Nihility [ Isekai • Dragon Evolution ]

As I walked the corridor, I couldn't help but try to understand what had happened. I was testing spells and I suddenly lost control? Farahio didn't seem to know either so I only had one skill to look towards that might contain answers. I say might because, you know, it's not that reliable. For a skill that in theory is connected to the universe itself it lacks information.

[Origin Magic]

That was the only information my skill gave me.

"What? What the heck is origin magic?" I asked.

[Information not available]

"Of course it isn't" Why would I even think otherwise? But even so, it seemed to answer me on stuff that I at least seen before or based on my own knowledge.

It's the second time I've heard about origin something. The first was my own name, from origin language or whatever, and then this origin magic. It feels too important to just ignore, but at the same time, I didn't have anything to go from there. I absolutely hate being thrown around like this and not knowing what is happening, and this has been happening since I reincarnated. Does that mean this is my life now? Thrown from one unknown situation to another with little to no rest between them?

A sudden dizziness hit me as I walked. I felt something activating just a moment before the dizziness, but I wasn't quick enough to do anything. The corridor seemed to double and then quadruple before stopping spinning around on my head and the dizziness receded, but not completely.

I was left with a strange vision in front of me. There were four stone doors in front of me, but instead of being in a line, they were at the end of the corridor, except they were stacked on top of each other, occupying the same physical space. It was giving me a headache just looking at them, but then I sensed the timestream and understood.

It's not that the doors were on top of each other, but that the corridor had split into four different timelines, and I somehow was on all of them at the same time. My guess was that my affinity to time, and being an Ouroboros Dragon, made me partially immune to whatever had just happened.

Another thing I noticed was how the flow of time felt different here than outside. It felt more controlled almost as if it was a water tank inside of a river, but change the water for time. I guess that's what Farahio was saying when he said I would understand about dungeons when I entered one. Even the timeline here felt artificial, built with a specific purpose.

I approached the stone doors and pushed them open. Each one opened in a different manner than the other. The first opened by having its hinges on the left side, turning towards the left. The second was mirrored, turning to the right with its hinges on the right. The third one was split in the middle, opening to the right and the left at the same time, and the fourth was also split in the middle, but inverted, having its hinges on a small pillar in the middle and opening on the left and on the right.

After the door I found three openings, one to the right, one to the left and one in the middle. They seemed entrances to a maze, if I was being honest. There was another object in the small room I was currently in. Hanging from the ceiling there was a crystal structure with a circle in the middle with one crystal protruding from the left, right, top and bottom of it and they were all glowing…No, they weren't all glowing. After I concentrated enough to make my head start to throb, I was able to see that in each timeline only one of the crystal protrusions were lit. The only thing that was consistent on every timeline variation were the two lights in the middle circle, probably a clue or something.

I looked at the corridors, one by one with each hitting my head like a hammer. Whenever I looked at something in here, all I could see was four different versions of the same object stacked on top of each other. It felt like I had drunk a lot of alcohol and was seeing double, or quadruple in this case. One of the corridors seemed to be aged, rusted and almost decaying into pieces, another one seemed to be more recent, with moving walls that slowly shifted, changing the paths and creating a visual cacophony in my eyes that made my brain feel like it had been rolled over by a truck. Another of the corridors seemed newer than all the others, but was filled with unstable temporal energy clinging to surfaces and dropping down onto the floor, where it fizzled out. The remaining corridor seemed normal, I couldn't see anything different, that was until I felt the temporal energy in the room. Where the other three were running normally, the fourth one was just stopped. I could feel a small bubble around me, not something of my creation, but apparently by design, of normal time, everywhere outside it was just frozen in time.

I closed my eyes. The headache was reaching absurd levels already, my head felt like it was going to explode like a melon. I needed something to help with this else I wouldn't be able to complete the first room…

I tried using [Mathematical Cortex] to accelerate my own mind, but the only thing I did was increase the speed of my headache as I was still perceiving the four timelines at the same time, just faster. Then I had an idea, if I was experiencing four different timelines at the same time, I just need my brain to process each one separately.

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With a mental switch, I divided my focus into four different streams of thoughts through the parallel processing sub-skill of [Mathematical Cortex]. It was a little weird, trying to juggle my thoughts through four different ways of thinking. Each stream was its self contained thing, aware of the others but not directly influenced by them. Having two was easier as I could focus one on just doing what I normally do and the other on other stuff like programming spells and stuff, but having four was proving itself difficult to control correctly.

Opening my eyes, each of my streams of thoughts focused on a single time variation. The result was that while my senses could feel all of them at the same time, I was focusing on each one separately, and it was working. There was a drain on my MP, but not much. I thought for a moment and decided to divide my mind into one more stream, this one would just prepare a few spells using [Magical Programming Language] in the case I needed them. I was in a dungeon, after all, anything could happen.

I took a step forward and entered the central corridor. The moment I stepped on the floor, a plate on the ground descended and with a click I heard a mechanism activating on top of me. Immediately activating the barrier I had started to develop before, I saw arrows hitting it and bouncing backwards.

I sighed. "Traps. Why wouldn't there be traps in a dungeon?"

One thing I noticed was that the trap only activated on the rusted corridor, whereas on the others nothing happened.

"Different timelines, different traps… Cool" I said and kept moving forwards, avoiding the unstable temporal energy that felt like a ticking time bomb to my temporal senses and carefully touching the ground, feeling for traps before actually taking the step.

My progress was awfully slow. I was simply too scared of activating any other traps to be any faster. Thanks to that, however, I was able to avoid stepping on a stone slab that fell the moment I put a little bit of weight on it, a river of unstable temporal energy beneath it that turned the stone into dust the moment it touched the energy.

I had to avoid traps, unstable temporal energy and falling stone slabs. The moving walls weren't that much of a treat as an annoyance, cutting a clear path on the other three timelines. I tried to go through it, but if there was anything blocking me on one timeline, I was trapped on all of them. Which made me discover that I was safe from the falling slabs as the ground was solid on the other timelines, meaning that I was stepping on nothing on that timeline, it was weird.

"Wait. The first trap, the floor descended on all timelines… Does that mean"

I then carefully stepped on all of the stone slabs back to the entrance, not triggering any other traps.

"The traps are pressure plates, meaning that I need to make them go downwards to activate, but I can't go down because I'm stepping on the ground on other timelines" I concluded.

I had just cheated out of traps by accident, hah.

With new found confidence, I walked with a bit less care than before, but still being careful, I wasn't stupid. After a few minutes walking through the maze, avoiding the unstable temporal energy and the shifting walls I found a lever on the wall on the rusted corridor.

Approaching it I inspected it, tried to [Appraisal] it with no luck and then decided to pull it. The moment I pulled it I felt something gathering around me and trying to yank me out of where I was, but how I was existing on four different timelines at the same time it wasn't working. I felt a presence looking at me from everywhere at once and the strength of the pull increased, but still no luck. I even felt some of the energy around me entering my body and being absorbed.

The presence diminished, like it gave up, and the energy gathering around me dispersed, part of it being absorbed by me. I still felt the presence observing me but not doing anything.

"This feels weird" I said to the sensation of being observed. "Are you the dungeon?" I asked, but didn't receive any answer.

I kept moving through the maze until I heard soft steps coming from a corner a few meters in front of me. Already preparing a fireball spell I waited. Eventually I saw a white spider that seemed to glitch in and out of time appeared from the corner.

The spider was almost as big as me and had thin long legs with fangs the size of my humanoid hand that dripped with the unstable temporal energy. It had a spectral feel to it, almost translucent.

The moment the spider saw me it screeched and with its back legs began pulling a silvery thread of unstable temporal energy, forming it into a sphere the size of my closed hand and then threw it at me.

I casted a fireball at it. The moment my spell met the sphere of unstable threads it exploded in flames. I already casted another fireball and casted it towards the spider, not missing a beat I already began coding an electric spell.

The fireball exploded on the spider, its agony screeching reaching my ears before it lunged at me, passing through the flames. I casted the electric spell, but the spider flickered and the spell passed through it.

It kept coming right at me, so I pulled another fireball spell and tossed at it, but the spider seemed unfazed by it as it passed right through its body.

I blinked, my eyes readjusting to the spider itself. It somehow had changed timelines. My spells were only working on one timeline apparently, and the one I focused the most on was where my spells activated.

The spider was already on top of me before I could cast another spell and it pushed its fangs on me. I raised my left hand to block it, trying to create a rudimentary type of shield, but the spider's fang passed right through them like a hot knife through butter and cracked my scales before stopping. The unstable temporal energy that it releases constantly from its fangs dripped on my scale. I saw as the temporal energy that coursed through my body naturally react with the unstable energy.

For a moment, nothing happened, the next one everything was white.