Jared chance novel Chapter 6563

Beyond the ice gate, the passage ran even deeper, and at the far end, the outline of the crystal palace loomed faintly into view.

"Let's go."

Jared stepped into the passage first, and Gwendolyn followed right behind him.

They had gone less than 30 yards when a burst of hurried footsteps suddenly echoed from behind them.

Jared spun around hard, a cold light flashing through his violet eyes.

At the passage entrance, a dozen or so figures poured in one after another, dark-red primal fire burning over their bodies and staining the ice-blue passage in blood-red light.

At their head was a dark-crimson figure, tall and slender, with ink-black hair, a breathtaking face, and intricate dark-crimson sigil-lines marked across her forehead.

Josephine.

Jared's heartbeat kicked violently in his chest, her familiar figure reflected in his violet eyes.

His hand tightened around the hilt of the Dragonslayer Sword before he even realized it.

He wanted to rush to her. Wanted to call her name.

But the instant he took a step forward, an invisible force nailed him where he stood.

It wasn't Gwendolyn stopping him.

It was Josephine's gaze.

Those dark-crimson eyes rested on him without the slightest ripple of emotion, as if she were looking at a stranger.

No.

Colder than that.

She looked at him the way a holy maiden might look down at some insignificant insect beneath her notice.

"Jos..." Jared's voice came out rough.

Josephine's brows pulled together slightly, as though she were trying to place him.

Her gaze lingered on his face for a moment, dropped briefly to the Dragonslayer Sword at his waist, then withdrew.

"You?" Her voice was soft, touched with uncertainty. "Jared?"

She didn't finish the thought.

She didn't have to.

He understood.

She remembered him.

But only in the thinnest, most distant sense.

She remembered that first meeting in the Fourteenth Firmament.

Everything before that was gone.

Or maybe, to her, none of it had ever happened at all.

The Josephine standing in front of him was not the woman who had come with him to the Ethereal Realm and faced life and death at his side.

This was a Josephine stripped of her memory.

A Josephine taken by the demons and remade with new memories.

A Josephine who no longer remembered a single thing they had been to each other.

Jared stood there without moving.

Something inside his violet eyes shattered.

"Are you here for the Heart of the Abyss too?" Josephine asked, her voice so calm she might as well have been commenting on the weather.

Jared drew in a slow breath and forced the surge inside him back down.

“Yes.”

“You can’t open that door.”

Josephine’s gaze slid past Jared and landed on the ice gate already standing open behind him. A sharp glint flashed through her dark-crimson eyes.

“The Ice God Bloodline...” Her eyes shifted to Gwendolyn. “You’re a descendant of the Frost Deity Branch?”

That last question was aimed at Gwendolyn.

Gwendolyn stood at Jared’s side, the ice-white gown almost glaring beneath the icy blue radiance.

There was no fear in her eyes either.

Only wariness.

“Yes.”

Gwendolyn’s answer was clipped and brief.

Josephine nodded, as if that confirmed something for her.

“I don’t want to fight you.”

She said it in the same even tone, like none of this meant anything at all.

“The Heart of the Abyss is important to our Inferno Devil bloodline. I need it to activate an ancient relic. You came here for the inheritances of the Frost Deity Branch too, didn’t you?

“But I can sense that beyond that door, there’s more than just the Heart of the Abyss. The Heart is mine. Everything else is yours.

What do you say?”

Jared said nothing.

He knew exactly how much the Heart of the Abyss mattered to Aldric.

It was the Frost Deity Branch’s inherited relic.

Like he was looking at someone he’d lost a very long time ago.

“Do you know me?” Josephine asked suddenly.

She had asked him that same question once before, back in the Fourteenth Firmament.

Jared’s hand twitched on the hilt.

He wanted to say yes. Wanted to tell her, You matter to me. Wanted to ask if she really couldn’t remember—after everything they had been through together.

But when the words reached his lips, only one made it out.

“Yes.”

Something flickered in Josephine’s eyes, then vanished under a smooth, unreadable calm.

“I lost my memory. Most of my past is gone.”

Her voice stayed level. “The person you knew was who I used to be, not who I am now. The person I was before...”

She paused, and a self-mocking curve touched her mouth.

“She’s probably dead already.”

It felt like an invisible hand had closed around Jared’s heart and squeezed hard.

The person I was before is already dead.

The words drove into his chest like a blade.

He wanted to argue. Wanted to tell her she wasn’t dead, that she was standing right in front of him.

But he already knew it would change nothing.

The amnesiac Josephine wouldn’t believe him. She would only see a stranger trying to force a connection that no longer existed for her.

Jared drew in a slow breath and swallowed every word burning at the base of his throat.

“The Heart of the Abyss...” he said at last, his voice rough. “I really can’t give it to you.”

Disappointment flashed through Josephine’s eyes—brief, sharp, and gone.

Coldness took its place.

“Then there’s nothing left to say.”

She lifted a hand. A mass of dark red primal fire gathered in her palm, so hot the ice crystals along both sides of the passage began to melt.

Droplets slid down the ice wall and fell in a steady drip, drip, drip.

Jared drew the Dragonslayer Sword. Violet sword energy built along the blade as his chaos-flame met her primal fire head-on.

The two utterly different flame-forces slammed against each other inside the passage, crackling with sharp, explosive pops.

And just as both sides were about to move, hurried footsteps burst from the passage entrance, wrapped in golden radiance.