A half-real, half-ethereal virtual time domain burst into existence—like a flowing river made of illusion and eternity.

  It enveloped Seraphine, whose body instantly shifted into a fictive time-realm form. Wrapped in its currents, she rapidly ascended.

  She surged toward the transcendent, true River of Time—the eternal stream where 【past, present, and future exist simultaneously】.

  The ascent was impossibly swift. Before such overwhelming force, any power that tried to press down from ‘above’ was violently repelled, crushed, and scattered like dust before a tidal wave.

  From the viewpoint of the blazing giant tiger, which had already activated its skill and severed itself from its own time coordinates—what it saw was horrifying.

  Its Stagnation field, descending from the macro flow of real-world time to blanket the small lifeform below, was met with shocking resistance. From within Seraphine erupted a terrifying power, fierce and unyielding.

  And this power, pressed down beneath the jade-bowl-like dome of the Stagnation field, only grew more unstable—like a hydrogen bomb already deep in fusion, seconds from detonating. The more it was suppressed, the wilder its surge became.

  Relentless. Unending. Until it violently forced the field apart—shattering it, blasting it into fragments.

  ROAR!!!

  The giant tiger’s eyes bulged wide. It bellowed in disbelief, its roar carrying the unspoken words:

  “Impossible! What is this power?! How can my skill fail to contain it?!”

  It had no way of knowing—yes, its Stagnation field was indeed terrifying.

  It could descend from outside spacetime itself, slowing a chosen target within its domain by nearly a billion-fold. And the effect wasn’t fleeting—the slowdown could last for years.

  But against Instant Time Compression, though it lasted only a mere five seconds… its range of effect encompassed the entire universe.

  Once Instant Time Compression was unleashed, it pierced straight through the fissures of the River of Time.

  By means of some mechanism and principle that even Seraphine herself—despite her mastery—could not fully unravel, it summoned forth and elevated a virtual time domain from within the river. This domain engraved itself upon the flow by taking as its template the countless macroscopic and microscopic aspects, objects, phenomena, developments, and processes of the entire universe at that single instant—forming a static mirror of reality.

  Unless Seraphine, who had wielded this skill tens of thousands of times and honed near-perfect control, personally intervened—shattering, disrupting, redirecting, or reversing the construct—

  The virtual domain would rise inevitably, like a self-proving natural law, lifting and hovering in the “sky” of the true River of Time.

  Though shallow, hollow, almost ethereal in “quality,” this very thinness in comparison to the true universe meant its physical essence was still unfathomably vast. Its mass and weight of existence lay far beyond conventional comprehension—an enormity no Stagnation field could ever fully suppress or contain.

  Once the virtual domain crystallized, Seraphine herself shifted—her form transforming into an ethereal time-realm body, a paradox of existence and nonexistence. In that state, she became immune to time stagnation, detached from all phenomena within the static time realm, and yet able to derive causality backward from effect to cause—allowing her to interact with the very fabric of reality itself.

  In the span of a single blink, the virtual current enclosing Seraphine arrogantly crushed and devoured the Stagnation field that had weighed down upon her.

  To the giant tiger’s horrified eyes, she ascended—soaring upward until she stood level with it, side by side above the River of Time.

  From a grander vantage, one small corner of that infinite, boundless, eternal current had erupted into blinding radiance.

  The battle-scarred beast, overwhelmed, could not flee upstream nor downstream. It could only cling desperately to that segment of the river, lurching sideways in clumsy evasions.

  For though it could slip freely among parallel universes, and even impose its will upon specific objects in localized regions of spacetime, it lacked the ultimate authority: the ability to cross true temporal dimensions, to stride into past or future.

  That kind of supremacy—transcending time itself, rewriting causality—was forever beyond the giant tiger’s reach.

  And this was a reality it had never once conceived of, not in countless years.

  The very power it had always considered its sole dominion—the ability to evade spacetime imprisonment, to traverse endless parallel realities at will—was now wielded by this tiny being.

  And more: against its full-force killing strike, the creature emerged utterly unscathed.

  What manner of existence was this?

  The giant tiger did not know.

  In truth, for Seraphine—who wielded the four fundamental forces and could nearly replicate every natural phenomenon and object in the universe—the attack was as meaningless as a passing breeze.

  Be it the torrents of searing energy capable of vaporizing colossal stars, or the sheer kinetic power sufficient to rend and annihilate molecules, atoms, and nuclei in uncountable numbers—

  Be it ultra-massive electric and magnetic fields, crushing gravitational wells, or even cataclysmic bursts of gamma rays—

  So long as it was bound to matter and energy, and fell within the dominion of the four fundamental forces, its effect upon Seraphine was precisely zero.

  Even if the beast’s strike were magnified tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold—or ten thousandfold—it could not scratch her in the slightest.

  Only forces beyond the reach of the four—energies vast enough to surpass their framework, or assaults that simulated the unimaginable violence of the early universe’s birth—might truly wound her.

  Barring that, only through irregular means—black holes, causal inversion, spacetime distortions—could Seraphine be threatened at all. All else was futile.

  Of course, Seraphine knew her vulnerabilities well. That was why she pursued, with relentless focus, the study of such super-standard abilities.

  She would never waste thought on complaining that the system was not omnipotent—that was the language of the weak.

  Instead, she rejoiced that her beginning was so high, already beyond countless lives.

  With such a foundation, the only path was forward: to tread, to surpass, to break through.

  And as for the two months that had slipped away—though Seraphine felt a twinge of regret, she would never sink into annoyance or remorse.

  Such emotions belonged to the weak. They had no place in her mind.

  Her only choice was to exhaust every possible method to reclaim what was lost.

  And that question—how to reclaim?—had already taken shape within her consciousness as a radiant moon, hanging in the sky of her Ocean of Knowledge.

  Under the relentless tide of her infinite learning, the great moon fractured with cracks, preparing to reveal its answer in concrete form.

  Meanwhile, above the River of Time—

  The giant beast’s arrogance—an arrogance it had carried for countless millennia, that creed of 【Only I may strike, none may strike me; I can hit anyone I choose, yet none can hit me back】—was shattered in an instant.

  Reality broke it cruelly. Its pride collapsed, and in panic, the beast’s mind fell into hollow emptiness.

  But the unfolding of events paid no heed to its despair.

  Rumble—rumble—rumble!!!

  The ethereal River of Time, like a heaven-devouring serpent that had already swallowed countless fragments of the Stagnation field, did not continue to rise and expand into a boundless false time domain.

  Instead—under Seraphine’s will—it split apart, collapsing into a chaotic torrent of starlight, a river of light laced with countless stellar flares. This current wrapped around her form and lashed outward, binding her fate to the giant tiger that lingered tens of timelines away.

  “Success!”

  Sensing the sudden transformations coursing through her body and mind, Seraphine glanced at the critical results derived by the joint deduction of Eye of True Revelation + Chaos Calculation:

  【By fusing the two temporal forces of time stagnation and Stagnation into one crucible, and transmuting them into a spacetime-causal bond that shackles an exotic beast, one can coexist with it—thereby acquiring its unique spacetime state. The longer one endures in this condition, the greater the chance of evolving spacetime-type skills, or of awakening entirely new ones.】

  Raising her gaze once more, Seraphine swept her surroundings—

  The River of Time… no.

  Her higher-dimensional senses unfolded. A boundless panorama of parallel universes revealed itself before her.

  Through Instant Time Compression, she glimpsed the River of Time.

  Now, two visions opened at once—two vantage points of the Grand Universe, seen from different angles. And after briefly seizing the peculiar spacetime state of the tiger-shaped beast—

  Her eyes beheld the Grand Universe.

  That cosmos of countless trillions of parallel realities, each carrying its own flow of past, present, and future—

  It transformed, in her perception, into an endless glacier. A glacier formed of layer upon layer of strange crystalline ice walls, each wall thick as a world yet thin as an atom.

  Each sheet of this cicada-wing-thin ice was, in her sight, a timeline, a probability surface, a parallel universe made real, each observing and recording endless phenomena.

  And her position—Seraphine existed in the gaps between these impossibly fine sheets of ice.

  Meanwhile, the Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation, sensing the shifting external state, whirred furiously within her heart. In an instant, they produced their verdict:

  【Though this perspective lies closer to truth than the River of Time “seen” through consumption of the Regret Potion, it is still not the true River of Time, but merely a “River of Time” constructed in personal perception.】

  “So… the universe reflected in that big cat’s ‘eyes’ is not the same as the one I see.”

  Enfolded within this magnificent, resplendent, miraculously beautiful yet infinitely perilous and alien cosmic spectacle, Seraphine felt no danger at all.

  Instead, she was filled with a sense of boundless satisfaction.

  And then, the ever-turning Eye of True Revelation + Chaos Calculation surfaced new knowledge:

  【Shortcut discovered to increase probability of spacetime-type skill evolution:

  Under the condition that the tiger-shaped exotic beast is not slain, continuously stimulate its body and soul through relentless strikes.

  Perceive the subtle surges of spacetime energy coursing through its form and spirit.

  Force the beast into high-frequency traversals across parallel universes, and collect spacetime variation data from countless timelines.】

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  At that very instant, the question-moon suspended in the sky of Seraphine’s Ocean of Knowledge cracked open with a thunderous roar, unveiling an 【Answer】 at once clear and elusive:

  【Experience spacetime shifts. Reverse past and future.】

  …

  Desolate planet.

  Within a massive valley scarred by fissures and craters, a figure hovered in mid-air.

  He wore the garb of a warrior. His skin was corpse-pale. A long, twisted horn, shaped like a rabbit’s ear, jutted from his skull. From beneath the veil of long gray hair, his empty white eyes glimmered coldly.

  Several hundred meters away, two humans stood ready, their auras burning bright in the atmosphere, locked upon the pale figure in the distance.

  One bore a mane of white hair, his face etched with scattered scars.

  The other had long bangs and an untamed, ragged hairstyle; one eye gleamed green, the other red—her presence icy and defiantly unyielding.

  The white-eyed man gazed down at them from afar and spoke with chilling disdain:

  “Daring to resist Godworm… you will soon become my nourishment.”

  No sooner had the words fallen than a terrifying fluctuation burst outward from him, upending the surrounding earth, tearing through layers of soil and stone.

  As the valley collapsed around them, the two figures vanished from sight.

  An instant later, shrieks split the sky, golden-violet lightning roared through the atmosphere, and the pair struck together at the pale man.

  He merely raised a single hand, effortlessly parrying their combined assault.

  Then, from him erupted another catastrophic shockwave, reducing everything within several hundred meters to drifting dust.

  But the two remained untouched—unharmed, unmoving.

  “Impressive,” the white-eyed man said at last, a mocking smile curling across his lips. “For lower beings, to push me—a god—this far… you should take pride in it.”

  “Give him a lesson, Sinue!”

  The scarred white-haired man snapped his eyes open, golden light blazing forth as his aura surged like a rising sun.

  “Understood, Karuo.”

  Sinue responded.

  Her red eye, veiled beneath her bangs, suddenly flared with searing violet light. Rings of black patterns spiraled outward, fusing with the cold gleam of her green right eye—together casting an aura so sinister and dangerous it sent chills at a glance.

  Rumble—rumble—rumble!!!

  Power erupted. The world shook. Mountains trembled. The earth quaked as if about to collapse.

  Then, in a blinding instant, both sides clashed.

  Karuo and Sinue, their bodies blazing with golden light, stormed into the fray. In the blink of an eye, they traded over a thousand blows with the white-eyed man.

  Fists and feet collided. Figures blurred and vanished, reappearing only as flashes in the air.

  Golden sparks burst like stars, tangled with violet-blue arcs of lightning—hundreds, thousands of them, igniting all at once.

  The shockwaves were catastrophic. Valleys split apart. Craters erupted. Entire mountain ridges crumbled to dust, annihilated in the crossfire.

  The white-eyed man’s every strike cut toward Karuo’s vitals, each casual swing unleashing gales fierce enough to reduce entire stretches of land to ash.

  Time bled away in chaos as their battle escalated, each unleashing techniques that shattered the world:

  —Tens of thousands of sword beams, brimming with thunder and storm, rained down like a flood of blades, piercing sky and mountains alike.

  —The ground split open for miles. Jagged fragments the size of hills wrenched upward, condensing into floating asteroids that crashed back to earth.

  —Colossal gray-white dragon heads tore through the void, ravaging all in their path.

  —An earth-splitting detonation roared, carving a massive crater and birthing vast black mushroom clouds that devoured the sky.

  —Golden-red light surged like wildfire, and a titanic demonic fox, blazing and mountainous, erupted with a sky-shaking roar.

  But the earth itself rebelled. Countless rocks gathered into a molten giant of stone and lava. It seized the fox’s throat in a crushing grip, lifted it high, and slammed it down with world-breaking force.

  Boom!!!

  The ground fractured in endless layers. Pillars of stone collapsed. Mountains sank into ruin.

  The pale figure’s voice rang coldly through the carnage:

  “Mere lower creatures… perish before me.”

  Before the words had even faded, both the lava giant and the colossal demonic fox froze in place.

  A tremor of dread ran through them, a fear that clawed straight down into the marrow of their souls.

  At that same instant, the space above the desolate planet twisted violently. First came a severely wounded, palm-sized, six-legged “kitten,” tumbling out of the void—then an ethereal, radiant human silhouette followed in its wake.

  The moment the kitten appeared, it let out a harrowing shriek and plummeted downward, tearing across tens of thousands of miles in an instant before slamming straight into the lava giant.

  Boom!!!

  It was as if the world itself shattered. The kitten pierced the giant’s body in a single stroke, detonating it into countless fragments.

  The white-eyed man hidden within was shredded into fundamental particles by the overwhelming force—snuffed out in an instant.

  The power the kitten carried was so vast that even after obliterating the giant, the aftermath swept across thousands of miles, collapsing nearly half the planet’s surface into a ruined sinkhole.

  Thunder raged, firestorms engulfed the land, and mountain ranges stretching hundreds of thousands of kilometers were ground into dust.

  Yet, amidst this annihilation, Karuo and Sinue remained standing. Though their own power and equipment were torn apart and stripped away, their lives endured.

  For in that moment, a ray of divine light descended—enveloping the two, shielding them from certain death.

  Above, the luminous silhouette hovered in silence. She shook her head lightly, a soft laugh slipping from her lips.

  “The endless parallel universes truly are a mystery. Perhaps… somewhere in spacetime, even my homeland still exists.”

  Below, Karuo and Sinue scarcely registered the apocalyptic ruin surrounding them.

  Their every thought, their very souls, were consumed by the radiant silhouette whose presence filled the heavens with a boundless, divine majesty.

  Even Sinue, proud and defiant, and Karuo, ever carefree—both could only tremble in awe.

  Every fiber of their beings quaked. Even their souls bowed in bewilderment and reverence.

  “Magic…”

  Her Divine Will swept over them, seizing and plundering every memory tied to magic from their minds.

  “Though it won’t amount to much, since I’m already here… I may as well take it.”

  Then she turned her gaze toward the kitten, now streaking through space after ripping apart the planet. A smile curved her lips.

  “What’s the rush?”

  With a mere shift of her form, Seraphine crossed tens of thousands of kilometers in an instant. She seized the six-legged kitten by the neck and slammed it mercilessly into the void.

  Meow!!!

  Boom!!!

  A vast tide of boundless power erupted, rippling across tens of thousands of kilometers in every direction.

  As the kitten shrieked in agony beneath her grip, Seraphine—and the creature with her—vanished entirely from this universe.

  Only with her departure did Karuo and Sinue finally escape the suffocating weight of her presence.

  Both collapsed at once, sprawling on the ground without a shred of composure, chests heaving, eyes wide in disbelief.

  The ever-carefree Karuo muttered, dazed: “Simply… more terrifying than the gods of legend.”

  Sinue said nothing.

  He had long believed himself to stand among the world’s strongest, yet never had he imagined such beings existed—creatures so far beyond the mortal peak they might as well be divine.

  A bitter wave of discouragement surged through Sinue’s heart.

  The endless void of space stretched, silent and dim.

  On the barren Moon, an American flag stirred—fluttering where no wind should exist.

  A moment later, it was shredded to tatters by sudden ripples of spatial distortion.

  Hum—

  Seraphine emerged, dragging with her the luminous, flickering form of the struggling cat.

  She lifted her gaze to the farthest reaches of the heavens—where another Earth hung suspended.

  Even without summoning a trace of Divine Will, she could sense it clearly: this parallel Earth’s life aura was hundreds of times weaker than Emberlight’s Earth.

  The ground below was saturated with radioactive energy, a poisoned world.

  Her eyes shifted back to the trembling cat, hovering weakly beside her under the Moon’s frail gravity, its cries sharp and pitiful.

  Seraphine’s lips curved into a smile.

  “Honestly… you’re surprisingly resilient.”

  This kitten, though it outwardly seemed small enough to fit in a single outstretched hand, was in truth the tiger-shaped colossus transformed.

  Its mass and volume had not diminished in essence. Its current, pitiful size was entirely the result of Seraphine compressing its spatial form by a trillionfold—reducing a ten-thousand-meter feral titan into this trembling, mewling scrap. It was the exact same method she had once used to bind the Primordial Demon.

  If one were to peer at the tiny cat through a super-magnification optical scope, they would see thousands of hair-thin streaks of flowing light encircling its body without pause.

  Under magnification, these streams revealed themselves—colliding, striking, trampling the giant tiger at near-light speed, forcing its body to shudder and cry out endlessly.

  Every one of those lights was one of Seraphine’s spontaneously created clones. Each stood over a hundred meters tall in their true form, and a single one, unleashed in full assault, could obliterate ten thousand miles of stars in an instant.

  The only reason such a massacre didn’t shake the heavens was because Seraphine had contained all of that apocalyptic energy within a single centimeter of space around the kitten—locking the devastation tight, never allowing it to leak beyond.

  Her reason was simple: to force the tiger’s Physical Strength and soul into continually manifesting its strange spacetime powers, which she could then dissect and study.

  Even after analyzing it at the most microscopic scale—from flesh to soul—she still could not unravel the fundamental mechanisms behind its mysterious spacetime abilities. It was unlike anything she had ever seen.

  Not even its memories escaped her. She flipped through them as though turning the pages of a book.

  From within that vast ocean of memory, she unearthed the name of its kind: Astralglow Tiger.

  It had no parents—or none that it remembered.

  This six-legged beast was born in a twisted region buried deep within a wormhole. It knew only that the wormhole was its lair, and anything that entered—interstellar fleets, spacecraft, comets, wandering meteorites—would either become its food or its toys.

  Most became toys.

  One such victim was the ill-fated Milky Way Tyrant, which had endured longer than any other as its cherished plaything.

  The Astralglow Tiger had tormented, gnawed, and clawed at the Tyrant for tens of thousands of years, never once growing bored.

  And the reason for its cruelty was almost laughable.

  It was still in its juvenile stage.

  Yes—this Astralglow Tiger, capable of torturing the Milky Way Tyrant until the great beast was reduced to little more than prey, was still but a child.

  Young by its own reckoning, scarcely 950,000 years old by Earth’s measure.

  By its perception, true maturity would not come until another 1.3 million years had passed.

  In every sense, this creature remained a child.

  Seraphine’s voice was soft, yet it carried the weight of inevitability:

  “Which is why I won’t let you go, child.”

  The corners of Seraphine’s mouth curled into an exaggerated grin. With a cruel smile she said,

  “For so long—aside from the constraints of light-speed—you are the first living creature to make me taste bitter loss.”

  She lifted her hand and closed her fingers around the palm-sized cat, squeezing ever so slightly.

  Meow!!!

  The Astralglow Tiger’s soul-rending cry tore through the void, unleashing a torrent of energy that surged like a cosmic tsunami in every direction.

  Impact craters melted and collapsed, and vast seas of lunar soil were shattered into drifting ash.

  From space, the view was apocalyptic. The Moon’s entire surface boiled and heaved, overturned by landmasses thousands of meters deep as the energy tide roared outward.

  Though Seraphine had locked 99% of the power inside the tiger’s body, the remnants alone were enough to tear the Moon apart—fracturing it, hollowing it, and shearing away a fifth of its mass until it looked like some mold-ridden cheese sphere gnawed by a celestial beast.

  Amidst endless fragments of stone and torrents of fire, the Astralglow Tiger was crushed into a fiery-red bullet, no larger than a fingernail.

  Seraphine had nearly pressed it into the state of molten quark-gluon plasma.

  “Relax. I won’t kill you… not yet.”

  Standing within the crater, its heat rising like the breath of hell, Seraphine studied the bullet. With the faintest thought—

  Swish!

  The Astralglow Tiger reformed, collapsing back into its original shape, though left unconscious.

  “Your body structure mirrors that Milky Way Tyrant’s, but your soul is different. Until I unravel it fully, death will not claim you.”

  Her eyes split focus, piercing directly into the creature’s soul.

  And there, where the root source should have been, no root was found.

  Instead, only a black-golden pattern glimmered—something between feather and leaf, its form unable to manifest fully within three-dimensional reality. From it, spacetime power poured endlessly, weaving itself into the depths of the soul.

  Once, Seraphine had attempted to bind this pattern with her Mind Suppression Seal, but had failed.

  The light-feather was immutable, like some primordial Dao from myth, indestructible and untouched by her Seal.

  “So… this is what allows you to traverse parallel realities. To halt segments of spacetime. Your very existence… is anchored to this feather of light.”

  Her gaze flickered as her senses strained to their utmost, probing every nuance of the divine pattern. Yet no detail revealed itself. She could only faintly perceive an aura—one that utterly transcended time and space.

  She extended a wisp of Divine Will, pressing it gently into the feather-shaped light.

  Whoosh—

  Her will slipped through without resistance, unable to touch it, as though both were phantoms.

  Even so, in the presence of that feather, her understanding of spacetime grew sharper, surging visibly.

  Indeed, through this endless struggle across spacetime—absorbing the temporal energy and fractured information the Astralglow Tiger shed whenever it invoked its powers—her Instant Time Compression had multiplied in duration several times over.

  And it continued to expand without end.

  More than that, the flood of energy and information inspired something new.

  Seraphine’s eyes gleamed as a fresh skill unfurled within her mind.

  Spacetime Waypoint.

  The so-called Spacetime Waypoint granted the ability to mark and preserve the exact coordinates of one’s current timeline—ensuring one would never be lost in the infinite streams of the Grand Universe, unable to return.

  At the same time, Seraphine could sense it: within her soul, and even within certain hidden layers of her body, new powers were stirring. A third—perhaps even a fourth—spacetime-type ability was germinating, preparing to break through into reality at any moment.

  Moments ago, when she had crushed the Astralglow Tiger to the brink of death and then instantly restored it, Seraphine finally seized the minute fluctuations hidden deep within the feather of light lodged in the beast’s soul.

  She traced the chain of subtle reactions it caused—changes rippling across matter, energy, information, and force, bridging the tiger’s body and its spirit.

  From that immense flood of data, her Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation spun ceaselessly for a few seconds.

  And then Seraphine herself shifted.

  Her body and soul twisted, adapting once more—evolving along the same path that had birthed Spacetime Waypoint, yet now blooming into something far more profound.

  “Time…”

  Her voice trembled with wonder. Divine light blazed from her eyes.

  Extending one slender finger, she pointed toward the molten crater below—thousands of miles wide, rivers of lava glowing red beneath the broken lunar crust.

  “Reverse!!”

  Hum—

  At once, an invisible force erupted from her fingertip, vast as a cosmic tide. It swept across the entire Moon, silent yet overwhelming.

  Every fragment of rock, every grain of lunar dust, every crater and river of molten soil—

  even the very core of the Moon itself—was swallowed whole by this formless, immeasurable power.

  And then…

  It reversed.

  All the scattered fragments—colossal mountains of stone, shattered boulders, even fundamental particles cast adrift into deep space or lingering within the massive crater beneath Seraphine—suddenly began to reverse.

  Like a video spool wound backward, they flowed in streams of impossible motion, racing back into the crater.

  Farther still, across the torn and churned lunar surface, the land overturned by the raging tide of energy likewise healed and restored.

  And in the span of a single second, the Moon—nearly half-obliterated by Seraphine moments earlier—was whole again.

  “As long as it lies within a radius of ten thousand kilometers, every change in matter, energy, information, and mechanics can be flawlessly restored to any chosen instant within a ten-second span.”

  Seraphine closed her eyes slightly, savoring the texture of the new power flowing through her, then opened them with a smile of satisfaction.

  “Since this skill was born because of you, little cat… let it be named—Astralglow Reversal.”

  Just then—

  A beam of light descended, binding her form with a gravitational pull as precise as it was inescapable.

  “Hm?”

  Her brows arched faintly. She lifted her gaze toward the source of the beam, far in the distance—tens of thousands of miles away.