Translator: AnubisTL
Seeing that the other party's attitude wasn't too bad, Jieming felt a bit more at ease.
He took a deep breath and asked the most critical question:
"Excellency Artorius, may I ask... why have you personally... projected yourself to see me? Is there something you wish to instruct me on? Also, what exactly did you mean by 'adding variables' just now?"
Starforger Artorius's gaze once again fell upon the chart in front of Jieming, his kind smile seeming to deepen slightly.
"It's not so much an instruction," he said in a casual tone, as if discussing the weather. "As for the 'variables'... actually, your two questions are essentially one."
Without waiting for Jieming to fully digest his words, he shifted the topic to a more fundamental question, his tone that of a mentor guiding a student to a conclusion:
"After all these years of research, based on your current understanding, what is the true nature of the continuous time reversal in this plane?"
Jieming focused his mind, his gaze sweeping across the data streams on the chart.
The results of fifteen rounds of research rapidly integrated in his consciousness, stripping away the trivial details to point toward the most likely conclusion.
"It's not a natural phenomenon," Jieming said, his voice ringing clear in the silent laboratory. "The trigger conditions are too quantified, the range of effect strictly defined, and the way it handles 'memory contradictions'... It's more like a preset error-correction program."
"After synthesizing various scenarios, we believe that this plane—or its core structure—is a strategic war machine. Time reversal is its core function, allowing its internal combat units, the Scythe-Skull Race, to endlessly restart, trial-and-error, and wear down powerful enemies."
He was stating the research group's consensus, but as he spoke, he could feel the excitement behind the conclusion.
A world that forges an entire civilization into weapon components... The knowledge and technology behind such a feat... Just thinking about it is exhilarating!
Artorius nodded slightly, his expression conveying a sense of 'Not bad, you've seen this far.'
"To be more precise," Artorius added, "it is a temporal paradox generator. Ordinary time manipulation is a dance of water elements, a ripple in the laws of reality. But this machine, while reversing time, must systematically 'resolve' the resulting causal contradictions affecting all involved—conflicts in material states, information that is lost and then reappears, and fractures in memory logic. It forcibly 'rationalizes' these contradictions, which is its most defining characteristic as a 'machine.'"
Jieming immediately grasped the key.
Yes, he thought. The wizards' detection data had repeatedly shown that this plane's mechanism for processing "paradoxes" was fundamentally different from conventional space-time laws, as if it had built-in, specialized error-tolerance and override protocols.
If this plane were viewed as a machine specialized in creating and digesting temporal paradoxes, all the anomalies were explained.
A complete war system materialized in his mind: the Scythe-Skull Race served as the blade and the expendables; time reversal was the core; and the paradox-processing capability was the ultimate defense and a potential killing blow against advanced enemies.
The ruthlessness and ambition of the creator, who had deeply bound a plane to such a terrifying space-time weapon, were chilling.
As he pondered, Artorius's voice sounded again, calm yet imbued with the power to pierce the fog:
"You were just confused because you couldn't find the core object responsible for time reversal. This is natural; after all, as the heart of a war system, it must be hidden most securely. After personally experiencing several cycles, I have also seen through this. When dealing with a machine designed so precisely—where the core might simply be a 'non-intelligent inherent rule'—searching from the outside for an elusive 'controller' is often futile."
The Starforger tapped gently in the void, as if pressing down on the invisible pulse of the entire plane.
"I chose a different path: instead of searching for a weakness, I attempted to overload it."
Overload.
The word struck like a bolt of lightning, clearing the fog in Jieming's mind.
Artorius pressed on, guiding his line of thought: "No matter how inconceivable the machine's technology is, the fundamental principles behind achieving 'time reversal' share some common ground. Jieming, with your current knowledge, you should already know the most critical difficulty in achieving time reversal, shouldn't you?"
Jieming tapped into his own knowledge base.
"Computational power," he said slowly, his thoughts gradually crystallizing.
In Jieming's previous life, 'time' was not a tangible entity. So-called time reversal was essentially the precise replication of the states of all fundamental particles in the universe back to their past positions, according to some 'record'.
This required an unimaginable amount of information and computing power.
In the wizard world, although one could directly manipulate 'time' as a tangible entity, reversing all matter, energy, information, and even soul states within a certain range back to a precise point in the past—without creating any contradictions—still required processing an astronomical amount of data and performing a vast number of law-based calculations.
It was no exaggeration to say that the latter's computational requirements were no less than the former's.
This was why many wizards, even those who had mastered the Time Rules, only used time acceleration or deceleration to assist in combat.
Even for high-rank wizards, their computational power was still too limited to achieve localized time reversal.
"Any manipulation of time—or indeed, any manipulation of elements—requires immense computational power to process the resulting information."
"Precisely," Artorius affirmed.
"This machine's reversal range is confined to this plane. Theoretically, if we continuously inject new information and variables into this closed system, exceeding its preset processing capacity, we can overload its inherent 'error correction' and 'overwrite' logic. This will cause it to malfunction, lag, and eventually... crash from overload."
As the words fell, Artorius's entire strategy instantly became clear to Jieming.
The million-strong Vanguard Legion served as the "base number" and "anchor." They not only maintained basic combat power but also constituted the "fundamental information stream" that the system processed daily.
Wizards, by their very nature, contained vast amounts of information. A million-strong wizard legion possessed enough combat power to ensure they wouldn't be annihilated by the Scythe-Skull Race, who might otherwise exploit the information gap across countless reincarnations.
When the wizards' formations shifted, the larger the base legion, the more information changes were generated with each movement.
Moreover, every time a reinforcement squad—one of the thirty designated teams—entered the fray, it constituted an unplanned "major variable injection" for the system!
Artorius's eyes gleamed with the light of calculation. "According to my projections, this system can withstand approximately twenty-five 'significant tactical shifts.'"
Crucially, the entry of a single squad would inevitably force the Scythe-Skull Race to adapt, which would in turn trigger further tactical adjustments from the wizards.
Thus, a single injection of reinforcements would cause at least two "information shifts."
Thirty squads would mean at least sixty "transformative shocks"—far exceeding the system's capacity!
Even Frost's two Seventh-tier Adjutants, as high-tier individuals, were powerful sources of variables in their own right, capable of serving as the final straw that broke the camel's back.
"A plan... to overload a precision machine with 'surprises' and 'variables,'" Jieming murmured, his eyes shining with understanding.
But a new question immediately arose in Jieming's mind. "Excellency, if the goal is to introduce variables, why not enter the field yourself? The 'information volume' you carry and the 'variables' you could trigger would surely far exceed the sum of all our reinforcement troops."
The almost affable smile that always graced Artorius's face vanished.
He did not evade the question, instead showing a rare candor.
"Two reasons," he said, raising a finger. "First, the 'information volume' I bring is too vast. My true body's entry would not cause a 'gradual overload' but would instead instantly trigger the highest-intensity paradox countermeasures. It would be like smashing a pocket watch with a star—the watch would be destroyed, but we would be left with no salvageable wreckage to study. Our goal is to obtain a 'relatively intact' space-time machine, not a chaotic mess of Law Turbulence."
He paused, then raised a second finger. His tone grew more subdued, carrying an unmistakable gravity. "Second, I dread the temporal paradoxes this plane might trigger."
The "dread" of an eighth-tier wizard.
The word sent a chill through Jieming's heart.
Artorius's gaze swept over Jieming, his own nearly perfect "Mass Projection."
"Why do I only use a projection? Besides controlling the variables precisely, it is also because... in my current state, the moment my true body steps into this realm, there is an extremely high probability of directly triggering a paradox attack powerful enough to severely wound me."
He looked at Jieming, his eyes devoid of any hint of a joke. "In fact, I have already been injured once. When I first noticed the time reversal anomaly and judged that the situation had exceeded the norm, I forcibly intervened and pulled the entire legion out of a reincarnation cycle. That interference triggered the deepest countermeasures of this plane."
Jieming held his breath. "The injury... is it severe?"
"Very severe." Artorius nodded, his tone as flat as if he were stating an objective fact. "It took me a full three seconds to completely heal the wound."
Three seconds.
Jieming froze for a moment, and then a cold shiver seized him.
He knew all too well what these "three seconds" meant for an eighth-tier wizard.
Don't let the fact that it only took three seconds to heal make the injury sound like a joke.
In reality, as a wizard's level increased and their self-modifications deepened, their immortality also grew stronger.
For an existence at the level of an eighth-tier wizard, ordinary physical destruction and energy annihilation often didn't even count as "damage."
Even if the vast majority of their physical body were blown away, it would merely be a temporary change in their state of existence. A mere thought could restore it.
Only attacks that touched the foundation of the soul or the very level of one's existence could be defined as "injuries" that required "healing."
The healing time directly reflected the depth and lethality of the damage.
An injury that required an eighth-tier wizard to focus for "three seconds" to heal... its destructive power, in theory, was already enough to threaten Artorius's life!
"The most alarming thing about time-based abilities..." Artorius seemed to mind revealing this little, explaining calmly, "is that they can manipulate 'temporal sequence,' stacking multiple, massive amounts of damage to erupt in the same instant. If this machine were pushed to its limit and resorted to self-destruction, it would theoretically be possible to trigger the paradox attack against me tens of thousands of times in the same 'instant.' Such stacking..."
He did not continue, but Jieming had already seen the terrifying picture.
Even an eighth-tier wizard could be struck down by that time blade, accumulated to its absolute limit.
Although for an existence like an eighth-tier wizard, death did not mean they couldn't be resurrected, it was estimated that they would lose all their face in this lifetime.
And as an existence with infinite lifespan, sometimes, social death might be more painful to him than real death.
(End of the Chapter)
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