Chapter 200: Playing with Time to Find the Truth [Bonus - ]

Chapter 200: Playing with Time to Find the Truth [Bonus Chapter]

"May I ask what you are here for?" Adam asked after the relief of seeing that Triss finally recognized him.

"I will visit the Underworld. The Devouring Desolation’s seal looks like it needs to be renewed, and there is also a boy I want to check on." She answered while looking at the campfire.

"The seal? Isn’t there still at least 70 years before it needs to be renewed? The boy is still alive?" Adam asked one question after another, faced with 2 surprising pieces of information at once.

Triss felt that 2 questions were too much to answer and simply looked at him. "Do you want to come along?"

"No, I’m good." He had to stay there to keep guarding the entrance. He also wasn’t interested in visiting such an unpleasant place anyway.

Triss didn’t ask again. She simply kept looking at the campfire and quickly murmured a spell.

Under her gaze, the fire suddenly stopped burning.

It didn’t go out. Time around it had simply stopped, leaving the flames frozen in place without even a flicker.

Adam frowned for a moment.

He knew very well that the Time spells countered the Fate spells, but seeing Triss so easily interfere with the seal Hecate had placed just recently was still awe-inspiring.

"Don’t worry. I didn’t break the seal. It will return to normal after I enter the realm." Triss explained while looking around as if searching for something, then asked, "Where was the entrance again?"

She had apparently forgotten where the entrance was as well.

Adam gave a low sigh. "Please follow me."

—

The 2 passed through a hidden entrance beneath Adam’s hut and entered the large cave where the boiling pool was located.

It was once again illuminated by the red, gem-like stones embedded in the walls, while the sound of the boiling water echoed throughout the cave.

Triss first looked at the water before turning her eyes toward the clothes beside it. "Is there someone inside?"

Since the pool was filled with pure mana, she couldn’t detect anything inside it, even with her detection spells.

"There is a Drakon girl training inside."

One of Triss’s eyebrows rose slightly. "Even for a Drakon, this shouldn’t be a place where she can casually swim."

"She has the Flesh of Fate."

Hearing that, Triss found it reasonable and turned toward him. "You can go if you don’t want to come along."

Adam lowered his head again, wished her a good journey, and retreated to the surface, leaving her alone.

Triss didn’t immediately dive into the boiling water. Instead, she lazily looked around the cave for a while, as if trying to imprint the entire place back into her memories.

Then she opened her mouth and murmured in a soft, soothing tone. Her voice reverberated through the cave for a second as she activated her spell.

The next moment, everything around her began to change.

It was like watching a scene being rewound. The boiling water began bubbling backward, while the steam that had risen from the hot water flowed back down toward it.

She kept watching time move backward and didn’t stop when the image of the Drakon girl leaving the pool appeared. She continued rewinding, searching for the moment when Magna had fallen into the pool so she could better understand what had happened.

But when she approached that point in time, something happened that shouldn’t have.

Her time spell suddenly shattered, forcing everything that had been rewound to snap back to the present.

"What was that?" Triss frowned as she looked around.

It was the first time her spell had suddenly broken like this, and she couldn’t even understand why.

"Is it because of the mana density in the cave?" she wondered, thinking the mana spreading out from the pool might be interfering with her spell.

She cast the spell again, this time making sure not to lose control.

But when she reached the exact same point in the past, the spell suddenly broke again, forcing time back into the present.

She became even more confused, unable to pinpoint the problem.

She wasn’t feeling any barrier blocking her or any entity interfering with her spell. It simply disappeared at the same point, as though she had never cast it in the first place.

Time itself seemed to reset whenever she tried to move past that certain point.

She cast it again and again until frustration finally began to show, each attempt ending the same way without revealing the cause.

"What’s wrong? Have my abilities really become rusty?"

She for sure was spending most of her life sleeping, but it wasn’t ordinary sleep like that of normal people.

While sleeping, she always divided her consciousness between 2 different periods of time. One remained in deep sleep with her casual memories and awareness while the other was always working, researching and studying. ℯℯ𝘭.

So rather than becoming rusty, her abilities should have actually become much stronger, especially when it came to the spells she possessed.

Not wanting to give up so easily, she cast her Time Reversal spell once again. This time, she added another spell on top of it.

Her lips began to move as the murmurs resonated throughout the cave again, but this time there were 2 layers of murmuring. She was shockingly casting 2 spells at the same time, as if 2 people were speaking through the same mouth.

As her Time Reversal spell activated, her Time Manipulation spell activated alongside it, creating a combination.

The scene in front of her began rewinding again. But this time, unlike her previous attempts, she raised her hand, and an hourglass appeared in her palm, its bright golden sand filling the bottom half while the upper remained empty.

It was one of Triss’s own inventions, a spell that allowed her to directly interfere with time through the hourglass, even when dealing with the past.

When the scene reached the same point where her Time Reversal spell had each time broken, she immediately turned the hourglass in her palm, freezing that exact moment before her spell could break again.

The golden sand began rapidly falling through the narrow center of the hourglass.

She had very little time, perhaps only one hundredth of a second, but that was enough. She now had complete control over that tiny fragment of the past.

It consumed an enormous amount of mana, required an extremely high level of control, and lasted for only a brief moment. Yet despite all of these drawbacks, its raw power made it one of the three strongest spells in Triss’s arsenal.

The real reason for its power was that, during that tiny window, Triss had complete control over a specific section of time.

To a Grand Witch, it was like having a video editing program for reality.

She could snip that tiny temporal clip out of the timeline, slide it into another era, or stretch and contract it as she saw fit. Every frame was under her absolute control.

This time, she used that control to find what was interfering with her Time Reversal spell.

She began manipulating the isolated interval, stretching it wider and wider.

As she expanded it, the single instant slowly separated into countless smaller moments, each one becoming distinct from the next.

Time and space warped together around her control, the distance between moments stretching apart while the events inside them slowed to almost nothing.

The further she expanded the interval, the more strange the structure of time became.

Eventually, she could see the individual fragments that made up each moment, with empty gaps existing between them like tiny spaces between pieces of a larger whole.

She was certain that if something was interfering with her spell, it had to be hidden somewhere inside those gaps.

And she actually found it.

At a point between two expanded moments, between two molecules of time where the normal flow should have bridged them, she saw something.