Urban Plundering: I Corrupted The System!-Chapter 533: Anchors of Humanity

The Awakening didn’t knock on doors or whisper through dreams.

It kicked the fucking door down.

In a single breathless span of hours, the Four Great Families—who’d been playing nice with wealth, legacy, and invisible chains for generations—got reborn as sovereign forces of nature. Their bloodlines, once leashed by politics and protocol, surged with magic older than civilization itself, reshaping not only their reality but the fabric of the world around them.

They’d become something new.

And yet—something ancient.

The Wilder Family...

Time had basically rolled over and played dead for the Wilders.

Their mansion—once a quiet estate of antique clocks, winter decorations, and old-world refinement—was now a complete mindfuck of fractured chronology and elemental power. Moments stuttered like a glitched video, unsure whether to move forward or backward. Ice crept across the walls in delicate patterns that looked like nature’s own graffiti, and sound had weight now, leaving echoes that felt like memories you could actually touch.

Grandfather Wilder, with his spine straight and his soul older than most empires, didn’t need watches anymore. One flick of his wrist and seconds slowed, folded, or flat-out reversed. The grandfather clock in the hallway now ticked backward—not because it was broken, but because it knew who was boss.

Ethan had tried reading a textbook and watched it age backward into mulch, then into a fucking seed.

Talk about your harsh study sessions.

Vivian’s laugh could crack marble now with her sound powers. Her voice sculpted sound into visible waves, delicate as spun glass, deadly as shrapnel. She’d recited a poem once, and the chandelier above shattered into crystalline frost, each shard suspended mid-air in frozen time—an art piece born of power and pure defiance.

Their emotions fed directly into ice, into vibrations, into the very tempo of reality. Elena’s sadness had frozen an entire wing of the mansion. Thomas’s irritation turned a glass of water into a frozen sculpture of anger, carved by his own heartbeat.

But deeper still—beneath the snow, beneath the frost and sound, beneath the soft lull of distorted time—lay something terrifying.

Absolute Zero.

Not cold. Not stillness. Complete cessation. A state where heat, motion, sound, and time all collapsed into absolute silence. A place where nothing moved—not even fate. When Grandfather Wilder touched the garden pond and it froze not just solid but conceptually still, they realized what they’d actually become:

Temporal Sovereigns.

Time would never move without their permission again.

*

The Harrington Family...

Isabella’s bloodline had always dealt in land, contracts, and the weight of stone. But when the Awakening hit, the earth didn’t just obey their ambition anymore—it rose to fucking salute it.

Beneath her bare feet, marble floors cracked in sacred geometry. Roots tore through imported Persian rugs as oak and ash split through ancient stone like nature was throwing the world’s most expensive tantrum. Metal—old iron nails, door hinges, chandelier frames—trembled and slithered toward her like loyal dogs, reshaping themselves according to whims she didn’t fully understand yet.

The air around her shimmered with static electricity. Lightning crackled from her fingertips like stardust charged with vengeance. Flames coiled around her wrists like bangles forged in the heart of volcanoes. And everywhere she stepped, the world shifted. Responded. Obeyed.

She hadn’t called the storm.

She was the storm.

Their elemental dominion wasn’t divided between them—it was fused. Earth buckled beneath their fury. Metal obeyed their emotions like memory-etched steel. Plants erupted in wild obedience, reckless and eager. Lightning licked the sky like a promise of violence. And fire—fire danced for them, loyal and living.

At the apex of their power, when mind, spirit, and body aligned—they could forge a citadel from nothing.

Elemental Fortress. A fusion of all five elements—a living, breathing bastion of primal fucking magic. Unbreakable. Untamed.

A temple of dominion, born not from spellbooks but from blood, fury, and sheer fucking will.

The Beaumont Family on the other hand...

The storm inside Diana Beaumont had been waiting years to breathe. A general’s precision had masked it. A mother’s silence had muffled it. But it had always been there—torrents of untapped life swirling just beneath the surface, ready to explode.

And then it did.

Not as a scream.

But as a weather system.

Rain began falling indoors, weightless and slow, spinning in impossible patterns above her head. The walls pulsed with humidity. Her emotions didn’t leak into the environment—they became it. Joy summoned soft winds that curled like lovers’ fingers. Anger called tornadoes that refused to touch ground out of pure fear. Panic birthed hurricanes. Calm brought sunshowers. And in grief—a silence so heavy it bent barometric pressure itself.

Blood bent to her call—not violently, but reverently. She could slow a heartbeat, accelerate healing, or touch someone’s wrist and feel everything they were trying to hide. Her hands stitched skin closed like cosmic needle and thread.

Her tears healed with purpose. A whisper from her lungs could summon wind from absolutely nowhere.

But when all these instincts fused together...

The Life Storm descended.

A divine equilibrium of life and death, creation and erasure. A tempest that didn’t distinguish between nurture and annihilation—it simply knew what was needed. Rains that restored. Winds that stripped souls bare. A godborn storm that judged with love and fury both.

And in Diana’s eyes, you could see it:

She wasn’t wielding weather.

She was wielding vitality itself.

Lastly, The Morello Family...

Of all the bloodlines, the Morellos changed the most... and the least.

Their family had always housed secrets—now it housed shadows that whispered them out loud. Darkness spilled from under feet now like oil with a heartbeat. And Alessandro stood at the center of it all—calm, composed, utterly unreadable—as the void unfurled itself at his feet like a loyal pet.

But this wasn’t just absence of light.

The shadows lived. They grew teeth. Wings. Memory.

Creatures slithered from the corners—part bat, part wyvern, part something that shouldn’t have a name. They didn’t shriek. They spoke. Not in words, but in longing. Some ate curtains. Others sat like housecats with spines of starlight and watched the world burn with curious eyes.

Toxins bled from his skin in iridescent waves—gorgeous as stained glass, lethal as divine judgment. Poison that shimmered like expensive perfume. Not a byproduct—a language. An aura.

And when shadow and toxin fused, the air grew colder.

The Shadow Beasts came.

Living nightmares spun from sorrow, born in the silence between heartbeats. Creatures that fed on fear, moved through walls, obeyed no geometry humans understood. They couldn’t be banished. Only accepted. They weren’t his weapons.

They were his children.

And Alessandro—stoic, silver-eyed, unreadable—loved them as such.

*

Each family member bore a mark now—a sigil not of submission, but allegiance. Glowing symbols burned across their foreheads, radiant with authority both ancient and newly born.

The Wilders: gears entwined with snowflakes and ripples of sound—time made visible.

The Harringtons: mandalas of root, flame, and lightning—command of creation itself.

The Beaumonts: spirals of wind and water laced with pulses of living light—the breath between death and birth.

The Morellos: curling shadows and beast-silhouettes etched in poison shimmer—dominion over what shouldn’t exist.

Each mark was a tether to Parker—their Prince. Their anchor. Their law. They were his stewards, his vassals, his legacies.

But they were also dangerous as hell.

Amateurs wielding divinity. Children holding infinity in trembling hands. They’d already bent the mansion to chaos. Untrained, they’d bend the Earth itself into something unrecognizable.

But trained... guided...

They’d become the pillars the next world would rise on.

They weren’t just powerful families anymore.

They weren’t just human anymore.

They were the First Architects of the New Existence.

And the world had absolutely no idea what was coming.