The sound was deafening, like an explosion tearing through the calm of the night.
The walls trembled, the lights flickered, and for a moment, everything—the bed, the room, the world itself—felt as if it had been violently ripped away.
Karen's breath hitched in terror, her body freezing as the chaos outside pressed into the room.
Ross's protective presence shifted instinctively as he quickly moved to shield her.
In that instant, everything changed.
The carefully constructed world of desire, of anticipation, of testing boundaries, had been replaced by something unpredictable, dangerous, and urgent.
Ross closed his eyes for a moment, letting his divine sense flow outward like a tidal wave.
In an instant, the world unfolded before him in intricate layers: the faint pulse of spiritual energy in every living being, the subtle shifts of qi across the terrain, and the distant ripples of a power that had been quietly stirring beneath the surface.
