The transition was not instantaneous, but fluid and terrifying. Kai plunged into the black water of the Gate of Time, and the cold sensation immediately intensified into an all-consuming, high-frequency vibration. He wasn't drowning; he was being disassembled by causality.
Around him, the black water transformed into a river of raw, glowing energy—the Temporal Flow. It pulsed with shifting colors, representing moments in time: bright gold for the present, deep sapphire for the past, and a flickering emerald for the immediate future.
Roric, a solid mass of Iron Dominion pragmatism, entered the Flow just behind Kai. He immediately began thrashing, his heavy clothing and boots acting as anchors in the non-physical medium.
Roric: "What in the name of the Industrial Flow is this, Analyst?! I'm being pulled apart! My limbs are phasing!"
Kai, however, felt a strange, cold calm descend upon him. His mind, aligned by the Sacred Flow and his senses honed by the Vital Flow, immediately began to parse the chaos. He gripped his transmuted shard—now a perfect, dark emerald—and channeled his focus.
Kai: "Don't fight it, Roric! The Temporal Flow isn't water; it's a current of cause and effect! If you resist, your present state breaks down! Align your will with the current!"
He turned his focus inward, finding the flow of the current within his mind. The Temporal Flow worked not by speed, but by coherence. To travel forward efficiently, one had to move perfectly parallel to the main timeline. Any deviation meant instant entanglement with past or future realities.
He forced the probability of perfect temporal synchronization to surge toward the absolute. His new alignment power was essential here; he wasn't dictating the outcome, merely tuning his reality to the one he needed.
P(textSynchronization)= 99.99%
The chaos around him smoothed out. The flickering colors organized themselves into a navigable channel—a bright, stable golden current that led toward the destination: the Sunken Spire.
Kai reached back and grabbed Roric's heavy, armored wrist.
Kai: "Focus on me, Roric! I'm the anchor! Think only of the now!"
Roric, who had been on the verge of fading into a previous iteration of himself, snapped back to rigid focus. His eyes widened as he saw the horrors swimming in the dark sapphire eddies: ghost images of battles that were never fought, and fragments of people who had tried to enter the Flow and been trapped between moments.
Roric: "By the Forge, those are... discarded futures! They tried to rewrite too much!"
Kai: "The Chronomancers of the Spire believe the present is only one of infinite flawed outcomes. They filter the Temporal Flow to stabilize their reality. We need to follow their filter line."
The journey became a lesson in causality. Kai realized that his probability manipulation power had been fundamentally upgraded in the White Citadel. In Neo-Veridia, he changed events. Now, he was subtly changing the preconditions for events. He wasn't cheating; he was editing the script of time.
As they traveled, the Temporal Flow began to compress. They were nearing the Spire's temporal bubble. The golden current narrowed, and the sapphire past and emerald future began to collide with dangerous frequency.
A figure suddenly appeared ahead—not a ghost image, but a solid entity made entirely of shimmering gold light. It wore robes that seemed to be woven from digital clock faces, and its face was featureless, yet radiated immense, cold intellect.
THE CHRONOMANCER: "UNAUTHORIZED TEMPORAL SIGNATURES DETECTED. HIGH PROBABILITY OF CAUSAL ANOMALY. INITIATING TIMELINE ERASE."
The Chronomancer raised a hand, and the Temporal Flow around Kai and Roric began to distort violently. The golden current shattered into a thousand sapphire shards, pulling them backwards—toward the past.
Roric: "We're going back! We're going to hit the Iron Dominion's founding era!"
Kai felt the excruciating sensation of his body vibrating at a frequency that shouldn't exist. He saw his clothes changing, his skin growing older, then younger. The Chronomancer was trying to erase them by collapsing their existence into a moment where they didn't belong.
Kai reacted instantly. He plunged his emerald shard deep into the chaotic flow. He didn't use the Industrial Flow to push back, or the Sacred Flow to find harmony. He used the Vital Flow—the life-force principle he learned in the Silva Mystica.
He forced the probability of life persisting despite the temporal disruption.
Kai: "We exist, regardless of the cause!"
A wave of resonant green light erupted from the shard. It didn't stop the temporal erase, but it forced the Chronomancer to stabilize the attack. The Chronomancer couldn't understand an entity that valued being over cause.
THE CHRONOMANCER: "LIFE IS TEMPORARY. CAUSALITY IS ETERNAL. YOU ARE INTERFERING WITH THE CORE ALGORITHM!"
Kai: "The core algorithm is flawed! You're letting the Scourge rewrite the timeline around the anchors! We're here to fix the time anchor!"
The Chronomancer hesitated for a fraction of a second, but that was all Kai needed. He used the brief lull in the temporal current to force a massive probability spike: P(textBypass Chronomancer Protocol)= 99.9%.
He didn't erase the Chronomancer; he made it believe Kai's mission was necessary to the continued function of the Sunken Spire.
The Chronomancer's form dissolved, replaced by a holographic message overlaid on the Temporal Flow: "TEMPORAL SIGNATURE FLAGGED AS 'HIGH NECESSITY VARIABLE.' ACCESS GRANTED. PROCEED TO THE CENTRAL SPIRE."
The Temporal Flow calmed instantly, rushing them forward into a stable, golden light.
They erupted out of the Flow, landing hard on a metallic platform. The water vanished, replaced by a smooth, obsidian floor.
They were inside the Sunken Spire.
The nation was a colossal, self-contained city built deep beneath the sea, enclosed by a shimmering temporal dome that held the ocean at bay. The air was pressurized, clean, and silent. Everywhere Kai looked, he saw evidence of hyper-advanced temporal engineering: walls that displayed three parallel moments in time simultaneously, and walkways that phased in and out of existence.
Roric groaned, hauling himself up. He was soaking wet, and his heavy field kit was sparking.
Roric: "I aged three months and six days in that current. This place is going to give me a paradox headache."
They were standing in a massive atrium. Overhead, the Temporal Anchor—a gigantic, humming crystalline clock face—spun silently. Around them, the Chronomancers moved with a chilling, deliberate slowness, each step perfectly calculated to minimize causal interference. They all wore the same robes and the same featureless gold masks.
A Chronomancer glided toward them. Its mask turned toward Kai.
CHRONOMANCER ELDER: "The High Necessity Variable has arrived. Your existence is a low probability, Analyst Kai. We have determined that your continued presence is required to access the Temporal Core."
Kai: "Why? We're here to stabilize your anchor. What's the Scourge doing here?"
CHRONOMANCER ELDER: "The Scourge does not attack our anchor with force. It attacks with redundancy. It has created five simultaneous timelines for the anchor's destruction. The Temporal Flow is being pulled in five different, catastrophic directions."
Roric: "So the Scourge is running five probability loops at once? It's chaos multiplied!"
CHRONOMANCER ELDER: "We cannot choose which timeline to stabilize without sacrificing the others. We need an anomaly who can exist in all five states simultaneously and find the singular point of convergence."
The Elder extended a hand, offering Kai a slim, pulsing device—a Temporal Injector.
CHRONOMANCER ELDER: "You will inject this into the Temporal Core. It will split your consciousness into five parallel realities. In each, you must find and eliminate the Scourge's influence on the core's mechanism. Fail in one, and your consciousness—and the timeline—is lost."
Kai looked at the device, then at Roric. His heart hammered. This wasn't probability manipulation; this was high-stakes temporal surgery.
Kai: "And if I succeed?"
CHRONOMANCER ELDER: "If you succeed, the five realities will snap back into one. And the Temporal Flow will be fused into your focus, preparing you for the final journey."
Kai gripped his emerald shard. It was time to push his power to its absolute limit.