There was no earth-shattering roar, nor sound of collapse or mourning. When that colossal entity extended itself from within the central hub and unfurled its vast, majestic form across the sky, the entire world fell into absolute silence. Only a lonely, fragmented song echoed through the stillness.

I think of home, I think of home,

My home so dear, so lovely...

How are the ones back home these days?

They linger in my thoughts always...

A lonely traveler in a foreign land, lost and desolate...♪

Even time itself seemed to come to an abrupt halt. Then, it began to flow backward.

The countless hands that governed sky and earth gently pulled the threads in their grasp, once again taking hold of all things. Everything seemed to be controlled by invisible hands. All that had shattered began to reassemble. Everything that had collapsed rose again.

It was as if a sequence of frozen frames were being stitched together under unseen manipulation, causing the ruined, broken wasteland to once again take on the outline of a town.

What had been lost returned once more. What had been destroyed awakened from the ashes. Even time itself was going backward.

From within the devil’s work ball came a numb voice. “This is the sage’s Theory of Creation. This entire rift realm is built upon her Theory of Creation. She’s still alive after all these years? Damn it... this time we really dug up a Tyrannosaurus.”

Ji Jue was unable to speak. If it were anyone else, they might have been awestruck by the grandeur and impossibility of the scene before them. But as a user of Fluid Alchemy and Pacifier, he could feel on a deeper level what was happening inside the rift realm, including the mechanisms beneath the overwhelming spectacle and the craftsmanship that defied imagination.

It was like... a true god at work.

When the countless records buried beneath the earth merged with the reconstructed town before his eyes, it was as if a rift in time had once again been opened. A door leading back ‌four hundred years ago had reappeared. At both ends of time, the town in the rift realm and the town of the past mirrored each other, forming countless invisible threads that gradually built an unseen bridge between them.

But now, even though the door had appeared, it remained sealed shut. Although it looked close enough to reach, the distance between them was as wide as the chasm between heaven and abyss.

High in the sky, the towering, radiant great spire stood, piercing the clouds. It severed the past and future, standing directly in front of the gate like an insurmountable barrier.

The moment a brutal fracture appeared upon that towering spire, the mirrored reflection formed by both timelines and the bridge Mercury had painstakingly constructed vanished without a trace. Together with the Tower of Origin, everything was violently severed. Only a pitch-black abyss remained.

All that had been reborn turned back into ruins. All that had been reconstructed fell once more to the earth, leaving only debris, just as it had happened at the far end of time.

In the sky, the colossal being formed from countless hands froze for a moment. Within the lonely song, the wailing voices surfaced again, like cries of grief and lamentation. Blood-red tears fell like a storm. Shattered fragments dropped from the sky, twisting into grotesque forms, which then turned and rejoined the grand yet solitary chorus.

Once again, from the ruins, everything was rebuilt anew, again and again. Just like the countless cycles that had been attempted in the past, it went on endlessly, never stopping even for a second.

The Seer said, “This is Mercury’s Theory of Creation. It is called the First Cause. Mercury combined the paths of Ember and Aether, and built a causal chain stretching from past to future. Her power allows absolute cause-and-effect links to be established between past and future, which can then be traced upward, reversed, and rewritten, creating this recursive phenomenon of time.”

Ji Jue gazed at the world of birth and destruction before him and murmured softly, “What is she trying to do?”

Deep down, he already knew the answer.

Besides restoring everything that had once existed, what other answer could there be? Besides reclaiming all that was lost, what else could be worth making a sage endure such pain and madness?

Some say that the Supreme Benevolences are history and the world itself. They were born from the very origin, extending all the way to the far end of apocalypse, ultimately reaching their end.

All things in existence, such as order and chaos, life and death, war and peace, the rise and fall of regimes, the shifting of mountains and rivers, everything intertwined into an intricate tapestry that encompasses all and spreads through everything.

Everything was fixed within the tapestry of the Supreme Benevolences.

Because of this, everything still held a chance of being reversed. As long as she could return to that day, as long as she could arrive in time for that wedding that could never be reached...

“Before the Age of Chaos, there was a saying: before the box is opened, no one knows whether the cat inside is alive or dead,” the Seer said slowly. “Perhaps, within history, that destruction has already been predetermined. But before everything is destroyed, there is still a chance for preservation. As long as she could preserve the souls that existed before destruction, then there would still be room for change.”

For that, she spared no cost. For the rest of her life, she poured all her strength into pursuing the position of sage, shaping her Theory of Creation into its current form. She hoped that one day, through the simulation of such a tool, she could infinitely approach that past era, and ultimately pass through the Eternal Gate to return to that day.

But she failed. No matter how many times she tried, no matter what immense price she paid. It was not due to lack of ability, nor a miscalculation. It was precisely because the Tower of Origin collapsed.

The tapestry woven by the Supreme Benevolences was shattered by her own hand, and she could no longer trace the path upward along its threads. A terrifying chaos and destruction carved an unbridgeable abyss through history and time. It was an unhealable scar that separated her from everything she once loved.

And so, everything became irreversible. This was her unbecoming. All was already predetermined.

If the sage of Ember turned into this because of destiny, then this was the forging of her own fate. She could not reverse her origin. Just as the Dragon, representing the end, would eventually meet its end. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

Even though she had exhausted every method and had spent endless time searching for scattered fragments of the past, she still could not repair the void within it. Even the smallest deviation, when repeated countless times, would eventually become a distant illusion entirely different from reality.

Even at the cost of everything, even if it meant personally creating hell and imprisoning herself within it, she exhausted every possibility, repeating it again and again with nothing gained. In that desperate cycle, the ending that awaited her was not true termination, but the beginning of eternal torment.

The Seer sighed. “Crazy, isn’t it? There’s a bright future waiting to be explored, and yet humans would actually waste an entire lifetime trying to return to the past.”

Ji Jue shook his head. “I don’t think so. A mother wanting to see her child again, wanting her to live a happy life, what’s so crazy about that?”

Even if it meant dying hundreds or thousands of times, even if it required sacrificing everything, whenever they recalled each other’s faces, every price they had paid would become insignificant.

“If it were me, I’d probably do the same,” he said softly.

The Seer asked, “Even if it means creating hell?”

Ji Jue fell silent. The Seer looked at him and let out an inexplicable sigh.

“You really are exactly like her.”

Had she known earlier, she might have chosen her collaborators more carefully. But now, she no longer cared about such minor details, nor did she regret it anymore. Since becoming self-aware, she had already made far too many decisions she came to regret. This time, she would rather regret it than face failure.

Yet, for some reason, she could not help but wonder: was Mercury back then also this resolute?

She closed her eyes. Now, everyone was the same kind of “human.”

BOOM!!!

As the phantom of the Tower of Origin shattered once again, everything within the rift realm turned back into ruins.

Amidst the rain of blood-red tears, the lonely song still continued. Countless hands persisted in reaching outward, tirelessly correcting everything, rebuilding all things endlessly.

The sage sang alone as she cried again, and again, until her wings were ignited by the shifting currents of time, until her limbs were burned to ashes. Yet she refused to stop. She was even willing to offer herself as a sacrifice.

She reached out in vain, trying to touch a face from four hundred years ago, but everything had already been predetermined.

The closer she drew to the surviving timeline of the Tower of Origin, the stronger the curse upon her became. Every act of temporal regression brought another wave of backlash from Origin itself. As her sanity and soul were gradually worn away, all that remained was obsession.

It was like throwing one’s own corpse into an abyss again and again, hoping that one day, by stepping over those bones, one could reach the other side.

In this hopeless, futile torment, chasing a future that would never arrive, and a past that could never be reached, what would you become in the end, Mercury? When both soul and body were burned away, when ashes and embers were scattered into the cracks of time, would you return to nothingness? Or would you, as something truly aberrant, be born from those remnants of pain and despair?

But everything should have ended before that...

The Seer opened her eyes and issued her final command toward everything, toward the rift realm itself, “Stop it, Mercury.”

She shouted, “Stop!”

The song ceased abruptly. The sky, earth, creation, ruins, and even Mercury herself, who had enveloped the entire heavens, all of it came to a sudden halt. A wailing cry of unbearable pain erupted from the sky, tearing through everyone’s eardrums.

From deep beneath the nine layers of the earth, the workshop’s central hub rose once more in response to the Seer’s command, transforming just as it had countless times over the past four hundred years.

A blade-like tower shot upward from the ground, rising into the sky, replacing the phantom of the Tower of Origin. It stood between heaven and earth, piercing through Mercury’s grotesquely altered form.

Once again, the sage was imprisoned within the cage known as the Workshop, bringing the endless cycle to an abrupt halt.