Valmont Series - Inheritance Code

Chapter 9.5 - The Ghost Tier

The stars above Avalon weren't natural—they never were—but tonight, the illusion bordered on divine.

It began with light. Not the glare of fluorescents or the flicker of candlefire, but something else entirely—a celestial architecture, mapped live by Avalon's atmospheric AI. Nebulas bloomed where there was no air. Galaxies spiraled in perfect silence. The horizon melted into indigo and silver, each hue calibrated to trigger awe in 92% of viewers. Even the moon was a construct—angled impossibly, veiled in transparent auroras that shimmered like thought made visible.

It was a sanctioned interlude.

In Avalon, sabbatical carried the same weight as merit. Rest wasn't indulgence—it was infrastructure. A high-order correction in the algorithm of excellence. Every seventh cycle, the system slowed. Schedules paused. Metrics dimmed—unless something truly historic demanded their glow. The city didn't sleep. It exhaled. Not in surrender, but in sovereign control. Even stillness here was strategic. Planned. Measured. Sanctified.

Above, the sky complied.

Not with stars—but with story.

Simulated constellations arced across the engineered sky in mythic precision, each one pulled from Avalon's founding legacies. A fractured crown—the Dominion. A radiant sun flare enclosed in rings—the Solara. Others followed in silence, each configuration too deliberate to be random.

Aiden counted thirteen.

He assumed they mapped the twelve Sectras—the original legacies that built Avalon. But the thirteenth? Dim. Unnamed. Watching.

Across the island, the tempo shifted.

Formalwear faded into high-end designer casual. Study halls emptied. Code labs powered down. Weekends in Avalon weren't a pause—they were performance, reimagined.

Not with grades or ranks, but with experiences only this world could invent.

Dream-lounges suspended over the sea. Starlit observatories that played music pulled from memory. Immersion chambers that let you rewrite reality just for the night.

This wasn't leisure. It was engineered wonder.

Here, "fun" didn't mean games.

It meant Vertigo—anti-gravity duels across the skyline.

It meant MythosCraft—labs where dreams, fears, and obsessions became living avatars.

It meant Whisperthreads—encrypted social dares written in real time by Veritas Feeds, triggered only when accepted.

What passed for entertainment elsewhere didn't register here.

Avalon didn't play.

It reconstructed.

And tonight, nothing mattered except how far you were willing to fall into the impossible.

Normally, Aiden might've joined. Let AvaTech feed him something unforgettable.

But not tonight.

Aria and Aurora had left right after dinner, heading to The Lumen Drift—a twilight-tier experience somewhere in the Solara Sectra. Part immersive light theater, part social cipher. No schedule. No invitation. Just knowing it existed meant you were already in.

The Lumen Drift changed weekly.

One weekend, a city of mirrored moons.

The next, a gravityless rose garden suspended in violet dusk.