THE GENERAL'S DISGRACED HEIR

The tear pulsed, expanding slightly as if in response to his recognition. And in that moment, David understood what had happened. The experiment hadn't failed—it had succeeded too well, opening not just a stabilization pathway for his own dimensional frequency, but a direct observation window into the space between realities themselves.

Yet as he stared into the void, something within that infinite darkness seemed to stare back—a presence ancient and vast, stirring at the disturbance of its domain. A tendril of pure darkness, thinner than a thread but blacker than the absence of light, extended from the tear toward David, drawn to the unique resonance of his fractured existence.

It moved not like matter, but like thought—silent, deliberate, intelligent.

With newfound clarity tinged with sudden alarm, he raised his hands toward the tear, fingers moving in precise gestures that seemed to pluck at invisible strings connecting him to the void. The howling wind gradually subsided as the tear began to contract, its edges folding inward like a closing eye—but not before the tendril of darkness made momentary contact with his outstretched hand, leaving a hairline mark of absolute blackness across his palm.

It sizzled faintly. It pulsed once. And then it vanished—though David knew, without doubt, that something had stayed behind.

"What are you doing?" Yue called, amazement replacing fear in her voice.

"Applying the correct harmonic," David replied, his voice strangely distant. "Every dimensional boundary has a resonance frequency. This one responds to..."

His fingers completed a final, complex pattern, and the tear sealed itself with a sound like a distant bell. The formula beneath his feet dimmed to a gentle glow, and the five pylons returned to their normal state, though the void crystal now possessed a strange iridescence it hadn't before.

Silence fell over the laboratory, broken only by the sound of Yue's astonished breathing and David's own thundering heartbeat. The experiment had failed in its original purpose—his dimensional instability remained unresolved—but had succeeded in demonstrating something perhaps more valuable: the possibility of controlled dimensional observation.

David stepped carefully from the platform, his legs trembling with exertion and the aftereffects of dimensional exposure. "Well," he said with a weak smile, "that was unexpected."

Yue approached the void crystal, examining its changed state with professional curiosity. "Unexpected is putting it mildly. You just opened and closed a dimensional rift using nothing but harmonic resonance manipulation." She looked up at him, her ancient eyes wide with wonder. "Do you have any idea what this means?"

Before David could reply, the laboratory door burst open. Elara stood in the doorway, her expression a mixture of concern and exasperation, with Litty peering around her shoulder.

"We felt a disturbance from the cafeteria," Elara explained, surveying the disheveled laboratory with a tactician's eye. "What happened? Are you—"

She stopped mid-sentence, noticing the strange new light in David's eyes and the altered state of the void crystal. Something had changed, something fundamental that she could sense but not fully comprehend.

David turned to face her, and for a moment, his form seemed to shimmer with possibilities—as if he existed in multiple states simultaneously, all converging on this single point in space and time.

"I think," he said slowly, "we may have just discovered something Solomon herself never fully understood."

Behind him, the void crystal pulsed once with inner light, as if in agreement.............

Before anyone could respond, the void crystal began to shimmer wildly, pulsing with an intensity that cast harsh shadows across their faces. Hairline fractures appeared across its surface, not breaking it but rather allowing something to seep through—light so pure and cold it seemed to drain warmth from the air.

"What's happening?" Litty demanded, backing toward the door instinctively. "I thought you said it was stable now!"

Yue lunged for the control tableau, her childlike hands moving with desperate precision. "It's not drawing from David anymore—it's drawing from somewhere else. Something's feeding energy into the medium!" Her fingers danced across crystalline controls, attempting to sever the mana flow that now surged through the entire system.

All around the laboratory, the dimensional formulas David had inscribed began to glow, lifting off the parchment and hanging suspended in the air. The equations pulsed and shifted, rearranging themselves into new configurations—ones David had never written.

"David..." Elara's voice was steady despite the chaos, her tactical mind assessing the threat even as her hand began to twitch ready for anything. "Is this bad?"

David stared at the transforming equations, Solomon's Legacy translating their meaning in his mind even as they changed. His eyes widened in horror as understanding dawned—the formulas weren't changing randomly. They were being rewritten with purpose, as if guided by an unseen intelligence with malevolent intent.

"Luna! Elara!" he shouted, backpedaling from the platform. "Destroy the medium! Now!"

Elara, battle-hardened and quick to respond, was already summoning a massive fireball between her palms, the heat distorting the air around her hands as elemental destruction took form. Luna simultaneously materialized fully from the shadows, her domain of darkness spreading across the ceiling like living ink, ready to crush everything below.

But as they prepared to strike, a peculiar sensation rippled through the room. The fireball's flames slowed their dance, the tendrils of darkness ceased their advance, and dust motes hung perfectly still in the beams of light. It wasn't just that everything slowed,

— time itself ceased to flow.

Only David remained aware, frozen in a moment but still conscious, watching helplessly as the light from the void crystal reversed its outward expansion. The radiance collapsed back toward the center with unnatural precision, condensing into a single point of brilliance so intense it should have blinded him, yet somehow didn't.

Within that point, something began to take form—a silhouette that shouldn't have been possible to discern in such brightness, yet was unmistakably present. It moved with ancient deliberation, every particle of light bending to its will.

Then, a voice that seemed to bypass his ears and resonate directly in his mind spoke with a chilling clarity that froze his very soul.

"Found you!"