Nihility [ Isekai • Dragon Evolution ]

I fell onto the bed of the inn's room after failing to create a time loop, almost completely drained of MP. The process should have been easy enough, I knew how to reverse time, so I just needed to anchor the reversal to a specific point in time, but it was much more easier said than done.

Reverting time was very easy, I just had to go against the flow of the timestream, but looping was more complicated. I was basing my thoughts on what I saw and felt from my time inside the loops, but I needed to make the timeline itself loop backwards into itself before continuing its normal flow, and that was more difficult.

No, scratch that. Difficult doesn't even begin to describe the task. To make a temporal loop, you literally have to twist the timestream, which is the same as asking someone to decompress a black hole. The sheer scale of it is just mind-boggling. I must thank whoever created the loops I was stuck in, whether it was the God of Time or not.

Not to say that it was impossible, no. Just that I would need so much magicules to pull it off that I would be 90 years old before I had enough magicules. So that was a plan I would need to scratch as I didn't have any way to pull that quantity of magicules out of thin air– or did I?

The flash of a magicule lightning bolt striking the city's shield flashed through the room's windows. I stared through the window at the city's shield and the magical storm raging just outside of it.

"Farahio said each of those lightning bolts had so much magicules to make anything they touched explode," I said out loud, looking at them as I checked my current MP levels.

It would take the rest of the day for my MP to regenerate back to full, and I couldn't absorb from the environment as the various absorption runes throughout the city make it a desert compared to just outside the walls.

"This is stupid," I said, and I knew it. Each bolt of lightning hitting the city's shield was enough to pulverize me. True, I couldn't actually feel how much they had individually, but I felt the storm before entering the city, when it was far away, and it reminded me a little of the boronita ore in the sheer amount of magicules. I wouldn't be surprised if it acted like a solid if I were to fly to those clouds.

Still, that was my best shot if I wanted to create a time loop.

I spent the next half hour thinking about it as I waited for a little bit of my MP to regenerate so I wasn't that tired, but in the end, I concluded that this was necessary to better prepare against Jack.

I got up and was about to grab the bag Farahio left me when I stopped to look at my hand. It was slightly trembling. I still didn't understand why Jack left me feeling like this, it certainly should have an explanation, but I couldn't find one still.

I placed my other hand over it and held it until it stopped shaking. I looked at the bag again and decided to leave it there, as it would probably get damaged or straight up vaporized if–no, not if, when a lightning hit it.

I left the inn, leaving the key to the room with the receptionist and asking her to hold it for me because I could lose it, and walked to the city's gate Farahio and I entered. As I got closer, I could see it was closed, there was a metallic door that probably came from the inside of the walls, as it wasn't there when we entered, and I could feel the shield protecting the city extending inside of it as well.

That was a bust. I wouldn't be able to leave through the gates. I needed another way to leave.

I walked to an alley and sat on the ground, thinking.

"I could leave through the sewers? No. I don't know the sewers or even if they would have an exit to the outside," I thought out loud. "Portal? Might work."

I got up and tried to open a portal to just outside the city walls as it was easy to calculate the relative coordinates, but unfortunately when I tried to open the portal, I felt resistance from space, almost as if I was trying to open a door to a flooded room and the weight of the water stopped the door from opening.

I tried forcing it, pushing space with [Spatial Manipulation] to try to open it, but it backfired as my control on space slipped and it rebounded right at me, launching myself against the wall of the building on my back, cracking the wall and leaving me gasping for air on the ground.

It was several minutes of hurting to just breathe, and me casting my prototype healing spell that didn't do much before I was able to shakily stand up. My back hurt like it was on fire, but I was able to at least walk, if poorly.

"Portal is out–At least I know why they close the portal plaza during these storms," I said out loud, again. "I don't know if it might be different, but I might as well try teleporting."

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In theory, teleporting should be easier than portalling, as I didn't need to open a hole in space, I would just kind of pop up there. Might be a mistake, but at least I know I won't die–Okay, this is starting to become dangerous. I need to keep myself in check. It's not just because I know I can't die because there's a fixed point in time with me in the future that I want to become paralyzed from the neck down because of an injury, you know?

I took one final deep breath, only to stop and cough a little. I shook my head and then began forming a bubble around me. I was trying to follow the way [Knowledge Library] had explained it to me. Then, I started to make the same process of portalling, creating the corridor to my destination, but instead of just trying to rip space open to create the portal, I compressed the distance until I felt resistance, but it wasn't as bad as creating a portal.

Pushing it a little, to the point that most of my recently regenerated MP went to it, I was suddenly hit by a giant magical pressure that forced me to the ground. It was a difference so big and so sudden I couldn't do anything but fall to the ground face first.

I looked around and saw various open holes in the ground and splinters of trees. The sound of strong winds and explosions echoed all around me. I saw a lightning hit a tree a dozen or so meters away from me, and the tree just ceased to exist in the next second, with fragments of wood that felt weird to me hitting my body.

I managed to move my body to be sitting on the ground. I took one of the fragments of the wood and saw how it wasn't wood anymore, it was a crystalline fragment.

[Wood Crystal is made when a piece of normal wood is supercharged with magicules. It is used in wooden construction to allow the object to regenerate by consuming magicules.]

Huh, interesting.

I looked up and saw the massive storm. Now that I was outside of the shield, I could use [Magicule Detection] to feel it better–except not, the ambient magicule was so high that it felt like I was constantly being assaulted by bright lights, and the storm itself looked like a second sun right on top of me.

I was right, it was a stupid, very, very stupid, idea. I could barely stand up, and the lightning hit so fast I couldn't possibly dodge even if I wanted to. I crawled right next to the walls, hoping they would at least give me some protection against the lightning.

I couldn't reenter the city, I barely had magicules, and the magical pressure here was so big I couldn't properly hold onto space to grab it.

The magicule problems I could easily resolve. There was so much around me that I was already absorbing part of it, but I could accelerate it more, just like inside the dungeon when I manually absorbed those magicule cubes.

The moment I used [Magicule Manipulation] to absorb the magicules around me, I felt [Living Paradox] resonating with [Knowledge Library], but before I could do anything, I blacked out.

[??????? POV]

My body felt weak, very, very weak. I looked around. I was near the wall of a city with a forest a dozen or so meters away. There was a magic storm raging all around me. I was inside a small crater caused by one stray magicule lightning bolt. All around me were earth crystals, crystals formed when dirt is supercharged by magicules, easily found where magical storms like this one pass through.

"It seems I don't have much time here," I said, not recognizing the voice that came out of my mouth for a few moments.

I got up from the ground and raised my hand, but the moment I tried to move magicules, my hand exploded into a fine mist, not being able to contain the amount of magicules I was currently wielding.

"Right, this body is very weak," I said. The next moment, time reversed, and my hand reformed to right before it exploded.

"You wanted a temporal loop, right? This is how you do it." The next moment, I started floating to the sky, right above Brostin's shield. Lightning rained towards me, but I held every single one back. Some parts of this body exploded due to the stress, but I reverted time to before the damage.

I could see the people in the city looking at me, and some of the higher-ups were starting to make a move, but everything would be over before they reached me.

I started to absorb the magicules in the lightning into this body and immediately used them to freeze time and then reversed to a couple of hours earlier, still keeping my hold on the storm's magicules and absorbing them.

I flooded [Time Manipulation] with it, tightening my control around the timestream itself. I could feel Zwriniz's gaze on me as I did it, but we both knew this needed to happen. I began pulling the timestream back into itself while I kept a tight control on all the waves I was causing.

I snuffled out the waves before they could properly propagate backwards and forwards through time. I didn't need more attention than what I was already getting. As I did it, my body kept exploding and I kept reforming it again and again. I could keep doing it as long as necessary, but it wasted a large quantity of magicules that I could be using for something else.

I stopped once the timestream flowed into itself before flowing forward. I descended back into the ground. The storm was over, I had used every bit of magicule in it, and because of it, there was a small reception party awaiting for me for when I touched the ground.

"Halt! Who are you?" The knight commander of this city asked me, but I ignored him. I didn't have much time before the other attention I had caught arrived.

With a movement of my hand, several runes and magical circuits appeared around me. The guards backed away, but I saw some of the mages start to read my spell.

The last thing I did before I let go of the body was activate the spell, and then I was out of the timestream again. I looked at Zwriniz and waved.