The moment Rein saw the cabin, the scene hit him with the cold, static weight of a memory he hadn’t asked for.
A single-story wooden cabin—old, weather-worn—sat in the middle of a dense pine forest. A wide porch stretched across the front, silent and abandoned, like it had been waiting for someone to step onto it—and never leave.
His eyes flicked up.
A bird perched motionless on the roof’s gable.
“Is that…” Mira murmured, inching closer to Boris like the air itself had teeth. “A mana owl?”
“Could be,” Boris chuckled, trying to sound casual. “Maybe it’s just some guardian familiar the club keeps around.”
Rein barely heard them.
No—he heard them the way you hear an old recording, played too many times until every word is carved into your brain.
He already knew what they would say.
He already knew exactly when.
“Look at the state of this place…” Boris started—
—but the rest of the sentence never made it out.
Because Rein spoke at the exact same time, perfectly overlapping the words that were about to come.
“…If you told me this was a haunted cabin, I’d believe you.”
His voice landed perfectly on top of Boris’s—like the line had been rehearsed.
Boris and Mira froze.
Both of them turned toward him like they’d just realized the real ghost wasn’t the cabin.
Before either of them could speak, the front door creaked open.
Kellen stepped outside, waving with a friendly smile.
SNAP.
The reality in front of him buckled, overlapping with a phantom image that refused to be ignored.
This time it wasn’t a gentle ripple.
It was violent—white-hot—like something had grabbed the scene and torn it apart.
No.
Something had changed.
Instead of the same looped memory playing cleanly, an outside force crashed into it, shredding the image into broken fragments.
The cabin shattered—falling away like pieces dropping into an endless pit—
—and the world behind it surged into view.
A massive Dungeon Core sphere trembled at the center of a circular platform. Stone walls split with spiderweb cracks. Dust and debris rained down without pause, the entire space groaning under the warning signs of imminent collapse.
And where Kellen had been standing in the doorway—
he was now sprawled on the ground.
Blood seeped from the hole in his thigh, bright red against the dark stone. Behind the monocle lens, his eyes burned with hatred… and confusion.
“If you think you can build the ‘key’ to return to Arath on your own…” Kellen forced out a laugh that sounded more like choking. “Then I’m sorry, Rein. You’ll never pull it off.”
His fingers trembled as he pointed weakly at his own temple.
“The Ekhosar holds too much. Ancient glyphs. Structures so complex you can’t even imagine them. Do you have any idea how many loops it took me to read it—again and again—until I found the answer?”
He gritted his teeth, eyes wide.
“Without me… you’ll never succeed.”
Rein—now a faint, translucent silhouette—watched the scene as if it were happening to someone else.
He watched his “real” body ignore Kellen’s threats completely.
All of his focus was locked on the book.
In Kellen’s eyes, Rein looked almost deranged—hands moving through the air above the black grimoire as it trembled and screamed, its light pulsing like the heartbeat of a dying beast fighting not to go still.
[02:45… 02:44…]
Then the ghostlike Rein was pulled forward—
dragged into his own body—
until the two forms merged into one.
The messy-haired boy stiffened for a fraction of a second.
“…What the hell was that just now?”
[LIZ: Rein—are you okay?]
“Yeah,” Rein muttered, rubbing the space between his brows. “Just… stressed. That’s all.”
He lifted his gaze to the six HUD windows hovering in front of him.
LIZ was working at full capacity, peeling The Ekhosar apart layer by layer.
One hologram displayed a 3D model of the dungeon as it crumpled inward, collapse accelerating like a failing structure under load. Another window translated the twisted glyphs into a language Rein could actually read. The remaining screens were filled with equations, mana signatures, and raw data streams scrolling like they’d gone insane.
“The exit point for those two…” Rein’s eyes narrowed as he tracked the moving markers on the map. “Isn’t it a bit far, LIZ?”
Mira and Boris were two tiny lights—still running, still alive—closing in on the location he’d forced LIZ to stabilize.
[LIZ: That zone is the nearest stable anchor point, Rein. Every other position is too high-risk. If we deploy a portal on unstable ground, the dimension may collapse before their identity data can be saved and transferred.]
Rein stared at those two dots.
Fighting.
Crawling toward the only door he could afford to open.
I already told them I can’t save everyone.
So they’d better save themselves—if they want to live.
[LIZ: Rein! The Ekhosar is destabilizing fast. Parts of it are already corrupting—and there’s a core section I can’t decode.]
A heavy tremor slammed into the Dungeon Core. The ceiling groaned, fractures widening. Rein had to brace himself, boots sliding slightly on the shaking platform, before he snapped his attention back to the HUD.
“Data missing…?” His voice dropped. “Or…”
He turned.
Kellen lay in his own blood, face drained pale.
And then—
he smiled.
A wide, sick grin that didn’t belong on a dying man.
Like he’d been waiting for Rein to look.
“Ah…” Kellen wheezed, pressing a hand to his thigh as blood kept spreading beneath him, dark and slick against the stone.
He let out a tired, bitter laugh.
“You really think you’re capable. Superior.”
His eyes glinted behind the monocle.
“But you’re just as pathetic as I am—just better at pretending you’re not.
“That arrogance—the belief you can solve everything—no matter how many loops pass… it never changes.”
He rolled onto his back, exhausted, staring up at the cracking ceiling.
“Last time, you wasted everything trying to save those two. Time ran out. The loop restarted.”
His breath hitched.
“The funny part is… we still ended up here again. Different moves. Same ending.”
He swallowed, forcing the words through pain.
“I didn’t think you’d reach this room so fast… but I came prepared this time. “The moment this loop began, I corrupted part of the data on purpose.”
His grin sharpened.
“The ‘Reset Key’—the one that sends everything back to the beginning…”
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“It doesn’t exist anymore.”
Rein’s gaze snapped to the five spheres trembling above the control altar. The images inside warped with the instability of the dimension itself.
He turned back, voice cutting like steel.
“Tell me the key’s data, Kellen. Now.”
“Or no one gets out of here. Not alive.”
Kellen stared at the collapsing ceiling with empty eyes, then slowly closed them, as if savoring the end.
“Ah… yes.”
His voice softened, almost reverent.
“A perfect tragedy doesn’t need an escape, Rein.”
Rein’s teeth clenched.
LIZ. Any other option?
He’s not giving it up.
He’s stalling—he wants us to die here with his rotten little play.
[LIZ: Rein, no. Constructing a new key from a database already damaged beyond 12% is extremely dangerous.]
[LIZ: If an error occurs this dimension will collapse instantly. Nothing will be recoverable. And more importantly: I need more processing time.]
“…So there’s no way out,” Rein murmured, eyes still locked on the HUD windows overflowing with junk data. “Missing data… key…”
His hand stopped scrolling.
Instead, his fingers began tapping lightly against the stone pedestal.
A fast, rhythmic beat.
Like he was trying to force a heartbeat back into a dead system.
“Time…” he whispered, almost to himself. “That’s the problem. The one variable we don’t have.”
His eyes drifted across the equations again.
Then he froze.
His pupils widened.
“Wait…”
His voice sharpened—alive again.
“Why is the loop shortening? And why does it keep siphoning mana from Arath?”
His gaze snapped up, scanning the chamber as if seeing it for the first time.
“A closed space… compressed mana… density at a critical threshold…”
He went still. And then it hit him.
Yes. If it’s compressed that tightly… spacetime warps.
Rein’s focus snapped toward LIZ, the mental gears finally catching.
“LIZ!”
“Check for time deviation. Now.”
“The time flow here and in Arath should be different. If this dimension is running a loop, and mana density is at this kind of critical level…”
His eyes gleamed in the middle of the ruin.
“…there has to be evidence of time dilation.”
LIZ’s interface flickered.
[LIZ: What are you planning? Are you trying to exploit the time differential to—]
“Yes, LIZ. We have to rebuild the whole model.”
Rein’s voice sharpened as he shoved aside anything that wasn’t essential.
“This black book didn’t just start falling apart now. It’s been corrupted for a long time—maybe since the moment its creator abandoned it. It’s not a divine artifact.”
He stared at The Ekhosar as if it were a malfunctioning machine.
“It’s a broken program. An infinite-loop bug that keeps trying to run itself over and over. A corrupted script that destroys itself every cycle—and every time it loops, the runtime gets shorter—because the system is bleeding itself dry.”
He flicked away more irrelevant windows until only a single curve remained: a warped graph of time-flow.
“To survive, the program needs outside energy—something to prop up the system before it collapses. That’s why it latched onto Arath. That’s why it tied Ht’ara to our world—to siphon mana and keep itself stable.”
His eyes narrowed.
“There. Found it.”
He dragged a cluster of numbers into focus.
“Run the deviation on this set, LIZ. Now.”
[LIZ: Okay. I’m seeing it in the system log. Time dilation is real—exactly as you suspected.]
A beat.
Then her next line hit like a hammer.
[LIZ: The time differential between this dimension and Arath is three hours and twenty-two minutes.]
[LIZ: Put simply: three hours in Arath equals less than two minutes here.]
Rein glanced at Kellen.
The boy with the monocle had gone still, drained by blood loss—...ashen, helpless, barely conscious.
Rein didn’t linger on him.
His gaze snapped back to the red numbers counting down at the edge of his vision.
[01:45… 01:44…]
Less than two minutes left.
Rein inhaled slowly. His pupils widened as he reached into the warped mana flow around The Ekhosar—feeling the instability like heat through a cracked lens.
“LIZ,” he murmured—calm, the way people get when they’ve already accepted the blast. “If the data isn’t enough, fine. We can’t reset it the normal way.”
His fingers tightened slightly.
“But we can force one last loop—just long enough to ...steal the time differential—and spend it like stolen cash.”
[LIZ: Ah. Here we go. You’re putting on the Mad Scientist coat again, Rein. [LIZ: ...I’m fairly certain the ‘god’ of this world doesn’t like you.]
“Tell him to get in line,” Rein said flatly. “He can hate me right after Kellen.”
His eyes stayed locked on the trembling status window.
“Begin a Time Loop build. Drain the dungeon. Leave only the core. I don’t need fancy—just a small fold in time.”
He measured it like a tool, not a miracle.
“Give me a hundred seconds. That’s plenty.”
[LIZ: This is extremely risky. Once the new loop begins, you’ll have under two and a half hours in Arath. And when it resets, no one remembers.]
A brief pause—then her tone shifted, colder, tighter.
[LIZ: …But fine. I’ll attempt a memory splice—anchoring the data in your subconscious so you’re the only constant in this loop.]
“Do it,” Rein said. “I’ll rip that key out myself.”
[LIZ: Command confirmed. Initiating Temporal Overwrite.]
The instant LIZ’s message finished, the black grimoire erupted.
The Ekhosar erupted—black light punching outward like a flash of negative space. The shockwave slammed through the Dungeon Core with a thunderous roar. Pressure crushed the air; parts of the wall ...buckled, then simply vanished—as if the dimension had been cut out.
[LIZ: Be careful. For the next two and a half hours, I won’t be able to contact you. I’ll be fully linked to this system, using all processing power to hijack that trash program.]
A flicker—almost like a sigh.
[LIZ: …Don’t die.]
Green light unfurled around Rein like a curtain of water. It twisted into spirals, waves folding into each other. The world blurred—and his consciousness was ripped straight into the center of that whirlpool.
…
…
The cabin returned.
The wooden door opened again.
And Kellen stepped out, waving with the same friendly smile.
Rein stood there for half a second, stunned because the last loop hit him all at once.
A sharp whine filled his ears.
Something warm ran from his nose.
Blood.
He lowered his face quickly, wiping it away before anyone could notice.
LIZ… did you see that?
Silence. No reply.
Rein pressed his lips together and lifted his gaze to the cabin.
“Rein?” Mira’s voice came—light, normal, unaware. “Why are you spacing out? Come on. Kellen’s been waiting.”
And in that moment, Rein understood exactly what he was standing inside.
This is the last loop.
Two hours and thirty minutes in Arath.
After this—nothing.
Rein looked at Kellen as the boy approached—then nodded, and answered in a tone that made the air around them hesitate.
“…Hey, Kellen.”
His eyes didn’t smile.
“Here we are again.”
Kellen frowned for a second—just a faint crease between his brows—then returned the friendly grin.
“Again? Well… sure. We saw each other a few hours ago.” He gestured toward the cabin. “Come in. The Unsolved Mystery Club welcomes you.”
Rein stepped over the threshold.
Inside was exactly the same.
The interior space stretched far larger than it should have been—at least twice the cabin’s real footprint—like a pocket-dimension trapped inside wood.
A large table sat in the center, dinner arranged with deliberate care.
Rein swept the room in a single glance.
Dana sat on the sofa with Jalara. Kurt still stood by the window, staring outside like a statue. Marten was still fussing at the blackboard. Every face, every posture—unchanged.
People—moving like puppets—inside a prison made of minutes.
“Officially—welcome to the Beyond the Enigma Society,” Kellen said softly as he followed him in.
Rein paused, then forced his voice into a careful mask of curiosity.
“Uh… this room…?”
“You’re surprised, right?” Kellen launched into it immediately, energized. “It’s inscribed with a high-tier spatial expansion array—”
He started rambling about runes in the corners—exactly the same explanation he’d given before.
Rein nodded at the right beats.
But he didn’t truly hear a single word.
His mind was hunting.
A flaw. A tell. Something he’d missed.
Because if Kellen destroyed the data the moment the loop began…
Then the key might still exist right now.
Either on Kellen.
Or hidden somewhere in this place, waiting to be touched.
Introductions moved quickly.
Rein smiled at the right beats. Nodded when the room expected it.
Inside, something was already burning.
How much time has passed?
“All right!” Kellen announced, raising his voice. “As president of the Beyond the Enigma Society, I hereby open this special dinner party!”
He turned toward Rein with a bright smile.
“And as our honored guest… Rein, would you like to say a few words to start?”
Every pair of eyes in the room fixed on him.
No one moved. Even the cutlery stopped.
All of it waiting for him to be normal.
Rein gave them none of that.
“Okay.”
Then, with the same flat voice—
“Enjoy.”
Before anyone could clap—or even decide how to react—Rein turned and walked straight to the corner of the room, toward the rune-inscription Kellen had used to expand the space.
Mira and Boris just stared at him.
Like they weren’t sure whether to laugh—or apologize for him.
Kellen’s brow twitched behind the monocle—then smoothed out again.
Rein never looked up.
He knelt in front of the carved runes and set his fingertips gently on the grooves in the wood.
Behind him, everyone watched his back in confusion.
Mira hurried to patch the social damage, forcing a strained smile.
“Ah… sorry. He’s like this sometimes.” She laughed awkwardly. “It’s… kind of a bad habit. Genius types, you know?”
Rein didn’t look back.
Instead, he crooked two fingers at Boris.
When the silver-haired boy approached, still confused, Rein spoke without preamble.
“Your watch.”
Boris blinked. “Huh?”
“Now.”
Even though the request was bizarre, Boris still fished the pocket watch out from under his cloak and handed it over.
Rein stared at the brass face with a hard, focused gaze.
19:34.
Thirty-four minutes gone.
Rein closed his fingers around the watch. And he hadn’t even touched the real problem yet.
The room blurred at the edges. Only the second hand mattered.
He slid the watch away—
and Kellen was suddenly behind him, as if he’d been there the whole time.
“Relax, Rein.” Kellen’s smile stayed warm. His eyes didn’t.
“Why don’t you grab something to eat first? Then you can come back and study it properly.”
He leaned in slightly.
“I’d be happy to explain the Spatial Expansion Runes to you in every last detail. They’re a family treasure, after all… but only after we’ve enjoyed dinner together.”
Kellen’s tone was hospitality.
His timing was control. Each polite word clicked like a lock.
“We have all the time in the world... don’t we?”
These entries expand the lore and mechanics introduced in this chapter.
Completely optional—read only if you enjoy diving deeper into the system.
Name: Temporal Loop (Time Heist Variant)
Category: Temporal Magic / Spatial-Dimensional Theory
Type: Emergency Dimensional Reset
User(s): Rein (via LIZ system)
Tier: Unknown (Not traditionally categorized — classified as system-level override)
Description:
A highly experimental form of dimension override that exploits differences in temporal flow between dimensions. When a Dungeon Core or sub-realm reaches critical mana density, time within the dimension warps—leading to measurable time dilation relative to the outside world (Arath). The loop system Rein interacts with is not a magical spell, but rather a programmatic collapse embedded in The Ekhosar's corrupted structure.
Mechanism:
Rein and LIZ identify a 3-hour : 2-minute time differential, meaning three hours in Arath equals under two minutes within the dungeon. This allows Rein to forcibly compress a temporal loop (a "Time Heist") — stealing time to extend his operating window in Arath before the system collapses.
The corrupted nature of the loop means each restart shortens its duration, making every iteration more dangerous than the last.
Requirements:
– Access to dimensional anchor points
– Real-time mana monitoring (via HUD and LIZ)
– Deep knowledge of The Ekhosar's internal logic and runic structure
– Full control of environmental mana manipulation
Outcome:
Rein initiates one final loop—the “last loop”—with a runtime of 2 hours and 30 minutes. Memory splice allows only him to retain knowledge across the reset.
Definition:
A distortion in the perceived passage of time between two planes of existence—caused by critical concentrations of mana and instability in the dungeon’s dimensional structure.
Measured Ratio:
3 hours in Arath ≈ 2 minutes in dungeon space.
Usage in Chapter 58:
Rein exploits the dilation to gain more time in Arath by sacrificing time in the collapsing dungeon.
Update Note: Previously defined as an ancient black grimoire storing forbidden knowledge. Now revealed to be a looped execution construct, similar to a corrupted software script.
New Information:
– Self-repeating loop that destabilizes over time
– Leaks mana unless stabilized via external siphoning (e.g. Ht’ara connection)
– Described by Rein as a “broken program”
– The loop destroys itself faster with each restart
– May have been created or abandoned by a divine-level entity
Status: Deleted by Kellen during the beginning of the current loop
Function: Originally enabled full reset of the loop cycle
Loss Impact: Rein is forced to manually hijack the system via time dilation instead of formal reset
Context:
The dinner scene in the wooden cabin is revealed to be a temporal memory loop, possibly created by Kellen using The Ekhosar. The cabin acts as a loop anchor—unchanging between cycles unless manually disrupted.
Known Members:
– Kellen (President)
– Dana, Curt, Marten, Jalara
– Mira, Boris (visiting)
– Rein (loop-aware guest)
Spatial Property:
Cabin interior is double its physical footprint due to Spatial Expansion Runes
