Do you know the beauty of war? It is not in its glory or strength but in its very act. To kill, to devour, to take, it is at the roots of life itself. Even the peace between the primordials is nothing but a breath between clashes. To live is to kill. Mortal, immortal, god, or Imperium, we are life built on death.

  -The First King of War, Name Unknown. Deceased Imperium.

  The Old God of Time stood in his halls and watched.

  Clocks were how people measured time, the movement of things. The timed, precise, controlled movement of things.

  It was measured change, consequences and actions, effects and cause. The path of the sun through the bright blue sky, and the faces of the moon on a star-filled night.

  That was time for them. It was the ability to change and move.

  He was an old man with a beard that seemed to meld into the ground. He stood in a large hall of clocks, each clock ticking with a timid measured cadence. Some clocks ticked fast, so fast that they came to be, ticked, and disappeared before other clocks could even tick for a second.

  Some clocks ticked slowly. Each movement of their giant hands seemed to take the force of a god to move. Their clock hands were like mountains, some reaching high into mid-day and taking eons to descend into the valleys of noon.

  Some clocks were immense and mountain-like, needing a whole wing to hold them. Others were small, like dust mites.

  But still, The Old God watched them all. His predecessor would never have done this. They had just made and left, tossing existence into chaos and creating a rift amongst realities so wide that only the Imperium could cross it.

  But he was their successor, their better and he would stand his guard.

  He watched the clocks become, break, die, and be undone. He watched the clocks turn backward and forward. He saw some speed up and others slow down. He didn’t interfere. It wasn’t his job. He was the watcher, the measurer, the man who measured time itself.

  A small clock, one of the slower ones, suddenly decided to jump and speed itself up. That happened sometimes. It could be due to a person’s interference, it could have been natural.

  Either way, it was none of his concern. He noticed it, as he noticed every other thing within his realm.

  Each clock moved forward, measuring its own time as it saw fit. But within those halls, only The Old God measured them against each other. Only he kept time outside of time.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  And he remained as he ever had, concise and measured. He watched existence tick away and he made sure no one forgot the consequences.

  ********

  I looked at Ah-Marin and gave an audible sign. I had just changed the nature of the realm, nothing special, just sped up its progress rate of time.

  Someone would notice quickly, especially if someone from the realm left for the void, they would find that the time they spent out there would be far shorter than the time that passed in here.

  It was a little selfish, speeding up the time of the realm, but I had my reasons.

  My journey through the void had taken no time at all. That was the nature of the void, the nature of nothing. But my time spent within the Cosmic Forest did exist and so did my time spent near the lower heavens.

  But even then, barely any time had passed in Ah-Marin. That could be both good and bad. Generally, the faster time passed within a realm, the more developed the realm became. Cultivation speed would increase within the realm.

  Some realms would pop into existence and within ten Lynorian seconds have whole empire blossom and die and Demigods bursting from them.

  But the faster time passed within the realm, the faster the realm itself would die. But most realms were slower than Lynoria, much much slower.

  And seeing as Lynoria was the celestial realm at the center of existence, that was what most beings used as a reference for time.

  But most realms were open to manipulations of one sort or another. The Keepers of Time and their leader watched time across existence, but as long as I didn’t do certain things, the Keepers of Time wouldn’t bother me.

  And even if I did, it all depended on scale and impact.

  This was nothing in their eyes.

  It took a bit of delicacy and concentration, not because the process itself was hard, but because I was changing the very fabric of reality and I had to take care to not undo the people living within it. If reality was the cloth then the people here would be like pebbles held up by the cloth. The goal had been to alter the stitchwork and pattern on the cloth, without letting the pebbles fall to the floor.

  And I had succeeded, aside from maybe losing a bacteria here and there, I had transferred all forms of life into this altered reality.

  The more powerful people were completely ignorable. Anything at the ninth rank or higher existed within their own minor reality and while they would notice the change of time, they wouldn’t be affected by it.

  The same could be said for anyone below the immortal rank. But anyone between that and the demigod rank I had to be careful with.

  But it worked out in the end, though it was bound to puzzle some of the more powerful people within the realm, nothing would come of it.

  I think.

  But on the more practical side, I wanted everyone to grow quickly. I had, to some degree, taken in this village as responsibility.

  I wouldn't call it my kingdom, but I wanted the people here to feel safe. And to do that would require them to grow. I wanted to at least have the maidens reach immortality, and Dao knew how far Chin could get.

  Maybe he wouldn’t grow any further than this or perhaps he could reach past immortality. Either way, the difference was practically nothing in the grand scheme of things.

  Even God-Kings were nothing in the affairs of the Imperium.

  It all felt strange. I was used to surviving. Dane’s whole life had revolved around guaranteeing that he would live to see tomorrow.

  That was Dane, and that was me.

  But now, I cared. I had responsibilities.

  Apathy wasn’t an option anymore. I didn’t want to stand by and let the world around me fall to pieces.

  “Chin,” I said to a startled farmer who suddenly found me standing next to him.

  “Let’s practice.”

  Patreon is 24 chapter ahead but the plan is to get it forty chapters ahead within the next two weeks.

  One moment he’s dying in a warzone — next, he’s naked on a moon full of real cultivators.

  Jake Sullivan just woke up in the wrong body, on a moon called Verdis, inside a cultivation academy where failure means getting culled back to Earth to live as a powerless mortal—and probably die uselessly in the upcoming alien invasion.

  His memories are mostly gone, but his spirit’s intact. His classmates? Rich kids with qi crystals and family techniques. The school? Doesn’t give a damn. Let the strong survive. With enemy agents already on campus, Jake will need to out-cultivate, outfight, and outsmart everyone around him. He has only one year to become a real cultivator.

  No dying this time!

  Dark humor. Sharp dialogue. Flower picking, teeth flying. A fresh blend of sci-fi, xianxia, and LitRPG.