A roar tore from John’s throat before he could stop it—a primal sound of agony that shook the smoldering ruins and sent ash swirling skyward. It echoed off the distant trees, raw and broken, carrying the weight of every face he had just seen.

  He dropped to one knee, fists clenched against the scorched earth, breath ragged.

  A soft step approached from behind. He tensed, but no attack came. A hand—gentle, trembling—settled on his shoulder.

  John looked up.

  The weretigress was one of the survivors, silver hair streaked with soot, golden armor dented and bloodied. Her face was familiar in the way of shared glances around campfires and training grounds, but he did not know her name. He felt she was young, although it was not easy to tell with her kind, perhaps one of the newer initiates, her blue eyes red-rimmed but steady.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly, voice thick with unshed tears. “For saving us.”

  No accusation. No blame. Just sadness, heavy and shared, laced with the fragile strength of someone who had just watched her world burn but lived to mourn it.

  John’s chest tightened. Five. He had saved five. Out of dozens. All those faces—Klara, the Shaman, Lara, Talissa, Shira—gone because he had been grinding levels in a frozen pocket dimension while they fought and died here. No, that was not true, time did not pass while he was doing that. His mind rationalized it but his heart ached.

  “I was late,” he whispered, voice cracking. “I should have—”

  She shook her head, hand squeezing his shoulder once before withdrawing. “You came. You ended it.”

  Silence fell between them, broken only by the crackle of dying embers and distant bird calls that had no business sounding so indifferent.

  A thought cut through the grief, sharp and desperate.

  “The black tigers,” John said, rising slowly. “They wanted to… breed. With you. They only killed those who refused, who fought as humans. Are there… prisoners? Somewhere they took them?”

  The weretigress met his eyes, expression darkening with old pain. She made a slow, firm no gesture with her head. “Before the attack, we decided. We would die before letting those beasts create more of their kind through our wombs. We fought in bipedal form. All of us, with pride.”

  John exhaled, the last sliver of hope crumbling. No captives. No chance to rescue. Just this—the bodies, the ruin, the finality of their choice.

  He turned to Archangela, still standing sentinel amid the survivors she had healed. “Search,” he said flatly. “Anyone left. Alive.”

  She nodded once, no questions, and vanished into a blur of motion—circling the encampment’s perimeter, then darting into the treeline, senses far sharper than his own.

  John knelt again, this time before the nearest body—Shira’s. He reached out, hesitating, then gently brushed a strand of silver-white hair from her face. The others surrounded him: Klara’s steady presence, the Shaman’s quiet authority, Lara’s clever hands, Talissa’s bold strength. Mentors. Friends. Family, in all but blood.

  His hand trembled.

  He could not do it. Could not summon Kana from the Shelter, could not let her see this carnage—her mother’s body cooling in the ash, the camp she had known her whole life reduced to graves. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  The surviving weretigress knelt beside him, joining the vigil in silence. The others gathered slowly, forming a loose circle around the fallen. No words. Just shared grief, hands touching shoulders, eyes on the dead.

  Archangela would return soon.

  Until then, John knelt, the golden dragon king reduced to a boy mourning what he had not saved in time.

  Another white weretigress approached from the edge of the gathering survivors, her steps measured, golden armor still smeared with blood and ash. She was older-looking than the others, perhaps one of the mid-rank huntresses, her silver hair cropped short for battle, blue eyes shadowed by exhaustion and loss. Somehow, even if they all looked young, John was starting to distinguish them by age by looking at their eyes, way of walking and other subtle cues.

  She knelt beside John, close enough that he could see the fresh scars already fading on her cheek from Archangela’s healing.

  “No one can do anything about this,” she said softly, voice heavy with the finality of too many battles lost. Her gaze swept the bodies, the ruins, the darkening sky. “The dead are gone. The black tigers are scattered. We bury them. We mourn them. We… go on.”

  John’s hands stilled on Shira’s hair. Desperation clawed up his throat, hot and choking—the urge to scream, to deny, to tear the world apart until it gave them back.

  But then his face hardened.

  Determination flooded in, chased by a cold, building rage that straightened his spine and narrowed his eyes to slits. He rose slowly, turning to face her fully, the air around him seeming to thicken as his Tier III presence pressed outward without conscious effort.

  “Yes,” he said, voice low but carrying like a gathering storm. “I can.”

  The I landed heavy, deliberate, every syllable laced with the certainty of someone who had broken the system’s rules since the day it first touched him. Not a boast. A fact. He was the exception—the boy who had looped XP into oblivion, shattered ascension stones into tier jumps, turned paradox into power. The world’s rules did not bind him. Not anymore.

  The weretigress blinked, caught off guard by the shift—the raw, unyielding authority in his tone. Around them, the other survivors stirred, heads lifting.

  John’s gaze swept the encampment once more, not in defeat, but in calculation. “The black tigers have a source. A lair. A reason they came back after millennia. They don’t just hunt for sport. And I—” He clenched his fist, golden flecks sparking briefly along his knuckles. “I will find it. I will end it before this happens.”

  The circle of weretigresses watched him, grief mingling with something new—faint, flickering hope born from the blue tiger who had slain their enemy’s alpha. But what did he mean, he would end the black tigers before this happens?

  John turned away from the bodies, mind already racing ahead. Archangela would return with her report. Kana would need to be told—but not yet. First: answers.

  He was the deceiver to the black tigers who had posed as their divinity.

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  But he was more, he was the paradox in the system.

  And this world would bend to him whether it liked it or not.

  John turned from the bodies, the weight of his declaration still hanging in the smoky air. The surviving weretigresses watched him, their expressions a mix of grief and fragile trust.

  “The black tigers,” he said, voice steady now. “Where do I find an Ascension Stone? For my other track.”

  One of the tigresses—a wiry huntress with long silver hair and a fresh scar across her jaw—nodded without hesitation. She rose and padded toward the encampment’s edge, where half-collapsed ruins marked an older foundation beneath one of the ruined tents. Kneeling, she clawed at the earth, digging with practiced efficiency until her fingers closed around something buried deep.

  She returned, holding out three smooth, pulsing stones in her palm—Ascension Stones, their surfaces etched with faint runes that hummed faintly even amid the ash.

  John took one without asking, the crystal warm and heavy in his hand. “Thank you.”

  He crushed it.

  The world warped. No gentle village of memory this time—just a storm of light and pressure as his Apex Paradox Warden track surged from Tier II. The leap was violent, seals cracking like thunder in his soul—two shattering outright, their bindings dissolving into raw, unbound potential. Power flooded in, stats recalibrating, and a new notification burned across his vision:

  Affinity Unlocked: Time (High)

  He felt it immediately—a subtle thread woven into his core, alongside Water and Arcane. Not just sensing flow, but nudging it. Bending it.

  No time to savor.

  He turned to the five survivors. “Go. Now.”

  With a gesture, he opened the Shelter’s boundary just wide enough. They hesitated, eyes flicking to the bodies, but his tone brooked no argument. One by one, they stepped through—vanishing into the pale, timeless dome. Inside, time would not pass. Neither for them, nor for Kana, still waiting in her private grief. Or at least, this is what John hoped. When he was inside the Shelter, time did not pass outside. So, it would be logic to infer that if he exited and left someone inside, an eternity would pass for them before he returned but it seemed to not work like that according to what he had read in the system’s windows. If he was absent, time would not pass inside. It had not been like that when he had exited the parallel world and left Bobo inside though. John was a bit unsure if he was maybe making a mistake but he did not spend too much thought on it. Neither had he reflected too much when he had left Kana behind. He just hoped that the Shelter in his absence had changed in function when he had switched from a Shelter in the parallel world to a Shelter compensation for his outstanding achievements in the dragon dungeon. All these time mechanics were still confusing but he needed to master them and his new heightened affinity was the first step.

  The boundary sealed.

  John closed his eyes, reaching out mentally. Archangela.

  Her presence answered instantly, a cool thread in his mind.

  Keep searching. Survivors to safety. Black tigers—exterminate on sight.

  Understood.

  She was gone before he finished the thought.

  John shifted, his golden dragon form erupting once more. Wings beat down, hurling him skyward and south east, toward the sub-aquatic cave. The wind howled past; jungle blurred below.

  He landed at the cavern mouth, transformed into a human, and jumped down into the semi-spherical air-filled antechamber to the subaquatic maze. In a spray of water and stone he proceeded further into the water, diving straight into the depths without pause. Currents parted before him as he arrowed toward the divine blue crystal—massive, eternal, pulsing with mana so dense it warped the water around it into glowing halos.

  He reached it, clamping his arms around it.

  Mana flooded him—an oceanic torrent slamming into reserves already stretched thin from the fight. His bars filled to bursting, overflowed, then stabilized at levels no human frame could contain.

  Enough.

  He released the crystal, hovering in the glowing depths. His new Time affinity hummed, threads of causality shimmering faintly before his draconic eyes. Rewind time. Not weeks, not months—just hours. A day, maybe two. Far enough to arrive before the black tigers. Far enough to change this.

  He poured everything into it: Tier III Sovereign stats, Tier IV Warden power, shattered seals, the crystal’s borrowed infinity. Mana drained like sand from a shattered hourglass. His vision blurred; pressure built behind his eyes.

  The water around him slowed. Bubbles hung motionless. Light bent oddly.

  Reality recoiled.

  He pushed harder, willing the threads to unwind, to pull the world back to a moment when tents still stood, laughter still echoed, and Shira still breathed.

  Mana hit empty.

  He poured more from the crystal—reserves he hadn’t known he had, drawn from paradox itself.

  The cave trembled. Time gave.

  As far as he could force it.

  John hurled himself into the spell like a drowning man grabbing at air.

  Rationally, he knew there was a better way. He had just unlocked a Tier IV class. He could have retreated to his Trial Subworld, leveled Apex Paradox Warden to its new cap, learned how to properly handle his freshly improved Time affinity, refined the weave until rewinding hours—or even days—became stable and controlled. If he spent real time outside, the distance he needed to rewind would lengthen, yes—but time in his Trial Subworld did not move in the real world. He could have trained there, pushed his mastery up while keeping the time offset as small as possible.

  The logical path was clear.

  But logic wasn’t what drove him at that time.

  The images of Klara, the Shaman, Lara, Talissa, and especially Shira lying broken in the ash burned behind his eyes. Kana waiting in a shelter that no longer had a home to return to. The stink of blood in a place that had once smelled of herbs and incense.

  So he acted on raw emotion.

  In the sub-aquatic cave, claws of partially dragonized arms dug into the divine blue crystal, John dragged every drop of mana he could into his core and magic circles and forced the world to bend. Time around him shuddered. Water slowed, then halted. Bubbles froze mid-rise. The glow of the crystal stretched into strange, elongated halos, as if light itself hesitated.

  For a heartbeat, it felt like victory.

  Then… nothing.

  He pushed harder, channeling his high Time affinity until his veins felt like they were carrying molten glass. The pressure behind his eyes grew unbearable. He tried to pull on the thread of his own timeline, to drag himself and the world backward through the last hours.

  Reality did not budge.

  The water remained motionless. The world did not run in reverse. He stood in a perfect still frame of the present, suspended but not undone.

  John snarled, fury spiking. He tried again.

  He changed the approach—focusing not on the world, but on himself, trying to revert his own personal timeline while leaving everything else intact. It only made the strain worse. The system flickered warnings at the edge of his vision—integrity errors, paradox overload, structural recursion impossible.

  He ignored them.

  Again.

  He shunted mana into a more intricate pattern, weaving Sovereign of Paradox and Apex Paradox Warden together, betting that his dual-class nature could exploit some loophole in causality. Briefly, he sensed something—a faint impression of earlier states, echoes of moments now gone—but each time he reached, the fabric of time snapped back, slapping his grasp away like a hand brushed from a wound.

  Again.

  He tried to target only the camp. Only a region. Only a single hour around the encampment, hoping that limiting the scope would make the spell tractable. The cave didn’t care. Time didn’t care. All he accomplished was draining his mana into a hungry void that refused to blink.

  Every attempt ended the same way: frozen water, screaming nerves, a sense of being right at the edge of a cliff he simply could not cross.

  Finally, the crystal itself pushed back.

  As he forced more mana through channels already frayed, a shock jolted through him—like a silent rejection. His vision exploded in white pain. The spellform unraveled in his mind, threads of Time and Arcane snapping like overstretched wires. The cave shuddered, then settled. The water remained suspended for a breath longer… then resumed its slow drift, bubbles rising again as though nothing had happened.

  He had failed.

  No rewind. No second chance. The bodies at the encampment would remain where they lay.

  John hung there in the glowing blue, chest heaving, exhausted to the marrow. For long moments, all he could do was float, letting the cold bite into his scales, letting the last dregs of wasted mana seep away. John was in a strange state. The effort had taken a toll on him and he was neither in his human, dragon nor blue tiger form but rather, some chimera in between.

  Then the emotional storm subsided enough for thought to seep back in and him to retake his human original form.

  Charging blindly had gotten him nowhere. If he wanted to touch time at all—let alone bend it—he needed more than rage and raw power. He needed control. Mastery. Structure. And that meant doing what he should have done from the start.

  He closed his eyes and summoned the system.

  With a thought, he stepped out of the cavern and away from the world’s flow. The water, the crystal, the failed spell faded—and the familiar presence of the Totem Trial Subworld unfolded around him instead. The white space greeted him.

  Here, time outside would stand still.

  Here, he could be rational.

  Here, he would learn what it truly meant to carry Tier IV power and a High affinity for Time—before he dared challenge the laws he’d just slammed into headfirst and lost.