The chrono-chamber within the heart of the Imperial Palace was a place where causality went to die. Here, the air did not flow; it jittered in golden loops. The light did not travel; it sat in stagnant pools of past and future.
Aegis stood at the center of this temporal storm, his eyes glowing with the fractured brilliance of a thousand timelines. He was practicing the Ultimate Time Manipulation skill, a technique he had refined through decades of dilation but was only now beginning to master at an interstellar level.
With a flick of his wrist, Aegis snatched a falling drop of water from the air. He didn't just stop it. He accelerated the front half of the droplet by five seconds while reversing the back half by ten.
The water tore itself apart in a microscopic explosion of temporal friction before knitting back together into a perfect sphere that existed simultaneously as steam and ice.
