Time passed.
The various factions finished scouting the central plaza and slowly regrouped near the largest fragment of stone in the middle. It was a broad, uneven slab that had once been part of the city's heart, housing a massive fountain that stood over twenty meters tall.
One by one, the faction heads stepped forward and gave their reports.
Some spoke cautiously, emphasizing the absence of movement and the lack of immediate danger, while others were uncertain, pointing out strange residue, warped terrain, or the lingering pressure of corrupted spiritual energy that intensified in some places.
Many of the conclusions conflicted with one another.
Even the smaller, lesser-known groups were allowed to speak, their exhausted voices carrying across the empty plaza as they shared their differing opinions.
The discussion dragged on…
Arguments rose, fell, and resurfaced, forming an endless loop.
Possibilities were weighed and dismissed.
No one wanted to be the first to make a mistake.
Eventually, after a long and grinding debate, a decision was reached.
The city showed no signs of an active threat. There was no movement, no sound, no resistance, only an oppressive stillness that hung over everything.
Although no one questioned the danger, they still chose to push deeper.
Search teams would branch out through each district, securing the surrounding areas, and combing the ruins for anything left behind.
The suggestion came from Hexfill himself.
He naturally had an ulterior motive…
On the surface, it was a sound choice. Cover more ground, reduce the risk of ambushes, and make use of numbers while they still could. But beneath that reasoning was something else, this was his chance, his last chance—!
He knew it in his heart!
Hexfill knew that after the Second Calamity, whether he was judged as guilty or innocent, something would change. The flow of events had already shifted too far, and it was impossible for it to be a mere coincidence. He didn't know how or why, but the certainty sat heavily in his chest.
His heart told him this moment mattered the most.
No, more than that...
This was the only chance he would ever get!
He could feel that, despite the call, the last flickering flame from 'behind' refused to fade. That witch cast his soul alite was still persisting, grasping onto some ethereal thread that prevented his light from extinguishing, allowing his soul to continue to stand out, to remain apart from the endless field of fates shadow, to escape the background, to remain.
Despite its time having arrived—
His story refused to end…
Somewhere within this fallen city, the old headquarters of the Mercenary Alliance still existed. If it hadn't been completely destroyed, it would still contain what he needed to shape the Alliance's future. The place where he could undergo the White Wolf Trial and claim the right to lead.
He had waited too long already.
Hexfill had no idea that, in the original timeline, Arthur was meant to return with proof of his involvement with the 'Duskwood Project' and the 'Second Calamity'. He didn't know that he should have been exposed, expelled from the United Army, and hunted as a criminal, thrown into eternal damnation, and pulled into the abyss.
Only Elena knew that, in her past lives, Hexfill was never meant to even set foot in Oriest.
This was already an anomaly…
All Hexfill knew for certain was that the unbearable emptiness in his heart, the hollow sensation that had haunted him for far too long, was pulling him forward, drawing him deeper into the ruins, toward something he couldn't see, couldn't name, and couldn't ignore.
For the first time since the calamity began, he was done resisting it.
Not because he couldn't, but because he realized that this was not his fate, it was a crossroads.
* * *
After everything was decided, the United Army broke apart into dozens of smaller teams and began to flow into the ruins like a tide. Lantern lights flowed through the streets, briefly illuminating collapsed buildings and twisted roots before vanishing into the dark and scattering.
Elena went alone.
She moved without a word, vanishing towards the rooftops with a swift step.
Woosh!
Despite being a cultivator, Elena fought more like a rogue. She preferred speed and precision over violence and brute force. Her movements were light, efficient, and precise, the kind of motion a machine might perform.
She had developed this over many years and multiple lifetimes.
She shot through the city!
Elena's spirit roots were 'Wind', 'Fire', and 'Metal', but her focus wasn't on raw destruction. It was on agility, finesse, and momentum. She had to train herself to kill a target many times her size, with a single attack. This was necessary for the future calamities.
As for the golden light that often shrouded her body, this didn't belong to any of her spirit roots.
This golden light came from a treasure called the 'Phoenix King's Bone'. This was a bone from the beast king, and produced the 'Holy Fire' attribute that Elena's Spiritual Energy had taken after. She had picked it up in the Green Wind Forest shortly after her regression, and only now did it start to display its effects. It gestated in her body, slowly fusing, and transforming her physique.
As for her weapons, she favored twin daggers, short and elegant blades etched with runes that flared faintly whenever she swung them. This was another artifact that she had picked up, called the 'Twin Talons of the Sea Storm Rock', another Beast King, and a powerful weapon forged from its claws.
Elena was selfless, but not naïve.
She wasn't like Arthur, who believed in perfect heroes and glorious sacrifices. She didn't rush towards death for ideals. She looted because she needed to, she saved people because she could, because it mattered, because she refused to survive every calamity only to become the final survivor.
Swoosh!
She crossed the rooftops like a shadow, carving through the air with a blur. Each time her feet touched broken tile, faint ripples of golden energy rippled and vanished.
Elena was currently at the ninth step of the Second Level of the Immortal Cultivation Pathway, just one step away from forming her Golden Core and reaching the Third Level.
For most cultivators, that speed would have been unimaginable. For her, with the experience and resources she possessed, it was considered slightly slow.
Of course, that was by choice…
Like the other heroes, she had been refining her foundation to its absolute limit, and seeking perfection in every realm. The purer the foundation, regardless of the path, the further one could go. Power without stability was nothing more than fuel for a dead end.
In her previous life, she had never reached the Ninth Step.
She was always one step short and always held back by something she could never name.
It didn't matter.
Not this time.
Elena had been told that Petra would only exist in this loop. She didn't know if that was true, but she was determined to never see the next one.
Swoosh!
-
Elena moved towards the northern district of Oriest.
There was something she needed to do, no, someone she needed to find.
It was a time-sensitive matter.
Her target was an important 'piece' she intended to retain in this loop.
Hidden beneath the ruins of an old outpost belonging to the White Skull Organization was a small and discreet laboratory that once belonged to a woman named Jillian, a name Elena had never forgotten. In her first life, Elena had missed her completely, and by the time she learned who Jillian truly was, the woman had long since died. But in her second life, she found her by chance and saved her in time. It was also in that loop that she realized just how 'valuable' she was. In her third life, the previous loop, she pushed Jillian as hard as she could and created a monstrous hidden piece.
Elena intended to make Jillian the 'Dark Mage' of her 'Heroes Party'.
Jillian was the last survivor of Oriest. She was an eccentric elf who, during the Second Calamity, had been conducting experiments in secret, so she was still 'stuck' in the city.
She was a necromancer, but not one obsessed with corpses or mindless summons, not one who manipulated others, and not one who played with frost fire or the soul. She was a scholar who studied the evolution of the soul itself, not like a toy, but more like a direction for evolution.
She was a researcher of forbidden boundaries.
In the future, she would become known as the 'White-Robed Puppeteer', a legendary figure capable of creating living armies woven from her own soul.
She would later found an entirely new cultivation branch derived from necromancy, 'Soul Architecture'.
-
Elena moved swiftly through the ruins, the rooftops blurring past beneath her feet.
When she reached the northern district, she landed softly on a half-collapsed roof and slipped into the building through a small, well-hidden crack.
A burst of golden light flared as she cleared debris from an old staircase.
She descended into the basement.
The air was thick with the smell of mold and dust.
After several cautious steps, her eyes caught a faint distortion in the wall. She pressed her palm against it, and the stone split silently down the middle, revealing a hidden stairway that led even deeper underground.
Elena's eyes narrowed.
She drew her daggers and continued.
Delving deeper—
The walls were coated in a strange black residue. This wasn't Duskwood Dust, but something similar. Residual spiritual energy seeped from the substance, producing an unnerving aura that mixed with the air, and almost seemed to overpower the accumulating corruption that formed the haze in the city. It was the ink on a black canvas.
Elena didn't touch it.
She knew exactly what it was.
This was the remnant of Jillian's failed experiment. The moment when the Corrupted World Tree's influence first reached the lab, it twisted the material she had been studying into something half-living, half-spiritual.
It had attacked everything in its path, including the lab workers, the guards, and of course, herself.
It was the last thing she ever created, and her legacy in Elena's first life.
Elena moved faster.
The passage twisted deeper, opening into a sprawling underground labyrinth. The walls were cracked, and the space bore the unmistakable signs of a recent battle. The viscera that coated the ground were still wet, and the spiritual energy that lingered in the air still turned. Ruined golems, shattered bodies, and half-melted artifact plates.
It was a mess.
Jillian hadn't worked alone. She was simply the only one who survived. Those that didn't made up the majority of what remained on the walls.
Elena reached the final chamber and stopped before a heavy steel door.
Its surface was scorched black, engraved with hundreds of overlapping runes from the human system.
Without hesitation, she drew her dagger and sliced downwards.
The golden edge flared once, then, with a violent tearing sound, the door, said to withstand a fourth-order strike, split apart like paper.
Elena stepped inside.
The room beyond the door was dark.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
She advanced cautiously, scanning the space. The laboratory was small, lined with shattered glass tanks and shelves filled with broken alchemical tools.
Elena looked around cautiously.
Then—
She froze.
"Ah?"
Her eyes widened as her gaze lifted. As her head craned upwards, she was suddenly overwhelmed by an inexplicable feeling. Not only was Jillian not there, but—
Elena stared at the massive hole torn through the ceiling. It looked as if something had exploded upwards, ripping straight through the ceiling and out of the earth.
Her lip twitched.
In her mind, only one question remained.
"What the hell? Where did my dark mage go…?"
* * *
The camera lazily cuts to a small ant girl swaggering through the city of Oriest.
On her shoulder was a busty elf girl in purple, with black hair and eyes, and wrapped in a comically large scarf. She tilted her little head, thinking back to events from not too long ago…
-
Rewinding the clock a bit.
Jillian had been having a very bad time…
After the Second Calamity tore through the western region and the Corrupted World Tree revived, the city of Oriest was the first to suffer its changes.
When massive black roots erupted from beneath the streets, splitting stone and crushing buildings, Jillian sealed herself inside her laboratory. Knowing that it was already too late to run, she gathered a handful of trusted colleagues and began researching the strange phenomena that were spreading through the city.
She wanted answers, but no matter how hard she worked, everything only continued to grow worse.
The Dusk Dwellers came first…
They crawled up from beneath the city long before they appeared throughout the rest of the region, pouring through forgotten tunnels and the cracked foundation. They devoured the outer districts and infected the vast majority of the survivors before any organized resistance could be formed.
Jillian soon lost the vast majority of her workforce.
Next came the insects.
They were massive, vicious things that tore through what remained of the city and its people, leaving nothing but mangled corpses and shattered streets in their wake.
After that came the black rain.
It fell without end, soaking into the soil, poisoning the crops, and dooming the water sources. Anything left exposed began to rot, corrode, or twist into something unrecognizable and inedible.
Then the air got worse.
The spiritual energy radiating from the Corrupted World Tree washed over the city like a slow, suffocating tide. Those who had survived the Dusk Dwellers and the poison were not spared. Their bodies hardened, flesh merging with wood and bark, transforming them into living statues frozen in expressions of silent agony.
It was enough to turn one's heart cold, but this didn't stop our little mad scientist.
Every passing day brought another disaster.
Jillian learned of it through scattered reports from the few people she risked sending out. Each message was worse than the last. The messengers grew fewer and fewer until there were none left at all. Soon, she was isolated. She stayed below ground, buried in her laboratory, documenting everything that still made sense with the few remaining helpers. Recording symptoms and mapping mutations became a daily thing, while writing down her observations became the last thread of hope.
Then—
One of her experiments went berserk…
A subject she had been studying for its unusual resistance to corruption suddenly mutated and turned violent. It shattered its containment cell and slaughtered the remaining assistants before Jillian managed to drive it into the outer tunnels.
By the time she sealed the doors again, she was alone…
Now, Jillian sat slumped against the reinforced door of her laboratory. Her back pressed against the hard metal, as her head tilted to the side. Her leg was broken, twisted awkwardly beneath her skirt. Her hand trembled as she pressed it against her side, blood still slipping between her fingers. The infection she had picked up a long time ago had spread far beyond her control. Duskwood Dust poisoned her veins, and the black rain had already reached her lungs.
Living was agony.
Each breath felt like it was ripping out an organ.
Perhaps, it was time to die…
Here, deep beneath the city, the effects of the Duskwood Dust, the black rain, and the corrosive spiritual energy were far more intense than anywhere else in the western region.
It was all focused towards this one room.
Her vision blurred.
The lights in the laboratory flickered weakly as her consciousness drifted in and out. The faint hum of machines was the only sound left in the oppressive silence. She lifted her gaze toward the nearby worktable and tried to sigh.
"It's too late…"
Vials lay shattered across its surface. Papers were scattered across the floor, each page filled with frantic notes and half-finished formulas. The most recent among them was an antidote she had tested on herself. Unfortunately, it had done nothing, no, if anything, it had just made things worse.
"Ah, how I'll miss those three…"
Her skin was beginning to darken, not in the way a Dusk Dweller changed during the early mutation, no, this was different, more personal, almost selectively so. She was melting, transforming, and her heart felt hollow. Everything she had worked for, everything she had sacrificed, it was all gone. Was this death? Am I scared? No… She didn't fear the silent rope that was dragging her down. What she feared wasn't the end, it was being forgotten, disappearing before she could leave her name in history. The only thing keeping her from sinking completely into despair was the faint figure standing in front of her.
'It's different than the others…'
Is this… a dream?
No…
A small ant stood alone in the darkness. Her large eyes were wide and observant, and her outline was faintly glowing against the gloom.
For a human, her expression was unreadable.
Jillian forced her blurred vision to focus. With the last of her strength, she pushed herself up. Her voice was weak, trembling from exhaustion and pain, but she forced out the words.
"All right," she sighed. "I'll go with you."
Tock!
The wheel of fate fell from the frame.