The standing Sagres watched the shifting expression on his future self's face and calmly pressed on, throwing the burden of choice back at him.
"Now you can no longer decide whether to kill me based on a clean observation, because the result is guaranteed to be contaminated by my interference. So what will you choose? Abandon the test, or risk some unpredictable consequence and kill me now?"
The anger on the future Sagres's face receded like the tide, replaced by a strange calm and even a hint of appreciative understanding.
He repeated the words Sagres had spoken earlier.
"Why are you still asking me that?"
He tilted his head slightly.
"Don't you already know the answer?"
With that, he suddenly let out a low laugh.
There was something complicated and difficult to decipher in it: relief, helplessness, and perhaps even a trace of pride.
"I knew it... Of course I would be able to solve this problem. After all, you are my past self."
The standing Sagres remained unmoved.
"So what is your choice?"
"No more testing."
The future Sagres answered decisively and waved a hand as though dismissing a boring idea.
"However, just in case. After all, we aren't the only ones capable of travelling through time. If some enemy were to return to the past and try to eliminate the problem at its root while I was still weak, that would be troublesome as well."
He extended one index finger, and a sphere of silver magical light swirled at its tip.
"I'll cast a Time Anchoring spell on you. It will firmly anchor your entire life trajectory, from birth until this very moment, within the river of time, like an anchor securing a ship."
"From then on, no one, including my future self, will be able to travel back into this anchored portion of your past."
He smiled faintly.
"Consider it a parting gift, as well as a way for me to eliminate a potential hidden danger."
The standing Sagres nodded.
"Sounds interesting... When did you create that magic?"
The future Sagres looked briefly nostalgic before answering without much enthusiasm.
"I don't remember. More than a hundred years ago, probably? I made it casually to deal with some pest that liked jumping around the timeline."
The standing Sagres fell silent for a moment.
Then he asked, "How old are you... now?"
He was trying to estimate the temporal gap between them.
Hearing the question, the future Sagres gave him a meaningful look, wearing an expression that seemed to say, Guess.
He did not answer.
The standing Sagres met his gaze for a few seconds, as though he had understood something, and eventually stopped pressing the issue.
But there was another question he urgently wanted answered.
"So in the future... what did I, or rather, what did we actually do? Why did we turn the world upside down badly enough that you were willing to come back and try to kill the source of it all?"
The future Sagres thought for a moment, seemingly choosing his words carefully.
Then he answered in a calm voice that made the content all the more unsettling.
"The Flesh Catastrophe."
He spoke the words with a deep, distant gaze.
"The flesh monster you fed eventually lost control. It devoured and assimilated everything at an unimaginable rate. The entire material plane nearly became one enormous living mass of flesh capable only of endless proliferation."
"In the end, I personally 'saved' that world."
He paused.
"Or perhaps I should say I ended it."
There was no joy or pride in his voice at having saved the world, only profound weariness.
After a brief pause, he continued listing events as though reciting a terrifying inventory.
"Besides that, you also caused the Root Reversal, the Law of Silence, the Rain of Aberration, the Weaver's Rampage..."
With each name he spoke, the standing Sagres's brow furrowed a little more.
"Every one of them was a crisis capable of overturning the world. And I spent an incalculable amount of effort and paid enormous costs to put them down one by one."
The standing Sagres grew curious and pressed further.
"I can roughly imagine what the Flesh Catastrophe was, but what exactly was the Root Reversal?"
The future Sagres answered in a flat tone, as though reading from an experimental report.
"Magic itself began to leak out of the world and reverse. It wasn't simply a matter of magical power being depleted. The very magical foundation that maintained the stability of reality was being gradually eroded."
"Spells would fail at random or twist into unpredictable effects. Transfiguration could no longer be reversed. Carefully brewed potions might suddenly become deadly poisons. Ghosts and Patronuses gradually faded away."
"Even places like Hogwarts, which depend on ancient magic for their continued existence, began to become unstable. Bricks and stones came loose, magical staircases stopped moving, and portraits lost their souls..."
He paused.
His voice remained calm, but there was a heaviness beneath it.
"In the end, everything that depended on magic, including magical creatures and the entirety of wizarding society, either returned to the mundane or was directly annihilated."
"And the process of stripping magic from reality itself triggered violent physical disasters. Landslides, tsunamis, abnormal celestial phenomena..."
"The entire world was affected. No one was spared."
The standing Sagres fell silent for a moment, trying to imagine the terrifying sight of a barren world stripped of magic.
Then he brought up the next name.
"So... what was the Rain of Aberration?"
"A global magical downpour."
The future Sagres continued.
"The rain itself was harmless, but it distorted the memories and cognition of every living creature it touched."
"People gradually forgot their loved ones. They confused friends with enemies. They remembered spell incantations and wand movements incorrectly. Some even forgot whether they were wizards or Muggles."
"The foundation of trust and cooperation, shared memory and shared understanding, collapsed completely. And once that disappeared, society collapsed with it."
He looked up at his standing self, his eyes unusually serious.
"Civilisation wasn't destroyed by some external enemy. It destroyed itself through madness, chaos, suspicion, war, and mutual slaughter."
"This wasn't merely physical destruction. It was the end of humanity as a functioning civilisation."
He paused briefly.
"You can think of it as a global, permanent, upgraded Confundus Charm."
A chill ran through the standing Sagres.
Almost instinctively, he asked, "And the Weaver's Rampage? That sounds like some kind of magical construct..."
"Correct. The Weaver was a magical construct you created."
The future Sagres's expression became slightly strange.
"Your original intention was probably to preserve world peace, but when you first set it up... you may have made a typo."
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