## Monologue
For a moment, a terrifyingly simple thought surfaced. Tao could remove him. A single nudge and this meticulously crafted, lonely kingdom would shatter into the chaos its warden feared so much.
I found myself speaking aloud, a voice, soft murmur in the silent, shielded presence of domain in air.
"Should I? And then what?" The question hung in the stillness. "I never cared for free will when it wasn't my problem. Would I just be presenting myself as a solution to a crisis I created, for a reality I'm just visiting?"
I turned my gaze back to He Who Remains, the man who saw himself as the savior of all time. "Man, looking at you... I see myself." The admission was quiet, almost uncomfortable.
"Writing the scripts for other people's lives. Directing the timeline, all while telling yourself you ended a war that you and your own kind started. Creating allies only to bind them under a dogma because you believe it's what people desperately need..."
I turned away, the weight of the revelation settling on me. " Having limited power is always there problem is it? It narrows the possibility. But having power only is enough? I was born from a god's existential curiosity and boredom. Did I, aside from the boredom... inherit the flawless aspect of a manipulator, too?"
The question hung in the air.
"Come to think of it, my original wishes were pure examples of a pursuit of perfection. I was never altruistic. Even my close relationships were transactional. Domination, manipulation, control - everything for self-interest." I thought about Shen Xiu and Xiao Ning.
" Even my passivity, my so-called 'non-interference,' is just another form of strategic control, a way to shape events similar to what I know without getting my hands dirty. And above all else, this obsessive need to isolate oneself even from the reality, like right now..."
I took one last glance at HWR, who remained blissfully unaware that a stranger was having an existential crisis by his desk. I continued walking past him, the final thought leaving a bitter taste.
"Having all the power but none of the responsibility or restraint... it seems it's not always the blessing one might think. It all just goes back to being boring again."
The perfect replication of his domain's rules ensured my null presence left no ripple. Through the vast circular window, the Loom's braided timelines overflowed, a testament to one man's controlled insanity. I pushed my own troubling reflections aside and returned my attention to the present.
There was work to be done.
## Outside the Asteroid
Whatever his philosophical turmoil, in the end, Tao saw no reason to stay and interfere in the redemption arc of the Loki variants or the retirement plan of one Victor Timely.
Seeing him as a normal human, Tao lost interest and even if he tried doing anything, it felt like pettiness.
A copied Tempad now rested in his hand. He slowly walked through and beyond the Citadel's windows, back into the void. He had already recreated the white streams of the universe's spatial construct as he'd mused, and now he stored the two shimmering spheres within his internal world.
"...So now that I've figured out how to anchor myself to this reality," he muttered to the endless nothing, "Where to enter? what to do? Or I could..."
He knew the answer. His attention returned to the device in his hand. The Tempad was a masterpiece of engineering at the edge of comprehension: near-infinite energy via entropy reversal, integrated temporal field mapping, local timestream control, mental control and manipulation, Energy projection and manipulation, layered self-protections.
Most of its principles were borrowed from the mind of the man still sitting inside.
With what I've learned ~ his knowledge, the domain rules, basic matter manipulation ~ I could replicate this. I could improve it. And he could do it all without any connection to He Who Remains, without alerting a single soul to his presence. The power to move through the story was now his to command.
A local laws, danced on the Tempad, exploding it and recombining at field interactions level reconjuring a better version with intact software, a simple bracelet that can project a display above his palm.
Having divine sense, the Library of Heavenly Paths for mapping, and matter-energy manipulation was like carrying an industrial toolbox into a paperclip factory. Everything felt like overkill. Still, he filed that thought away and stepped through the time-door far outside the Citadel's influence.
The door flickered. It opened. Then it didn't.
Typical TVA tech, Tao muttered internally. Looks reliable. Isn't.
He knew the problem was his, not the device's. His shielding was too absolute, rejecting the local rules the door needed to function.
He relaxed his shield, just a fraction, allowing the recreated-linked reality's rules to brush against his form. The moment he did, a faint sensation of overlapping viewpoints flickered just within his domain ~ his worldline in past - a perfectly normal feeling for someone used to holding absolute control over his immediate reality.
He stepped through again. This time, the gateway held, albeit sputtering like an overworked elevator before sealing shut behind him.
## TVA Metropolis
His presence still set to null, he materialized in front of a guard clutching a pruning stick. The man's eyes scanned the hallway, lingering on the space where the time-door had just vanished.
"Morning shift?" Tao asked, the words fun, spoken out from his cloaked position. He'd become familiar with English, the apparent world language, during his stay in the Void.
The guard twitched, looking around. "Who said that?"
"Nobody." Tao walked past him, invisible as a astral soul. TVA guards. Very professional.
Thus his first real conversation in new reality was with an office worker.
The first thing he noticed was the time flow ~ or the strict lack of linearity. It was like the Citadel, but controlled, bureaucratized. A place where paperwork ran the timeline. Still, the rules here explicitly allowed for cyclic traversal. Useful.
He scanned the interior: retro-tech corridors, endless filing cabinets, monitors glowing with an orange hue, everything smelling faintly of coffee and ozone. Like bureaucratic purgatory meets 1970s government office.
Deep below it all, he could feel the Loom, mechanically smoothing the branches of reality into a seamless loop. Here, the threads of timelines were tangible, not just visions.
***
How mortals managed such a leviathan system still amused him. After a lifetime in a cultivation world, he had grown accustomed to the idea that ordinary humans were fragile and limited. Seeing them here, running a temporal empire with clipboards, was surreal.
He drifted toward the windows lining a side hall, and for the first time he took in the metropolis beyond the TVA interior.
A colossal dome enclosed everything. Inside it, a city unfurled - the future trying hard pretending to be the past, while the so referred "past" wearing the bones of a civilization which is still thousands of years ahead of his own memories. There is this strange retro affectation - buildings molded with deliberate antiquity, signage styled after long- "dead" aesthetics.
It was the retro of a civilization so far in the future that its idea of "old-fashioned" still looked like advanced circuitry to him.
Flying vehicles glided on invisible rails. Zooming in, he felt the details; structural arcs bent in ways materials should not allow. Entire districts shimmered with technologies that felt closer to alien engineering than anything born of Earth he used to know.
He took a moment to consider that weird nostalgia he was getting at - like making him feel too ancient in a familiar reality. If he didn't have such amazing abilities to see through, understand the technologies and learn the developments in moments, he would have felt that work being done under the appearance must be relatable.
The birth of major religions of humans or even the fall of roman empire is close to my past time period than some of the people and technology outside, if we relate the developments.
And farther out, he noticed something even stranger: city-blocks frozen in distinct eras. Ancient Egyptian courtyards. Victorian streets reconstructed with surgical precision. Fragments of future Earth, stitched into the circle like samples in an archive.
These weren't neighborhoods built for culture. Some were case studies, some were sort of like high setup prisons or even containment rooms - controlled time-zones, arranged for oversight, interrogation, and paperwork. A control institution masquerading as a metropolis.
Outside the dome, the threads streaming toward the Loom were ceaselessly pruned. Resetting branching timelines here was an everyday routine - no ceremony, no spectacle. Just bureaucratic extermination: the erasure of entire possibilities with the same emotional weight as stamping a form.
The whole place resembled a three-dimensional microchip: stacked, structured, optimized for process rather than life. Kang's memories had shown him glimpses of this, but seeing it with his own perception - his cultivator senses parsing the architecture like energy diagrams - was perversely satisfying.
Penetrating such a fortress wasn't trivial. The layers of shielding, concealment, and phased barriers around the TVA were dense enough that anyone below his level would need divine sense or a TemPad just to notice it existed.
Outside the initial curiosity, he felt the emotional energy of people of city, it was a mix of duty and boredom, suffocation, uncertainity and emptyness. Keeping such a system without people questioning themselves require all sort of controls in place, and he felt it was more like in automated pigpen than a city. Humans aren't designed for such cohesive, efficient and boring work, at least evolution didn't quite catch up to fix those underlying issues in just few millennia.
Switching back to normal vision, he felt the hum of a nullifying field in the background ~ a power dampener. His Qi felt slightly pinched now that he was allowing the local laws to affect him.
Anti-magic, anti-mutant, anti-everything inconvenient. Ironically, the design borrowed heavily from the very beings it was meant to suppress.
"Even a ten-millionth drop in density and I can still taste it," he whispered.
To Tao, the suppression was little more than an itch. A lower cultivator or mortal sorcerer would have collapsed under the pressure, but he simply constructed a counter-field and let it fold neatly around his form, neutralizing the dampening without raising alarms.
He shifted his influence, containing it entirely within himself. No reason to trigger alarms. Any minor interference would just register as a normal Tuesday in TVA history.
## A Short Rest
He moved past a few running guards, descending in an elevator using a stolen ID badge. Muzak played softly. He'd already copied an agent's uniform, face, and surface memories, his soul and soul armor momentarily transforming into the perfect replica. Just like he choose to let others hear him, he could adjust his perception even when momentarily existing out of tune with reality.
The elevator operator glanced at his badge. "Didn't expect to see you out of the archives," he said.
"Yeah," Tao replied, mimicking the voice he'd pulled from the man's mind. "Got reassigned. Temporal anomalies audit section." The operator nodded, half-asleep. "Right. Coffee machine's still on floor three."
"Thanks," Tao said, stepping off.
His cover held. He was looking out for how the interactions would remain consistent.
The way the effect ripples from the cause is fascinating, he thought, simultaneously aware of both. He could operate well under a set threshold, and no one noticed a thing. Not even A.I.
The person I met wouldn't meet my persona any time soon in the thread of their world line.
## Pocketing Trinkets
His destination was the storage vault where captures' items were kept ~ not just the causes of branching, but all sorts of confiscated artifacts including items the TVA didn't understand but refused to throw away.
Workers moved methodically through the aisles, their faces unfamiliar ~ nothing like the actors he remembered from another life; all had the same TVA glaze - monotony lacquered onto skin.
A clerk looked up from a clipboard. "Return slips?" Then, with deliberate mischief:
"Filed yesterday, by the way do you know what fish is?" Tao asked smoothly.
The man shrugged "Nope. Let me guess.. did a loose variant running around ask you? Is it a condition? This is the second time I was being asked. Ahh..don't care" and went back to stamping a stack of glowing forms.
Each stamp emitted a small, defeated chime.
Yep that must be Casey, and he just confirmed what I saw in kang's version of TVA Story and the story point I am in.
Tao followed the energy signatures to a desk, opened a drawer next to an empty cabinet, and found a pile of stones. Three in particular caught his attention, each a different color. But all the expected colours are also not present. Here, they were paperweights. Elsewhere, they'd shape universes.
He pocketed them into his transformed armor. The cause and effect in the room wobbled slightly, like a desk fan out of balance, but it remained within the acceptable threshold. No cosmic alarms blared. There was no need to waste precious creation energy on shielding office trinkets.
An announcement buzzed just as he was stepping out: "Reminder: Do not use confiscated items to hold memos. Disciplinary action will be non-linear if found missing."
He left the Vault before anyone could ask why a mid-level analyst needed three stylish, glowing stones.
## Library
Moving invisibly through the office spaces, he found a poster that read: "Welcome to Records & Archives: Filing Made Simple."
The place was a library designed by an overworked bureaucrat: endless metal cabinets, towers of scrolls, glowing cubes stacked like office supplies, all stamped with indecipherable codes. He lowered his concealment and assumed another agent's form, a perfect forgery complete with a buzzing badge.
He slid into an empty station, picking up a pamphlet titled "Best Practices for Nexus Incident Filing" as cover. Miss Minutes had tried to pop up on his TemPad earlier; he'd disabled her with a thumb press.
Not today, cartoon clock, he thought. He was onto something else.
His modified TemPad hummed as it bypassed failsafes. HWR had built layers of redundancies to stop exactly this, but Tao had already gutted the synthetic intelligence link and sidestepped them all without the system's knowledge.
Files streamed in: Loom schematics, Miss Minutes' source code, internal memos about "existence quotas." He'd gotten most of this from HWR's own mind, but finding it all here was convenient. If he ever needed to give this information away, he now had a pristine, non-mental copy.
Convenient. No meddling required.
## In My Own Thoughts
Why am I sitting here reading all this? he wondered.
Well, while one part of his mind was processing the data on the screen, another was sorting through the colossal information backlog via the LoHP.
The real issue fermenting inside him was simple, heavy, stubborn:
Freedom.
It stemmed from a fundamental conflict: he was a being made of and bound by laws, however grand, existing for his own power and existence ~ yet he was trying to live amongst or within beings who scripted the laws themselves.
He breathed ~ spiritually ~ and let the LoHP's data settle. Earlier, in the void, every subtle energy field in the cosmos had pulsed against his senses. The consciousness of stars, the foundations of magic and science, abstract concepts themselves had lined up like employees at shift change.
It was a lot to normalize, especially with the recent, sharp increase in his abilities. The dull, bureaucratic atmosphere of the TVA was almost oddly grounding - comforting.
But beneath the monotony, he sensed turbulence.
What he had found was this: trouble lurked beneath it all. With his paramita-level cultivation, he could slip into the category of non-linear beings here, but integrating, truly existing here, came at a cost.
Those beings lived outside sequence, existing in every state at once, shifting only through interaction.
Every gain meant a loss.
Every expression of existence was tangled with non-existence.
Integrating directly without his shield meant facing a choice: lose his chaos and soul cultivation to accept a pre-existing template of life in this reality, or become an abstract source for new concepts within it.
Integrating with this cosmos wasn't simple. It was stable for now because he was actively translating the rules imposed on reality. But this wasn't a static cosmos.
It was alive.
It recorded everything thrown at it.
And I am not giving it back proper feedback ever since I am translating the rules through my domain.
His existence here risked introducing concepts foreign to its balance if feedback ever crosses a limit who knows what —> true cultivation system, continuous growth, Truth: prototypes fully realized instead of just myths or half assed set ups like the 'jade emperor' in marvel:
Yeah apparently LoHP digged out a memory of mine from the movie Thor Love and Thunder with a mythical god appeared in the Omnipotent city credited as Jademurai , he is the ruler of TaLo or Xian Pantheon who is supposed to be having a cultivation style setup. A caricature of cultivation, not the real thing.
Power here was inherited or bestowed; his method was… designed. Dropping it whole into this place to observe means that the possibility of such is created which would distort everything to find a new balance.
*****
In source world of apotheosis the soul cultivation of previous reality initially worked seamlessly because of the same reason I could integrate them under my domain.
One system is a variant or derivation of other. There is a balance to it under the grand concept of cultivation. It was not supposed to be that stable process but the mix of creation energy refinement, adaptation, ever present domain shielding auto translating rules before he had control, and finally with addition of unified perfected cultivation system, in practice made it easier.
But even he had to pause it for a while as keeping one dominant was a better choice back then, when he hadn't got this control over cultivation and other reasons.
To do the same here, there should be something of comparable ones that I am used to. But the only law on this reality is that there is no absolute law to begin with. Everything is part of a cosmic dream - a relative truth the more you get a feel of it.
Reality was a dream negotiating its own logic.
A poster on the wall next to where he sat on the library read: "Reminder: Nexus Events Are Not Break Times"
Sensible. Not giving me a break.
If I wanted to be all powerful as some omnipotent being I could do that within Source World itself. But I am not speed running to the ultimate prize anyway. Nor does fighting for supremacy against controller of this reality give me any shit.
Anyway, if I can't fully merge and only translation of rules is allowed, be it that way. Don't tilt the scales too much. Explore within the domain.
He drew a breath - or its closest metaphysical equivalent -and prepared to see what this universe would reveal next.
After nearly forty minutes of sorting information and ignoring increasingly irritated "Break Time Exceeded" alerts, footsteps approached his desk.
"Mind if I sit down?"