According to a document (date not listed in the file metadata), here's a release-ready refinement of Chapter 40 (kept close to your version, just cleaner + smoother for WebNovel paste).
Chapter 40
Scene 1
"So why the names?"
I had my mom half-pinned in the hallway—one arm across her path, the other braced against the wall—just enough to stop her from sliding into her office like she always did.
Busy.
Phone.
Paperwork.
A clean stone wall every time my questions got too close.
She kept glancing between me and the office door like the handle was an escape hatch.
I'd skipped the return trip on purpose.
After questioning my own title… after feeling how easy it was for the world to decide what I was…
I couldn't let it sit.
Her face shifted—surprise first, then that practiced later smile—
Then she locked eyes with me.
And the smile died.
"You wouldn't."
Quiet. Sharp. Not a threat… a boundary.
I matched her stance, refusing to say the next part out loud—because the second I verbalized it, I'd be giving her grounds.
Lock-and-key grounds.
"I'm just wondering," I said, forcing my voice to stay calm, "why everyone's names are attached to old myths. Except I can't find current myths in the world. No living stories. No cultural roots. Like somebody ripped names out of a dead book and stapled them onto you."
Her jaw tightened.
"Artemis," I continued, and I felt the air lean toward the word—like reality was listening. "Greek pantheon. One of the three virgin—"
I didn't finish.
My mom shoved me hard enough that my feet lost the floor.
I stumbled into her office—and the instant my back crossed the threshold, something snapped shut behind us.
A barrier.
Not the soft kind.
The kind that made my ears ring and my bones feel too loud inside my skin.
I rolled to reset so she couldn't pin me—
—and a staff cracked across my ribs before my weight even settled.
Pain went white.
I hit the bookshelf.
Wood splintered.
Hardcovers rained down like thrown bricks.
I sucked in a breath and tasted dust and old ink.
My instincts screamed third party—because this wasn't just "mom disciplining her kid."
This was containment.
I pushed up, aura flaring just enough to keep my spine from folding.
"Huginn," I said, and the name tasted like a test. "Or should I sa—"
A fist buried into my face.
Not a swing. Not anger.
A straight drive meant to shut my mouth.
I hit her table and it groaned under me.
My mom's voice came down like a gavel.
"Learn some manners before I reteach them."
She stood over me like she was holding back a storm. Her aura pressed down and my muscles trembled—like gravity doubled and decided I was the problem.
"So you figured half of it," she continued, eyes cold now. "What does my name have to do with yours? My name's Nicole, not Artemis."
Her gaze sharpened.
"Or did you forget, Crow?"
That wasn't a scolding.
That was personal.
"God," she muttered, like she was looking at someone else in my posture. "You act like your damn uncle."
The word uncle hit wrong in my chest—like a hook.
I forced myself upright anyway, even with her aura trying to glue me down.
"So it's true," I said, voice rough. "All of you stole someone else's name. That's why all of you went through madness."
My pulse hammered.
"And what did you lose in ex—"
Something moved at the edge of my vision.
Huginn stepped in like he'd been waiting for that sentence.
His punch was cleaner than hers—less emotion, more function.
Clear annoyance in his eyes.
Clear instruction in his knuckles.
Don't.
Finish.
That.
I spat blood and laughed once, bitter.
"Look at you," I rasped. "You both hit like it's a policy."
Huginn didn't answer.
Because something else did.
A sharp chirp—small, electronic—cut through the barrier hum. The kind of sound that didn't belong inside a sealed room.
Huginn's head tilted slightly.
His eyes unfocused for half a heartbeat like he was reading a message in the air.
Then his aura flickered—just a twitch.
My mom noticed too.
Her expression didn't change… but her shoulders went tight.
"What is it?" I asked, trying to push through the weight. "Another 'emergency' every time I get close?"
Huginn's jaw worked once.
Then he looked at my mom—not at me.
"Crystal," he said. Like the word alone explained everything.
My mom's eyes narrowed.
And for the first time since I'd forced her into this room… she looked less angry and more… worried.
Not of me.
Of what my questions were connected to.
Scene 2
"Ma'am… why are you constantly rewatching Odin's trial? Shouldn't you be staying away from that stuff?"
Teresa's voice floated in the background, but it barely reached me.
The screen played again.
Odin's last words toward Crow.
That stare.
That tone.
The way he said something like it was both a joke and a verdict.
I didn't blink.
"No," I said.
Because something didn't sit right.
Odin never spoke of Crow—never acknowledged him the way he should've—
—but he called him a Cosmic fuck up like he'd known him for years.
And no one really knew where Tyr got his Order Key.
No one could explain cleanly how Chaos took over.
No one could explain why the story had holes and yet everyone treated it like a finished report.
My jaw clenched until my teeth hurt.
"Odin must've for—"
I stopped mid-sentence.
Because the thought arrived whole.
Not as a theory.
As a knife.
"That fucking bastard conned us."
Teresa stiffened.
My chair scraped as I stood.
"He better be fucking dead," I snapped, "because we still need to find that other missing traveler named Ten we kept forgetting about."
The words came out like poison.
Ten.
A name that slid away every time you tried to hold it.
A file you'd swear you saw yesterday that wasn't there today.
A gap in the story that kept pretending it was normal.
"Call Jonathan," I barked.
Teresa moved immediately, and that told me my face wasn't just angry.
It was dangerous.
I grabbed my phone and dialed Nicole.
Ring.
Ring.
"Fuck," I hissed. "Where the hell is she when I need her."
I didn't have time for worry—only momentum.
"Teresa—get the intel teams. Now. Pull up every incident since Odin came back. Everything. Sightings, anomalies, disappearances, unsanctioned portals—all of it."
I was already walking.
The main server room swallowed me in cold air and humming lights. I punched in my password like I was breaking a lock.
Information poured.
I discarded anything about Tasey or Agni making visits home—noise. Familiar noise. The kind that made people lazy.
Then a report flashed:
White-haired man sighted meeting Thor.
My fingers froze.
Baldur's stamp of approval sat on the file like a blessing.
Of course.
Baldur would assume it was Agni home again.
He'd tell "him" to head back to guild once his meeting with the government was over.
Routine.
Normal.
Safe.
My stomach went hollow.
Because I had no way to know if Ten was the body that had been missing of Tyr.
I'd never seen Tyr's corpse.
Not once.
I'd seen Odin fall apart—soul fracturing like glass in a furnace.
I'd seen the long-dead lawyer being puppeted by Chaos like a cheap mask.
But Tyr?
Nothing.
No body.
No confirmation.
Just absence.
And the two eldest of the John family—Tyr and Odin—
If you didn't know them, you'd call them twins.
Nicole might've been right…
But wrong about which one she met.
My hands moved faster.
Second password.
Restricted access.
The archive we pretended didn't exist.
Pre-Sea photos.
Faces from before the Astral Sea carved them into liabilities.
Tyr.
Odin.
Their eyes.
Their posture.
The difference no one notices until it's too late.
Even their mom only kept two physical photos.
Everything else had been erased by us to hide Crow's connection to them.
Because Crow looked like a spitting image of his father Tyr…
…and an offshoot rebel Odin, depending on the angle and the day.
I printed them—paper, because paper didn't "glitch" the way digital did when Astral contamination brushed it.
Then I sent copies to Nicole's email with one line:
Verify. Which one did you meet?
And I didn't stop there.
I forwarded the alert to Huginn too—short, brutal, impossible to ignore:
TEN anomaly resurfacing. Thor contact flagged. Baldur likely mis-ID. Get eyes on Nicole + Crow NOW.
We were cleaning up the house right now.
Any astral-touched anything was a threat.
And Odin's trial had shown something worse:
We weren't even in control of our world yet.
Scene 3
"So you won't tell me why you took the names," I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. My head still rang from the hits. "Just this stupid idea that they caused madness. So we're back to square one."
Huginn was gone.
Not "walked out."
Vanished like a switch had flipped—barrier or not, rules or not.
Like whatever Crystal sent mattered more than me bleeding on my mom's floor.
The barrier was down now. At some point, my mom had dropped it without announcing it—like she didn't want to admit she'd needed it in the first place.
Nicole exhaled slowly, and when she spoke her voice softened in a way that made my stomach twist.
Not because it was comforting.
Because it sounded like memory.
"Son… that's all I really know," she said. "I don't know the inner details. I don't know why it worked."
Her gaze slid away for half a second—toward a place in her head she didn't usually open.
"I wasn't part of Odin's group. And neither was your father. Besides Ares… he was in the rescue teams with us."
She leaned back against the desk like the past had a physical weight.
"Everyone else met up with the first group—Odin, Chronos, Oceanus, Wukong… and a lot of others who already gave up on being explorers."
She paused, and something warm flickered behind her eyes.
Not romance.
Not nostalgia.
Something like survival-bond.
"By the time me and Tyr met with the original group… we'd already taken our names to shield against our minds breaking."
My throat tightened.
"Wait," I said. "There's a difference in Explorers? I thought everyone who reached that rank had to be accepted by the current Explorer groups."
Her smirk grew like I'd asked why the sky was blue.
"Of course there is."
She tapped the desk once, like punctuation.
"Why do you think the world fears the Giver—your adopted grandfather? He's just as human as your grandmother. But both command respect among explorers."
I'd heard the name.
Everyone had.
But the way she said it made it heavier.
"He financed the entire rescue missions across the world to find his daughter," she continued. "Odin's girlfriend."
Her voice tightened on that.
"Who passed at some point in the Sea. Yet instead of stopping his funding… he doubled down when he saw the state we all came back in."
My mouth opened, but she didn't let me interrupt.
"Oceanus was one of the worst cases possible. He lost his entire friend group besides Athena and Uranus."
Her eyes hardened again, remembering it.
"We had to knock him out after forcing him inland just to cut off his water access."
I stared at her.
Trying to picture someone like Oceanus being dragged away from water like it was a drug.
Trying to picture land as a restraint.
"Yes," she said, reading it off my face. "He's that strong."
She rubbed her temple.
"Besides Wukong and Lu Bu… it'll be a hard fight to tame Oceanus by any body of water. The goal was to surpass your name—or learn to assimilate with it."
Her gaze sharpened.
"He was one of the highest due to his natural affinity. Just like Wukong being a trickster who could bully Odin with pranks."
A faint, reluctant smile touched her mouth.
"Everyone found their anchors in our actions. Or who we were."
She looked at me like she wanted to say more and hated herself for it.
"Even your name doesn't have to be it."
Then she reached down, picked up her phone, and set it on the table between us.
Dozens of missed calls.
All from the same contact.
Crystal.
There it was.
The same emergency that had yanked Huginn away mid-beating.
My mom stared at the screen like it was a warning label.
"Go meet with your Aunt Crystal," she said quietly. "She's been hogging those diaries Odin spoke on. The ones about names… and the concepts behind them."
I stared at the missed calls.
And I felt it again.
Not her aura.
Not Huginn.
Something bigger.
Like the world itself was leaning closer…
listening…
waiting to see if I'd finish the sentence they kept punching out of me.