THE GOD EATER

When Tepid Scholar heard Black Chain’s reply, he knew that the Dao Lord of the Four Directions Sect was about to deny what he did. But instead of getting angry, Tepid Scholar began to laugh. ”Hahaha!”

As he laughed, he said, ”Well done. I should have known. But I still fell for it. You successfully fooled me. You’re really impressive.”

Meanwhile, Loki was moving backwards. This started after he set the end point for the time loop and activated the Time Loop Metac.

After the second anchor was set up in the river of time, the power of the Time Loop Metac sent him back to the first anchor. So he was immobile in space. All of his motion was in time.

His consciousness was jumping from one version of himself to the other. The direction of the travel was into the past. So it looked as if he was moving backwards through space.

As time unwound around him, scenes of everything that had just happened flashed past him. Everything was happening in reverse.

At the start, when he activated the Time Loop Metac, it nearly failed. Something was pulling him from the front, so he nearly failed to move from the second anchor at all.

Intuitively, he knew that what was pulling on him was inside Tepid Scholar. There was something in the Dao Lord of the Myriad Phenomenon Sect that was refusing to let him go.

Because of this, the thing inside Tepid Scholar served as an anchor that wasn’t under his control, so he had to overcome the power of this anchor before he could move. He succeeded, but it caused a lot of lifespan to come pouring out of him.

After the force tying him to the Tepid Scholar was broken, he was able to continue moving back in time. But just as he started moving again, he encountered more things that were holding him back.

The second unwanted anchor came from Black Chains. It appeared at the moment he assimilated the Death Supreme Metac.

The third anchor came from Sword Maestro. This one appeared at the exact time he assimilated the Killing Supreme Metac.

The fourth unplanned anchor came from Golden Sun and the Luck Supreme Metac. This anchor came into existence just before he assimilated Golden Sun’s Supreme Metac.

A fifth anchor came from Golden Sun’s Cave Heaven. It appeared at the moment he devoured Golden Sun’s Cave Heaven and remained with him until he moved past the moment he found the Cave Heaven.

The second to the fourth anchors weren’t as strong as the first one, though. In fact, the power of the three of them combined didn’t reach up to 10% of the force of the anchor within Tepid Scholar. So the amount of lifespan he spent to overcome them wasn’t much.

However, the force of resistance from Golden Sun’s Cave Heaven was the strongest of the five anchors. He actually failed to break this anchor. The anchor left him on its own after he moved past the period of time where he made contact with Golden Sun’s Cave Heaven.

After these five anchors, he encountered one more anchor. This anchor was the strongest one yet. The worst part was that the anchor was ever present along the length of time he was traveling through.

The force of the anchor was everywhere around him. It was coming from the entire Blessed Heaven World.

It seemed like the world was trying to resist him and his time-traveling shenanigans. It grabbed hold of him and refused to let go. So Loki had to break off its hold by force.

As his lifespan drained out of him in previously unseen levels of consumption, he thought to himself, ’Damn it. I forgot that this world also counts as a Cave Heaven. It is also a Cave Heaven that is not under my control. The Time Loop Metac is truly much more problematic than the Rewind Metac.’

The force of the world holding him seemed to get stronger by the moment. The resistance to his traveling through time increased in might, so the energy consumption also increased.

This made Loki consider a terrifying possibility. He was shocked as he thought, ’Will I fail?’

’What if I didn’t have enough lifespan? Will the Time Loop Metac fail entirely or stop at the point I run out of lifespan? Or will I die?’

An even more terrifying possibility appeared in his mind, which made him ask himself, saying, ’If I fail, is it possible that I pull the will of the world and the consciousness of everyone affected by the Time Loop with me into the past too?’

This possibility sounded insane, but it was definitely possible since he had done something like it to the Time Traveler. In fact, not only did he succeed in keeping his memories of their fight through the time loop, he refused to be affected by it even physically.

So after he thought about this possibility, he couldn’t dismiss it easily. Especially since the Time Traveler’s time loop was actually successful, but it still failed to work on Loki.

The memory of that event made him consider the possibility that there are powerful beings in the universe who aren’t affected by the Time Loop Metac or even the Rewind Metac and always remember everything that happened in each timeline.

’Time Traveler couldn’t affect me with the Time Loop because he wasn’t strong enough and didn’t have enough lifespan. I am not omnipotent, and I don’t have infinite lifespan. So it should be currently impossible for me to affect all of reality with the Time Loop Metac.’

’If this is true, and it should be, what kind of reality am I in? Is this still the same universe I knew from my past life? If it is, why didn’t we notice any of these extraordinary things going on from Earth?’

After asking himself several more agonizing questions that he tried and failed to answer definitively, he shook his head and said, ”Maybe I should stop overthinking time travel. I’ll only be scaring myself.”