Chapter 458: Episode 456: My greatest experiement.

The freezing, relentless rain violently battered the concrete steps all around her, but the heavy drops no longer hit her skin.

Roxy kept her face buried in her scraped, trembling hands for a long, agonizing second. She was completely terrified that if she opened her eyes, the sudden reprieve would vanish, proving her mind had finally, permanently snapped.

But the rain did not return. The air above her remained completely still, blocked by a dark, heavy canopy.

Water dripped from her dark eyelashes as Roxy slowly, painfully tilted her head back.

She looked up the length of a sleek, silver-handled umbrella. Standing over her on the cold library steps was a man. He was older, perhaps in his late sixties, dressed in a thick, slightly frayed tweed coat that seemed to belong to a different decade entirely. His hair was a wild, unruly shock of gray, plastered slightly to his forehead by the damp air.

But it was his eyes that completely arrested her.

They were a piercing, sharp, and intensely intelligent gray. He was not looking at her with the uncomfortable pity the hospital doctor had shown, nor was he looking at her with the disgusted alarm of the head librarian.

There was absolutely zero judgment in his gaze. He did not look at her as if she were a crazy, broken vagrant sobbing in the mud. He looked at her as if she were a puzzle piece he had been searching for his entire life.

"You are asking the wrong people the right questions," the man said. His voice was gravelly, carrying a sharp, academic cadence that cut directly through the noise of the storm.

Roxy stared at him, her lips parted in shock. Her throat was completely raw from screaming, making her voice a harsh, broken whisper. "What?"

The older man shifted the umbrella, ensuring she remained completely shielded from the downpour. He reached into his coat pocket and extended a clean, dry handkerchief toward her.

"The library archives only hold what humanity is willing to accept as truth," he explained calmly. "You were asking about dimensional intersections. About worlds ruled by impossible biology. The librarians are programmed to reject anomalies. I am not."

He offered his free hand to her. It was a firm, calloused hand, stained slightly with dark ink and what looked like machine grease.

"My name is Elias," he introduced himself, entirely unfazed by the miserable, soaked state she was in. "I am a former university physics professor. I was discredited and chased out of my own faculty twenty years ago for my ’fringe’ theories on parallel dimensions and multi-planar reality. If you want to talk about a world that doesn’t exist, you need to come with me." 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

Roxy hesitated. Every survival instinct she possessed screamed at her not to take a stranger’s hand in the middle of a dark, rain-swept city. But she had nothing left to lose.

The Beastworld was her only reason for drawing breath, and this eccentric, sharp-eyed man was the absolute first person on Earth who hadn’t treated her like a lunatic.

For her mates, and children, she was willing to take the risk and be foolish once again.

She reached out, her freezing, trembling fingers gripping his hand.

Elias pulled her up from the concrete. Her knees buckled slightly, her physically exhausted body protesting the movement, but he steadied her with a surprisingly strong grip.

He did not take her to a warm coffee shop or a brightly lit apartment. Elias guided her through a labyrinth of narrow, rain-slicked alleyways, completely bypassing the busy main streets. They walked for ten agonizing minutes until they reached a heavy, unmarked iron door tucked behind a derelict commercial building.

Elias pulled a ring of heavy brass keys from his pocket, unlocked the deadbolts, and pushed the door open.

"Quickly now," he ushered her inside, snapping the umbrella shut.

Roxy stepped over the threshold and completely froze.

The space was massive, hidden entirely from the outside world. It looked like an antique bookstore that had violently collided with a mad scientist’s laboratory.

Towering, floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves were crammed with thousands of ancient, crumbling texts, leather-bound journals, and disorganized stacks of paper. The air smelled heavily of old parchment, ozone, and dark roasted coffee.

But it was the machinery that made her breath hitch.

Interspersed among the books were bizarre, complex instruments. There were massive, humming server towers wired directly into archaic brass dials and glass vacuum tubes.

Along the far wall sat a row of delicate, highly sensitive seismograph machines. But they weren’t measuring earthquakes; the needles were constantly, erratically scratching ink across rolling spools of paper, monitoring frequencies Roxy could not even begin to comprehend.

"Sit," Elias commanded, pointing to a heavy, high-backed metal and leather chair bolted to the floor near the center of the room.

Roxy stumbled forward, entirely exhausted, and collapsed into the chair. It was cold and stiff, but she was too tired to care. Elias disappeared into the back of the massive room, returning a few moments later with a thick wool blanket and a steaming mug of tea. He draped the blanket over her shivering shoulders and pressed the warm ceramic mug into her hands.

"Drink," he instructed, pulling up a wooden stool to sit directly across from her. He crossed his legs, resting his elbows on his knees. His sharp gray eyes locked onto her pale face. "Now. Tell me everything. Do not leave out a single detail."

Roxy gripped the warm mug, her knuckles white. She looked around the bizarre, hidden laboratory, and then looked back at Elias.

For the first time since she had jolted awake in her apartment, she spoke the truth. She poured it all out into the quiet, ozone-scented air. She told him about the rift. She told him about the Beastworld.

She spoke of the towering, volcanic Dragon Peaks, the freezing Northern territories, and the massive, sprawling Iron-Wood Manor. She told him about the Alpha Kings, Zarek, Kaelen, Torian, Syris, Ren and Caspian. She spoke of the magic, the shifting of forms, and the impossible, heavy combat auras.

Finally, with her voice cracking and tears spilling freely into her tea, she told him about the birth. She described the agonizing pain, the tiny baby girl with iridescent scales, and the violent, sudden void that ripped her back to Earth the absolute second her daughter took her first breath.

Elias sat completely motionless. He did not interrupt. He did not roll his eyes. He did not pull out a notepad to diagnose her with a psychological disorder.

He simply listened, his sharp eyes calculating, absorbing every single impossible word as if it were hard, undeniable scientific data.

When Roxy finally finished, a heavy, ticking silence filled the laboratory, broken only by the scratching of the seismograph needles against the paper rolls.

Roxy sniffled, wiping her eyes with the edge of the wool blanket. "You think I’m insane."

"On the contrary," Elias said softly, his voice devoid of any warmth.

The older man stood up slowly. He didn’t look at her. Instead, he walked over to the massive bank of monitors connected to the server towers. The screens were glowing with a harsh, green light, displaying complex, erratic wavelengths that were actively spiking.

He stood in front of the screens, his back to her, watching the data fluctuate with an intense, almost obsessive fascination.

"I have spent twenty-five years monitoring the dimensional friction of this planet," Elias murmured, his fingers trailing over the glass of the monitor. "I knew there were bleeds. I knew the barrier wasn’t absolute. But I lacked the physical catalyst. I lacked a biological anchor that had successfully crossed the threshold and returned with the residual radiation still clinging to their cellular structure."

Roxy frowned, her exhausted brain struggling to process his academic shift. A cold, creeping sense of dread slowly began to pool in the pit of her stomach. "What are you talking about?"

Elias slowly turned around to face her.

The eccentric, kind professor who had shielded her from the rain was completely gone. His sharp gray eyes were wide, practically burning with a dark, terrifying, and utterly manic obsession.

"I have been waiting for you for quite a while," Elias stated flatly.

Before Roxy could even process the ominous weight of his words, Elias reached out and slammed his hand down onto a heavy red button embedded in the console desk beside him.

Roxy violently jolted as the heavy metal chair she was sitting in suddenly sprang to life.

Hidden mechanical compartments in the armrests and the base of the chair violently snapped open. Thick, heavy steel chains erupted from the metal frame with blinding speed.

Before she could even drop her mug, the chains whipped entirely around her body, violently snapping tight. They bound her wrists flush against the armrests, locked her ankles to the heavy metal legs, and strapped a thick iron band directly across her waist, completely pinning her to the chair.

The mug of hot tea shattered against the floorboards.

"No!" Roxy shrieked, her heart exploding in her chest as she thrashed wildly against the steel restraints. The chains did not give a single millimeter.

Her physically depleted body was absolutely powerless against the heavy machinery. "What the fuck are you doing!"

Elias stepped away from the monitors, walking slowly toward her trapped, struggling form.

A slow, hysterical, and completely unhinged laugh bubbled up from his chest, echoing loudly around the massive, cluttered laboratory. He looked down at her bound, terrified body with absolute, manic delight.

"I am going to prove them all wrong," Elias laughed hysterically, his eyes wide with madness. "You are going to be my best experiment."