The sound wasn't loud. It wasn't an explosion of fire or gunpowder. It was the sickening, wet snap of reality breaking a bone.
The fake Stone of Serenity disintegrated.
For a moment, nothing happened. The shards of common glass hung suspended in the air, catching the light of the lanterns.
The crowd stood frozen, their cheers dying in their throats, their eyes wide with confusion rather than fear.
Then, the vacuum collapsed.
A shockwave of transparent, distorted energy erupted from the altar. It didn't push people back, rather passed through them.
"Lian!" Arthev screamed, scrambling to his feet.
He was twenty meters away. He lunged, his hand reaching out, but the shockwave hit him. He braced for impact, circulating his Soul Power to defend against a physical blow.
But there was no impact.
Instead, a wave of nausea slammed into him, dizziness so intense it felt like the ground had turned into the sky. The world spun. Arthev fell to his knees, clutching his head.
His eyes snapped open.
The Shinragan activated instantly.
Through these eyes, he saw the nightmare.
The valley wasn't just shaking, it was unraveling. The Anchor was gone. The spatial tear that the village sat upon, dormant for centuries, was now tearing open like a hungry maw, inhaling the time and space around it to fill the void left by the stone.
"What... what is happening?" a villager near him stammered. It was the burly man from the strength test.
Arthev watched in horror as the man's arm, the one he had used to ring the bell, began to wither.
In the span of a second, the muscle atrophied, the skin spotted with liver spots, and the bone turned brittle.
"My arm!" the man shrieked.
Then, just as quickly, the process reversed. The arm bloated, turning into the chubby, undefined limb of an infant, before snapping back to normal.
The man screamed, clutching his shoulder as the cycle repeated, old, young, dead, unborn, flickering like a broken image in a mirror.
"Get out!" Arthev roared, his voice cutting through the rising panic.
"Everyone! Run to the ridge! Get out of the valley!"
But they couldn't run.
The distortion was expanding. The cobblestones of the village square were weathering into dust and then reforming into jagged rocks. The wooden beams of the houses rotted away, collapsed, and then shot back up as green saplings.
Arthev looked down at his own hands. They were steady. He was the only person in the entire valley moving in linear time.
He was a fixed point in the storm for a reason he don't know.
Desperate, Arthev dived into his own consciousness.
'Shukaku! Matatabi! Isobu!' Arthev screamed internally, reaching for the immense power of the Tailed Beasts slumbering within him. '
I need power! Break this field!Use your soul power to stabilize the space!'
If he could access their power, rivaling that of Titled Douluos, surely he could force the barrier open.
But instead of a surge of power, he was met with a violent static.
'I CAN'T!' Shukaku roared back, his voice sounding distant and distorted, as if shouting through a thick wall of water.
'The air is eating soul power! If I release my power, it won't hit anything, it will just feed the void!'
'Do not draw on us, Arthev!' Matatabi's voice joined in, frantic and terrified.
'We are masses of pure, high-density energy. This is a spatial collapse! If you introduce a Titled Douluo level energy source into a vacuum, you will not fix it, you will cause a supernova! You will blow this entire mountain range off the map!'
'We have to lock down!' Isobu warned, retreating deep into his shell.
' The spatial shear is trying to pull us out of your body. We have to seal ourselves deeper just to keep you from exploding from the inside out! You are on your own, Arthev!'
'Wait! Don't...'
The connection slammed shut. The mental turned gray and silent.
Arthev gasped, snapping back to reality. His trump cards were useless. Using them would act like pouring gasoline on a forest fire.
He was truly alone.
"Elder Mu!" Arthev scanned the dais.
The altar was the epicenter. The distortion there was violent, a swirling vortex of white noise.
Elder Mu was gone, scattered across the timeline, a cloud of dust and a screaming infant occupying the same space until he simply unraveled into pure energy.
"No..." Arthev grit his teeth, forcing his body to move against the heavy, nauseating pressure of the atmosphere.
"Lian!"
She was there. Right at the center.
Because she had been kneeling directly in front of the stone, she hadn't been thrown back. She was trapped in the eye of the storm.
She wasn't flickering like the others. She was phasing.
To Arthev's enhanced vision, he saw her body splitting. One version of her was translucent, ghost-like.
Another was solid.
Another was just a silhouette of light.
She was vibrating between dimensions.
"Ar... thev..."
Her voice didn't come from her mouth. It echoed directly into his skull, sounding like it was coming from the bottom of a deep well and from right beside his ear at the same time.
Arthev reached the edge of the dais. He extended his hand, trying to grab her ankle to pull her out.
His hand passed straight through her leg.
It was like reaching into freezing water. The cold burned his skin, but there was no substance.
"Solidify!" Arthev commanded, "Damn it, stabilize!"
He managed to grab a flicker of her, the solid version. He pulled.
Lian screamed.
It wasn't a scream of fear. It was a scream of absolute, blinding agony.
"Stop!" she gasped, her eyes rolling back.
"It pulls... it pulls..."
Arthev let go, terrified. "Lian! Take my hand! Try to focus on me!"
She looked at him. Her face was contorted with pain, tears streaming down cheeks that were fading in and out of existence.
The flowers in her hair withered and bloomed in a rapid, sickening loop.
"I can't..." she wept, her voice breaking.
"I see... I see everything. I see the village dying. I see it being born. It hurts... Arthev, it hurts so much."
Arthev spun around, looking for a solution.
The village was a kaleidoscope of horror. The frantic screams of the villagers were merging into a single, high-pitched tone of suffering.
The blacksmith, the grandmother, the children he had seen playing, they were trapped in an infinite loop of biological destruction. They couldn't die. The time field wouldn't let them. They were being ground into dust and reassembled, over and over again.
"The seal!" Arthev looked at the shattered remains of the fake stone. "I need to reseal it!"
He activated his spatial storage bag, dumping out everything. Iron, spirit stones, weapons. He tried to pile them onto the altar to block the rift.
They vanished instantly. The rift ate the metal, aged it to rust, and disintegrated it in seconds.
'It needs a Spatial Anchor,' his mind calculated rapidly, coldly. 'A Grade-S artifact. I don't have one. The Beasts are locked out. My power is insufficient.'
He looked at Lian.
The energy wasn't just coming from the ground. It was channeling through her.
Because she had been connecting with the stone when it broke, she had become the new conduit. The chaotic energy of the rift was using her body as a bridge to enter this world.
As long as she existed in this state, the rift would remain open. And as long as the rift was open, the village would suffer this hell for eternity.
Arthev froze.
The tactical text in his mind stopped scrolling. The world narrowed down to a single, horrific equation.
Subject: Lian.
Status: Living Conduit.
Prognosis: Irreversible temporal fragmentation.
He couldn't pull her out. If he pulled her out, the connection would snap, and the rift would expand, likely swallowing the entire mountain range.
He couldn't plug the hole. He didn't have the materials.
There were only two variables left.
Option A: Do nothing. The rift eventually stabilizes in a few hundred years. The villagers remain trapped in this loop of dying and regenerating until then. Lian remains the conduit, suffering the sensation of being torn apart for centuries.
Or,
Option B: Destroy the conduit.
Arthev stumbled back, his legs hitting the edge of the stone steps.
"No," he whispered. "No. Not that."
He looked at Lian. She was looking at him.
Through the pain, through the phasing, she saw the realization dawn on his face. She saw the horror in his eyes.
And because she was connected to the rift, she saw it too. She understood the equation.
"Arthev..."
She reached out a hand. It flickered, skeletal, then fleshy, then childlike.
"It... never stops," she sobbed. "Make it stop."
Arthev shook his head violently.
"I'll find another way! I'll go get help! I'll find a Titled Douluo!"
"They... can't..." Lian's voice was fading.
"The pain... please. It feels like burning... forever."
She looked at the villagers, her friends, her mother, screaming in the time loop.
Then she looked back at Arthev. Her eyes, usually so full of warmth, were now filled with a pleading desperation that broke whatever was left of his heart.
"Cut the thread, Wolf-boy," she whispered, using the nickname she gave him. "Please. Save us."
Arthev stood there, the festival lights swirling around him in a mockery of joy.
The blue silk tunic he wore, the one she picked out because it meant peace, felt like it was strangling him.
He looked at his hand. He looked at her chest, where the vortex of energy was anchored to her heart.
He had to do it.
He had to kill the only person in two worlds who had made him feel at home.
"I'm sorry," Arthev choked out, tears finally spilling from his eyes, mixing with the chaotic energy in the air.
"I'm so, so sorry."
He stepped forward. His right hand raised, his fingers forming a knife-hand strike. Soul Power concentrated at the tip, sharp enough to pierce steel.
"Thank you," she mouthed.
Arthev screamed, a sound of pure, unadulterated rage and grief, and drove his hand forward.
To be continued.....