The light faded.

  Silence hung in the air, heavy and unnatural. Then came the sound—subtle at first, like wind over glass—followed by a low, grinding hum from the ruptured Mirror’s frame.

  Casen pulled Elian behind a console. Sparks burst from shattered conduits. The floor beneath them trembled.

  "Is it collapsing?" Elian asked.

  "Not yet," Casen muttered. "But something’s definitely—"

  A pulse surged through the bunker. Not mechanical. Temporal. Like a heartbeat out of rhythm with reality.

  The Mirror’s shards began to glow faintly. Images flickered across them—ghostlike echoes. Scenes from different timelines bleeding into one another.

  Casen’s breath caught.

  One shard showed his mother—alive, smiling, holding a baby that wasn’t him. Another shard showed a younger Elian, sitting alone in a white corridor, eyes blank. A third shard pulsed with static and showed… himself. Older. Hardened. Bleeding.

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  Elian reached toward the shard with her younger self. It blinked and vanished.

  Then the Mirror imploded—quietly, with no heat or flame, just a vacuum pop. And every echo disappeared.

  They staggered out of the lab. The alarms had died, and the corridors were still.

  "Did we actually destroy it?" Elian asked.

  Casen nodded slowly. "Yeah. And maybe more than that."

  "I saw things. Versions of me I don’t remember being."

  "The Mirror wasn’t just showing past or future. It was showing possibilities."

  They reached the elevator shaft, forced it open manually, and climbed up through the emergency ladder. As they emerged into the streetlight-streaked ruins of Sector 9, the city greeted them with silence.

  No ghosts. No Returns. Just the sound of wind whistling through dead high-rises.

  Then Casen’s phone buzzed.

  One message: "Wynn. Safehouse Delta. Tomorrow. 1:00 PM."

  He showed it to Elian. "She’s alive."

  Elian nodded. "Then that’s where we go next."

  End of Arc 1: The Noon Law

  The world changed the moment the Mirror fell. The rules bent. The dead paused. And two anomalies became a threat to the balance itself.

  Arc 2: Echoes of the Past Begins — Chapter 9 Preview:

  As the world reels from the Mirror’s destruction, ghost behavior shifts. The dead return with wrong memories. A new faction stirs: the Black-Suits. And the Red List resurfaces... with a name that should’ve never been there.