Lahat ng Kabanata ng BOUGHT BY CRUELEST ALPHA: Kabanata 111 - Kabanata 120

Their faces are blank, hollow, and the ones who still feel, who still try to cry, snap, rage, thrash as if the emptiness inside them is a clawing thing. I want to run. I want to grab them, cover them, anything. But my feet are lead. Every step toward them is a fight.The Cage hums. Not the normal hum, the living thrum of the place—but something else, vibrating through the floor into my soles, into my teeth. My stomach twists, nausea clawing, a high-pitched ringing in my ears. Lily, focus, I tell myself. Focus. But focus is gone. Pulled, stripped, like my very ability to hope is evaporating into that black void.I glance at the Warden. Their hands are trembling, but barely, barely visible. They stand near the heart of the Cage, the center of all this, fingers brushing the edge of the singularity, and I can see it in their eyes. Grief made solid. Heavy. Hungry. My throat tightens and I choke, try to swallow it back. It’s unfair. It’s terrifying. I hate seeing them like this. I want to t

The cold is no longer just his. It’s changed. A new quality to it, a texture. It’s not the clean, empty cold of a ghost anymore. It’s a… sticky cold. A clinging, invasive chill that doesn’t just sit on my skin, it presses in. Like frost on a windowpane, but inside out.I noticed it yesterday. A darkness. Not a shadow. A stain. A single, thin black vein tracing a path from the petrified stone of my wrist up into the flesh of my forearm. I thought it was a trick of the light. The Cage’s weird music playing on my eyes.It wasn’t.There are more today. A spiderweb of them. Dark, pulsing lines under my skin, branching out from the stone. They don’t hurt. That’s the worst part. They feel… warm. A sick, false warmth that feels too much like his hand used to feel after he’d been holding a glass of brandy. A deceptive heat.It’s the corruption. His corruption. The blight that ate him from the inside out, that turned his ambition into a cancer. It wasn’t just in his mind. It was in his essence.

The Warden’s stabilization field is a cage of cold light around Arthur’s ghost. It works. No more fading. But it’s… rigid. A constant, low hum that sets my teeth on edge. Our connection, once a wild, dangerous river, is now a locked irrigation channel. Controlled. Monitored.We strain against it. Not on purpose. It’s just our nature. His need, my giving, it’s a pressure that builds against the constraints. A silent rebellion.Then, it happens. A fault line. A crack in the Warden’s perfect system. Our combined strain—his desperate pull, my frantic push—slips through a seam in the reality of the Cage. And we tap into something… else. Not memory. Not energy.Potential.It hits us like a tidal wave. Not a vision. A life.One moment, I’m on the cold deck, the Cage’s discordant song in my bones. The next…Sunlight. Real, warm sunlight on my face. Not a star through a viewport. Sun light. The smell of turned earth. Of rain on green leaves. A porch. A wooden swing that creaks. My body is… old

The hollow ache is a constant now. A dull, numb void where pieces of me used to be. Arthur’s presence is a cold, heavy cloak around my shoulders, his new strength a reminder of my depletion. We exist in a fragile, terrifying equilibrium. Then the air… changes.It’s not a sound. It’s a pressure. A gathering. Like the moment before a lightning strike. The very atoms around us seem to hold their breath. The Cage’s dissonant song stutters, warps, then refocuses—here.A point of light appears in the center of the deck. Not the Warden’s starlight. Not the Gardener’s chaos. Something… new. It swells, not with heat, but with potential. A raw, searing power that makes the silver threads of my scars hum in sympathetic agony.It forms. A figure. Small. Slight. A girl. Starlight for hair. Eyes that are pools of shifting, liquid null-energy. She is the vision made flesh. The impossible child from a future we never lived.She doesn’t step forward. She just is. And her confusion is a tangible force,

The Warden’s solution is a diagram of light hanging in the air between us. Cold. Precise. A schematic of a soul. Arthur’s soul. It shows the ghost-energy, the stabilization field, the points of anchorage to my own life force. And it shows a pathway. A conduit to real, physical form. A body, woven from ambient matter and focused energy. A resurrection.My breath catches. Hope, that treacherous vine, strangles my heart. He could be real. Warm. Alive.Then I see the cost. The energy source. The equation is brutally simple. The power required is immense. Cataclysmic. There is only one source in all of existence potent enough, unique enough, to fuel such a miracle.The Prodigal Son. Our child. The conceptual being born from our love.The diagram doesn’t say “unmake.” It uses cleaner words. Conceptual reversion. Energy reallocation. Anomaly dissolution. It means the same thing. To give Arthur life, we must erase her. Unwind the starlight and null-energy back into base components and feed th