The news came at three seventeen in the morning on October 3, 2031.
Noah was still staring into the eyepiece of his microscope when his phone vibrated against the metal workbench.
For three weeks, his existence had been reduced to this.
Sleep a few hours.
Wake up.
Work.
Fail.
Start again.
The lamps of his improvised laboratory bathed the room in harsh white light.
Dozens of sheets covered in equations were pinned to the walls.
The boards were saturated with cellular diagrams, biochemical models, and calculations scribbled down at frantic speed.
The phone vibrated a second time.
Noah reached for it mechanically.
Then his eyes fell on the screen.
The hospital.
For one second, he remained still.
His brain refused to understand.
Then everything aligned.
The hour.
The sender.
The absence of a message.
The void.
‘No.’
His stomach clenched violently.
‘This can’t be real.’
The phone almost slipped from his fingers.
‘I thought I had more time.’
The laboratory went silent.
Terribly silent.
Even the fans seemed to have stopped.
Noah remained seated in front of his microscope without moving.
One minute.
Maybe ten.
Time had stopped mattering.
His father was dead.
And no equation could change that fact.
A few days later, London wept with them.
Cold rain had been falling without interruption since dawn.
Not a real downpour.
More like that stubborn drizzle that seeps into everything.
The church stood in the mist like a forgotten monument.
Water ran down the gray stone.
The stained-glass windows cast a pale light that turned the interior into an ocean of faded colors.
Incense floated in the air, mixed with the damp smell of black coats and the quieter scent of grief.
Noah stood motionless in the front row.
A black suit covered his frame.
His hair, soaked by the rain, looked darker.
His skin seemed paler than ever.
To his right, his mother sobbed silently.
Each tremor of her shoulders felt like a knife wound.
Mark kept his eyes fixed on the coffin.
His little sister seemed unable to understand what was happening, or maybe she understood it too well.
The coffin rested at the center of the church, simple, dark, final, and Noah hated it because it represented a truth he still refused to accept.
A man stepped up to the lectern.
Tailored suit.
Carefully styled hair.
The face of a man used to press conferences.
A senior official.
One of his father’s colleagues.
Maybe even a friend.
He adjusted the microphone, then began to speak.
“We have lost a friend.”
His voice echoed beneath the arches.
“A father.”
“A brother.”
“A man who devoted his life to protecting public health.”
Around Noah, several people lowered their heads.
Others discreetly wiped their eyes.
The speaker continued.
“His rigor, integrity, and humanity will remain engraved in the archives of our institution, as well as in our memories.”
‘Archives.’
Noah’s gaze stayed fixed on the coffin.
‘That’s what will remain of him ?’
A dull pain crossed his chest.
‘A line in a register.’
‘A few administrative reports.’
‘A commemorative plaque in some hallway.’
Rage began to rise.
Slowly.
Silently.
Every sentence felt hollow.
Every tribute sounded false.
None of these people had seen his father struggle to hide his pain.
None of them had shared the consultations.
The tests.
The results.
The silences.
None of them had watched the pillar of their family crack day after day.
‘What did I think, exactly ?’
His gaze lowered.
‘That I could find a cure for a disease that existed before I was born ?’
A bitter edge cut through his thoughts.
‘What pathetic arrogance.’
He had truly believed he could beat cancer.
Because he was intelligent, because he worked harder than others, because he refused to give up.
As if the universe had any obligation to reward his efforts.
The coffin remained still and indifferent.
Reality did not negotiate.
When he returned home, the silence was worse than the funeral.
The apartment felt empty.
Not physically, but emotionally.
As if something had been torn out of the very structure of the world.
Noah closed the door behind him.
Then stood in the entrance.
Without moving.
Without thinking.
The familiar smell of chemicals still floated in the air.
Notes of solvent, alcohol, and reagents.
The smell of his last three weeks.
The smell of his failure.
His gaze swept over the improvised laboratory.
The lined-up vials.
The open notebooks.
The boards covered in calculations.
Everything was exactly where it had been.
As if nothing had happened.
As if his father had not died.
As if this research still served any purpose.
‘Where did I mess up ?’
He moved forward slowly.
‘Where ?’
His fingers brushed a stack of notes.
‘Did I run out of time ?’
He shook his head.
‘No.’
Another thought emerged.
More painful.
‘Maybe I was simply hiding.’
His gaze fell on a formula written in black marker.
Then another.
And another.
Thousands of hours of work.
Thousands.
‘Maybe all these equations were just a way to avoid reality.’
Something gave way inside him.
Not suddenly.
Not violently.
Like a dam finally breaking under pressure.
Anger rose.
Brutal.
Immense.
Uncontrollable.
His breathing quickened.
His heart hammered against his chest.
Then his hand swept across the table.
In one motion.
Sheets flew.
Pens rolled across the floor.
Vials shattered against the wall.
CRASH !
Glass burst across the room.
A howl tore out of his throat.
An animal sound.
Primitive.
“ALL OF THIS FOR NOTHING !”
His voice echoed against the walls, then vanished.
Leaving behind only an even heavier silence.
He stood still among the debris.
His chest rose and fell violently.
Air refused to enter his lungs properly.
As if something were crushing him from the inside.
His legs finally gave out.
He collapsed against the overturned desk.
His fingers clenched so tightly that his nails dug into his skin.
Pain no longer meant anything.
“I don’t understand…”
His voice was nothing more than a whisper.
“What was I missing ?”
His shoulders trembled.
“A week ?”
A joyless laugh escaped him.
“A day ?”
His gaze drifted through the wreckage of the laboratory.
“A different molecule ?”
Silence answered him.
As always.
“Why ?”
His throat tightened.
“Why wasn’t science enough ?”
No answer.
Only the distant hum of the refrigerator.
Then nothing.
Absolute emptiness.
Something changed.
Noah felt it immediately.
A strange sensation crossed his body.
Heat.
No.
Cold.
Both at once.
Like melting ice flowing through his veins.
“Urgh…”
His hand clenched.
The sensation intensified brutally.
His veins seemed to ignite.
Every fiber of his body screamed.
His breath cut off.
A high-pitched ringing filled his ears.
The room swayed.
The light fractured.
As if the world itself were cracking.
“What the…”
He tried to stand, but failed.
His gaze met his reflection in a broken pane of glass.
His pupils were glowing.
Green.
An unreal green.
Too bright.
Too alive.
A strange light danced deep in his eyes.
‘What’s happening to me ?
An asthma attack ?’
For the first time in a long while, Noah felt true fear.
Then the world began to die.
CRACK.
A sharp sound rang out to his right.
He turned his head.
One of his medical textbooks had just split on its own.
A black line crossed the cover.
Then another.
Then another.
The pages came loose, disintegrated, and fell to the floor as blackish dust.
Noah’s eyes widened.
‘No.’
A vial exploded.
Then a second.
Then a third.
But no shards flew.
The glass turned directly into powder.
As if it had aged several centuries in a few seconds.
“What the hell is this…”
Another shelf began to crack.
The metal groaned.
Then collapsed in on itself.
Eaten away by something invisible.
“No…
no…”
The massive desk in front of him began to crumble.
The wood split.
Darkened.
Then turned into sawdust.
A wave of dust filled the room.
Everywhere his eyes landed, matter died.
Silently.
As if the very cohesion of the world were coming undone.
Gray energy began to seep from his hands, spreading through the room.
“But…”
His voice trembled.
“It’s like…”
He backed away in a panic.
His chair crumbled under his weight.
His hands were shaking.
His mind spun at full speed.
Searching for an explanation.
A logic.
A known phenomenon.
Anything.
Then the answer imposed itself.
Brutal and obvious.
‘Me.’
His breath failed him.
‘It’s coming from me.’
It was not an attack.
Not an accident.
Not a chemical leak.
He was undergoing an Ascension.
Astra was circulating through his body.
He could feel it now.
Like an extra organ whose existence he had never known.
Something had given way.
A biological lock.
A barrier buried deep within him.
And from that fracture, a new function had been born.
A new Node.
A new power.
Decomposition.
Dust floated around him.
Slowly.
Peacefully.
Like ashes.
Like the ashes that would soon cover his father’s grave.
Noah remained still.
Watching the phenomenon.
Gradually understanding.
Every object reduced to dust seemed to reflect his own inner state.
His anger.
His grief.
His helplessness.
When the phenomenon finally began to calm, the laboratory was nothing more than a field of ruins.
Layers of dust covered the floor.
The furniture had disappeared.
Part of the equipment too.
Noah stood alone at the center of the disaster.
Breathing with difficulty.
Trying to understand.
‘Is it because of Dad ?’
The thought crossed his mind.
His father had always been his anchor.
His reference point.
The constant around which his existence had organized itself.
And now that constant was gone.
Was that enough to trigger an Ascension ?
Maybe.
But another hypothesis appeared quickly.
More rational and consistent with what he knew of the world.
The crystal shards.
His gaze fell to his hand.
The old cuts had disappeared.
‘Or is it linked to that ?’
The crystal destroyed on the highway.
The fragments that had pierced his skin.
The strange sensation he had felt that day.
A mutation induced by the crystal seemed infinitely more probable.
More scientific.
More logical.
Even if no data allowed him to confirm it yet.
Noah slowly looked at his palms.
gray energy still seemed to move through them.
He closed his fingers.
Then whispered :
“What good is all this to me now ?”
His voice echoed through the devastated apartment.
No answer.
His father was dead.
And he had obtained a power too late.
Always too late.
Then something changed in his eyes.
A thought simple clear and cold.
‘If death took my father…’
His fingers tightened.
‘Then I will take death’s secrets.’
The silence seemed to grow heavier.
‘I will never accept being powerless again.’
This time, the thought did not feel like a promise.
It felt like a decision.
A final decision.
Noah slowly straightened.
Around him stretched the ruins of his former life.
He lifted his eyes toward the window.
The rain continued to fall over London, tirelessly.
As if the entire city were still mourning.
“Nothing is immutable.”
His father’s last words.
This time, Noah truly understood them.
Not as comfort.
As truth.
A fundamental law of the world.
Everything changed died and transformed.
Now it was up to him to understand how to use that law.
In the darkness of the devastated apartment, a new Ascendant had just been born.