For a heartbeat, Jacob stood with an empty expression there as if the world existed,
but he did not. The Cosmic Gateway’s explosion rippled outward again,
vital essence churning and scattering like luminous motes across the Verdantia Life Galaxy, precisely as it had moments or... ages ago.
The Time felt wrong, the Space felt wrong, and even Jacob himself felt wrong as his bones hummed with a hollow ache, as if some invisible hand had reached inside his mind and tugged.
For the first time since acquiring the Cursed Immortality, the sensation of being ’himself’ felt subtly... misaligned.
The ghostly light within Jacob’s disguise, the Deathless Prince, flickered, mirroring his real eyes, however, not with confusion, but with the eerie stillness of someone who knew something had gone terribly, impossibly missing.
A mystical hum echoed faintly within his skull before the next moment, suddenly...
"How nostalgic..." Immortika’s voice drifted through him like a cracked bell tolling inside a tomb, and instantly his unfocused gaze twitched.
Somewhere deep, where his consciousness lay trembling, an icicle-thin shard of fear stabbed into his awareness, and the cursed book’s following words fell like a falling guillotine...
"...some, threads refuse to forget—even when the past is forced to!"
Jacob didn’t hear the maniacal laughter after because right there, and then, the world snapped, however, not outwardly, but inside him as if a dam bursting, like a seal tearing open!
It was as if a corpse remembering how it died as memories, ALL of them, came crashing back, starting from the sudden assault and then the vision of his own rotten consciousness drifting in the mystical emptiness.
Thereafter, waking up within the Dreamscape Nightmare Realm after some weird encounter in that emptiness, and then Immortika suddenly controlling the Dreamscape Nightmare Realm and telling him how Nyx saved his consciousness.
Then Immortika shows him everything and unravels Alexandra and Destin Saint’s attacks, before learning about the hunter stalking the ’Cursed Ones’ through eternity, Immortal Nimrod of the Universal Void!
But the most terrifying part was the clash between two cosmic entities, both of whom were heirs to the Universal Godly Scripture.
Especially, Destin Saint with his terrifying, incomprehensible abilities and the sheer elegance with which he stripped Nimrod bare, rendering his calculations worthless, and silencing the Void itself in the end.
Lastly, the moment Destin Saint invoked it—The Winter of Past, and forced the reality with everything in it, Immortal Nimrod, including, was yanked backwards by the spine.
All of that, every second of horror, every glimpse of power of a true Arcanist that defied reason—rushed back into him in one shattering instant.
At that moment, Jacob jerked violently, and a crack tore through the space behind him as his skeletal nerves misfired. The infinity symbol suddenly materialized on his apex crown, and his Cursed Heart activated with raging pulses, sending a ripple of a vague yet infinitely profound power through his entire body, like the aftershock of a divine seizure.
His empty sockets blazed, not with flame, but with absolute, paralyzing dread because he remembered it all!
His jaw tightened until thin fractures webbed across the bone.
’...that... that wasn’t a dream...right!?!’ His thoughts were pure chaos, scraped raw by something far older than panic.
The Cosmic Gateway’s motes continued drifting beside him, serene and innocent,
oblivious to the metaphysical slaughter that had just been rewound.
However, Jacob trembled, not in weakness, but in comprehension as he vividly remembered just watching Immortal Nimrod, a being who toyed with laws, be rendered helpless, and dragged backward through the jaws of his own severed past!
He had also watched Destin Saint peel apart the ’present’ with his Universal Godly Scripture, as if it were a page from a manual he had written.
But the worst of all, Jacob knew everything that was going to happen if that wasn’t a dream, like a spectator gripped by those Arcane forces and forcibly hurled back into a moment that no longer existed.
Furthermore, as he remembered the hyperboloid collapsing, and remembered the inevitability of folding time like paper and then being dragged back...he remembered everything, the sensation of being uprooted from himself or from the ’reality’...it was still crawling on his inner bones like frost-bitten maggots.
However, for some reason, the Cursed Heart seemed to be affecting his emotions, causing them to go haywire and mind-shattering from that unimaginable experience, because he had basically just experienced something that not even the Gods were worthy of experiencing.
At that moment, Jacob felt like breathing, despite not being able to, a useless, unnecessary habit he had forgotten, yet one he desperately needed, like a mortal.
’...I...I died...and then...I was...erased...?!’ His body trembled as his empty eyes flared into focus, then contorted.
Not in fear, but in something colder, sharper as a realization that made his tremble faintly with pure apprehension, but a hint of ecstasy because he just realized that...
’Destin Saint... pulled me back...and from his words he didn’t seem to expect anyone to remember, but somehow I did...’
However, Jacob didn’t need to think twice before realizing why he seemed to have escaped that ’fate’ of not being able to remember, and he jolted back to reality.
"Cursed Immortality! It was you!" Jacob roared in his mind as he knew it was only the cursed book that could’ve done that and nothing else.
But what Jacob didn’t understand was how this happened.
After all, he had remembered everything as the Destin Saint seemed absolutely sure that even Immortal Nimrod wouldn’t be able to remember what had happened once he cast the Winter of Past.
According to Destin Saint, Immortal Nimrod had a Universal Godly Scripture, which means Jacob should also be affected. Yet, he seemed to be only affected for a moment before he wasn’t!
Furthermore, Jacob was sure that Immortika’s words seemed like some sort of trigger that actually helped him escape from Destin Saint’s Winter of Past, and he clearly remembered Immortika had spoken them before, but not altogether.
However, those cryptic words that Jacob thought had meant something were actually meant for this exact purpose...
An impossible realization struck Jacob at that moment, ’If that’s true, then doesn’t this mean Immortika had already predicted everything before it even happened?! Even Destin Saint erasing the future? Or it was some kind of vision!?’
At that moment, Immortika spoke, another unfamiliar action, "Now, now, don’t just stand here, if you know what I mean...hahaahaha!"