Chapter 566. She Is Becoming a Walking Storm, and the Storm Has Started Gardening

Chapter 566: 566. She Is Becoming a Walking Storm, and the Storm Has Started Gardening

Before they climbed back up toward the surface toward the deceptive normalcy of daylight, they struck three desperate bargains.

The first was absolute: the mutilated page, the severed parchment, and the chilling note left in the chest would never leave this stairwell. Not a whisper would escape their lips.

The second was a vow of restraint: no accusations would be hurled without ironclad proof. In an institution as vast and politically volatile as this academy, a false accusation wasn’t just a mistake; it was a blade that could split the school down its spine and send it into civil war.

The third bargain was the heaviest: Ellie must not be told.

"She cannot know," Catherine had said, her voice cracking like thin ice. "Not yet."

And she was right. Ellie had spent the last fortnight clawing her way back from the brink of psychological collapse.

She was a girl who had only recently discovered how to sleep through the night without waking up screaming, who had only just begun to believe that her own power wasn’t a parasite designed to devour her.

To tell her that someone had breached their most sacred sanctum to tell her that someone had been watching her like livestock, waiting for her to ’ripen,’ would be to shatter the fragile peace they had worked so hard to build.

It would be to tell her she was never safe, not even in her own skin.

"Who has access to the library after dark?" William asked, breaking the oppressive silence.

His voice was low, each word measured. "I need names... Not generalities."

Albert let out a tired, humorless exhale. "The library staff, the senior instructors, the faculty who live on campus, and anyone clever enough to know which windows on the second floor have faulty latches."

He shrugged, though the movement looked painful. "It is a list that spans half the academy, William..."

’It is a long list, and it is a useless one."

William nodded slowly. On the surface, he remained a statue of calm composure, but beneath the skin, something was wrong.

A thought had begun to coil in the back of his mind like a serpent, cold and venomous. He found himself trying to crush it, to push it down into the darkness where it belonged.

He had no evidence. No proof.

No logical reason to suspect anyone.

All he had was a feeling that nauseating, instinctual certainty that the predator was already among them, sitting across from him at breakfast, laughing at his jokes, breathing the same air.

But a feeling wasn’t enough to ruin a life.

Not yet.

He swallowed the bitter taste of suspicion and followed Catherine up the spiral stairs, leaving the iron bound darkness behind.

However, the darkness did not stay confined to the archive.

Over the following days, Ellie’s recovery followed a trajectory that was both promising and terrifying. In the most literal sense, she was improving: nobody died, the fever broke, and her appetite returned.

But in the deeper, more insidious sense, the world had become increasingly unpredictable.

The two small protrusions on her back—those strange, vestigial wings that had begun to manifest—had stopped their rapid growth.

Now, they simply sat beneath her skin like polished beads of bone or marble, visible only when the light hit her at a certain angle. She had learned to wear looser shirts to hide the unnatural ridges, but she couldn’t hide the way her body betrayed her.

Her stamina was still pathetic; she would collapse after mere minutes of sustained magical exertion. Worse still was the leakage.

Her power was no longer contained by her will alone; it had become volatile, bleeding out of her in involuntary pulses.

When she startled, sparks would dance across her fingertips; when she grew angry, the air around her would grow unnaturally cold and static; when she wept, the very ground seemed to shudder with her grief.

She was becoming a walking storm, a vessel that was slowly filling to the brim, and William couldn’t shake the feeling that the container was beginning to crack.

On the fifth morning, the fragile illusion of normalcy didn’t just shatter; it was torn apart by a sound that ripped through the dormitory like a serrated blade.

William bolted upright in bed, his heart hammering against his ribs as the echo of Kaela’s scream reverberated through the stone walls.

But as he listened to the second wave of noise, a series of high-pitched shrieks that sounded more like indignant fury than genuine terror, his adrenaline began to shift into something else.

He pulled on his boots with frantic movements, but as he sprinted toward the second floor, the absurdity of the situation began to register.

By the time he rounded the corner into the girls’ dormitory corridor, William found himself doing something entirely inappropriate for the situation: he was laughing.

It wasn’t a cruel laugh; it was the hysterical reaction of a man who had seen too much horror to process anything less than the impossible. The hallway had been transformed into a prehistoric jungle overnight.

Every potted plant that had lined the corridor for years had suffered a violent, supernatural explosion of life. The modest ferns that had once lived politely in their clay containers had mutated into thick, writhing green ropes that draped across the ceiling like the entrails of some great beast.

Ivy didn’t just climb the walls; it consumed them, swallowing the stonework in a suffocating embrace of emerald leaves. Pink and yellow flowers had erupted from cracks in the masonry where no soil existed, their petals unnaturally bright, almost glowing in the dim morning light.

And directly outside Kaela’s door, the floorboards had been splintered apart by something massive. A small orange tree had punched through the ancient wood, its branches spreading wide, its limbs heavy with ripe, glistening fruit that smelled cloyingly sweet in the stagnant air.

In the center of this botanical riot stood Kaela. Her hair was a wild thicket of tangles, sticking out in every direction like she’d been electrocuted, and her face was flushed a dangerous shade of crimson.

In each hand, she clutched an orange as if they were weapons.

"There is a tree in my room!" she shrieked, her voice cracking with pure, unadulterated outrage. "There is a goddamn orchard in my bedroom, Instructor Wade!"

"I did not mean it!" Ellie stumbled out of her own doorway, looking like a ghost.

She was still in her nightgown, pale as bone and visibly mortified, her hands shaking as she pressed them against her chest. "I swear, I didn’t mean to!"

"I was dreaming... I was dreaming that I was healing something!"

"Something broken... I only wanted to help a cactus I saw in the courtyard!"

"You helped a cactus into a goddamn rainforest!" Kaela bellowed back, shaking an orange at her. "My bed is covered in pollen, Ellie! My shoes are full of dirt! I can’t—"

A wet, muscular creak cut her off.

High above them, near the vaulted ceiling, a vine thick as a man’s forearm uncoiled from a beam. It moved with a terrifying, serpentine grace, its surface covered in glossy, slick leaves that seemed to pulse with hidden blood. Before anyone could react, it lashed downward like a whip.

The vine wrapped around Kaela’s ankle with a sickening thwack.

"Ah! What the—!" Kaela’s scream turned into a yelp of genuine panic as the plant suddenly constricted.

With a violent jerk that sounded like leather snapping, the vine yanked her off her feet. Her legs flew upward, and she was dragged off balance, dangling upside down in the air.

"Kaela!" Ellie screamed, reaching out instinctively, but her own fear triggered another pulse of energy that made the nearby ivy writhe in response.

It was chaos. A second vine shot out from the ceiling like a striking viper, seizing Kaela’s wrist with bone-crushing force.

A third thick tendril coiled around her waist, squeezing so tightly that William could hear the ominous creak of her ribs straining under the pressure. Her face began to flush purple as blood rushed to her head, her fingers clawing uselessly at the air.

"Instructor Wade!" she shrieked, her voice breaking into a desperate, strangled sob. "Instructor Wade, help me! It’s crushing me!"

William’s laughter died instantly, replaced by the cold, sharp focus of a predator. The amusement was gone, replaced by the grim reality that Ellie’s power was no longer just leaking; it was hunting.

"I see it!" he roared, already lunging forward into the green hell.