What was that? … … …

  John hung suspended in the crystalline depths, dragon scales of a partially re-dragonized body dim with exhausted light, the divine blue crystal's glow pulsing around him like a dying heartbeat. His mana reserves scraped empty, refilled from the crystal, drained again—a desperate cycle that accomplished nothing.

  Time had stopped.

  The water around him was frozen mid-ripple, bubbles suspended like glass beads, light caught in eternal refraction. He could feel the threads of causality trembling at the edge of his perception, his new Time affinity straining against the fabric of reality itself.

  But he could not go back.

  He roared—a soundless, furious bellow that sent shockwaves through the motionless water. His claws raked the crystal's surface, desperate, as if he could tear more power from it through sheer will.

  Move. Rewind. Go BACK.

  Nothing.

  He tried again. Drew deeper. Paradox Echo flared, absorbing the temporal pressure as if they were attacks of an imaginary enemy, then discharging it into another attempt. The threads shivered, bent—

  —and snapped back like overtightened strings, unchanged.

  A third attempt. A fourth. Each time, he felt the spell almost catch, almost pull the world backward by a heartbeat, a breath, a second. Each time, reality resisted, elastic and unyielding, his raw power insufficient to overcome the sheer mass of time he was trying to move.

  He thought of Shira's face. Peaceful. Still.

  MOVE.

  Mana emptied. Crystal pulsed. Refill. Drain. Nothing.

  His dragon form flickered, scales dimming to dull gold as exhaustion gnawed at his edges. The rational part of his mind—the Scholar craft, the voice of Elyndra's patient lessons, the old man's measured advice—whispered through the haze of grief and rage.

  You could have trained first.

  He snarled, rejecting it.

  The Trial Subworld. Time frozen there. You could have leveled your Tier IV class, mastered the new affinity, prepared properly—

  Another attempt. Another failure. The threads mocked him, vibrating with unrealized potential.

  —and the distance would be the same. Hours. A day. You wouldn't have added to the gap by training in frozen time.

  His claws loosened on the crystal.

  Better mastery. More stable spell. Higher success chance.

  The truth pressed in, cold and unwelcome. He had charged in on emotion—the same instinct that had saved the five survivors, that had killed the alpha—but this was not a battle of claws and fangs. This was magic. Precision. Understanding.

  He had neither. Not yet.

  His roar this time was quieter, broken. He released the crystal, floating backward in the frozen water, scales flickering between gold and human skin as his form wavered.

  One more try. Just one more.

  He gathered everything—every scrap of mana the crystal could feed him, every thread of Time affinity, every ounce of Paradox power—and pushed.

  For a single, breathless moment, he felt it.

  Time lurched. The frozen water trembled. A bubble drifted backward by a fraction of an inch.

  Then the spell collapsed, unraveling in his grip like smoke through fingers. The bubble resumed its frozen state. Nothing had changed.

  John hung in the void-like water, chest heaving with phantom breath his Oceanic lungs didn't need.

  He had failed.

  Emotion had driven him here—grief, rage, the desperate need to undo—but emotion alone could not rewrite causality. The old man's words echoed: “but you are not ready to attain all your goals.”

  Did the old man know about this?

  He needed mastery. Control. Understanding of this new Tier IV class and the Time threads woven through it.

  He needed to train.

  The realization tasted like ash. John was neither tiger, dragon or human but a mix of the three, because of the inhuman effort.

  Slowly, painfully, John shifted back to human form. The water remained frozen around him—a monument to his failed ambition—as he closed his eyes and reached for the familiar pull of the skill he had gotten from the totem.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  The Trial Subworld.

  Time would not pass outside. The bodies would wait, preserved in his absence. And inside, he could grind, practice, fail in safety until the spell that had just shattered against reality became something he could wield.

  He let the connection take him.

  The frozen cave vanished. The crystal's glow faded. Reality folded, and John appeared in the endless white expanse of the Trial Subworld—alone with his grief, his determination, and the cold, necessary logic of what came next.

  He would master Time.

  And then he would go back.

  John floated in front of the crystal, submerged in the underwater cave and attempted to rewind time again and again but failed and decided to train in the Trial Subworld.

  John floated in front of the crystal, submerged in the underwater cave and attempted to rewind time again and again but failed and decided to train in the Trial Subworld.

  John floated in front of the crystal, submerged in the underwater cave and attempted to rewind time again and again but failed and decided to train in the Trial Subworld.

  John floated in front of the crystal, submerged in the underwater cave and attempted to rewind time again and again but failed and decided to train in the Trial Subworld. Somehow, he had a feeling of déjà-vu but it was soon forgotten by the grief and the desperation of failure.

  ***

  From a different plane of existence that had no sky and no ground, only an endless tapestry of interlocking circles and drifting windows of light, an old man watched.

  He was the same elder who had trained John in the Trial Subworld to prepare him for the fight against the black tigers.

  Before him hovered a portal—not a hole in space, but a polished disc of reality, its surface showing a moving image like a memory being replayed. Within it, a partially dragonized young boy swam in a silent, blue-lit cavern, scales gleaming gold, claws locked around a massive crystal that pulsed with divine radiance.

  John.

  The scene played out clearly.

  John strained, Time threads shivering around him. The water froze. Bubbles stopped. Light hung motionless. He pushed, poured mana, roared without sound—then failed. Exhausted, he released the crystal, let the chimera form fall away, and vanished in a flicker of white as he shifted to the Trial Subworld.

  The portal shuddered.

  Without transition, the image rewound—not smooth, not natural, but snapping back to a previous frame. John again, clamped to the crystal, full of mana and desperate resolve, attempting to rewind the world. Again the water stilled. Again the spell buckled under the weight of causality. Again he gave up, deciding to enter the white void to train.

  Again, as soon as he chose the Trial, the image jumped—reset—to the submerged cavern and the start of the attempt.

  This was a time loop.

  The old man watched silently as iterations flickered past, each one slightly different.

  In one, John’s angle on the crystal changed by a fraction. In another, he tried layering Arcane Thread with Time, making the spell more structured. Once, he waited a heartbeat longer before giving up, staring into the suspended bubbles as if sensing something was wrong just beyond understanding.

  But always, inevitably, he chose the rational path: enter the Trial Subworld, train, then try again.

  And each time, the moment he made that decision, the loop snapped him back to the cave, erasing the training that never truly began, binding him to a single doomed branch.

  The old man folded his hands behind his back, long blue robes whispering softly around him. His eyes—ancient, clear, and faintly sad—tracked every variation, every small adaptation John’s paradoxical mind made unconsciously. Cause and effect rippled like fine threads around the boy, knotted into a tight circle.

  “He adapts quickly,” the old man murmured to himself. “Even when he doesn’t remember, the echo of each failure sharpens the next attempt.”

  On the portal, John tried a different incantation. The result was the same: stasis. No rewind. No escape.

  “But the loop is closed,” the old man went on, voice a quiet sigh in the vast, echoing nowhere. “A stable cycle, anchored at the moment of choice. As long as he chooses the Trial, the loop holds. As long as the loop holds, he will never reach the Trial.”

  John’s face, twisted with grief and stubborn focus, flashed again and again on the disc. So young. So determined. So utterly unaware that his rational decision had become the anchor for his own imprisonment.

  The old man watched a few more cycles, gaze narrowing as he noted the accumulating micro-changes—the way John’s spellwork became infinitesimally more refined, his timing more precise, his Time affinity more sensitive without him ever retaining conscious memory.

  He could learn inside the loop.

  But he could not break it.

  At last, the old man exhaled, the sound slow and resigned.

  “This won’t do,” he said softly. “He won’t be able to break out of the time loop on his own.”

  The portal kept playing, the same tragic determination repeating in endless permutations. The old man lifted his staff, its azure orb flaring in answer.

  For a paradox to move forward, sometimes another paradox had to intervene.

  From the old man’s vantage, the portal’s image of John and the crystal shuddered—and then he stepped through.

  Not into the cave as John knew it, but into the inside of the crystal itself.

  The world on the other side was an ocean of blue.

  He emerged standing—not swimming—on a broad avenue of translucent stone, the ground beneath his boots clear yet solid, like walking on frozen light. Above him stretched a vast, vaulted dome of liquid sapphire, water held at bay by unseen forces. Schools of silver and cobalt fish glided lazily through the suspended sea overhead, their movements casting shifting, rippling patterns of light across the city below.

  The city.

  It sprawled in all directions—a drowned capital-city, not ruined but preserved in perfect, eerie stillness. Towering spires of crystal and coral rose from the seafloor, their surfaces etched with flowing runes and reliefs of waves, stars, and serpent-like dragons coiling between them. Bridges arched between the towers in sweeping curves, some narrow and delicate as glass threads, others massive causeways wide enough for an army.

  No people. No movement. Just the whisper of distant currents pressed against the outer barrier, muted by the crystal’s timeless silence.

  The old man walked forward, robes trailing faint flickers of light along the path.

  On either side of the avenue, plazas opened like petals—each one centered on a fountain that poured luminous water upward instead of down, streams frozen mid-arc. Statues ringed these spaces: tall figures in flowing robes, warriors with tridents and curved blades, women with hair like sculpted waterfalls. All carved from the same iridescent blue stone, their eyes inlaid with pale, luminescent gems that watched nothing now.

  The architecture mixed grace with enormity. Pillars rose like bundled reeds of crystal, branching into filigreed lattices that supported ceilings patterned with constellations. Some buildings were domed, others stepped pyramids inverted, their widest tiers at the top, hanging like crystalline mountains held in place by invisible magic.

  Far above, at the very crown of this submerged world, he could see where the city’s highest spires brushed the inner surface of the crystal’s shell, touching it like fingers reaching for the sky beyond.