CHAPTER 38: BE SAFE

Ahce wrote as if the act itself could keep her alive. Her days blurred into nights, and her nights into the soft, endless hum of her keyboard. The words came like blood from a reopened wound, raw, insistent, unrelenting.

She wrote about heroes who vanished into the dark, about wars that devoured men whole, about lovers who waited at the edge of madness for someone who never came home. Every story she bled onto the page was another echo of Richard, another prayer disguised as fiction.

The readers adored it. Critics called her prose "haunting," her characters "tragically human." Her pen name became a phenomenon. Her books trended, adapted, and translated into languages she didn’t speak. She smiled for cameras, held trophies under studio lights, and answered interviews with grace.

But every applause reverberated like footsteps in an empty hall. Every award glinted like a consolation prize for a victory she’d never wanted. To the world, Ahce was a success story, a writer who had turned heartbreak into brilliance. To herself, she was a ghost feeding on illusion.

When she announced she would be leaving the country for a "world tour," the media swooned. They called her a romantic soul chasing inspiration across borders. She smiled on cue and told them she wanted to "see the world, to write about humanity."

None of them knew the truth.

Every plane ticket, every hotel booking, every staged book signing was a breadcrumb on a trail of secrets and blood.

Because Ahce was not just a novelist.

She was still Miss Nine, the Grandmaster hacker of Zeiren, the phantom who could slip through the digital arteries of nations without leaving a trace. And she wasn’t chasing inspiration. She was chasing ghosts.

Behind encrypted channels and shadow networks, Ahce hunted the whispers of The Division and the project they’d buried beneath classified layers, Tainted Blood. The deeper she dug, the clearer the fractures became.

There wasn’t just one enemy.

There were two.

One faction worked to erase the experiments, burning the files, silencing the scientists, and destroying the facilities that had once turned soldiers into something less than human. They called it containment. She called it conscience.

The other faction, colder, more deliberate, was still running the program. They were perfecting it. They dreamed of warriors that could heal like beasts, move like predators, and kill without hesitation. They spoke the language of science but worshiped only power.

They were the architects of monsters.

And The Division?

It was merely one limb of a body that sprawled across continents, an invisible hydra of governments, corporations, and private militaries, each feeding on the same diseased root.

When Ahce uncovered that truth, it hollowed her deeper than grief ever had. Richard had not simply died in an accident. He had vanished inside an empire built on human ruin.

Her novels became her disguise. Every story she released gave her legitimacy, public visibility that made her disappearance harder to question. And beneath the mask of fame, she infiltrated databases, decrypted archives, and unmasked names buried under code names.

Each page she wrote was a cover for a network traced, a hard drive breached, a secret unburied. And each night she dug deeper, until it was no longer just about finding Richard.

It was about curing the sickness that had infected the world. The same sickness that had turned heroes into weapons and soldiers into ghosts.

By the time the calendar bled into 2029, Ahce was no longer the woman who had once wept quietly over a folded flag and a hollow coffin.

She had become steel.

A year of relentless investigation and hidden missions had reshaped her grief into precision. Her loneliness calcified into focus. She accepted contracts under false identities, missions involving encrypted systems, smuggling routes, and data extortion. She dismantled corporations that had once whispered The Division’s name, each victory a silent act of vengeance.

Money flowed freely. But for Ahce, wealth was no longer indulgence, it was ammunition.

She used it to buy land on the outskirts of the old city, property that once belonged to her mother’s lineage. The soil there had grown wild from neglect, but it was fertile, surrounded by dense forest and silence.

It was perfect.

At first, she told herself she only wanted to restore the ancestral home. But as months passed, the project grew into something else entirely, a fortress disguised as an estate.

The main mansion rose first. A structure of glass and steel with reinforced walls and hidden generators buried deep underground. Then came the subterranean shelters, interconnected by tunnels and sealed doors. Storage units, water reserves, armories, medical bays, each room designed with the precision of someone who expected the world to end.

Her engineers called it overkill.

Ahce called it insurance.

Two deep wells ensured independence from the city’s grid. A filtration system could purify water for decades. Gardens flourished within climate-controlled domes, and vertical farms produced enough food to feed dozens. Even the air was filtered through subterranean vents designed to withstand biological threats.

She built it as a sanctuary. A place where her family could survive if the rest of the world burned. Only three people lived there who knew her true name, her grandmother, her mother, and her father. To them, she was simply a daughter seeking comfort in proximity, a writer who wanted to keep her family close.

They never questioned why her estate’s security systems mirrored those of a classified government bunker. The rest of the residents were not entirely human.

Humanoid robots patrolled the perimeter, sleek, expressionless sentinels with adaptive AI and facial recognition protocols coded by Ahce herself. They were gardeners, guards, and silent companions who never slept.

Inside, three human servants managed the household, women whose loyalty was bound by confidentiality contracts written in digital ink and blood. A driver and a housekeeper completed the roster, all of them oblivious to the purpose of the estate they maintained.

Every inch of that property was built to soothe her paranoia, or to prepare for a future she refused to name aloud.

Sometimes, as she stood on the balcony at dusk, the wind carrying the scent of pine and rain, she wondered why she was building a fortress for a war that hadn’t yet begun. Why was she preparing as if the world would soon end?

But deep down, she already knew. Something was coming. Something tied to The Division, to the beasts they had created, and perhaps, to the man she still refused to believe was truly gone. She was preparing for the day the world would break. And for the day, Richard Jing would come home.

Time never stopped running. Reports trickled in, fragmented, inconsistent, always dismissed as a coincidence. A farmer found torn apart near City G, the wounds too clean, too deliberate.A transport van overturned by something unseen, its driver mauled by claw marks no animal should have made.

Then came the footage, shaky, blurred, taken from dashcams and drones. Shadows moving faster than human reflex. Eyes that glowed in the dark. Figures that vanished the moment they were seen. Officials called it hoaxes. Experts blamed wolves or desperation.

But Ahce, watching from her hidden estate, knew better. The monsters were stirring again. And somewhere in their silence, she thought she heard Richard’s heartbeat.