The world fell silent once more.
The black-robed man remained kneeling where he was, completely motionless, like another statue in the chamber. All his strength and emotion seemed to have vanished along with the Raven Feather.
Nothing remained inside him but an empty numbness and the faintest spark of hope, one he hardly dared examine too closely.
'Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.'
Suddenly, something attached to the protective gear around his waist began to vibrate. It was a silver communication badge engraved with the emblem of the Department of Mysteries.
A soft white glow spread across its surface, and a calm, emotionless male voice sounded directly in his mind through an encrypted transmission.
"Cleanup mission code 'Abyssal Echo' has exceeded its allotted time. External monitoring indicates that high-energy activity within the target area has ceased. Confirm your condition and mission status.
"Repeat: confirm your condition and mission status.
"Per protocol, once mission completion is confirmed, you are required to report immediately to the Purification Chamber.
"Respond."
It was the Department of Mysteries' logistics and monitoring team. They had clearly been watching the energy fluctuations in this area the entire time.
Saruman's death had brought the high-energy reactions to an end. Whether those people realized what Saruman was actually planning was another matter. Of course, even if they had, it probably wouldn't make much difference, after all, every one of them owed Saruman a great deal.
"The Purification Chamber..."
The black-robed man knew that place all too well. It was the final destination for every "Scavenger" who carried out cleanup missions in heavily corrupted zones. They weren't simply executed; instead, they underwent complete "purification." Though, to be fair, the end result was often pretty similar: death.
There were survivors, of course. Just not very many.
The Purification Chamber's mechanism was relatively straightforward.
It was another of Saruman's alchemical achievements, combining a powerful ancient magical formation with holy artifacts to strip away, disperse, or at least permanently seal the corruption accumulated within an operative's body. It could succeed, but successful cases were exceedingly rare.
For most Scavengers, their souls had already become too deeply intertwined with the corruption. During purification, they either collapsed completely or mutated into something even more horrifying.
And even those who survived usually paid a terrible price, their power might be completely gone, or their memories fragmented. In the end, they became "clean" but broken people who required constant supervision for the rest of their lives.
Still, the Department wasn't simply throwing its people away once they'd outlived their usefulness. Aurors were valuable personnel, and every Scavenger knew the risks when they joined. This was the price someone had to pay to maintain the seals.
The black-robed man didn't fear death, nor did he reject purification. He had accepted that fate long ago.
But...
He lowered his gaze toward Saruman's peaceful face, then looked up at the empty space where the Raven Feather had disappeared. He wanted to see it. Even if all he could do was wait a little longer, he wanted to know whether his teacher had truly succeeded.
Could that feather really carry Saruman's soul against the current of time and return him to R'lyeh a thousand years in the past? Could his teacher really change Kag and Lina's fate? Could he change the outcome of that tragedy?
Curiosity was both a wizard's greatest strength and one of their greatest enemies, and the black-robed man couldn't stop himself from wondering.
If Saruman succeeded, would history change, even slightly?
Perhaps the difference would be so tiny that no one else in the world would notice. But he knew what had happened. Would he sense it somehow?
Or would the world itself give him some kind of... positive response?
The more he thought about it, the more desperately he wanted an answer. So, for now, the black-robed man didn't want to go to the Purification Chamber. He needed to wait. Just a little longer. Even one more moment. A few more minutes.
The communication badge lit up again, its message now carrying a clear sense of urgency.
"Respond immediately. Vital-sign monitoring indicates extreme instability. Corruption index is at critical levels. Repeat: proceed immediately to the Purification Chamber."
The black-robed man slowly reached down. Using what little strength he had left, he removed the communication badge from his waist.
He didn't answer, nor did he turn it off. He simply placed it gently on the floor, then leaned back against the cold wall and slowly slid down until he was sitting beside Saruman's body.
He closed his eyes.
The badge continued vibrating, the repeated warnings sounding inside his mind, but he ignored them. He simply waited.
Waited for a miracle that might never come.
Waited to see whether Saruman's final gamble would send even the faintest, almost imperceptible ripple through the river of history.
---
The turbulence of time and space could not be described in any mortal language. There was no direction here, no up or down, no past or future.
There were only countless shattered, uncontrolled fragments of flickering light and shadow, while pieces of contradictory and paradoxical information swept through everything like an endless storm.
The closer it came to its destination, the stronger the anchor became. Whispers of madness from R'lyeh drifted through the chaos.
There was the blinding flash from the magic formation, the startled cries of Saruman and the other two as they were dragged inside, and even the faint echoes of wars from far more ancient ages. There were even fleeting glimpses of possible futures that had yet to happen.
Through this impossible place, a single point of dark silver light traveled onward like a tiny boat struggling through a raging sea. It was the sanctuary created by the Raven's tail feather.
Inside rested Saruman's soul core, the spiritual essence containing a thousand years of accumulated wisdom, memories, emotions, and his purest, most unyielding obsession. It seemed to be sleeping, or perhaps it was "perceiving" everything outside in a way that ordinary minds could never understand.
He was a Legendary, after all. He could hardly be considered an ordinary human anymore. Even Voldemort had been capable of sensing the outside world through fragments of his soul, and Saruman's soul was still completely intact.
And now, his theory had been proven correct. He really was traveling back into the past.
The feather's power wasn't brute-forcing its way backward through time. Instead, it followed the tangled threads of cause and effect connecting Saruman to R'lyeh, Ian Prince, Kag, and Lina across a thousand years.
Like a spider crawling across its own web, it searched for the weakest and most crucial node.
The Raven Feather was clever about it, too. It avoided the main branches of causality, which were far too heavy and firmly established to alter.
Instead, it precisely followed a smaller branch, the timeline created when Saruman and the other two were accidentally swept into the temporal turbulence.
Countless images raced backward. Countless voices faded into silence.
Then, at last, the dark silver vessel abruptly stopped. It had encountered something like an invisible yet incredibly resilient membrane: R'lyeh's temporal barrier.
The boundary separating that realm of madness from the normal flow of time was also the "wall" surrounding the temporary passage Ian Prince had forcibly opened with his magic formation.
'Can it get through?'
Even Saruman felt nervous now. Any ordinary soul, no matter how powerful, would have been instantly blasted apart upon colliding with a barrier containing both the aura of the ruler of the Old Ones and the lingering power of Legendary magic.
Or worse, it would be completely corrupted and assimilated.
But the Raven Feather was different. It seemed to possess an innate affinity for abnormalities and cracks in space-time.
The mysterious runes flowing across its surface began flashing rapidly, and its dark silver glow turned almost liquid, slowly and silently seeping into the barrier.
There was no violent clash, no spectacular explosion of energy. The process was as natural as water soaking into a sponge.
'I knew the Raven's feather could do it!'
And just like that, the feather carried Saruman's soul through the barrier and back into R'lyeh's chaotic, maddening structure of space and time.
But it didn't manifest in the physical world; instead, it existed in a far more concealed state, almost like information or a concept, attaching itself directly to the underlying rules of this space-time.
Like a virus hiding inside its host's genetic code, it waited quietly for the moment to activate.
Saruman wasn't impatient. He knew exactly what the Raven Feather was waiting for.
Its destination was clear: a thousand years ago, in the central plaza of R'lyeh City, at the exact instant Ian activated the magic formation. The flash of light. The sudden pull that dragged them in.
In the normal flow of time, that "instant" would have passed too quickly for anyone to act. But within R'lyeh's distorted space-time, and through the perception of the Raven Feather, that single instant could be stretched into a window wide enough to use.
As they drew closer, the dark silver light moved through the cracks between moments. Then, it found the exact coordinates.
Saruman sensed the violently surging energy of the magic formation, and he sensed three young, painfully familiar souls being dragged away by an irresistible force, stripped from their proper place in reality.
The elderly Saruman didn't even need to give the feather a command.
'Now!'
The Raven Feather stopped hiding and leaped out from the gap in space-time. Dark silver light surged outward, transforming into a thread so fine it was almost invisible, yet impossibly resilient.
It reached into the turbulent current and wrapped itself around one of the three souls, the one at the very center, the one with the strongest causal connection to Saruman.
Young Saruman.
At that very moment, the younger Saruman felt as though both his body and soul were being torn apart. His consciousness rose and fell helplessly within a raging flood of impossible information, on the verge of sinking into complete darkness.
'I'm definitely going to die, aren't I?' That was young Saruman's final thought.
Then...
An indescribably strange will reached him, gentle yet vast beyond comprehension. Like a mother's arms catching a falling child, it softly supported his fading consciousness.
Countless fragments of profound knowledge, memories, and emotions poured into the young Saruman like a broken dam: the true nature of magic, the mysteries of time, the horrors of R'lyeh, the fate awaiting Kag and Lina, and an obsession, a plan, that had endured for a thousand years.
All of it flooded into his young body at once.
"Ahhhhh...!"
A silent scream erupted from the depths of his soul. He felt as though his very existence were swelling and tearing apart, while something vast was forcibly being overlaid onto him, merging with everything he was.
But this wasn't possession; the elderly Saruman wasn't replacing his younger self.
Under the power of the Raven Feather, his thousand-year-old soul and accumulated wisdom were more like an impossibly massive operating system and database being forcibly installed onto hardware that had never been designed to contain so much information.
This was also why the elderly Saruman had known there would be no going back for him. Everything was happening exactly as he'd calculated.
Young Saruman's consciousness, memories, and emotions remained at the core of his existence, but the soul merging into him instantly expanded that core, elevating it and filling it with an ocean of knowledge that someone his age, with his limited life experience, should never have possessed.
The process was indescribably painful, and equally miraculous.
It seemed to last only an instant, yet it also felt as if another thousand years had passed.
Then, as the overwhelming flood of information finally began to settle and the agony in his soul gradually transformed into an almost painful sense of overflowing power...
Saruman's eyes snapped open.
What greeted him was no longer the darkness of an underground chamber a thousand years in the future, nor the bizarre chaos of temporal turbulence.
It was light, endless, breathtaking light from the magic formation, filled with a blasphemous yet strangely chaotic beauty.
The shriek of space being torn apart assaulted his ears, mixed with the thunderous roar of surging energy. An invisible force ripped violently at his body, dragging him toward the center of the light with a sickening sensation of weightlessness.
And close beside him, Kag was roaring in shock and alarm. On his back, Lina let out a faint, pained moan.
He was back. No, more accurately, the soul from a thousand years in the future had returned to where it belonged.
This young, vigorous body, already touching the threshold of Legendary, had become the vessel carrying a thousand years of wisdom and regret back to the single moment that had decided everything.
The winds of R'lyeh tore at Saruman's silver robes. The magic formation's radiance reflected in his silver eyes, which had suddenly become impossibly deep and complicated, as though they had already witnessed the rise and fall of countless ages.
The next second, the boundless light completely swallowed all three of them.
But the true "change" had already begun the instant Saruman's future soul returned.
Within the blinding light, the corner of Saruman's mouth curved upward ever so slightly. The smile was cold, decisive.
He was the elderly Saruman. He was also the young Saruman. But none of that really mattered.
What mattered was that Saruman now knew countless things he was never supposed to know. And he knew exactly what he had to do.
The teleportation continued. His consciousness rose and fell within the violent currents of energy and the tearing forces of space-time.
Now carrying a thousand years of wisdom inside a young body, Saruman forcibly stabilized his mind before the turbulence could scatter it again.
'So we're about to be sent before that monster...'
He felt himself being thrown into a corridor of pure chaos. The enormous green stones of R'lyeh were gone; all around him were rapidly spinning fragments of meaningless light and shadow, accompanied by piercing, incomprehensible noise.
Having eyes again was certainly a strange feeling. Of course, relying on ordinary sight in a place like this was practically useless.
Saruman forced open the far sharper perception he now possessed after the fusion, extending his 'Eye of the Heart' into the void. He wasn't looking for an escape route, that could wait. His first priority was to confirm Kag and Lina's condition.
And then... to find that all-important figure.
His spiritual senses spread outward like a spiderweb, struggling against the relentless turbulence. It didn't take long.
He found Kag first, a tough, resilient soul burning with shock and fury. Then Lina, her life force faint and tangled in corruption, flickering like a candle flame in the wind. Neither was far away; both were tumbling through the same chaotic void.
But just as Saruman tried to pinpoint their exact locations and consider how he might help them…
His Eye of the Heart suddenly caught something else.
An existence "above" them. Or perhaps "above" wasn't the right word; it was more like another layer running parallel to their falling trajectory, yet somehow existing on a higher dimension.
And there, someone was standing. Perfectly steady. Almost leisurely.
A young man dressed in simple black robes. His short black hair stirred gently in an energy breeze that shouldn't even have existed, revealing a face so handsome it bordered on unnatural, yet so cold it might have been carved from ancient ice.
Ian Prince.
"Cold. Shivering..."
"Looks like you're the one with the best physical condition among this batch of newcomers."
Saruman: "...?"
Even after merging with a thousand years of accumulated knowledge...
Even after inheriting countless forbidden secrets...
Even after gaining a deep understanding of just how powerful and mysterious Ian Prince truly was...
Young Saruman's face still went completely blank.
Shock. Confusion. Utter bewilderment.
To be fair... Saruman genuinely had no idea what the hell Ian was talking about.
(End Of This Chapter)
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