Chapter 8 — Ember Protocol

😘 Ember Protocol marks the first true pivot—where the story stops being about “carrying a secret” and shifts into “the secret finding its owner.” The chapter intentionally amplifies sensory signals—light, frequency, pulse—to mirror Hạo’s state: the more he tries to hide, the more the world points a spotlight at him. Backlink to the previous 5 chapters: Chapter 3 hinted the Blade behaved like a living entity; Chapter 5 planted the seed that Hạo himself isn’t entirely ordinary. Here, the Protocol simply pulls away the final thin layer of denial. Foreshadowing the next 5 chapters: From this point on, the core theme becomes identity—not through lore-dumps, but through testing how much truth Hạo can withstand before he fractures. Vy returns not as a classic antagonist but as a curtain-puller, serving the larger motif: when truth rises, no one stands exactly where they expected to. After this chapter, the ripple has already been thrown. There is no undoing it.