Chapter 7. The Resonance Cascade
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The world dissolved into blinding, unbearable white.
Not the sterile white of the lab walls he’d stared at for days, not the cool, pulsing blue of the chamber’s standby lights, but a searing, absolute radiance that slammed into Julian Vance’s consciousness with the force of a physical detonation. It devoured color, shape, dimension, leaving only an infinite, annihilating intensity. It wasn’t just light; it was pressure, immense and crushing, squeezing the air from phantom lungs he no longer felt connected to, collapsing the perceived boundaries of his own mind inwards even as the energy surged outwards. A sound erupted simultaneously, not through his ears, which felt like useless, distant appendages, but vibrating directly within the marrow of his bo
