Dottore gasped for breath, bracing himself against the worktable as he struggled to stand.
His body still trembled uncontrollably.
Looking around, he saw that the laboratory had been thrown into disarray by the energy surge; many instruments were smoking, and the alchemical matrix, having lost its guiding hand, hummed erratically before dimming into silence.
The experiment had failed completely.
But he had no attention to spare for any of that now.
“What…
was that?” His voice was hoarse, carrying a fear he himself did not notice.
His fingertips trembled from how hard he was gripping the table.
“Memories of the future?
The end of Teyvat?” He shook his head violently, trying to dispel those terrible images, but they clung to his mind like a parasite to the bone.
Reason told him this could be a mental hallucination brought on by the experiment’s malfunction.
Yet the details of that memory, the emotions carved deep into his soul, the understanding of the world’s rules crumbling apart…
everything was so real it brooked no doubt.
Most of all, the cold sensation of his consciousness being devoured at the end, of all things returning to nothingness, made his very soul shudder.
He was no skeptic; he was an explorer.
When a “possibility” presented itself with such overwhelming intensity, he could not ignore it.
It took a long while before he could barely calm his churning thoughts.
He forced himself upright.
Ignoring his physical weakness and mental exhaustion, he strode to the main console and pulled up every data record from the experiment.
The abnormal energy peak, the bizarre leap in consciousness resonance frequency, the indecipherable information fragments recorded just before the instruments shattered…
All the data pointed to one fact: an anomalous phenomenon had indeed occurred, one that transcended the ordinary and touched upon the dimensions of time and consciousness.
“Not a hallucination…” Dottore leaned back against the cold console and closed his eyes, digesting this earth-shattering information.
“What I saw was a predetermined future on some timeline.” A sense of urgency and mission, unprecedented in his life, washed over him like ice water.
His original plans, his research in Snezhnaya, his pursuit of life alchemy…
before the ultimate answer that “the world will eventually be destroyed and all efforts will come to nothing,” it all seemed so small and laughable.
“No…
absolutely not…” He wrenched his eyes open.
The fanaticism of a researcher that once dwelled there had been replaced by a deeper, more resolute light.
“Whatever that was, I will never allow such a future to happen!” No matter where that memory came from, whether it was a warning or predestined fate, he refused to accept it.
He would change it!
The very moment this thought crystallized in his mind with absolute clarity, another sudden change struck.
Dottore felt as though some shackle inside his body had shattered.
Four distinct, overwhelming surges of power emerged from nowhere and flooded into his limbs and bones like raging rivers.
In an instant, he “understood” what these powers were, and he could also sense that they were only a portion.
The rest would need his own exploration and development.
[Heart of Fear] (Terror and Hypnosis): Strikes at the very root of the soul, breeding ultimate terror while shackling the mind to achieve a hypnotic effect.
Ability interpretation: A single thought draws the soul into a nightmare, birthing fear from the deepest depths of the spirit, immobilizing the consciousness of living beings, and realizing profound hypnotic control.
[Gravity Modulation] (Speed and Weight): Overrides the laws of balance between heaven and earth, freely regulating the severity of velocity, commanding stillness and motion in the world.
[Heart of the Black Hole] (Destruction and Transference): Devours all things and returns them to the void, forges spatial singularities (spatial shielding layers), and can also tear through spatial barriers to freely traverse the dimensions of time and space.
[Heart of Life] (Creation and Purification): An inexhaustible vitality that nourishes the source, cleansing evil and foul miasma, and can also reshape the physical form to bring forth new life.
Were these four heaven-defying abilities a byproduct of the experimental accident?
Or were they a “gift” or “compensation” from fate because he had glimpsed the future?
Perhaps even a means of survival granted to face an even greater danger?
Dottore quickly calmed himself and analyzed the situation.
Memories of the future, powerful abilities…
this was undoubtedly a massive variable.
It was his capital to rebel against fate but also a warning of even greater disaster.
He strode back to the experiment area.
Ignoring the wreckage around him, he activated the independent computing core with the highest level of clearance.
Immense computational power began to churn, aimed at a single objective: analyze the source and authenticity of the information that had flooded into him and search for any possible “variable.” After several sleepless hours of deduction and verification, the results were despairing.
The information’s structure was complex and ancient, bearing traces of temporal laws that surpassed the current understanding of Teyvat.
Its internal logic was self-consistent, and the future it pointed toward was practically a “certainty.” He tried countless possible development paths under existing conditions, and every single simulated outcome ultimately led to that same void of darkness.
Just as the crushing weight of this fate was about to break him, the computing core detected a faint anomalous fluctuation along a minuscule probability branch, a strange resonance related to “time” and “possibility.” A vague concept gradually took shape in his mind.
Within those future memory fragments, there seemed to be a blurry impression of himself attempting to research spatiotemporal technology.
“A method to traverse time, to find the key to breaking this deadlock…” Hope, like a tiny spark ignited in endless darkness, was faint but stubborn.
He surveyed the ruined laboratory, and his eyes turned razor-sharp and wholly focused.
All his previous research plans were now completely overturned.
He had a grander, madder, and necessarily more clandestine objective: to build a device capable of interfering with spacetime, to step into the river of time, and to find that single thread of survival for Teyvat and for himself.
He acted immediately, clearing away the damaged instruments and drafting a list of theories and materials that might be needed to create a “pocket watch of spacetime.” This undertaking was countless times more difficult and dangerous than any research that had come before, but he did not hesitate.
In the gaps between his frenzied work, he occasionally paused.
He would look toward the cold metal walls of the laboratory, as if he could see through them to the still-peaceful snowy plains of Snezhnaya beyond, and further still, to the distant Teyvat that was destined to be destroyed.
Two weeks had passed since the accident.
Dottore sent a brief report to Pierro via encrypted communication, using the excuse that an experimental accident had damaged his equipment and he needed to go into seclusion for repairs and data analysis.
He submitted a heavily redacted and embellished “accident report,” omitting the core content and mentioning only that an energy surge had caused instrument damage.
Pierro did not press the matter.
He simply urged Dottore to be careful and asked if he needed additional resources.
Dottore politely declined.
What he needed now were not ordinary experimental materials, but forbidden knowledge involving the theories of time and space, along with certain extremely rare materials that might only exist in legends.
He divided the laboratory into two zones.
In the surface laboratory, he continued research on some new weapons and other inconsequential biological studies to maintain a facade of normalcy.
Deep underground, in a hidden laboratory reinforced with a dual-layered force field of [Gravity Modulation] and further fortified on top of the spatial shielding of the [Heart of the Black Hole], his true plan was advancing at a feverish pace.
The difficulty of creating the spacetime pocket watch surpassed all imagination.
This was no simple timepiece; it was a divine artifact that needed to interfere with the very timeline of Teyvat and even the broader cosmos.
He buried himself in mountains of ancient texts, star charts, Ley Line energy theories, and his own avant-garde, even mad, theoretical manuscripts.
Though the fragmented memories of the future provided a vague direction, the concrete path to realization had to be discovered step by step, verified inch by inch.
During this process, he unexpectedly discovered that if he could fully explore and develop the four new abilities he had acquired, they might be capable of resolving the crisis entirely.
Moreover, they offered unexpected assistance to his research.
The [Heart of Life] granted him exuberant energy and rapid recovery, allowing him to work nearly without sleep.
Even when mentally exhausted, it quickly restored him to peak condition, except in cases of core essence depletion, which could only be slowly repaired.