At the absolute center of the Chrono-Mire, the flat, ash-covered wasteland slammed into a sheer vertical wall of petrified obsidian.
Rising thousands of feet into the swirling gray firmament was a solitary, jagged mountain. It didn't belong to the natural geology of the primordial world; the peak was surrounded by colossal rings of shattered mountain rock hovering in silent, anti-gravitational orbits, while rivers of inverted water flowed upward along its dark cliffs.
As Markus reached the base of the incline, his eyes narrowed beneath his shroud. The entire mountain was crawling with translucent, shifting shadows that hovered over the rock faces like spectral specters.
[SYSTEM IDENTIFICATION: TEMPORAL ANOMALY]
>> Entity Class: Time Wraith (Sub-Sovereign Manifestation)
>> Formation Mechanism: Spontaneous Condensation of Relic Leakage
>> Attribute: Temporal Desynchronization / Chrono-Phase Shift
>> Primary Threat: Infinite State Rewind / Localized Age Draining
These were not organic beasts, nor were they standard spirit entities. They were Time Wraiths—monstrosities born from the raw, uncontained aura of the time relic sitting at the mountain's summit.
As Markus took his first step onto the mountain path, the nearest shadow twitched.
Without a sound, the Wraith vanished. It didn't use speed, and it didn't use spatial displacement. It simply ceased to exist in the current second, re-manifesting three feet directly in front of Markus's face a fraction of a second before he even finished his step.
A jagged arm of condensed, gray chronal mist slammed down toward Markus's chest.
"Too slow," Markus grunted, executing a instantaneous spatial blink five meters backward.
In the same breath, he snapped his fingers. A razor-sharp spatial blade cut across the air, cleanly bisecting the Wraith's torso. But the moment the spatial blade passed through, the Wraith's body flickered with a faint golden light. The severed halves melted together instantly as the creature forced its personal timeline back by 0.5 seconds, completely erasing the damage.
Markus's eyes darkened. Physical and spatial attacks are useless if it can continuously reset its physical state. To kill a creature of time, I have to lock its personal timeline.
What followed was a brutal, agonizing battle of attrition up the narrow mountain pass.
Markus had to draw directly upon the gold runes of the Book of Time residing in his soul space. He matched the Wraith's erratic chronal shifts second for second, forcing his mind to process four different potential timelines simultaneously to predict where the creature would phase into reality next.
Minute 0–5: Markus attempted to anchor the Wraith using localized spatial gravity fields. The Wraith bypassed the spatial friction entirely by stepping outside the current second, striking Markus from behind and forcing him to deploy a spatial shield that drained a massive chunk of his core reserves.
Minute 6–12: Realizing spatial control was insufficient, Markus integrated his own nascent Time Law. He matched the creature's frequency, forcing his sensory perception into hyper-acceleration. The world slowed to a absolute crawl, but the mental processing speed required to hold that state burned through his consciousness like liquid fire.
Minute 13–20: Finding the exact microsecond where the Wraith's core reset loop refreshed, Markus struck. He unleashed a precise Chronal Sealing Pin—a spike of absolute, frozen time—directly into the monster's center.
The Wraith shrieked—a silent, mental screech that shook the bedrock—as its ability to rewind was locked. With its temporal immunity suppressed, Markus instantly followed up with a concentrated spatial compression sphere, collapsing the Wraith's core into a microscopic singularity before it could break the seal.
The Wraith dissolved into a harmless cloud of gray dust, leaving Markus standing alone on a narrow ledge halfway up the cliffside.
Haa... haa...
Markus leaned heavily against the cold obsidian rock face, his chest heaving as deep, ragged breaths tore through his throat. Sweat soaked the inner lining of his stardust cloak, dripping onto the stone below.
[PHYSIOLOGICAL STATUS REPORT]
>> Core State: Primordial Human Physique (Tier 6 Baseline)
>> Mental Stamina Capacity: 22% (Severe Temporal Burnout)
>> Meridian Strain: High Friction / Chronal Desynchronization
>> Recovery Requirement: Immediate Stasis Rest Recommended
Even with his elevated Primordial Human physique—a body far denser, more resilient, and biologically superior to any standard mortal framework—manipulating the Laws of Time was an utterly exhausting endeavor.
Space Law was about geometry and force; it was natural to manipulate the world around you. Time Law, however, forced the wielder to process paradoxical states of existence simultaneously. Holding a single second of temporal stasis while battling a Wraith had forced his brain to compute thousands of branching probability paths every millisecond.
Markus slid down the rock wall, sitting cross-legged on the stone ledge to take a much-needed break. He closed his eyes, channeling his primordial mana inward to heal the microscopic tearing in his meridians caused by the chronal backlash.
Taking a deep draught of refined recovery nectar from his inventory, Markus let the cool, soothing liquid wash over his parched throat. He rested on the quiet cliffside, staring up at the dark, storm-shrouded summit where the true source of this chronological nightmare was patiently waiting for him.
**
Markus sat alone on the narrow obsidian ledge, surrounded by silence.
There was no spectral voice echoing through his soul link, no black-scaled viper wrapped around his shoulders, and no familiar banter to break the eerie stillness of the Chrono-Mire. Miles away, across the dimensional divide back at the academy, Nagini was stationed at her post—an absolute, lethal guard dog watching over Rosanne and the girls.
Here, on the slopes of the temporal mountain, Markus stood completely on his own.
Taking one last deep breath, he flexed his hands. His Primordial Human physique had fully recovered from the initial burnout, his dense meridians once again thrumming with silver-blue spatial mana and golden threads of nascent time law. He stood up, pulled his stardust shroud tightly around his shoulders, and set his sights on the storm-shrouded summit.
Having spent twenty agonizing minutes dissecting the temporal rewinding mechanism of the first Time Wraith, Markus was no longer fighting blind. He knew he couldn't afford another drawn-out duel of multi-timeline mental calculations—not if he wanted to reach the peak with enough mental stamina to claim the relic.
As three more Time Wraiths phased out of the gray mist ahead, Markus didn't wait for them to initiate their chronal shifts.
Instead of fighting the wraiths on temporal terms, Markus used his superior Space Law first. With a sharp twist of his fingers, he slammed a Cube of Absolute Pressure down on the three entities. Space itself compressed around them into a dense, solid block, trapping their physical forms in place before they could shift out of the current second.
Before they could activate their half-second timeline rewind, Markus thrust his hand forward, driving three golden needles of compressed Time Law directly into their glowing core signatures.
Clang!
The faint, glassy chime of locked time echoed through the air. With their rewind capability paralyzed, Markus swept his arm horizontally, sending a razor-thin spatial blade slicing through the compressed block. The three Time Wraiths shattered into harmless gray ash, dissolving into the wind in under three minutes.
While his combat efficiency had drastically improved, the mountain itself became increasingly hostile the higher he climbed.
Five hundred meters beneath the summit, Markus crossed into a region where the ambient atmosphere was no longer uniform. He had entered a Temporal Shear Zone—a violent spatial area where different patches of air moved at wildly mismatched chronological speeds.
A falling pebble to his left dropped at standard speed, while a drifting cloud of ash to his right moved so slowly it appeared frozen. Step an inch to the left, and time moved at five times normal speed; step an inch to the right, and time decelerated to a crawl.
For a standard cultivator, entering this zone would mean instant death—their left leg would age ten years while their right leg remained in the present, tearing their physical body apart at the cellular level.
Markus gritted his teeth, his silver-blue eyes glowing brightly beneath his hood. He wrapped his entire body in a tight, form-fitting layer of folded space—a dimensional skin that absorbed the differential temporal friction before it could touch his flesh.
Even so, his Primordial Human physique was pushed to its absolute limits. His dense bones groaned under the erratic gravitational shifts, and his core burned as it constantly calibrated his internal mana flow to keep his blood circulating at a uniform speed.
After two hours of grueling, solitary climbing through the shear zone, the steep obsidian path finally leveled out.
Markus stepped onto the mountain's flat, wind-swept summit. The gray clouds above had been swept away by a swirling vortex of golden light that rotated in silence over a massive, suspended ring of ancient white stone pillars.
Floating at the exact center of the stone ring, hovering three feet above a shattered altar, was the source of the anomaly.