The sterile white of Sophia Cohen's advanced bio-lab had become Lin Feng's personal hell. The data on the holographic screen was an undeniable, terrifying truth: the digital ghost of the Titan was still inside him, a cancer of pure code woven into his very cells.
"It's dormant," Sophia explained, her face a mask of clinical concern. "But it's learning. Every time you use your power, it feeds on the excess energy, growing stronger, its mimicry of your own DNA becoming more perfect. We can't cut it out. It's too integrated. It's... you, now. A part of you."
"Then I will burn it out," Lin Feng said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble.
His solution was not one of science, but of sheer, brutal willpower. For days, he sequestered himself in the deepest, most heavily shielded meditation chamber in the Sanctuary, a simple, stone room designed to contain catastrophic energy releases. He would not fight the parasite on a cellular level. He would fight it on a spiritual one.
With Amira Khan as his guide, he plunged into a meditative state deeper than any he had ever known. He was not just calming his mind; he was journeying into the scarred, broken landscape of his own soul.
He found himself in a rain-swept jungle, the air thick with the smell of blood and cordite. The memory he had suppressed for years, the one that had ended his career, was now a vivid, living nightmare. He saw his men, his brothers, falling around him. He heard their screams. He felt the crushing, suffocating weight of his own failure. He saw the face of his point man, Li, his eyes wide with surprise and betrayal as the sniper's bullet hit.
This was the heart of his pain, the source of the cold, hard wall he had built around himself. This was his ghost.
"This is not your failure, Commander." Amira's voice, a soft whisper from the waking world, echoed in his meditation. "This was not your fault."
As she spoke, a new presence entered his vision. It was Director Chen, his face grim and filled with a deep, weary sorrow. But he was not speaking to the Lin Feng in the chamber; he was speaking to the ghost in the memory.
"The intel was a lie, Lin Feng," the phantom of Chen said, the words a confession that cut through the jungle's roar. "Your mission... it was a sacrifice. The higher command needed to test a new biological agent on a live battlefield. Your team was the price. Your failure was engineered. Your guilt... was a chain they used to control you."
The truth was a lightning bolt that struck the heart of his oldest wound. The guilt, the shame, the suffocating burden he had carried for years, did not just fade. It transformed. It became a pure, white-hot, and righteous fury.
He was no longer in the jungle. He was in the center of his own soul, a swirling vortex of blue and red energy. The blue was his own lightning, cold, disciplined, and precise. The red was the Titan's ghost, chaotic, furious, and parasitic. They were two warring kings in a single kingdom.
He did not try to kill the red. He did not try to suppress it. He opened himself to his own rage, to the truth of his betrayal, and he commanded them to become one.
It was an agony beyond all description, a feeling of being torn apart and reforged in the heart of a star. The blue and the red did not just mix; they fused. The cold discipline of the soldier and the chaotic fury of the machine were burned together in the crucible of his will.
In the meditation chamber, the stone walls began to glow with a fierce, violet light. Amira and the guards outside were thrown back as a wave of pure, controlled power erupted from the room.
When the light faded, Lin Feng stood in the center of the chamber. He was not sweating. He was not trembling. He was perfectly, utterly still. The wild, chaotic energy was gone. In its place was a deep, calm, and terrifyingly powerful hum.
He raised his hand. Between his palms, a single, perfect sphere of violet light, the Annihilation Orb from the Amazon, pulsed with a calm, steady beat. He had not just burned out the parasite. He had consumed it. He had taken its rage, its power, and made it his own. The two warring kings were dead. And in their place, a single, silent emperor now sat upon the throne. He had reached his A-Class.