The circle flared to life under my feet. In the blink of an eye, Peanu’s capital disappeared and I was back inside Lamp Fort.
I didn’t waste time. My body flashed forward, and I crossed the flame wall in one smooth step.
Ragnar was still seated in the middle of the ruined cemetery, his massive frame like a boulder among shattered graves. Knight, on the other hand, had perched himself on the castle wall beside Silver, both of them staring out at the horizon as if bored out of their minds.
I flew straight and landed on the wall near them.
"You came back fast," Silver remarked, his wooden armor creaking as he shifted to face me.
"Well," I said with a small grin, "I found something interesting, so I rushed back."
Silver tilted his head. "What interesting thing?"
So I told them. I told them about Roland’s trip to the prison hidden beneath the palace grounds, about the chained demon grandmaster, about the little girl locked away in another cell. And finally, about the plan Roland was cooking up, to send the demon into Lamp Island as a thief and then dangle the bait before their emperor.
"Roland really is a piece of shit," Lyrate said as she landed beside me. Her tone was flat, but her eyes were sharp. "To hold a little kid as a hostage... disgusting."
I shrugged. "The world is full of people like him. And the further we go from our world, the more scum we’ll meet. That’s not going to change."
She studied me, waiting. "So what’s your plan?"
I placed my hands in my pocket, eyes on the horizon where Roland would soon return. "Simple. Let him come. Let him leave with something that looks like treasure. That way, they’ll tempt their emperor into coming himself. When he does, we finish everything in one clean strike. And after that..."
I paused, letting the silence drag.
"After that," I continued, "we capture the demon."
Silver frowned. "Capture him? Why?"
"Because we can squeeze information out of him," I replied. "Which world he comes from, what he knows... and whether I’ll need to hunt down even more world cores. Who knows, maybe this path makes me an enemy of the entire universe. If that’s the case, it’s better to have a backup plan."
Knight gave a short laugh. "Now that would finally make things interesting."
Lyrate tilted her head, her sharp eyes scanning the ruined cemetery below. "So what treasure is he supposed to take back? There isn’t anything treasure-worthy here."
I paused, realizing she was right. Other than the wreckage, broken stones, and scattered bones, there wasn’t much to tempt anyone.
"Maybe the bones?" Silver suggested, his tone half serious, half mocking.
"Or we could break a pillar off the castle and hand him that," Knight added with a smirk.
I rubbed my chin, thinking hard. Both ideas had some weight, but not enough. Roland wasn’t the type to settle for scraps or rubble, not if he wanted to bait his emperor’s greed. No... we needed something that would burn in the man’s mind, something rare, something irresistible.
Slowly, a thought took shape. My lips curved as the answer settled in me. "No, that won’t work. We need something that will truly tempt him... something that will make his emperor lean forward in his chair the moment he lays eyes on it." I looked at the three of them. "And I think I know exactly what that should be."
Without another word, I leapt down from the wall, my boots crunching against the broken earth of the cemetery. Dust and ash swirled around me as I raised my hand. At my call, the massive bones scattered across the ground shuddered, then lifted into the air, one after another.
Vertebrae, ribs, fragments of skull—all of them floated upward, weightless under my will. They circled me slowly, like fragments of a giant forgotten by time.
The others watched in silence as the air grew heavy with Essence.
I sank cross-legged onto the ground, and closed my eyes. Inside my mind, the familiar glow stirred.
Three runes floated there.
I steadied my breath, sinking into silence as the first rune lit up inside my mind. The symbol was simple at first glance, but the longer I gazed, the more layers unfolded. It pulsed softly, each rhythm pulling threads of time itself and weaving them through my Psynapse.
Images rushed in, like a flood bursting through a broken dam.
I saw the crawl of a mortal child learning to walk, each step a small defiance against stillness. I felt the subtle shift when a warrior reached the peak of master rank, his body moving just a fraction quicker than the world around him.
Then came the grandmaster’s stride, bending the rhythm of time with every motion, stretching moments like an elastic thread before letting them snap back with devastating force.
Normally, this much knowledge would take decades to process, but my Psynapse drank it all greedily.
Each layer was absorbed, broken down, and reconstructed into pure understanding. Time wasn’t just a line, it was a series of pulses, beats, intervals. I could almost hear it ticking, shifting, accelerating or slowing depending on who held control.
The rune glowed brighter inside my mind. Then the flood began. The insights of dozens of Time followers poured into me at once, hundreds of years of their struggles, failures, and breakthroughs, all collapsing into my Psynapse. I devoured it in seconds.
The rune shivered, vibrating harder and harder as if resisting, then with a final burst it shattered apart and vanished, completely consumed.
A stream of notifications rang in my head the moment I opened my eyes, but I ignored them. My focus stayed on the floating bones around me. Slowly, I raised my finger and pointed toward them.
One by one, the bones trembled as my will pressed into them. My fresh understanding of time poured out, shaping into fine glowing runes that carved themselves across the surface. Each mark served a different purpose, some twisted the flow of seconds, others bent the feeling of minutes.
It wasn’t true mastery, not even close. I made sure of that. If I engraved too much, the Emperor might gain sudden insight into the law of time itself, and that was something I could not risk. This was not a gift, it was bait. Just enough to tempt him, nothing more.
Within a minute, five bones floated before me, each covered in shimmering engravings. The air around them distorted faintly as time fluctuations spilled out, moments stretching, snapping back, or repeating like broken echoes.
I exhaled slowly, lowering my hand. "That should be enough," I muttered. A lure sharp enough to draw in even the greediest emperor.