While Solmara was missing its lord, the man in question was busy lording over a whole other species in a whole other era.
But the race he was lord of wasn't particularly fond of his leadership. After all, who would want a madman at the helm?
Thankfully, for the next dozen loops, Ashen got busy with sothing else and spared them further tornt, not that they'd ever know.
What he was busy with was, of course, the ti regression spell.
After finding the last key to his dilemma, the rest had been comparatively straightforward. The bubble wasn't so little anymore as he kept mastering it, and now that he had the basic architecture down, he could pour more mana and different intent into the frawork to get the results he wanted.
As long as he stayed within the sa structure, he was able to rewind ti for more than a couple of seconds. He was also able to push it forward by predicting where particles would move next.
The last few attempts had ended with the object being warped and torn into dust as atoms fought and collided with each other. Sotis things even exploded.
Ashen was actually quite satisfied with that. It made for an effective attacking thod, even if the original intention had nothing to do with offense.
But the majority of the next loops went toward perfecting the rewind spell specifically.
After twenty loops, he could rewind a full day. Two hundred loops later, he could restore an object to its state from ten days prior. From there, he seed to find the rhythm of it, and progress accelerated until he reached the point where, with his full mana output, he could rewind up to three years as long as the bubble stayed within a manageable size.
By the ti he reached that result, his ti spell repertoire had grown large enough for him to confidently call himself a Ti Magician.
Among the many spells he invented, a few were his favorites.
Lag Step made enemies move a fraction of a second late. It was simple enough in theory, but anything but in application. For soone of his speed, a fraction of a second was more than enough.
Entropy Acceleration was the spell he had stumbled into when he tried to push ti forward rather than reverse it. Directed at a target, it pushed matter rapidly toward collapse.
But if he had to choose one absolute favorite, it would be Temporal Drag.
This one was an accident. He had tried to freeze every particle in place and observed what happened. He couldn't freeze everything predictably, but he could make everything within a radius move slower, creating a zone centered on himself where everything dragged the closer it got to him. After the adjustnt, he excluded himself from the effect entirely, which gave the spell a whole new aning.
None of these had stayed at the level of mana and intent alone. They had grown past that, particularly the ti rewind, and this growth owed itself to his newly comprehended concept.
It hadn't been new for a while since he had grasped it a couple of hundred loops ago, but the power of the concept seed to deepen with each loop, until it started directly amplifying his ti spells in ways that surprised even him.
He had eventually worked out what it was and how it had co to be.
He realized that it started with his unwillingness to watch Seraphine die.
With each loop, as the three-month mark approached, his dread built until it t the ironclad outco. Knowing what was coming and being unable to stop it was a different kind of suffering from simply being blindsided… worse, in so respects, because it demanded the sa grief over and over with full anticipation.
Loop by loop, the unwillingness to see the outco accumulate until it beca a crushing force, and with hundreds of loops behind him and the environnt of an era stranded in a ti loop, sothing crystallized.
The Lethargy of Ti.
His fervent desire to delay the outco, even by a fraction, even knowing it was futile, had apparently manifested across enough years to birth a concept. Sloth seed to have played a role in its shape, given that its core effect was a fractional slowing of ti.
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Its real power erged when fused with his ti spells. The results were, by any reasonable standard, overpowered.
And now, after 2,200 loops and 550 years, Ashen was finally ready to execute the plan he had conceived when he first began the ti spell work.
***
"Go on, baby… step onto the circle." Ashen hurried her along with an eager expression.
Seraphine, being half-dragged, followed without particular enthusiasm. "Yes, yes… I'm going."
After her breakdown a thousand loops ago, she had sunk into a kind of sustained lethargy. Even now, with the possibility of her life genuinely being saved before her, she couldn't summon excitent. She knew she should, especially with how many years Ashen had spent on this… But she just could not.
To her imnse relief, Ashen didn't seem to mind. He had developed a boundless tolerance for her antics in the sa way she had developed a boundless tolerance for his madness.
They stood as exceptions to each other's craziness, accepted it, and loved each other even more.
"Alright, geezers! get ready~"
The sages made their best efforts not to react to being called geezers. Though they didn't exactly know what that ant, they knew from the tone alone that it was nothing flattering.
They refocused on the magic circle beneath the consort. Their job was to trigger it on his signal to catch the soul before it could dissipate and fuse it back with the restored body.
They didn't know why a healthy human woman would suddenly drop dead, or why the Primordial spoke of it with such certainty, and they didn't need to. They were here to do a job, that is all.
Ashen began his chant. Mana gathered into a magic circle of his own construction, drawn in condensed mana lines, floating alongside his open palm. He had developed it when the ti rewind started destabilizing past the one-year mark. The architecture was borrowed from how the magicians of this era worked, but adapted until it was entirely his.
"As the first breath was drawn, so shall it be drawn again—……Return to what I once knew."
Ti Rewind—!
When the last syllable fell, the circle blazed and a flood of mana rushed out to engulf her body.
He had tid this for imdiately after the last loop, buying an extra three months of baseline. The circle had been drawn entirely by him; the sages were here only to contribute mana.
'...So this HAS to work.'
At first, nothing happened.
Then her breath caught.
Her chest stilled, its rise and fall faltered once, twice, before stopping. The warmth in her skin dulled rapidly, and the color followed as her body slackened lifelessly.
It never hit the floor for he was always there.
But even with her body effectively dead, the spell remained.
Her lips darkened. Her skin turned waxy and brittle. Her fingers curled slightly, joints stiffening unnaturally as a deepening pallor spread beneath the surface.
Ti did not stop. It kept reversing.
The stillness of death sank further, pushing her body past freshness into sothing older. Skin began to decay, and her fra turned hollow, but then sothing made Ashen's eyes widen.
Her chest emptied.
Where her heart should have been, there was only a cavity. Not a rotted organ. Nothing at all. As if it had been removed from the corpse entirely.
Then…
A twitch. Deep inside, sothing ford.
The hollow is filled with a presence returning. Sothing new filled into place, or perhaps, not new, but the original, since ti was flowing backwards.
It was her missing heart.
Her body followed.
The looseness tightened. The pallor receded. Decay withdrew like a tide reversing. Color returned last as the stiffness dissolved back into softness.
When Ashen felt the cold flesh in his hands warming by degrees, he knew her mont of death was rapidly approaching from the other direction.
He let the spell run a few seconds more. When he felt like the body in his arms was only minutes from its death point, he said, flatly: "Now."
The magic circle beneath them roared to life. The sages drove their mana into it.
Her soul was yanked back and fused with the corpse his ti spell had made as fresh as possible.
Every condition aligned. There was no reason for the resurrection circle to fail this ti.
A sudden breath.
Her chest rose, and life surged through her as though it had never left.
And finally… finally… she stood alive before him, as though the countless deaths had been nothing more than a bad dream.
"You're alive," he murmured, voice hazy. '...As if none of it had ever happened.'
Even the madness receded from his eyes for a mont.
"Ashen… am I alive?" Seraphine looked more bewildered than joyful. After countless deaths, she didn't dare believe what was in front of her.
"Ye—"
Caught—!
Blood spilled from her lips onto his face.
The concept of the Lethargy of Ti scread in his mind, as if trying to rip itself from his body in revolt at what was happening to her heart.
'Her heart—!'
He pushed his senses into her until they found it: a minuscule sphere at the center of her heart. Without his ti concept, he doubted he would have detected it at all. And now that he was aware of it, pulling from his mories across all the loops, he recognized it: this sphere had never left her body. Not once, no matter how far back the rewind went.
He probed it with mana. It passed through as if the sphere didn't exist.
He tried everything he could think of. Nothing worked. He only pulled himself back from the edge when he felt a soft hand touch his cheek.
"...It's okay."
"No… no… nonononono… please… no…"
"See you soon." She smiled faintly.
Bang—!
The mont he had been closest to saving her beca instead the most grueso death he had witnessed.
"..."
"..."
.
.
.
"Hm."
He lifted his head.
"Well. Seems like this one's a bust too." He let out a small laugh. "Too bad~"
Drip… drip…
"Hehe."
"...My lord?"
He looked at the sages. "Oh, you're still here?" He gave them a sunny smile. "Well. It doesn't matter."
"...what?"
"See you soon~"
Flash—
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