The breath That Steals Souls

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Six

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At midnight, the atmosphere changed completely.It didn’t start with sound, it started with absence of breath.

I woke up gasping for air, my lungs were burning as if I had been underwater for hours. My chest was heavy, but there was no air anywhere. Not because the room was stuffy,but because the air itself had been emptied of life.

I stumbled to the window.

The courtyard below was a graveyard of total stillness.

Students collapsed on the stones, not dead,breathing, but shallowly, like their lungs had forgotten how to pull in the world. Their eyes were opened wide with fear,mouths moving with no sound, as if screaming into a void that swallowed every cry.

Even the wind had stopped blowing.

As if something had reached into the sky and sucked the breath from the world completely.

By morning,the truth was no longer hidden.

It wasn’t an attack.

It was a harvest.

Every living thing in the academy,students, professors, birds in the eaves, even the fo