Boom—

The island suddenly shook to its core. The familiar phenomenon that occurred when a collision happened.

"W-What’s going on? That should be another collision. A second collision. A-Are we getting ganged up on?!" Liz cried out.

But Arc was frozen on the spot, his unfocused eyes locked in a random direction as his mind went blank.

"Arc, what should we do? We have to join them," Liz said after seeing his lost expression.

That line...

"W-What?" He was pulled back to reality and looked up at her before looking down at his shaky palms and slowly spinning around to take in his surroundings.

"Where..." he couldn’t bring himself to complete that sentence.

He could remember dying one minute, killed by the Avariel healer, and the next, he was standing with Liz... a few minutes back before he headed to the Avariel island, saying the exact same thing.

"Arc? Are you okay?" Liz asked softly, noticing something was off with him.

Arc didn’t reply. He barely heard what Liz had said as he stood rooted on the spot, trying to make sense of the past minute’s events, when the strange chanting suddenly came— 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

Ascend... o... suprem...

Ascend... o... suprem...

Ascend... o... suprem...

"Ascend... o... Suprem..." he slowly repeated, when a surge of memories suddenly flooded his mind, causing him to groan as he fell to his knees, grabbing his head at the searing pain, which disappeared as soon as it came.

The sound of a rusty gear shifting in his head echoed, and Arc slowly looked up with wide eyes.

Not only could he remember everything now, but...

"I’ve been regressed... again."

***

In a garden surrounded by otherworldly flowers and tiny colorful humanoid creatures with wings fluttering about, a woman dressed in a white robe with golden embroideries, whose beauty radiated throughout the garden, calmly watered the flowers with a beautiful smile and even more beautiful compliments that made them bloom, when she was interrupted as the garden suddenly began shaking fiercely.

The earthquake was so powerful that flower pots fell and shattered on the spot, the glass dome that covered the garden began to crack, and the fairies panicked and all went into hiding.

A flower pot hanging above the goddess suddenly broke loose and dropped toward her head, but before it could impact her, a hairpin suddenly flew out and shattered the flower pot. A lady in a white blouse and tight black skirt appeared beside the goddess and pulled her down, using her body as a shield to protect the goddess from the raining dirt and debris.

The earthquake disappeared as soon as it came.

"Are you okay, milady?" Cindra asked with a worried expression.

But Goddess Zemira didn’t reply.

Zemira slowly looked up, looking around at her once beautiful garden, now in wreckage.

The temperature instantly dropped to negative digits as her expression turned ice-cold. Layers of frost spread across the garden and even threatened to spread across Cindra’s skin as her breath became white mist.

"Mi-Milady, we can fix it in no time—"

"No." The Goddess said as she slowly stood, taking one last look around the wreckage as her expression twisted into something unrecognizable. "Burn it down."

Cindra’s heart dropped, though she expected as much. The Goddess’s temper was like a burning coal.

"B-But, milady..." she trailed off when she saw the Goddess’s cold gaze. She bit her lip. "As you wish, milady."

"This is the second time in the past few days," Zemira slowly said. "The last time, you couldn’t give me a name." She turned to look at her assistant, who lowered her head, not daring to look her in the eye. "Do you have something for me now?"

Cindra trembled on her knees. "I’m sorry, milady. W-We’re working on it."

The Goddess was silent for a moment.

"Where’s Aurelius?"

"An earthquake affecting the entire universe is clearly not something within your power to get hold of. If there’s anyone who should know, it would be Aurelius."

"The fact that he hasn’t reached out to me first tells me he knows something. Tell him I want to see him before nightfall," the Goddess said as she turned to leave.

"Mi-Milady..." Cindra called, making the Goddess pause in her steps.

"Did he send me a message already? What does it say?" she asked sharply.

Cindra was silent for a moment before she forced herself to relay Aurelius’s letter to the Goddess.

"He said in a letter that arrived a minute ago that... he doesn’t want to be disturbed."

"What?" The Goddess was visibly stunned for a moment, before her expression shifted and she scoffed coldly. "Get my carriage ready," she said as she began walking away. "We’re paying that old man a visit."

***

Meanwhile, in a different dimension...

A young boy who didn’t look older than ten was in a vast library of endless shelves lined with books. He was sitting at a table at the center of the library, drawing calligraphy onto a white sheet of paper.

His strokes were gentle and precise, when an earthquake suddenly shook the library, causing the neatly arranged books to fall out and scatter all over the place, some tearing and sending loose pages flying. The ink jar tipped over and spilled onto his calligraphy, making the boy pause in his movement until the earthquake stopped.

He looked up, his expression eerily calm, as a parrot flew over from its cage to his side.

"Loki, send a message to the three great factions saying I do not want to be disturbed," the boy said to the bird.

The parrot chirped once and flew away, and only then did the boy stand up and begin heading deep into the library. Wherever he passed, the spilled books reassembled themselves and returned to their shelves where they had fallen, as if time itself was being reversed.

He arrived before a row of shelves lined along the wall, but didn’t stop and walked right through a shelf, when the scene around him changed into that of the galaxy. He made a few hand signals and the galactic room zoomed in until it revealed intricate lines and patterns only he would understand.

For the first time, the boy reacted. He frowned subtly.

"Just like I thought... The timeline ended once more and created a new branch a few minutes back from where it stopped," he mumbled to himself.

"Interesting."