The dragon's harem

Chapter 1463: Time is a Lie

Arad stood and looked around. He’ll leave the bath first, and the girls will follow him. It won’t take him a long time to wear his clothes, unlike them.

As the maids saw Arad stand, nine of them did the same and were ready to follow him. But, to their surprise, all of the water dripping across his body evaporated in a second, and his armor appeared covering his whole body out of nowhere.

”Take your time. I’ll be going first.” Arad then disappeared, leaving everyone in the bath staring at nothing.

”He used the void to get rid of the water and then directly put on his clothes from his stomach.” Mathilde looked at where Arad had stood a second ago.

”He can freely swap clothes, armor, and weapons out of his stomach.” Merida stood, shaking the water from her hair. ”We better get moving as well.” She looked at the maids with a gentle smile, ”Sadly, you’ll only serve us today.”

****

Arad appeared in the middle of the wooden mansion, shrouded in his void. Plum was still on his head, and she stood, shaking the water out of her body.

”Cold!” She cried as leaves covered her whole body as a dress, and she then flew out and looked at Arad, ”I built this place. Doesn’t it look nice?”

”Just one room?”

Opposite to Plum’s expectations, Arad had the same reaction as D, asking why she made just one massive living room instead of multiple small ones. Since that didn’t matter now, Plum waved her hand and absorbed the whole mansion back into her magic, only leaving D’s things, which she collected in a basket.

”We just needed a roof over our heads, the details would’ve been just a waste of mana.” She handed the basket to Arad, and he stored it in his stomach for D to collect later.

The branches looked different; they were a bit higher than he expected. Mathilde must’ve flown a huge distance with everyone. Since they didn’t wake him up, they probably didn’t face anything they can’t handle.

Arad looked up. He can already see the sky above the top branches, a golden sun shining down with pride, and countless white clouds slowly drifting toward the horizon.

”A day, or two at most.” He started floating, prompting Plum to latch onto his hair.

Arad then landed back down and took a step forward. The wood of the branch cracked beneath his foot, and the bark shattered into splinters. He swung his arm forward, swiftly pulling it back and making a spin with his void quickly surrounding him like dark mist.

”Why are you dancing?” Plum asked, but Arad didn’t reply.

He wasn’t dancing, he was checking the threads of space all around him, flicking them one by one like the strings of a guitar to see how much tension they were under. Based on the pitch of the sound they made, the way they vibrated, and how they reacted to Arad’s void, he could tell which ones were more stable than the others.

Green flames started burning from Arad’s back, and the stars in the sky grew brighter, forcing their existence to show across the blue sky. For a moment, Plum was confused by what she saw, but quickly realised what was happening.

With each thread that Arad touched, the space around him shifted, refracting the light around him as well as diluting time. The threads of time and space were intertwined, and it was almost impossible to constantly mess with one without affecting the other.

This was Vorvadoss’s space magic, and Arad was trying to take it to a whole new level. Instead of just finding which thread leads to his destination and using that to catapult himself, he now needed to test the treads and find the sturdiest one.

Since Vorvadoss’s magic wasn’t equipped to do that, Arad had to use his own void as a catalyst, and nothing beats his void form when it comes to this. Void Dragons were space dragons; their main ability was bending the law of space to their will.

In his void form, Arad’s whole body becomes akin to the threads of space. The threads were as easy to tell apart as it was confusing, since they didn’t just respond to stress, but to compression and expansion. The faster someone moved, the slower time flowed for them, but that was just an illusion, not a reality.

Speed is just a function of space crossed in a given time. That means that the faster someone moved, the less time they needed to cross a certain space, and the reverse was also true. With the speed of light being the upper ceiling, at the extreme, the time needed to cross a certain distance becomes so small that it’s negligible, thus making it take zero time to cross any space at the speed of light.

At first, Arad couldn’t wrap his head around all of that, and he thought that he would need to reach the speed of light like Betty to understand it. But now he found his answer, and it was simple.

All thanks to one mistake the triplets of fate made. They attacked Dendron in front of him.

The answer was that time wasn’t real, it was just the Triplets’ way of logging the events of the world. It wasn’t that John needed Arad’s help to change a timeline; he needed the power of a void dragon to do the work.

That was what John meant by saying he couldn’t interfere with timelines directly; it was because he was merely an observer, someone who is sitting and watching the loom of the fates spin, each thread being a whole timeline.

How will that help Arad now? The answer was simple. He can just do what he did when John sent him to the future. First, force time to slow down to almost a halt, he can’t jump straight into a working loom and expect not to get crushed.

With the loom slowed to a safe speed, Arad used the first power he got as a void dragon, the essence of all of his might. Void Step, and mixed it with Vorvadoss’s magic.

The space around Arad compressed, and the threads snapped as he blinked out of existence alongside poor Plum, who was on his head.

Four thousand kilometers upward, a mist of blood appeared, soon followed by a thundering boom.

From the mist, Arad’s body reformed as he barely managed to stay afloat. It seems he made a huge mistake; there was a wall in his path, the wall of the limited space in his domain. While he managed to slow time enough inside his four thousand kilometer radius, once he hit that limit, it was like a snowball hitting a steel wall.

But what did he find? At first, Void Step could only teleport him inside his domain, and do it at the maximum speed of mana, which was a third of the speed of light. But with what he achieved now, Void Step was still limited to his domain, but it allowed him to freely move as fast as he wanted within that barrier, but stopping was another matter.

”With no time or space to slow me down, my speed keeps accelerating, and I’ve got no way of changing my direction until I hit the wall. I might be a bit too young for this.” He looked up to speak to Plum and paled. She was on his head, she didn’t turn to dust, did she?

Plum did get evaporated into atoms.

”Damn it!” Plum appeared once again above Arad’s head and swung a kick down as hard as she could. ”If my real body weren’t far away, I would’ve died.” She only survived because this fairy body wasn’t her real one.

Arad was about to apologize, but Plum interrupted him, ”You can make it up for me later. But for now, what will happen if you did this to some poor bastard?”

”Besides other void dragons, John, or maybe light dragons like Betty and Luminus, everyone else should just die. Unless they aren’t using their real body like you.” Arad replied, and Plum nodded.

”Whatever you did, it’s not something anyone can survive. So what was it?”

”Well, imagine shoving a whale through a needle’s hole.” He smiled, and Plum frowned.

”I can’t, but I can imagine something else, with me and you.”

”Forget it!” Arad growled, ”Just, I removed time out of my path and moved through the fabric of space as fast as I could, which caused me to move really fast, almost instantly.”

Plum didn’t understand a word of what he said, besides maybe removing the time that probably meant stopping it. ”Cool, next time warn me before putting me through a meat grinder.”