All Chapters of RUTHLESS BILLIONAIRE EX-HUSBAND CHASED ME BACK: Chapter 291 - Chapter 297

The golden light bled from Lina’s eyes, not in rays, but in shimmering motes that hung in the stale air of the ship, illuminating the dust of millennia. The voice that had come from her was an echo of a dead civilization, a ghost in the machine of my daughter’s mind. The words hung between us, more solid and terrifying than any weapon.*The gardeners are waking up.*Jeff was frozen, his spear held loosely, its point aimed at the floor. His face was a mask of pure, unadulterated horror. It was the look of a man who had just realized the ground beneath his feet was not earth, but the shell of a sleeping leviathan.“Lina?” I whispered, my voice cracking. I took a step forward, my hand outstretched. “Baby, can you hear me?”Her head tilted, a gesture that was entirely her own, yet unnervingly alien. The golden light in her eyes pulsed, and for a moment, her own familiar, vibrant consciousness seemed to surface through the ancient chorus.“Mama?” Her voice was small, layered with the echo,

The hope was a fragile, precious thing, warming us more effectively than the weak sun that filtered through our crude shelter the next morning. For three days, we built our new life. Our lean-to became a sturdier hut, its walls woven tight, its roof thick with leaves that shed the nightly rain. Jeff, with a patience I'd only ever seen him use on engine components, taught Lina how to knap a piece of flint into a sharp edge. I learned which mushrooms were safe, which tubers could be dug up and roasted in our small, carefully-tended fire.Lina was our guide. She didn't just hear the water sing; she listened to the forest's whispers. She led us to a thicket of berry bushes we never would have found, and when a sleek, cat-like predator with too many eyes stalked the edge of our camp, she simply stood and stared at it. The creature had frozen, cocked its head, and then melted back into the shadows without a sound."It was just curious," she'd said, turning back to me with a shrug. "It's not

The world narrowed to the fracture in the wall and the descending teardrop ship. The deep purple glow at its base intensified, humming with a power that made the fillings in my teeth ache. It was a sound of absolute finality. We were seconds from being expunged, our messy, biological story neatly deleted from the Archive's pristine records.But Lina's eyes were fixed on the crack, wide not with fear, but with a terrifying, dawning recognition."It's the same," she whispered, her voice almost lost in the building whine of the ship's weapon. "The song behind the wall… it's the same as the hungry nothing."My blood ran cold. The eraser. The void that consumed reality. It wasn't just a weapon of the Curators. It was a force the Archive was built to contain. And we had cracked the containment field.The teardrop ship hesitated. Its smooth, menacing descent faltered as its sensors undoubtedly registered the breach. The purple glow at its base flickered, its purpose shifting from exterminati

The jump was different this time. It wasn't the violent, reality-wrenching tear of the Ouroboros. It was a glide, a descent into a warm, dark river. The bronze ship around us hummed a low, soothing frequency, a lullaby after the Archive's sterile scream. There was no bone-deep terror, only a profound, weary disorientation.The light outside the viewport resolved from streaks into a soft, predawn grey. We were descending through a calm, misty sky towards a landscape of rolling, forested hills. It was Earth. It felt like Earth. The scent of pine and damp earth filtered through the ship's ancient environmental systems, a familiar perfume after the alien loam of the Archive's exhibit.Jeff’s hands were white-knuckled on the controls, his face slack with exhaustion and disbelief. "We're… down. We're stable." He looked at the readouts, his brow furrowed. "The power core is almost depleted. That one jump… it took everything."It didn't matter. We were down. We were alive.The hatch hissed op