All Chapters of BOUGHT BY CRUELEST ALPHA: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

I snatch my hand back, gagging. Echoes ripple away where I touched it, dark stains spreading outward like spilled ink.I hear them. The storms. My storms. Echo-storms. The air breaks into soundless cracks, thunder without thunder. Shapes stumble from the fissures—half-things, pieces of old memories—Mother’s hands twisted in blood, Arthur’s shadow but stretched, wrong, too long. My teeth chatter, not from cold but from the sick rhythm of it all, reality grinding against itself.They worship this. I know they do. Somewhere beyond these bending walls, there are voices chanting. A cult. They’ve taken my worst nights and named them holy. They kneel to the shape of my shame. I want to vomit.I run. Or something like running—legs sinking, steps too slow, the air thick as syrup. I don’t know where I’m going. The labyrinth shifts as I move, halls curving, then flattening, then dropping off into pits of glass shards. I keep running because if I stop, the memories catch me.One does anyway.Arth

The first true Scar isn't a mark on reality. It’s a hole in it. A wound where the fabric of everything is thinnest, where the Jailbreak law hums its constant, seductive promise. It doesn’t bleed void. It doesn’t radiate chaos. It… sucks.Not matter. Not energy. Context.History. Memory. Meaning.I feel its hunger. A deep, psychic vacuum. A desperate, wordless need to understand what it is, why it is. It’s a question made of absence, and it demands an answer, pulling the answers from everything around it.The Warden feels it too. Their eternal vigilance, once focused outward, turns inward, toward this new, terrifying consequence of their own making. Their starlight form, usually so still, is tense. A low hum of alarm vibrates through the silver threads that were my scars. They watch, and I feel the dawning horror in their silence. This wasn't the plan. The Scar wasn't supposed to be… alive with hunger.Civilizations border the nascent Scar. The Yulani, a species of crystalline philosop

It doesn’t think. It feels. It senses order the way a plant senses the sun. And it moves towards it, not with rage, but with a terrifying, natural inevitability. A galaxy on the outer rim, where a species had finally achieved perfect societal harmony, predictable and stable. The Gardener’s thorned fingers, extensions of its will woven through the fabric of the Cage, brushed against it.The harmony didn’t shatter. It… overgrew. Cities were swallowed by sudden, violent forests of crystal and razor-vine. Thought-patterns were disrupted by psychic pollen that induced glorious, destructive randomness. The species didn’t die. They were liberated from order. Driven mad. Reduced to base, chaotic instincts. The Gardener moved on. Satisfied. A gardener deadheading a rose.The Warden feels every cut. Each one is a tremor through the threads of my scars. They try to reason. A futile effort. Their voice, usually a decree of cosmic law, is met with a language of metaphor and sensation. They project

They’ve been silent so long. A quiet, festering knot in the foundation. But they haven’t been idle. They’ve been listening. Absorbing. The Cage’s dissonant symphony. The whispers from the Scar, the echoes of lost memories and stolen histories. All that pain, all that beauty, all that chaos… it’s been food for them. And now… now they’re singing.It’s not a loud song. It doesn’t need to be. It’s perfect. A melody of pure, undilutedregret. Every note is a choice unmade, a word unsaid, a wound inflicted. It’s the sound of Arthur’s ambition curdling into betrayal. It’s the sound of Kieran’s love twisting into sacrifice. It’s the sound of my own failures, my own dissolution, reflected back at me with heartbreaking clarity.The song doesn’t hit the walls. It seeps through them. It unstitches the bonds holding this place together not with force, but with sorrow. The silver threads of my scars, the very weave of the Cage, begin toloosen. They don’t break; they weep. A slow, psychic unraveling

It’s a convergence. A terrible, inevitable meeting of every choice, every compromise, every damned solution we ever patched together. The escaped concepts—shards of silence, harmonics of chaos, whispers of forgotten histories—they swarm like gnats, biting at the edges, finding every weak point we ever made. The Consensus, that god of cold logic, hangs in the void like a poisoned diamond, its analytical beams dissecting the Cage’s structure, calculating the most efficient way to dismantle us, to absorb our power and cure its own paradoxical sickness. The Wild Gardener’s thorns are everywhere, not pruning now, but ripping, tearing at the silver threads of my scars, trying to force the chaos within to join the chaos without. And underneath it all, the Scar’s hunger, that deep, psychic vacuum, pulls. Pulls at the Warden’s will. Pulls at the memories holding the Cage together. Pulls at me.The Warden is… breaking. I feel it. Their cosmic form, a tapestry of duty and grief, is fraying at th