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CHAPTER 165

Penulis: CagalieYula
last update Terakhir Diperbarui: 2025-06-04 16:14:58

Back in New York, the air felt different. Harsher, faster, less forgiving. Geneva had been the battlefield; this was the proving ground.

The Consortium headquarters stood like a monolith of purpose—clean glass and ethical ambition. For all its steel and stone, I now saw it as something alive, something fragile. Reputation, after all, was a heartbeat away from a flatline.

Jeff and I stepped into the lobby side-by-side. He was on the phone with our Lagos office, his voice even and calm. I scanned the reception area—every corner still bore the weight of recent weeks. Murmured greetings. Quick glances. That subtle caution in the eyes of people not yet sure if they could trust again.

We were rebuilding, yes—but some walls take longer to mend than others.

“Demi,” a voice called from across the atrium.

It was Ava Rhee, our new Director of Global Partnerships. She was brisk, smart as hell, and direct in a way I admired.

“We have a situation,” she said. “You might want to take this in your off
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    The post-Resort recovery was a gentle, sticky affair. We spent days picking glitter and traces of metaphysical goo out of the moss, and Lyra kept startling at the sound of the wind, expecting it to be a harp. But slowly, the garden’s deep peace soaked back into us. Lyra, freed from mandatory fun, simply… existed. She’d sit for hours by the stream, her light dimmed to a soft glow, just watching the water. It was the rest she’d actually needed.Our bakery resumed. Lyra proved to be a natural, her intuitive understanding of narrative energy translating into a preternatural sense for when a custard was exactly set, or a meringue had reached peak existential loftiness. The Jeff-resonance, now infused with the memory of our great escape, began producing pies with adventurous, rebellious fillings—bursts of unexpected spice, layers of contrasting texture. They were his love letters from the front lines of our minor rebellion.Life was good. Better than good. It was perfectly, wonderfully ordi

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    The air in the Eternal Repose was so clean it felt sterile, scrubbed of all conflict and surprise. The harp music was scientifically calibrated to induce placid acceptance. Our matching robes, which Vanilla would have called a "profoundly uninteresting weave," clung with a ghostly, polite insistence."Seminar Block A: 'The Joy of Detachment' starts in five centicycles," Lina read from her glowing schedule, her voice flat. "Do we find Lyra first, or do we risk having our desire to find her gently detached from us?"The Jeff-resonance, our beacon and cover, pulsed a warm, steady amber beside me. It seemed content, humming along with the ambient music. He was probably enjoying the engineering precision of the place."We look for her," I whispered. "But we look… calmly. We blend."Blending was harder than it sounded. Every being here moved with a slow, deliberate grace, faces arranged in expressions of serene vacancy. We tried to mimic it, gliding through the marbled halls, our eyes scann

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    The "Good Ingredient" pie marked a turning point. We weren't just baking anymore; we were curating a cross-dimensional, trans-temporal culinary exchange. The Grand Curator, whom Lina had nicknamed "Vanilla Bean" (to his flustered but secretly pleased chagrin), became a semi-regular visitor. He’d arrive with a new treasure—a pinch of radiant saffron from a photonic civilization’s last harvest, a jar of salt harvested from the tears of a reconciled tragedy planet. Each ingredient came with a quiet, data-rich story, which Kael would archive and Jeff would somehow…seasoninto his next creation.Our garden clearing now boasted a proper outdoor kitchen, courtesy of Kael’s engineering. A stone counter, a rain-collection cistern that doubled as a coolant for failed experiments, and an oven whose heat

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    The Great Garden Bake-Off became our secret, sacred project. The universe spun its epics, the Audience consumed its react streams (now hosted by a surprisingly charismatic collective of sentient moss we’d left in charge), and the Silence remained eternally baffled by its tax forms. But our true work was measured in crust flakiness and berry sweetness.We’d established a routine. Mornings were for foraging and theory.“The problem,”Lina declared, staring at a diagram of gluten chains she’d etched in the dirt,“is structural integrity versus tenderness. Dad’s treating the crust like a load-bearing wall. It needs to be a… a flavorful curtain.”“A curtain that holds boiling fruit,”Kael pointed out, us

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