I am Time.
Not the time you check on your wrist when you're running late. Not the time that marches forward on clocks hanging in quiet classrooms or ticks away in hospital waiting rooms. Not the abstract concept philosophers debate over wine, or the cruel enemy that steals your youth, or the gentle friend that supposedly heals all wounds.
No.
I am something... deeper than that. Something far more fundamental.
I am the Time that connects life to death—the invisible thread stitching together your first breath and your last. I am the Time that gives meaning to existence itself, the silent rhythm beneath every heartbeat, every thought, every choice. I am the Time that exists beyond beginnings and endings, beyond creation and destruction. For me, there is no "before" or "after." There is only the eternal now, stretched across infinity like a canvas painted with every possibility.
Why?
Because,
I m created by the Mother. She brought me into being for a singular purpose: to serve as the arena for her two children.
God and Devil.
They stand on opposite sides of me, their eternal chess match sprawling across my infinite surface. And the Mother? She watches from beyond, her gaze never wavering, never interfering. Just... observing. Like me.
The game has grown vast beyond comprehension. What began as simple moves—light versus shadow, order versus chaos—has now spread across all Nine Mortal Realms.
And I have see everything.
Everything that has happened—every empire that rose and fell, every love that bloomed and withered, every child's first step and every warrior's final stand. Everything that will happen—the wars yet to be fought, the discoveries waiting in darkness, the meetings between souls that haven't been born yet. Everything that could happen—the infinite branching paths, the roads not taken, the choices unmade.
For me, it's all the same. All equally real. All equally present.
I am the narrator of this story.
I am the listener of this story.
I am the writer of this story.
And yet, I am merely an observer. Completely detached. Never interfering. Never participating. Just... watching.
But here's a secret that might surprise you: I have favorites.
Yeah, I know. Everyone thinks Time is supposed to be this cold, impartial force—completely unbiased, utterly indifferent. Some grand cosmic accountant just tallying up the seconds without caring what fills them. But that's not quite true. When you exist as long as I have, when you've witnessed everything there is to witness... you start to develop preferences. You start to notice patterns. You start to care.
And sometimes, when all things come to their inevitable end—when civilizations crumble, when heroes fall, when stories reach their final chapter—I find myself wondering: Could it have gone differently? Could there have been another way?
That's when I come here.
I come to places where everything changes. Where the flow of destiny bends and shifts like a river changing course. Where the future stops being predictable and starts becoming... interesting.
I come to battlefields.
Not just the physical kind—though those are fascinating in their own right, with their clashing steel and roaring magic. No, I come to the real battlefields. The ones that exist in the space between heartbeats. The mental arenas where true magic happens. The moments where souls burn so bright they threaten to rewrite the very fabric of reality itself.
Places like this.
Right here. Right now.
I come to where Prince Agni—small, fragile, broken Agni—fights against his senior, Raul.
The Frostwind Tundra stretched out beneath me as I manifested, my consciousness settling into the frozen landscape like frost forming on glass. The air was sharp with cold, but it wasn't the temperature that made this place special. It was the heat. The burning, desperate, beautiful heat radiating from two souls pushing themselves beyond their absolute limits.
I stood on the churned-up ice—though "stood" isn't quite the right word for what I was doing. I existed there, present and watching, invisible to mortal eyes but absolutely, undeniably there.
And I looked at their faces.
Agni's face was a mess—blood streaming from his broken nose, skin pale from blood loss, void-slit eyes blazing with twenty-four geometric patterns that shouldn't exist in a human being. His right arm was gone, torn apart by the stress of combat. His left arm was literally burning, the flesh charring and peeling away as he prepared to detonate it like Serina had done with her staff. His body was shutting down, systemically failing, minutes—no, seconds—away from complete collapse.
But his expression...
Oh, his expression was glorious.
There was no fear there. No hesitation. No regret. Just pure, crystalline determination. Just that burning desire to prove something—to himself, to the world, to me.
The desire to be immortal against Time itself. To be undefeated against Death itself.
And Raul... Raul was grinning like a madman, his blue hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and blood,he was laughing. Actually laughing. His orange and purple aura crackled around him like a living storm as he prepared his ultimate technique—Life Destructor—with enough force to vaporize the small prince entirely.
One of them was so close to death he could probably taste it. Both of them knew exactly what they were risking. And neither of them cared.
This.
These desires—these burning, desperate, beautiful desires—they're usually hidden away. Buried deep beneath layers of social conditioning, fear, shame, practicality. People ignore them. They're afraid of what others might think. They tell themselves to be reasonable, to be safe, to survive rather than truly live.
But when their backs are against the wall... when their souls finally sync with their bodies in perfect, terrible harmony...
They shine. Oh, how they shine.
They shine brighter than any star. Brighter than any sun. They shine with a light that pierces through the darkness of entropy itself, defying me—defying Time—with every ragged breath.
I wanted to see this. I needed to see this.
I wanted to see how Agni would die trying. How he would burn himself to ash in pursuit of one more second, one more strike, one more Chain Strike. How he would detonate his own arm—his own flesh and blood—just to land one final blow against an opponent so far beyond his level it should have been laughable.
But then...
Professor Gareth materialized between them, his legendary shield—the Aegis of the Mountain King—absorbing Raul's ultimate technique as if it were nothing. As if all that concentrated force and passion and purpose was just... insignificant.
Professor Whisper cast her spell, her voice trembling with suppressed emotion: "Forced Slumber: Dreamless Void."
And Agni fell.
The burning arm extinguished. The void-slit eyes faded. The twenty-four geometric patterns dissolved back into normal human pupils.
The moment ended.
The flame died.
I m... angry.
No, that's not strong enough. I m furious. Absolutely, incomprehensibly furious in a way that transcended mortal understanding of emotion.
At this very moment—at this precise instant where past, present, and future converged into a single point of blazing possibility—I want to manifest fully. Not just as an observer, but as a physical presence. I want to appear directly in front of Professor Gareth and punish him. Punish him for stealing this moment from me. For cutting short something so rare, so precious, so impossibly beautiful that it only happens once in a millennium.
I want to feel what these souls were feeling. The moments of passion and enlightenment. The transition from ignorance to understanding. The exact instant when a person realizes what they're truly capable of—when they shed the limitations they've placed on themselves and become something more.
Ah... I'm jealous.
It's pathetic, really. I, who have existed since before existence had meaning, am jealous of these fragile, temporary beings. These humans,these creatures who can be snuffed out by a single well-placed blade or a moment of bad luck.
But they have something I can never possess.
They have the privilege of not knowing. The glory of discovery. The rush of growth. The intoxicating sensation of change.
I am all-knowing. All-seeing. I exist across every moment simultaneously, witnessing every possible outcome, every potential path. My existence lacks the very thing that makes existence worth having—the ability to be surprised. The capacity to not know what comes next
And I... I can never feel them.
.
These are privileges of the living—and I am not alive. I never have been. I never can be.
The simple fact is this: the Mother decided that only the living may enjoy such moments. Only those with finite existences can experience the desperate beauty of defying that finitude.
No wonder the Devil constantly claws at it, trying to consume and possess that flame of mortality.
No wonder God, for all his pride and pretension of protection, desperately clutches that same flame in his celestial hands, hoarding it like a miser.
They're both jealous too.
I turned my attention back to Agni's unconscious body as Professor Helena teleported him away in a flash of silver light, rushing him to the medical bay where emergency healers would fight to keep him alive.
What have you done, Agni?
The question echoed through every moment, every timeline, every possibility I could perceive.
How could you—a mere human, a fragile prince who couldn't even protect his own arm—have made God and the Devil jealous of you?
Do you even realize the consequences of what you've just done?
Your actions have sent the dominion rolling, spiraling out into something that no one—not even I—can fully predict. You've created ripples that will spread across all Nine Realms.
All of them will be affected by what you did here today.
And among all the chaos... among all the infinite branching possibilities spiraling out from this single moment...
God and the Devil are watching you at its center.
Curiosity.