Before I could even open my eyes, agony seared through my entire being. I tried to move, and my body felt wrong. It didn’t fit together properly. An attempt at a scream bubbled in my throat but came out as a mere squeak. This is all wrong. Wrong, wrong, WRONG.
Light painfully assaulted me as I managed to get control of my vision, and I surveyed the room around me.
“It’s alive!” the fanatical, disheveled man screamed.
I narrowed my eyes, focusing. I know this man. It’s the wizard.
Like a switch flipped, my thoughts raced forward, catching up to the moment.
This is just like when I first awoke in this world.
We were in the ritual room filled with cages—weren’t these cleared out?—and based on the blood and viscera around us, it looked like some kind of torture chamber, but I knew better now. The pieces around me were a rat tail and pieces of a giant scorpion. The leftovers from my creation.
I examined how my body felt, and the comfort I had felt when I was a whole rat was gone. I flexed my tail, and confirmed my suspicion. I had returned to my original chimaeric form.
What’s happening?
The wizard was wheezing and cackling, doing a little jig, one that I vaguely recognized from my original awakening. This glee had been replaced by anger as he went on to fail at making a new chimaera.
This wasn’t just similar to when I first woke up in this world. This was literally the day of my awakening.
How was this possible? Had everything up until now been for nothing? Was it all going to happen again?
I checked my system to see if I could learn anything.
[Amalgamation] has been destroy by [Time Explosion].
[Chimaeric Core] has been destroyed by [Time Explosion].
ERROR! [Bound Soul] requires [Chimaeric Core]. Restoring…
[Bound Soul] has been destroy by [Time Explosion].
ERROR! [Chimaeric Core] requires [Bound Soul]. Restoring...
[Chimaeric Core] has been destroyed by [Time Explosion].
ERROR! [Bound Soul] requires [Chimaeric Core]. Restoring…
[Bound Soul] has been destroy by [Time Explosion].
ERROR! [Chimaeric Core] requires [Bound Soul]. Restoring…
It continued like that for a while, before suddenly halting, after which there was an additional set of notifications.
ERROR! Infinite loop detected due to influence of [Time Explosion].
WARNING! Paired attributes [Bound Soul] and [Chimaeric Core] incompatible with destruction by [Time Explosion]. Seeking solution…
WARNING! Local spacetime destroyed by [Time Explosion]. Seeking solution…
SOLVED! Energy from [Time Explosion] can be modified to destroy [Bound Soul] and [Chimaeric Core] simultaneously by shunting bonded attributes to alternate spacetime with new attribute [Time Loop].
[Time Loop] initiated.
...What? What the hell? I let out a squeak and jumped back, and the wizard interrupted his celebration to bend down and peer at me.
“Yes, welcome to life, my pet. You will be the first of many. You must be hungry!”
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
The wizard stalked away quickly towards the corner of the room to the grasshopper tank, a familiar sight to me after eating so many of them in my first go-around. He reached in, snagged a grasshopper, then quickly covered the top back up before returning to me.
“Eat,” he said, and dropped it in front of me.
Don’t need to tell me twice, I though as I slammed my stinger into the grasshopper. I greedily pulled it to my mouth and bit the insect’s head off. I’d need all the experience I could get—again.
(Level 0) defeated. Reduced experience gained.
Reduced experience? Wait...
I summoned up my status.
Level: 2
Attributes: [Amalgamation][Bound Soul][Chimaeric Core (1)][Time Loop]
Skills: n/a
I’m still level two.
I quickly pulled up my [Chimaeric Core], and sucked in a breath.
[Chimaeric Core]: Requires [Bound Soul]. The control core which operates and modifies the [Amalgamation]. Mass storage: 2.6/10 grams.
I still have the growth of my core, as well as the leftover mass from my rat tail and the mass I got back from my scorpion tail.
A moment later I realized that I didn’t get the grasshopper’s profile from eating this grasshopper this time, but upon checking my Loadout options, it was present, meaning I already had it. All of the information and matter in the subspace of my core had come back with me, as had my level. Perhaps my skills would too once I started investing in those.
I can use this.
“Excellent!” the old man cackled. “You seem to have control of your tail and your mouth.”
Pleased with himself, the wizard reached down to pick me up. I didn’t attack him this time, since I knew it would amount to nothing, and the wizard hefted me up to his eyes and examined me closer.
“Surprisingly docile. Perhaps you know who your master is. Good pet.”
He brought me back to a cage I was quite familiar with, opened the door, and placed me inside.
“Now that I’ve succeeded, I should be able to make a more powerful one…” the wizard muttered as he left my cage and headed towards the exit. The door slammed shut behind him.
The echoing sound of his footsteps faded, and I took a slow breath.
I was here. I was alive. And I knew what was coming.
I didn’t know what that “time explosion” was, but clearly the wizard’s new spell had gone wrong. That was hardly a surprise, since he had seemingly only created me by chance, with luck, as he had never succeeded with a second chimaera. Not exactly experimenting with best practices, this guy.
The time explosion had killed me, though. Probably the wizard, too, who didn’t seem to recollect his previous life at all. And that meant…
Timothy.
Timothy must have died in the time explosion. As a regular human like the wizard, he wouldn’t know me yet in this timeline. If everything played out the same, he was doomed to die in the future when the wizard switches back to time magic.
I had to protect him.
To do that, I had to get stronger.
While celebrating the fact that I had retained my advancements from the previous timeline, I hadn’t looked closer at the new attribute I had gained from the time explosion. Hopefully I could learn something from it.
[Time Loop]: Created out of the energies of a [Time Explosion] to preserve the link between a [Bound Soul] and [Chimaeric Core].
That told me what it was, but not so much what it did. That was kind of the same as my other attributes. There was a lot of hidden information that wasn’t revealed at a glance, though I hoped I could learn more by upgrading them. Thanks for nothing, system.
As before, no one visited the chamber until the next day. I spent the night considering my options, making plans, and debating the best course of action.
The wizard returned the following day, as I recalled. Just like the first time, he selected a crab and a rabbit from their cages. I watched, this time much more interested in the process, as the probably insane wizard hacked them apart and reassembled them into what would become a chimaera like myself, should the wizard be successful in binding a soul.
I watched with much more interest as he pulled out a crystal, which I presumed to be the chimaeric core. He muttered over it, guttural whispers that sounded warped and echoed. The spell to create a chimaera, I suppose, not that it helps me to know it. The air shimmered and it gathered around the core, lighting up with a purple energy. The wizard stuffed it into the chimaera-to-be and quickly stitched it up, chanting some more.
My hackles raised again at the sense of foreboding, but as the energy reached a crescendo in the room, it again faltered and collapsed in on itself. The chimaera failed to come to life, as it had before. There was nothing for me to learn from it, neither about chimaeras or the time explosion induced looping.
“Damnation,” the wizard grunted, and punted the failed chimaera at the wall. The combination of corpses hit the stone with a splat and began seeping a dark gas, some kind of energy which dissipated back into the aether or wherever it had been collected from. The wizard started to stalk towards the door in disgust.
I let him leave without interruption.
If I remembered correctly, I would have about a day before the wizard would come back and try to make another chimaera. After that, Timothy would be sent in to clean up the mess.
It was time to act.
WARNING! New profile uses less mass than old profile. Lost [Amalgamation] mass will be stored in [Chimaeric Core] mass storage. Insufficient room to store lost mass. Continue and discard mass?
Yes.
My body shifted as I took my new form. I tested my limbs, and found them functional, so I walked over to the bars of the cage which had contained me.
Had contained me. After all, I fit between the gaps now with my new grasshopper body.
I squeezed through the bars, tasting true freedom for the first time.
Time to set my plan in motion.