There was no day or night here, only a boundless river of time, its surface shimmering with faint golden particles and resplendent flowing light.
Across it drifted seven colored torrents, each representing a different aspect: Formation (white), Birth (green), Past (yellow), Present (purple), Parallel (blue), Future (orange), and Quietus (gray).
Interwoven with these torrents, countless world bubbles and innumerable possible timelines floated in orderly chaos.
The “paths” representing different timelines stretched away from beneath his feet into infinity.
He began walking aimlessly along the banks of the river of time.
Eventually, at a confluence where certain timelines gathered, he saw many of Teyvat’s possibilities, but the results were without exception.
They all ended in destruction and dissolution.
Hope was like a candle guttering in the wind, snuffed out time and again by the cold reality.
“Still…
no way…” Just as despair was about to drown him like a tide, at the far end of one of the dim, gray timelines, he seemed to catch a faint, stubbornly flickering glimmer of golden light.
It was an ending he had not noticed before.
In the outcome that light shrouded, in order to resist the foreign enemy, he had resurrected all of Teyvat’s past high-level combatants, and he himself had paid a heavy price for doing so.
After the battle, the shattered continent of Teyvat slowly began to reform, aided by the Heavenly Principles, her Four Shades, the Seven Archons, and every major fighting force.
The smoke of war had not yet fully cleared, but the sky was no longer a despairing void.
Instead, it revealed a long-absent starry expanse, scarred but real.
Dottore saw the blurry, busy silhouettes of survivors.
He saw the Seven Archons in conference with the Heavenly Principles.
He saw Columbina strolling across the snowfields with her moon spirits.
He saw Pierro standing beside Capitano, helping to gather the pieces.
Everyone was still alive.
Everyone, that is, except himself.
Teyvat remained a land of wounds, but the flame of civilization had not been extinguished.
Yet at the center of this vision, within the fragile yet balanced Ley Line core that sustained the new world, he saw himself.
Not a standing version of himself.
He was suspended in midair, eyes tightly shut, encased within a massive energy sphere woven from Ley Line power and ancient runes.
His original blue-black hair had turned completely silver-white, and his vital signs were so faint they barely registered.
Fortunately, a weak energy was slowly mending his damaged essence, but it had also plunged him into an unknown slumber from which no one knew when he would wake.
A sliver of hope…
and the price was an unknown sleep.
“A sliver of hope…
so it was here all along.” After his consciousness returned to his body, Dottore was immediately hit by a violent wave of dizziness and weakness.
The extreme depletion of his core essence nearly made him collapse.
He braced himself against the cold metal wall and coughed violently, a few beads of blood splattering onto his pale hand.
A profoundly complicated smile surfaced on his ashen face, bitter, relieved, and above all, filled with a resolute calm.
“Trading my slumber for everyone else’s survival, for a chance that Teyvat can endure…
it’s a fair bargain.” He murmured to himself, his voice hoarse but unwavering.
He did not care whether he would ever wake up, whether that sleep would be eternal or fleeting.
As long as the land he cared for and the consciousnesses upon it could persist, whether he himself existed or not was irrelevant.
The hope was faint and the price immense, but at least he had seen a direction.
He had seen hope.
At the same time, he also understood the purpose of those “invaders.” They devoured the core energies of various worlds to grow their own power.
He named those invaders “the Void,” for they had no concrete forms and acted purely on devouring instinct, yet they possessed their own autonomous will.
This time, they had set their sights on Teyvat’s four pure, fundamental core forces: the World’s Origin Core, the Irminsul Core, the Abyss Core, and the Ley Line Core.
Dottore struggled to his feet, the light in his eyes reignited, even firmer and colder than before.
He wiped away the trace of blood that had leaked from the corner of his mouth due to essence depletion and looked at the spacetime pocket watch, which was nearly ruined.
Fortunately, he had successfully entered the river of time and seen that sliver of hope.
He would no longer gaze upon those futures doomed to failure.
Instead, he poured all his energy into figuring out how to realize this “slumber ending.” He needed to more precisely locate those high-level combatants who could be resurrected and would willingly fight to protect Teyvat.
He needed to perfect the spacetime pocket watch, ensuring that at the critical moment it could activate with precision and reverse cause and effect.
He also needed to better master those four abilities, especially [Heart of Life] and [Heart of the Black Hole], as they might play pivotal roles in the final battle.
The intensity of his research escalated once more.
He abandoned nearly all unnecessary rest, like a sponge being desperately squeezed, frantically absorbing knowledge and conducting one dangerous experiment after another.
Xiaomu made regular trips back and forth between the surface laboratory and Pierro’s office, and the “experimental weapons” it delivered grew ever more sophisticated.
Occasionally, he would also include “byproduct” research reports on energy core stability, perfectly masking his true research direction.
Pierro examined the latest batch of improved Delusions Xiaomu had brought.
Their efficiency and safety had reached an astonishing level.
He then looked at the brief note attached to the report, its handwriting slightly scrawled, clearly the product of extreme exhaustion: All is well.
Do not worry.
Resource list enclosed.
“All is well?” Pierro set down the report, a deeper worry in his eyes.
An ominous premonition rose in his heart.
He summoned the Debt Collectors tasked with covertly protecting (in truth, observing) the perimeter of Dottore’s laboratory.
“The Doctor still shows no signs of leaving the laboratory.
Xiaomu’s entry and exit frequency remains stable.
No unusual individuals have been detected approaching.” “What about his personal condition?
Any observed signs?” “None, Director.
The cloaking barrier around the laboratory is extremely powerful.
We cannot probe the situation inside.
Only occasionally can we feel extremely faint yet abnormal energy fluctuations and tremor frequencies.
The attribute…
cannot be identified.” Pierro dismissed his subordinates and walked to the window.
The snow in Snezhnaya never stopped, just like the misgivings in his heart.
Dottore, what kind of experiment are you really conducting?
And what are those unidentifiable energy fluctuations?
At that same moment, inside the surface laboratory, Dottore had just come up, preparing to have Xiaomu deliver the experimental samples ahead of schedule.
His head was swimming, a sense of oxygen-deprived dizziness overtaking him.
The recent intense, simultaneous work on two major experimental projects had already pushed his still-unrecovered mental strength into overdraft.
On top of that, the core essence he had over-depleted when his consciousness entered the river of time had yet to recover.
Both forces were already in a weakened state, and now they had finally dragged him down completely.
It was as if the strength was sucked out of his body in an instant.
His vision went black.
A violent wave of weakness and a soul-rending agony swept over him.
He didn’t even manage a groan before his eyes rolled back and he fell straight backward, crashing heavily onto the cold floor and losing consciousness.
His hair, once a blue-black, had already been turning white due to prolonged overuse of his powers.
At the moment he collapsed, it was as if all color had been drained away entirely, his hair turning a shock of silver-white in an instant.
A trickle of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth, evidence of the severe overdraft of his core essence.
The laboratory fell into dead silence.
Some instruments, just activated, now issued intermittent alarms due to the loss of their master.
In the corner, Xiaomu, which had stood as still as a decoration, suddenly flashed a rapid red light from its blue crystal eyes.
Its simple thought core had received the final directive from the creator’s life monitoring system: [Creator’s vital signs have fallen below critical threshold.
Conscious activity absent.
Comatose state detected.
Initiating final safety protocol!]