version of himself who was no longer alone.
Without a word exchanged, the older Eathan glided forward and their forms merged seamlessly—becoming one again. The cemetery around him exhaled right then; the chrysanthemum thinned to mist. Water returned underfoot—the inner lake—and the Qilin waited where it had always waited, with the patience of weather.
Warmth bloomed again, this time without the body's flinch. Golden glyphs braided outward beneath Eathan's skin, tracing pathways along his limbs. His breath steadied into slow, even rhythms, each exhale rippling visibly as frost through the cavern air.
[SYSTEM] NOTIFICATION:
[Humanity] stabilized!
30% → 37% → 44% → 50%
Identity anchor reaffirmed.
The voice of the [SYSTEM] melted in his mind, blending seamlessly into the steadiness of his duo-heartbeat.
"Thank you."
Qilin's voice resonated, clearly within him now.
"Now trust yourself. Trust us."
Fear did not argue. It stepped aside.
Eathan opened his eyes into the carvern's dim with irises that fractured into petals of gold. Undeniable power flooded him, simultaneously profuse and peaceful—as if he'd spent a lifetime with a missing half that had just now reunited.
Without consciously moving, his hand lifted, feeling the power ripple through his veins. He stretched his senses outward, brushing against the island's spiritual turmoil. A second later, a wider map he felt more than saw came into view.
His heartbeat synchronized with the pulse of the island itself. Leylines flickered like nerves through a wounded limb; some were compressed into knots, some split like frayed rope, some had hardened into channels that remembered only the demon engines' demand. His heartbeat found theirs. Four beats, four directions, and on the fifth, the rhythms braided.
The chaos was overwhelming, yet from within this dual-consciousness, the solution seemed simple, intuitive. Qilin's innate nature was to harmonize, to heal chaos; his job, then, was to guide this power, to relinquish its potential to the fullest.
Eathan took a deep breath, feeling every tiny fragment of life on this island. He could taste metals in the current—iron where tunnels had collapsed, copper where arrays still sparked, salt where grief had saturated ground for centuries. None of it asked to be erased. It asked to be placed.
He was no longer simply mortal—yet still entirely himself. It was a strange duality, one that was humbling yet empowering.
He now hovered midair, feet grazing the mirrored surface. His chest pulsed, syncing in rhythm with the heartbeat of the island itself. His voice, when he spoke, resonated with dual timbres—one human, one divine—each word radiating an ancient authority.
"Let all be restored."
Gold spread from the central spring— waves of purified qi cascading outward like concentric rings. Almost immediately, the quaking land calmed, violent tremors fading into quivers. Countless leylines, twisted and tangled, began to slowly unravel, guided by the irresistible pull of the Auspicious Beast.
Across the Southeastern Ridge, trembling mortals shielded their eyes as their world momentarily stilled. Cracks mended slowly; jagged wounds of earth knit together, and turbulent streams of qi realigned into crystalline purity.
Floating at the eye of this storm, Eathan's consciousness continued to expand, senses blossoming far beyond mortal limits. He felt the mortals' exhausted heartbeats and sensed Willow and Finn standing protectively near an enclave of UMC soldiers. Chewie's quiet determination was tangible as she rallied demons toward tentative peace. He sensed it all clearly, yet his heart rested within Qilin's wisdom, untouched by mortal emotions.
"So, this is what balance feels like," Eathan whispered, dual voices harmonizing. His eyes were entirely golden as they peered outwards to the rest of the island.
"Let's set the bones right."