Noah stood up, a grin spreading across his face. "Want to see my Domain?"
"ARE YOU KIDDING ?" Kelvin nearly shouted before quickly lowering his voice. "I've been dying to see it since you first told ! Yes, a thousand tis yes!"
"Okay, how should we—"
"Wait!" Kelvin interrupted, holding up a finger. "Before we do this, I need to theorize. If your Domain exists in a separate dinsional pocket, does ti flow differently there? Could we spend hours inside but return to this exact mont? Or is it synchronized with our reality's temporal flow?"
Noah blinked. "I... don't know."
"And the physics!" Kelvin continued, barely pausing for breath. "Can you alter gravitational constants? Change the behavior of light? Create atmospheres with different elental compositions? Can you program complex systems like weather patterns or ecosystems, or is it more static?"
"Kelvin—"
"What about computation?" Kelvin was fully in his elent now, eyes bright with intellectual fervor. "If you create a computer in there, would it operate on our laws of physics or whatever rules you establish? Could you theoretically create a quantum computer that operates at efficiencies impossible in our universe by simply changing the underlying constants?"
Noah couldn't help but laugh. "I have no idea, but we can find out. Ready?"
Kelvin took a deep breath, composing himself. "Ready. What do I do?"
"Just stand there," Noah instructed, closing his eyes to concentrate. He reached for the void energy within him, feeling it respond eagerly to his call. The Domain had always been there, a separate reality tethered to his consciousness, but now the barrier between it and the physical world felt thinner, more perable.
Noah extended his hand toward Kelvin.
"Domain Travel," he commanded.
The world around them blurred, reality folding in on itself as dark purple void energy engulfed them both. For a brief mont, they existed everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, suspended between dinsions.
Then, with a gentle shift, they arrived.
Noah didn't need any proof to know it worked. The look on Kelvin's face said it all.
For the first ti, a HUMAN besides himself in his domain.
# Domain Expansion - Oracle's Haven (Continued)
The world shifted once more as Noah and Kelvin returned to their dorm room, reality knitting itself back together around them. The familiar sights of their shared space materialized—Kelvin's cluttered desk with three monitors, Noah's neatly made bed, the faint scent of energy drinks and late-night study sessions.
Kelvin stumbled backward until his legs hit his bed, then collapsed onto it. His hands were shaking, eyes wide with an expression sowhere between religious awe and scientific euphoria.
"You okay?" Noah asked, watching his friend carefully.
Kelvin just stared at the ceiling, mouth working silently for a few seconds before any sound ca out. "I—that was—you weren't—holy shit," he finally managed, each word punctuated by a trembling breath.
"I'll take that as a yes," Noah said with a small smile, sitting down on his own bed.
Kelvin shot upright suddenly. "Yes? YES? Noah, that was—" He ran both hands through his hair, leaving it sticking up at odd angles. "We live in a world where people shoot fire from their hands. Where Lila can literally bend tal with her mind. Where Miss Brooks can—well, you know."
"Make guys walk into walls by just smiling at them?" Noah offered.
"Exactly!" Kelvin pointed at him emphatically. "But your Domain? That's..." He trailed off, seemingly at a loss for words—a first for Kelvin since Noah had known him.
Noah leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "You were pretty quiet once we got past Nyx."
At the ntion of the dragon, Kelvin's face lit up with childlike wonder. "Nyx! A real, honest-to-god dragon! Red scales, those intense eyes, wings so big they could act as a canopy," He mid an enormous wingspan with his arms. "And the way he was guarding Storm's cocoon—like the most overprotective brother ever."
"Yeah," Noah nodded. "Nyx has always been protective of Storm, even though they're not related. I'm just glad he didn't see you as a threat."
" too," Kelvin said fervently. "I didn't expect him to be so... big."
"He's grown a lot since he evolved," Noah explained. "And Storm's going to change too when he erges from that cocoon in a couple weeks."
Kelvin shook his head in disbelief. "When you first told about your system, about Nyx and Storm, I thought maybe you were exaggerating. Or hell, maybe you'd gotten hit in the head during training." He looked straight at Noah. "But they're real. All of it's real."
The weight of that reality hung between them for a mont.
"The Harbinger fight on Cannadah," Kelvin said suddenly. "That was Nyx ...the very Nyx who saved everyone!!" He shook his head now beginning to compartntalize everything that had happened.
Noah nodded.
"Jesus," Kelvin whispered. "If you hadn't smuggled him off-world... if he hadn't been there that day..."
A harsh electronic beep cut through the mont. Kelvin jumped, then lunged for his tablet that was flashing an alert on his desk.
"What is it?" Noah asked, recognizing the shift in Kelvin's deanor from amazed friend to focused hacker.
"My program," Kelvin said, fingers already flying across the screen. "I've had it running deep searches on the Rowes while we were... otherwise occupied." His eyes narrowed as he scrolled through the results. "And holy shit, this is weird."
Noah moved to look over Kelvin's shoulder. The tablet displayed a complex web of data—financial records, birth certificates, property deeds—all interconnected with color-coded lines that ant nothing to Noah but clearly told a story to Kelvin.
"What am I looking at?" Noah asked.
"Evidence that shouldn't exist," Kelvin said, his voice taking on the rapid-fire cadence it always did when he was deep in tech mode. "Or rather, evidence that other evidence doesn't exist."
He tapped a section of the screen, expanding a tiline. "See this? It's a chronological mapping of the Rowe family's digital footprint. Birth records, education, financials, property holdings, the works."
Noah squinted at the display. "Looks normal to ."
"Exactly!" Kelvin exclaid. "It looks perfectly normal—if you don't know what to look for. But look here." He zood in on a section of the tiline. "Forty years ago. Before that point—nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing verifiable," Kelvin clarified. "There are records, sure, but they're all surface-level. Dig deeper than the first authentication layer, and it's all smoke and mirrors."
Kelvin switched to another screen, this one showing a complex diagram of financial transactions. "Take their wealth. Today, they're loaded—multiple properties, controlling interests in three major defense contractors, significant political influence. But trace the money backward, and it just... appears."
"You an they got it illegally?" Noah asked.
Kelvin shook his head. "I an it literally appears. No prior transactions, no inheritance, no gradual accumulation of wealth. One day they had nothing, the next they had millions."
"But that's impossible," Noah protested. "Everything leaves a trail."
"Exactly," Kelvin said, pointing at Noah. "Everything leaves a trail, especially money. Old-school gold? I can track shipnts, weigh variances in global markets. Twenty-first century cryptocurrency? Child's play—the blockchain never forgets. Modern beast cores? Heavily regulated, every transaction logged six ways from Sunday." He swept his hand across the screen. "But the Rowes? Nothing. It's like they dropped out of the sky."
Noah sat down heavily on Kelvin's bed. "What about their ancestry? You ntioned Lila's hair color change—could they have just changed their na?"
"First thing I checked," Kelvin said, pulling up another screen. "Ran DNA pattern recognition against the global database. If they were operating under different identities before, I'd find matches in facial structure, gait analysis, voice patterns—sothing. But there's nothing before forty years ago. No parents, no grandparents, no extended family. They just... appeared."
Noah stared at the data, the implications slowly sinking in. "So either they managed to erase every trace of their existence before that point—"
"Which is practically impossible, even for ," Kelvin interjected. "The global systems are too interconnected, too redundant. Delete sothing in one place, and it pops up in three others."
"—or they really did co out of nowhere," Noah finished.
Kelvin nodded grimly. "I don't know who the Rowes are, but they're definitely not who they claim to be."
Noah rembered the cold eyes of Lila's parents, the way they'd looked at her with calculation rather than concern. The way Lila had grabbed her head in pain before collapsing.
"A ntal block," Noah murmured, recalling Lila's words. "She said sothing about a ntal block placed inside her."
Kelvin's eyes widened. "Mind control? That's so serious restricted protocol. Military-grade stuff like the thing I suspect Miss Brooks underwent."
"And the Rowes have military connections," Noah said, the pieces starting to connect in his mind. "High enough clearance to be invited to the sa events as Sophie's dad, the Defense Minister."
"But why would they need to control their own daughter?" Kelvin asked, already typing furiously again, opening new search paraters. "What could Lila know that's so dangerous?"
Noah thought of dark hair changing to blonde, of chi techniques she shouldn't know, of the pain in her eyes when she'd recognized her parents in the dical wing.
"I don't know," Noah said slowly. "But I think Lila might be as much a victim here as anyone. And I think she was trying to tell sothing important before she was 'shut down.'"
Kelvin and Noah stared at each other, the silence in the room heavy with unanswered questions and disturbing possibilities.
"Who are the Rowes?" Kelvin whispered.
Noah had no answer, but he was determined to find out—for Lila's sake, and perhaps for everyone else's as well.
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