"GOOOAL!"
"GOAL! MATEO KING!"
It does not ease back in.
It comes straight out of the black at full volume, and it does not let up for four minutes.
Goals. One after another after another. From outside the box, from six yards, on the half-volley, with the outside of the boot, with his head from a corner. A boy running at a defence with three men backing away from him because none of them want to be the one who commits.
Then celebrations. The calma. A shirt pulled up over a face. Both arms out wide and a stadium screaming.
Then the fans.
A camera in the Camp Nou concourse. A man with his son on his shoulders and both of them shouting the same name. A woman crying and laughing at once. A boy of about nine in a shirt with KING 36 on the back, jumping on a plastic seat.
And the noise underneath it just keeps climbing.
Mateo King was sitting up on that examination bed now with the phone in both hands.
He had a grin on his face he could not have removed with a chisel.
"So. La Masia."
Interview room. Black polo. A boy in a chair with one ankle over the other knee.
"You came through the academy."
"Since I was eight."
"Eight years old."
"Eight."
"And now the supporters are calling you the saviour of FC Barcelona."
Mateo laughs and puts a hand over his own eyes.
"Ohhh."
"That is the word they are using."
"Please do not."
"They have banners."
"I know they have banners."
He sits forward.
"Look, I am seventeen. I have played half a season. Half. There are people in that dressing room who have won more things than I have played matches."
He shrugs.
"So no. I am not saving anybody. I am just a kid from the academy who got lucky enough to be in the building at the right time."
A pause.
He looks up.
"But I will say this."
And the laugh goes off his face entirely.
"I am not here to be a nice story. I did not come up through that building for eight years to be a nice story."
He shakes his head.
"At the end of it, all I want is to win with Barcelona."
"That is it. That is the whole thing."
In a corridor at the training complex, eleven boys were completely silent.
Then Balde let out a breath.
"Bro."
And the footage changes.
And it is a training pitch at La Masia, and the grass is slightly too long, and somebody is filming on a camcorder.
A small boy with a shaved head, maybe eleven, takes the ball at the halfway line of a pitch that is not full size and goes past four children.
Then he does it again.
Then again.
And then he scores, and turns round, and does a celebration that is far too big for the occasion, and one of the coaches off camera can be heard laughing at him.
"Oh my God."
"OH MY GOD."
The La Masia corridor came apart.
"LOOK AT HIM."
"LOOK AT HIS HEAD!"
"THAT IS THE SAME CELEBRATION!"
"IT IS THE SAME ONE!"
"He has been doing the same celebration since he was ELEVEN."
"HAHAHAHA!"
Mateo had a hand over his own mouth.
"Where did they even get that."
"Who do you look up to most in that squad?"
"Messi."
The interviewer laughs.
"You did not even think about it."
"You did not ask a hard question."
"HAHAHA."
"That is not a hard question. Ask me a hard one."
And then the documentary does something clever.
It splits the screen.
On the left, the camcorder footage. A small boy with a shaved head at La Masia, taking the ball, dropping a shoulder, going past somebody.
On the right, footage from 1999. Grainier. A smaller boy with long hair on a similar pitch at the same academy, taking the ball, dropping a shoulder, going past somebody.
Same pitch. Same building. Twenty-one years apart.
Neither of them looks up when they dribble.
Both of them shield the ball with exactly the same shoulder.
Nobody watching that anywhere on earth said anything.
In his own living room, Lionel Messi was leaning forward slightly with his elbows on his knees.
"When I first met Messi."
Present day. And the boy has gone serious.
"You know that saying. Never meet your heroes."
"Yes." The interviewer nods. "Because they never live up to it."
"Yeah. That one."
He chuckles and looks off to the side.
"Well, I can tell you for an absolute fact."
He looks back at the camera.
"Messi is the single exception to that rule."
And then it is the teammates.
"Mateo and Leo."
"Ah."
Piqué laughs immediately.
"Those two."
"It is father and son, honestly."
Ter Stegen, in a chair.
"No, I am being serious. If you saw them at breakfast you would think he was his father."
Araújo, grinning.
"It is more like older brother and younger brother."
Koeman, in a coat, on a touchline.
"Mentor and student."
He shrugs.
"Although I am not always sure which one is which."
"HAHAHA."
Piqué again.
"No, listen. Listen. It is like this."
He holds up two hands.
"Leo does not talk. Everybody knows that, Leo has never talked. And this kid does not stop talking. Ever. About anything."
He shrugs.
"And somehow that works. I do not understand it. But it works."
And then it is just footage.
No commentary. No voiceover. Just two minutes of training ground video with the natural audio.
Messi clipping a ball across a pitch and Mateo taking it out of the air on his chest without breaking stride.
The two of them in a rondo, back to back, laughing at something.
Mateo talking at high speed with his hands going while Messi watches him and says nothing.
Messi showing him something with his foot, very slowly, three times, and then Mateo trying it and getting it wrong, and Messi doing it again.
Mateo scoring in a training match and immediately running past everybody to Messi and being caught in a headlock.
An arm across a shoulder going down a tunnel.
Mateo was smiling at that phone with his chin on his own hand.
And Lionel Messi, on his sofa, let out a small chuckle at his own television.
Antonella looked over at him.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Are you ready?"
The audio quality drops hard.
It is a different camera. An older one. Handheld, slightly out of focus, with the date burned into the corner.
2007.
A room with lights on stands and cables taped to the floor. Somebody adjusting a backdrop. A young man in a chair with long hair and a red and blue shirt, twenty years old, looking mildly uncomfortable in the way that young man always looked mildly uncomfortable in front of a camera.
"Leo? Are you ready?"
"Yeah."
In a hotel room in Barcelona, David Charles Rodrigues sat straight up.
"Ah."
He put his coffee down.
"Finally."
And his assistant, on the sofa beside him, let out a breath and smiled.
"Honestly. Putting that in was worth all of it."
"Okay, and can we bring the children in?"
On screen, a door opens.
And three small children are walked into the frame by somebody off camera.
One of them is about six. One of them is about four.
And the third one is about three years old, and he is blond, and he is holding the hand of a woman whose face is out of shot, and he is looking around that room with the enormous unimpressed suspicion of a toddler who has been brought somewhere he did not agree to.
Mateo King came straight up off that bed.
"No."
He was standing.
"No way."
He held the phone out in front of him with both hands.
"When did this happen?"
He was almost shouting at it.
"WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?"
"What?"
Lionel Messi sat forward on his own sofa.
"What?"
Antonella turned and looked at him.
"Leo."
"Hm?"
"Did you two meet then?"
"I—"
He was staring at his own television.
"I do not remember this."
"PAPÁ!"
Thiago was up on the sofa pointing at the screen.
"PAPÁ, THAT IS BIG MATEO!"
"THAT IS BABY BIG MATEO!"
"HE IS SO SMALL!"
"HE IS TINY!"
"MAMÁ, LOOK, HE IS TINY!"
On screen, a twenty-year-old Lionel Messi leans forward out of that chair.
And he puts both hands out.
And a three-year-old boy, after a moment of consideration, walks over and takes them.
Messi says something to him that the microphone does not pick up.
And the boy says something back, and whatever it is makes Messi laugh, and he swings the boy's arms gently from side to side.
Then somebody off camera says something, and Messi lifts him, and sits him on his own knee, and the boy immediately grabs a fistful of his hair.
And the clip holds there for about four seconds.
A twenty-year-old with his hair being pulled by a blond three-year-old, both of them laughing.
2007.
"No way."
Mateo had sat back down on the edge of that bed.
"No way. For real?"
He rewound it.
He watched it again.
He laughed out loud at a wall.
"NO WAY."
"Their connection is ridiculous."
Koeman, present day.
"I have coached for a long time. I have played with Cruyff. I have seen combinations."
He shakes his head.
"This is not a combination. This is two people who know where the other one is without looking. It is not coached. You cannot coach it. I certainly did not coach it."
And then it is goals.
Messi to Mateo. Over and over and over.
A through ball threaded between two men. A chip over a defence. A first-time ball around a corner that has no business existing. A pass with the outside of the boot from thirty yards.
And at the end of every single one of them, the same boy arriving.
"WHO STOPS THIS?"
"Genuinely, who stops this? Because I have watched three teams try this season and I have not seen it yet."
"You cannot double Messi, because then King is free. You cannot double King, because then it is MESSI."
"Pick one. Go on. Pick one and live with it."
And then, out of nowhere, a clip from 2013.
A press room. A grey-haired Frenchman in a suit.
"Mr Wenger. Who is the best footballer in the world right now?"
"Lionel Messi."
Instant. No pause at all.
"And who is the best footballer in history?"
Arsène Wenger does not blink.
"Lionel Messi."
And the footage cuts, and it is the present day, and Arsène Wenger is sitting in a studio watching himself say it on a monitor.
"Mr Wenger, you made that statement years ago."
"I did."
"Do you stand by it?"
And the old man smiles.
"I have never regretted it once."
"And what about Mateo King?"
Wenger sits back.
"Hmm."
He thinks for a moment.
"The boy shows promise."
"Only promise?"
"I cannot say more than that. I would be lying to you. I have not watched him enough, and I do not like to talk about players I have not studied."
He holds up a finger.
"But I will say one thing."
"I watched an interview with him. Somebody asked him about being the youngest to do this, the youngest to do that, and he said he was not interested in being the youngest."
And a clip plays.
A boy in a press chair, about four months younger than he is now.
"I do not want to be the youngest anything. Being the youngest just means somebody younger comes along. I want to be the best."
And back in the studio, Arsène Wenger nods slowly.
"Well."
He spreads his hands.
"His head is in the right place. And that is the part you cannot teach."
And then, because the documentary knows exactly what it is doing, it releases all of that at once.
Dressing room footage. Somebody's phone.
Four grown men wrestling a seventeen-year-old into a chair while a fifth approaches with clippers.
"NO."
"HOLD HIM."
"GET OFF ME. GET OFF ME, GERI."
"HOLD HIS ARMS!"
"I WILL NEVER FORGIVE ANY OF YOU."
"HAHAHAHA!"
In a study outside Barcelona, Gerard Piqué watched himself hold a boy's shoulders down and laughed until he had to take his glasses off.
More of it. Music playing in a dressing room. Somebody dancing badly. Alba being thrown a shirt and missing it entirely. De Jong attempting Spanish. Araújo laughing at something so hard he has to sit down.
And Mateo King in the middle of all of it, always, every single time, right in the middle of it.
"There was joy in that dressing room again."
Messi's voice, over the top of it.
"That is the thing people will not understand from the outside. We were winning before. We won a lot of things."
A pause.
"But it had stopped being fun a long time before it stopped being successful."
"But it is all fairly meaningless, is it not?"
The interviewer says it lightly.
"All of the joy, the fun, the mood in the dressing room. At the end of the season nobody remembers the mood."
And Mateo King goes completely still.
"No."
He shakes his head.
"No, I know."
He sits forward, elbows on his knees.
"I want to win. I do not care about being liked, I do not care about being a nice story in a documentary, I do not care about any of it."
He looks straight down the lens.
"I want to win. With this club. That is all I am here for."
Cut.
Messi, in that grey room.
"The Champions League."
He nods.
"It is a promise. I made a promise to those people three years ago and I have not kept it."
He turns his hands over.
"So this year it is not a target. It is a debt."
And the screen goes black.
And two words come up.
THE RUN.
"Welcome back to the Camp Nou."
"And let us not pretend. Barcelona are four-one down from the first leg. Four-one. To Paris Saint-Germain, in this competition, at this stage."
"This tie is written. Everybody in Europe knows this tie is written."
A pause.
"Except."
"Except this Barcelona is a different Barcelona. Because this time they have Mateo King."
In an office, Joan Laporta had come off the arm of that chair and was now sitting in it properly.
"That match was the hurdle."
Laporta, present day, in his own office.
"I will be honest with you. The board had modelled the season both ways. If we go out in the round of sixteen, that is an enormous financial difference. Enormous."
He shrugs.
"So yes. We needed it."
"It was a hard night."
Koeman.
"Four-one is four-one. I did not have a plan for four-one."
And then he smiles.
"Thankfully, we had those two."
FIRST MINUTE.
A ball leaves Lionel Messi's boot on the halfway line before anybody has settled.
And a boy is already running.
"Messi, looking long—"
"OH."
"OH, THAT IS—"
"GOOOOOAL! FIRST MINUTE! MATEO KING! THE FIRST MINUTE OF THE MATCH!"
"THE CAMP NOU HAS ERUPTED! WE ARE ONE MINUTE INTO THIS FOOTBALL MATCH!"
Oriol Cerdà came straight up out of his recliner with both arms above his head.
"AHHHH!"
He was alone in that room.
"AHHHHH!"
"The game had literally just started."
Frenkie de Jong, in a chair, laughing.
"We had not even touched the ball. Leo plays it, and before I have turned round, Mateo is already there, and it is in."
He shakes his head.
"I remember thinking, what is happening. We are one minute in and something is happening."
"It was surreal."
Mateo.
"Honestly, even standing on the pitch with them, it did not feel like I was in the same match. It was like they were playing a different game and letting me stand in it."
"GOAL! MESSI TO KING AGAIN!"
"AGAIN! IT IS THOSE TWO AGAIN!"
And it goes fast now.
Goals. Crowd. Flags. A Camp Nou that had been half empty and half dead for two seasons making a noise that came up off the ground.
Fans outside afterwards, at midnight, still there.
"I have supported this club for forty years and I have not felt like that since 2015."
"It is alive. That is all I can tell you. The club is alive again."
"They gave it back to us."
"They started inspiring me."
Marc-André Ter Stegen, in a chair, quite quietly.
"That sounds strange for a goalkeeper to say. But it is true."
"When you are behind a team like that, and they keep coming, and they keep coming, you start thinking, well. I am not going to be the reason this stops."
And the footage plays.
Bayern Munich. The last minute. A penalty.
Robert Lewandowski places the ball.
And Marc-André Ter Stegen goes right and gets a hand to it and pushes it onto the post, and the Camp Nou makes a sound like a building coming down.
In his own living room, Ronald Koeman had both hands together in front of his mouth.
"Mateo."
Back in that interview room.
"Can I ask you about the other side of it?"
"Sure."
And footage plays. A lot of it, quickly.
A crowd of two hundred people pressed against a barrier screaming one name. A boy being walked to a car with a hand on his back and four security staff around him. A phone being pushed into his face at an airport. A crowd outside a restaurant. A man filming him through a car window.
And a clip of him after a goal, going toward the corner, and the front row of that stand climbing on each other to get to him.
"You are seventeen years old. You are never going to be a regular seventeen-year-old again."
"How does that feel?"
And Mateo lets out a long breath.
"Hmm."
He rubs the back of his own neck.
"Honestly? I do not really know how to answer that."
"I know I cannot be normal right now. I know that. I have to go out covered up, I cannot just go to places, there are things I used to do that I cannot do any more."
He shrugs.
"Maybe it is because I have not been in it that long. Maybe in three years I will hate it. I do not know."
He chuckles.
"Ask me again in three years."
And then he stops chuckling.
And footage starts playing underneath him. La Masia. A dormitory. A corridor. A small boy in a yellow bib at a training session in the rain. A group of children eating at long tables.
"But this is all I have ever wanted."
"Since I was a kid. Since I was eight years old in that building. Playing for Barcelona. That is the entire thing, that is all of it."
He looks up.
"So honestly, as long as I can do that."
He shrugs.
"Everything else really does not matter."
In a corridor, eleven boys who live in that building did not say anything at all.
And then the tone changes.
"He is arrogant."
A pundit, in a studio.
"I am sorry. I like the boy, I think he is a wonderful player, but somebody needs to teach him some humility."
"The celebrations, the comments, telling a stadium to be quiet."
Another one.
"At seventeen? Come on."
And then a clip of an interview, from months ago.
"People are saying you are arrogant."
And a boy shrugs at a journalist.
"I want to win."
"That is not what they mean."
"I know what they mean."
"You will learn," the journalist says.
And the boy smiles at him.
"Maybe."
THE SEMI-FINAL.
"Manchester City. The best team on this continent. Pep Guardiola's masterpiece."
"And a Barcelona side that has no business being here."
The first leg plays out fast and it is brutal.
A boy running at a blue wall and being closed by three men every single time. A shot blocked. Another shot blocked. A one-on-one that goes wide by nothing.
And then a goal at the other end.
1-0.
The Camp Nou, silent.
And a seventeen-year-old walking off that pitch at full time with his shirt in his hand and his head down.
Oriol Cerdà, in his recliner, had gone very quiet.
"I will say this, actually."
Arsène Wenger again, back in the studio.
"After the first leg against City, I changed my view."
"You said he showed promise."
"I did. And after that match I watched it back twice."
He leans forward.
"That was a statement. They lost. He did not score. And he was, by a distance, the best player on that pitch against the best team in Europe, at seventeen, in a semi-final."
He sits back.
"You do not need to score to make a statement."
And more of them.
"Best individual performance in a losing side I have seen in years."
"Forget his age. Forget it entirely. That was one of the best performances in a Champions League semi-final full stop."
"And City knew it. Look at Guardiola's face at the whistle. He knows what he has just watched."
"I took responsibility for that game."
Gerard Piqué, present day, and he is not smiling.
"I got sent off in the league. Stupid. Completely stupid, and it meant I was not available."
He shrugs.
"And I sat there and watched us lose one-nil and thought, if I am on that pitch, maybe it is different. Maybe I head one away. Maybe."
He shakes his head.
"That is a horrible way to watch a football match."
Then he looks up.
"But there was a second leg."
THE ETIHAD.
"Welcome to Manchester."
"One-nil down. Away from home. Against the best side in Europe."
"And Barcelona have a corner."
A pause.
"And, ehm. Mateo King is going over to take it."
"Sorry?"
"Mateo King is taking the corner."
"Why is Mateo King taking a corner?"
"HAHAHA."
Pedri, in a chair.
"People think we planned that. They genuinely think there was a plan."
He spreads his hands.
"There was no plan. He just said he was going to take it. That was it. That was the entire conversation."
"Do you think we are joking?"
Koeman.
"When we say this boy is mischievous. Do you think we are joking?"
"I trust Mateo."
Messi, simply.
"He said he wanted to take it. I know what kind of person he is. So I left him alone."
"When I saw him standing over that ball."
Piqué.
"Honestly, I just thought."
He starts laughing.
"I thought, okay. I had better get in there."
And the ball comes in.
And it is vicious, inswinging, hunting the six-yard line.
And Gerard Piqué rises above everything in a blue shirt and puts it into the net.
"GOOOOAL! PIQUÉ! FROM THE BOY'S CORNER!"
And then it happens again.
The same corner. The same delivery. The same man.
"AGAIN! HE HAS DONE IT AGAIN! PIQUÉ AGAIN! FROM ANOTHER MATEO KING CORNER!"
"IT IS FOUR-NIL."
"FOUR-NIL ON THE NIGHT AT THE ETIHAD."
"BARCELONA ARE GOING TO THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FINAL."
The away end, coming down the front of the stand.
A dressing room with the door open and music already going. Piqué on a bench with his arms out. Somebody spraying something. Ter Stegen with a towel round his head.
And a hand grabbing the camera and turning it round, and Mateo King's face filling the entire frame, grinning, screaming something that the microphone cannot handle.
In a study outside Barcelona, Gerard Piqué watched himself and shook his head slowly at his own monitor with a smile on his face.
"We did it."
Messi, in the grey room.
He is very quiet.
"I remember standing on that pitch afterwards. And I did not feel happy."
He looks up.
"I felt afraid. Because now we were there, and now there was nothing between me and the thing I had promised."
"I have made a promise as well, actually."
Mateo, in his chair.
The interviewer sits forward.
"Oh?"
"Yeah."
"Would you care to share it?"
And Mateo shakes his head.
"No."
He smiles.
"No, this one is a bit personal."
In his own living room, Lionel Messi laughed out loud.
Antonella looked over at him.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Leo."
"Nothing."
THE FINAL.
"It is time."
Porto. The Estádio do Dragão. Fifty thousand people. Two ends of a stadium singing at each other.
And a seventeen-year-old on the halfway line jumping straight up off the ground with both fists above his head and screaming at the roof.
"I was nervous."
Mateo.
"Everyone says they are not nervous. I was terrified."
"And then Werner."
"GOAL! TIMO WERNER!"
And it stops.
The whole documentary stops.
The music drops out entirely and the screen goes to slow motion, and it is not the goal.
It is the faces.
Piqué, hands on hips, head back. Busquets, bent double. Ter Stegen on his knees in his own six-yard box. Alba crouched with both hands behind his neck. A boy face down on the grass with his shirt pulled up over his head.
And Lionel Messi, standing alone on the halfway line, with his head down.
And underneath it, quietly, the old footage comes back.
Rome.
Anfield.
Lisbon.
"I promise you."
"I promise that this season—"
Oriol Cerdà had both hands over his face.
In the La Masia corridor, one of the boys said "no" out loud, at a screen, watching something he had already watched happen four days ago.
Neymar, in Paris, had sat down on the arm of a sofa.
"At half time."
Koeman.
"I did not know what to say. I am the coach. That is the job, you are supposed to have something."
He shrugs.
"And then Leo stood up."
Dressing room footage. Shaky. Somebody filming from the corner.
Twenty men sitting in a room and one man standing in the middle of it.
The audio is bad. Most of it is lost.
But you can hear this much:
"—not going to happen again. Not to us. Not this time."
"I have stood in front of those people and made them a promise and I am not going back to that city without it."
"Forty-five minutes. That is all that is left of nine months."
A pause.
"So go out there and take it."
"And then."
Present day. Messi. And he almost smiles.
"And then it was the ninety-sixth minute."
"ALBA, INSIDE—"
"MESSIIIII!"
"MESSSSIIIIII! NINETY-SIXTH MINUTE! LIONEL MESSI!"
Every single person watching that documentary, everywhere in the world, made a noise at the same time.
Oriol Cerdà came out of his chair again.
The La Masia corridor went up.
Two people on a sofa in Gràcia grabbed each other.
Ousmane Dembélé, now on the ground in Paris, standing in an aisle with his bag over one shoulder and a laptop open in one hand, holding up an entire row of passengers, did not care even slightly.
And on screen, a small man stood on a pitch in Porto and screamed at a black sky with both fists going.
"What did that feel like?"
Messi does not answer for a moment.
"I have scored a lot of goals."
He shrugs.
"That one was not for me."
And then the documentary does the thing that everybody who ever watches it will remember.
It cuts back.
2007.
A twenty-year-old with long hair sitting a three-year-old on his knee and getting his hair pulled.
Both of them laughing.
2021.
"Mateo is."
Messi, in the grey room, thinking about it.
"Messi is."
Mateo, in his chair, thinking about it too.
And on screen, in the one hundred and nineteenth minute of a Champions League final, Lionel Messi puts his head up in the middle of four Chelsea players and sees something nobody else on that pitch can see.
And hits it.
"Mateo is—"
"Messi is—"
The ball drops out of the black sky over Porto.
And a boy turns his back on the goal, and throws himself backwards into the air, and everything in the footage slows down until you can see the grass coming off his boots.
And both of them say it at the same time.
"The best."
BANG.
"GOOOOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLLLL!"
"MATEO KING! A BICYCLE KICK! IN THE ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEENTH MINUTE OF A CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FINAL!"
Eleven boys in a corridor at La Masia were screaming.
Two children were jumping on a sofa in a house outside Barcelona.
An old man in a recliner had both hands on top of his head and tears coming down his face and had no idea they were there.
A man in an airport in Paris was standing completely still in the middle of everybody.
In Doha, Xavi Hernández was on his feet behind a desk covered in paper.
And in a medical room at a training complex, a seventeen-year-old boy sat on the edge of an examination bed and watched himself score, and he was not smiling any more.
He had one hand over his own mouth.
"BARCELONA HAVE WON THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE!"
Gold coming off the roof of a stadium. Confetti. A trophy going up into the air with two hands underneath it and thirty men screaming around it.
And then it slows.
And it holds on one image.
A small man from Rosario and a boy from Barcelona, both of them holding that trophy, one hand each, foreheads almost together, both of them shouting something at each other that nobody will ever hear.
And the music goes out.
And over that frozen image, an old voice comes in. Worn tape. A Dutch accent bending around Spanish.
"At the end of the day, I am not worried about this club."
The image holds.
"After all."
"Barcelona has always been more than—"
And the picture cuts to black, and two words come up in white, and hold there in silence for a very long time.
MÉS QUE UN CLUB.
Author's Note
I'm sorry for the irregular updates lately. I haven't been able to type for a while, and I know the inconsistency can be frustrating, especially for those of you who have been patiently following the story. Thank you for sticking with me.
Unfortunately, this will be the only chapter posted this week, as I need to spend some time catching up on Patreon. The chapters ahead have become a little short, and I need to build that buffer back up so my Patreon readers can continue enjoying chapters ahead of the main release.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and thank you for continuing to read and support the story despite the delays. If you'd like to read ahead and support my work, you're always welcome to join me on Patreon. Every bit of support helps me keep the story moving forward, and I genuinely appreciate it.
Thank you for your patience and for being part of this journey. It means a lot to me.
patreon.com/David_Adetola
Thank You your support is greatly appreciated thank you all
I've also created a Discord channel to make communication easier, where I'll post updates
https://discord.gg/9WWG3y5Uq (New discord link)