Liberium International High School — 8:03 AM
Most Mondays started with groans, yawns, and at least one student attempting to teleport back to Sunday via wishful thinking.
But today, 2-A was buzzing.
Not because they wanted to learn. No, no.
Because the teacher's name on the new schedule had sent shockwaves through the class group chat.
"Aurea Arsensia."
No subject. Just a name. Like a final boss.
And right on cue, the classroom door burst open.
She walked in with heels clicking, coat flaring like a gust of war, and a crimson aura so calm yet commanding.
It made even the lights above flicker as if adjusting to her frequency.
"Good morning, chemical mistakes in human form," she said.
Casually dropping her designer bag on the desk.
"I'm your new chemistry teacher, and if you're here to survive, please try not to inhale anything I didn't explicitly tell you to."
Riven blinked. "She's kidding, right?"
Asvara, arms crossed, expression unreadable. "I wouldn't count on it."
Kenji leaned over from the back. "You think she's armed?"
"She's wearing a lab coat," Riven replied.
"Exactly."
Lyra, meanwhile, looked... intrigued. "Is she glowing? Or is that just her being confident?"
Aurea flicked her finger, and a projection ignited midair.
A molecular model made of actual glowing fire and swirling mist.
"This," she said, "is a depiction of unstable chemical attraction. It's what happens when two volatile compounds fall in love. Think... Romeo and Juliet, if they were elements and didn't have any emotional intelligence."
The class went dead silent.
They think this teacher got a cool magic trick.
Then Riven slowly raised his hand. "Miss, is this going to be on the test?"
"No," she said, eyes locked onto him. "This is going to be your life if you keep interrupting my poetic metaphors."
The lesson continued, but whether anyone actually learned anything was questionable.
Aurea wasn't just teaching chemistry, she was performing it.
She summoned a small thundercloud over Kenji's desk when he started daydreaming.
Turned Lyra's beaker into a mini-fountain of purple foam (which she promptly called "mood juice").
And nearly caused the fire alarm to go off when a student confused magnesium with chalk.
"Oh," Aurea muttered, calmly dousing the small flame with a snap of her fingers and a swirl of water vapor, "I forgot normal humans don't have built-in elemental stabilizers."
Asvara raised an eyebrow. "You forgot?"
"Slip of vision that feels like century old," she replied.
By the time the bell rang, every student in Class 2-A bolted out like survivors of a chemical warzone except for our main quartet.
Asvara remained still, deep in thought.
Lyra sat on the edge of her chair, trying not to giggle.
Kenji was brushing foam off his wooden katana.
And Riven, he was still trying to understand how one woman could be both terrifying and charismatic... while also making hydrogen bonds sound like dating advice.
Rooftop — 12:04 PM
Rooftop lunches had become their unofficial club meetings.
And after a lesson like that, they needed the sky.
Asvara sat on the ledge, his uniform slightly disheveled, eyes scanning the clouds as if looking for constellations only he remembered.
Lyra approached quietly, two bento boxes in hand.
"Still not eating?" she asked, offering one to him.
"I like observing food. It reminds me that humans invented beautiful things just to procrastinate death," he said, smirking.
"That's... dark," she chuckled.
"I've lived long enough to see that cooking is a better peace treaty than any political summit."
They sat in silence for a moment, the quiet of the rooftop wrapping around them like a fragile cocoon.
A rare moment between them where the weight of thousands of years paused just for a second.
Lyra leaned in a little closer. "You always speak like you've lived a thousand lives."
"I have," he said, softly. "And in one of them, I think... I loved someone who looked exactly like you."
Her breath hitched. "And in this life?"
He turned to her, his eyes like stardust compressed into human shape.
"I don't know yet. But you're rewriting the script faster than I can read it."
Just then—
SLAM.
The rooftop door burst open.
Kenji charged in, brandishing his wooden katana with the same energy as someone crashing a proposal. "Oi, oi, oi! What's this?! A date without me?!"
Lyra buried her face in her palm. "You're not even subtle anymore."
Kenji winked. "Subtlety is for people who don't own handcrafted spiritual timber."
Asvara sighed. "I should've known peace was a temporary illusion."
Kenji sat cross-legged between them and opened his own bento. "Let's call this a tactical third-wheel deployment. Necessary for balance."
Lyra rolled her eyes. "More like emotional disruption."
Suddenly—
Footsteps.
Riven stepped onto the rooftop, expression unreadable.
"Guys," he said slowly. "Something's... off."
Asvara immediately stood. "Define 'off.'"
Riven opened his shirt collar slightly revealing the glass hourglass embedded in his chest.
A crack.
A glowing, jagged line ran across the hourglass.
The sand inside pulsed in erratic swirls, glowing unnaturally bright.
"Oh, that's not good," Riven muttered.
Then... He collapsed.
Asvara was the first to move, catching Riven mid-fall.
He lowered him gently to the ground, scanning his vitals with his eyes like a surgeon with photographic memory.
"Pulse is stable. Breathing... shallow. But something is wrong with his time anchor."
Lyra knelt beside him, worry flooding her face. "His what?"
Kenji stood frozen, his katana trembling slightly. "He's... dying?"
"No," Asvara said sharply. "But his existence is being rewritten. The hourglass isn't just a lifespan extender—it's a stabilizer. If it cracks…"
AIRA's voice suddenly cut through the air from Asvara's phone:
"Temporal anomaly detected. Causal thread divergence at 3.7 seconds per heartbeat. Recommendation: stabilize source immediately or risk temporal inversion."
Lyra looked pale. "Temporal inversion?"
"Time could start flowing backward for him. Or split. Or... loop."
Kenji blinked. "Wait, like... Edge of Tomorrow or Groundhog Day?"
Asvara glared. "Worse. Groundhog Eternity."
He closed his eyes for a second, accessing his Subspace Archive.
A flurry of golden script danced behind his eyelids.
Then he stood.
"I need components. Stabilization glyphs. Etherium thread. And we need to get him somewhere safe. The dorm."
Kenji lifted Riven onto his back. "Say no more. Timber squad has got this."
Lyra was already typing something onto her phone.
"I'll tell the nurse he's just... food poisoned."
Asvara looked at her, impressed. "That's... disturbingly fast."
She winked. "I grew up covering my cousin's track records. Long story."
Somewhere in Yamato Province, 700 AD
They say some people are born cursed.
But Riven Takarashi?
He was born hungry.
Not for food. Not for love.
But for secrets, for wonders buried beneath the earth, for treasures that time forgot.
He was the kind of child who would sneak into shrines not to pray, but to search beneath the floorboards for hidden vaults.
"One day, these gods will pay rent," he used to whisper as he peeked under statues.
The village elders called him hōmonsha no kodomo — the child of the seeker.
His parents were long gone, vanished in a merchant accident at sea when he was five.
From then on, the world raised him and the world, to be fair, did a terrible job.
By the time he was twelve, Riven had already sold three counterfeit relics to a noble in Kyoto, bartered with forest spirits for passage through cursed woods.
And discovered that he could mimic some forms of low-level magic just by watching traveling monks long enough.
But there was always a whisper in his ear.
"If you die, who will inherit it all?"
He had no brothers. No sisters.
No one to pass on the jade ring from the Dunes of Persia, the cracked obsidian mask from Mongolia, or the cursed coin from a forgotten Roman outpost in China.
What would become of his legacy?
That thought haunted him more than the skeletons he found in tombs.
And so, like every obsessed soul in every myth ever whispered, he did what no child should do.
He started looking for a way to never die.
The Myth of the Time Reaper
The first time he heard of it, he was fifteen.
A blind merchant from a northern shrine whispered it as payment after Riven gave him back a dropped gold coin.
"A timekeeper buried in the earth. A god's failed attempt to cheat death... shattered and imprisoned inside an hourglass. It can take what's left of others and feed it to you."
Most would've laughed it off.
Riven didn't.
He followed that whisper from one scroll to another.
Across rivers, over snow-covered mountains, until he found himself in an abandoned temple, half-swallowed by a cave on the edge of Iya Valley.
There were no guards.
No monsters.
Just an eerie stillness, like time had stopped to breathe.
Inside, buried beneath roots and stone, lay a box of obsidian.
It didn't open with a key.
It opened when Riven bled on it.
The box unfolded like a blooming flower, revealing a glass hourglass no taller than a dagger, floating above a bed of golden dust that glowed as if it had its own heartbeat.
A whisper echoed in his skull, ancient and unintelligible, except for three clear words:
"Time... is yours."
The First Sacrifice
Riven didn't realize how it worked until he stumbled upon a battlefield days later.
Dozens of bodies, twisted and fresh.
One of them, a soldier barely older than him, was gasping, bleeding out but still breathing.
And as Riven stood over him, the hourglass pulsed from inside his satchel.
The dying boy looked at him with eyes full of fear, confusion... and relief.
Maybe he thought Riven was a priest.
Or a spirit.
Riven whispered a quiet apology and held the hourglass close.
The boy exhaled his last breath.
And time flowed.
Golden particles rushed from the boy's body into the hourglass like a wind no one else could feel.
Riven felt a warmth in his chest.
A sudden, terrifying calm.
His breath deepened. His skin tingled.
The boy's life had become his.
And in that moment, Riven realized two truths:
He would never age again, as long as time remained in the glass.
If he took a life, the hourglass would not accept it.
Only unnatural death — accident, war, tragedy — would feed it.
Murder was not immortality.
Only entropy was.
By the time Sinbad's legends began circulating in taverns and ports, Riven already had stories twice as long.
He disguised himself as a wandering scholar in Persia.
Stole relics from tombs in Babylon.
Got cursed by a sentient mirror in Constantinople (he never spoke of that one again).
And yet, no matter how many lifetimes passed... he remained a seventeen-year-old boy with too much knowledge and not enough friends.
He tried love.
Once.
A girl in Nepal who loved stories as much as he did.
But when she began to grow old and he didn't...
He realized time doesn't just give but it takes.
Since then, Riven kept moving.
A vault here. A temple there.
Magic circles, secret libraries, and whispers of anomalies that danced too close to reality.
Eventually, he met others like him, anomalies, immortals, beings cursed or blessed by gods or madness.
And then he met Asvara.
It was during the Sengoku period in Japan.
Riven was after a rumor about a sword so sharp it could cut fate itself.
He found it.
But more importantly, he found the one who wielded it.
A seventeen-year-old general.
Calm. Sharp-eyed. Wearing battle like a second skin.
Asvara Regalia.
They didn't fight. They talked.
And for the first time, Riven met someone who didn't flinch when he spoke in riddles.
Someone who also had lived too long.
Someone who didn't want to rule the world... just understand it.
And perhaps, rewrite it.
Back to the Present — 2025, Liberium Dormitory
Riven stirred in his sleep.
The cracked hourglass in his chest was glowing faintly, sand spiraling inside like a storm stuck on repeat.
In his dream, he was standing in that temple again.
But this time, there were two hourglasses.
One golden.
And one is purple, pulsing with something far darker.
"Someone's copying me," he muttered in his sleep.
Then, "They're not stealing time... they're replacing it."
His eyes shot open.