Adrian opened his eyes ten thousand years in the future.
The ceiling of his apartment was gone. A gray sky crossed by red fissures stretched above him, while the remains of several buildings leaned against one another like corpses that had yet to finish falling.
His body still carried the injuries from the dungeon, but the pain had diminished. Adaptive Carapace covered his abdomen with small black plates, while Starforged Body kept his ribs stable.
[Future access established.]
[Temporal distance: 10,000 years.]
[Current location: Meridian Ruins.]
[New coordinate available.]
A golden line appeared before Adrian and stretched through the ruins.
It didn’t point toward the fortress where he had found Lyra or the old training center. It led underground, directly beneath a structure he recognized despite thousands of years of destruction.
Hollow Station.
In the present, the station stood beneath the academy district and contained the dungeon they had just conquered. In this era, only an opening covered in rusted metal and black roots remained.
The coordinate ended beneath its ruins.
Adrian opened Sovereign Territory.
Lyra emerged first. Her restoration had altered even the way she manifested. She no longer resembled an image slightly detached from the world. Her boots crushed the dust, her silver hair moved with the wind, and the pressure surrounding her body forced the dark mist to retreat.
Five Star Guards appeared behind her.
The Calamity Hound emerged last.
The beast sniffed the air, and the three fragments floating around its neck began to rotate. Then it tilted its head toward the ruined station.
"It recognizes the Warden’s energy," Adrian said.
"It was created from the Warden," Lyra replied. "It may also be following an order you haven’t detected."
The Calamity Hound looked at Lyra.
She rested one hand on the hilt of her sword.
The creature lowered its ears and moved beside Adrian.
"I think it likes you."
"I think it understands the consequences."
Adrian examined his connection with the unit. He found no external commands. The bond belonged entirely to Infinite Sovereign.
Even so, the Warden had arrived from a modified future with orders to kill him. The coordinate could be a reward or a second trap.
Probably both.
"Two Star Guards in front," he ordered. "The riflemen will cover the entrance. The others are coming with us."
The units entered formation without responding.
Adrian descended into Hollow Station.
The main entrance was blocked by several tons of concrete. One of the Star Guards attempted to move it, but Adrian raised a hand.
"There’s another route."
He could feel it.
The core registered in the present didn’t yet exist for him in this timeline. Hollow Station had been destroyed thousands of years ago, but part of its authority remained attached to the structure.
[Dungeon ownership recognized.]
[Owner: Adrian Vale.]
[Local core status: Destroyed.]
[Emergency owner route detected.]
A section of the wall lit up.
Adrian placed his palm against it. The stones began to shift, revealing a maintenance staircase.
Lyra stared into the darkness.
"Someone preserved this route after the core was destroyed."
"Someone who knew I would become its owner."
"Or someone who needed you to believe that."
"I knew I missed you."
"We were separated for less than six hours."
"It’s been ten thousand years from the city’s perspective."
Lyra entered without answering.
The tunnel descended farther than Adrian remembered. The present-day version of Hollow Station ended within the dungeon’s lower sectors, but this staircase continued for hundreds of yards.
The walls changed as they advanced. At first, they were made of concrete. Then plates of metal resembling the Temporal Warden’s armor appeared. Farther down, even those vanished and were replaced by black stone.
The Calamity Hound stopped at a fork.
The golden line indicated the right-hand corridor.
The creature growled toward the left.
Adrian activated Rift Sense.
The empty passage distorted.
Something invisible crossed from one wall to the other.
"We have company."
A figure emerged from the darkness. It stood slightly over six feet tall and wore the remains of a Meridian Academy uniform. Its body had fused with the wall, rusted cables ran through its back, and its limbs ended in metal blades.
[Corrupted Guardian detected.]
[Level: 17.]
Three more guardians detached themselves from the walls.
The Star Guards raised their weapons.
Adrian stepped forward.
"I’ll handle them."
"You’re still injured," Lyra said.
"I also have a new class."
The first guardian attacked.
Adrian didn’t evade completely. He turned his body and allowed one blade to graze the black plates covering his forearm.
The edge opened a shallow line.
[Adaptive Carapace has analyzed Physical Slashing Damage.]
[Temporary resistance acquired: 8%.]
The second strike hit the same spot.
The blade barely penetrated.
[Temporary resistance increased: 17%.]
Adrian caught the guardian’s wrist and drove Starbreaker Fist into its chest. The artificial body struck the wall, but the cables attached to its back prevented it from flying away.
The other three attacked simultaneously.
Rift Sense revealed their trajectories.
Adrian crossed through a Rift Step and appeared behind the first guardian. He used its body as cover, blocked two blades with Starforged Body, and allowed the third to strike Adaptive Carapace.
[Calamity Heart activated.]
[Accumulated damage: 6%.]
[Physical performance increased.]
Strength flooded his muscles.
Adrian tore the cables from the guardian’s back, spun its body around, and hurled it into the other two. Before they could rise, the Calamity Hound opened a rift beneath them.
Both guardians fell through.
The beast thrust its head into a second Rift and bit them from the ceiling. Its jaws closed the space between them, severing both enemies along with the section of corridor they occupied.
[Calamity Hound defeated Corrupted Guardian Lv. 17 ×2.]
[Experience shared with registered classes.]
The final guardian attempted to retreat.
Lyra appeared in front of it.
She placed two fingers against its chest, and the creature disintegrated into a cloud of metallic dust.
Adrian looked at the remains.
"That seems new."
"Battlefield Dominion allows me to impose my will upon enemies considerably weaker than I am."
"Could you have done that to all four?"
"Yes."
"And you let me fight while I was injured?"
"You wanted to test your class."
Adrian noticed the faint smile on Lyra’s face.
"You’re learning."
They continued until they reached the coordinate’s endpoint.
They didn’t find a chamber.
Only a wall.
The map indicated that the objective lay on the other side, but Rift Sense detected neither empty space nor a hidden door.
The Calamity Hound approached. The three fragments around its neck rotated backward, and the surface of the wall changed.
For one second, Adrian saw another version of the corridor.
The lights were on. The metal wasn’t rusted, and a door occupied the place where the black stone now stood.
Then the image vanished.
"The chamber isn’t hidden in space," Adrian said. "It’s hidden in another moment."
Lyra extended her hand.
Battlefield Dominion came into contact with the temporal energy. The Hound’s fragments accelerated, but the door didn’t remain visible.
"We need a third anchor point," she said.
Adrian looked at the coordinate’s golden marker.
It originated from the authority fragment they had extracted from the second heart. Lyra possessed one part. The Calamity Hound retained another.
The final part was inside him.
He activated Rift Hunter.
Instead of trying to open a path through space, he focused on the distortion separating the ruined corridor from its former state.
Rift Sense detected a fissure far smaller than the others.
It didn’t divide two places.
It divided two moments.
Adrian dug his fingers into it and pulled.
The black wall opened.
On the other side waited a clean corridor illuminated by white lamps that had remained lit for ten thousand years.
[Hidden temporal chamber discovered.]
The Star Guards entered first. They detected no enemies.
Adrian crossed over with Lyra and the Calamity Hound. As soon as they were all inside, the temporal fissure closed.
The chamber was small. A table, three chairs, and a recording device occupied most of the space. Combat marks covered the walls, and dried blood stained the floor.
A sword rested beside the device.
The blade had been broken in half.
Adrian recognized it.
It was the weapon Evelyn had destroyed while blocking the second heart’s escape route.
"This belonged to the woman from the dungeon," Lyra said.
"Yes."
"But that sword was destroyed in the present."
Adrian picked up the hilt.
In the present, Evelyn had abandoned it inside Hollow Station only hours earlier. Someone had recovered it, repaired it, and preserved it for years before bringing it into this chamber.
A new inscription had been engraved into the guard.
You paid for the second one.
Adrian ran his thumb over the words.
"It belonged to Evelyn."
The recording device activated.
A figure appeared above the table.
The woman in the hologram had longer hair, and several scars crossed her face. She wore white armor covered in bloodstains, and a sword of unknown rank rested across her legs.
It was Evelyn.
Not the eighteen-year-old woman Adrian had left in the present.
This woman was at least thirty.
One of her arms was missing below the elbow.
The recording took several seconds to stabilize. The adult Evelyn looked directly at Adrian as though she could see him across the millennia.
"If you’re watching this, you defeated the Warden and chose the fourth option."
Adrian didn’t move.
Lyra approached the projection.
"I knew what you would choose," Evelyn continued. "You said taking only one reward would have been an insult to your class. You also spent years insisting that it counted as a strategic decision rather than greed."
A faint smile appeared on the woman’s exhausted face.
"I never managed to make you admit the difference."
Her expression hardened.
Something struck a door behind her. The recording trembled.
"I don’t know which of our actions preserved this timeline or how much your present has changed. If Lyra is with you, tell her that she was right about the station in the end."
Lyra’s gaze sharpened.
"About what?"
The recording couldn’t answer.
Evelyn leaned toward the device.
"Adrian, if you received these coordinates, we can still change it. Find the underground station. And when you find your corpse... don’t let it touch you."
Silence filled the chamber.
Adrian looked down at the broken sword in his hands.
His corpse.
Not an ancestor. Not someone else who shared his name.
Evelyn was talking about him.
The woman in the recording looked toward something outside the image. The door behind her was struck again, and a crack spread across its surface.
"You need to understand something before you go. What happens when you sleep isn’t a simple journey into the future. The reason your body can appear ten thousand years later and the reason your corpse is waiting inside Meridian Station are the same."
The image began to distort.
"Adrian, you aren’t being sent into the future. In reality, your body—"
The transmission cut off.
The hologram vanished.
Adrian activated the device again. It didn’t respond.
Rift Sense passed through its interior and found that the memory module had been reduced to dust. The final playback had destroyed the remaining data.
"It ended too soon," Lyra said.
"Recordings from the future have an irritating sense of drama."
"She said your corpse is inside a station."
"She also said I can’t allow it to touch me. That implies it can move."
Lyra looked toward the chamber’s sealed entrance.
"And that it isn’t completely dead."
The system reacted to the transmission.
Part of the future map opened before Adrian. A network of tunnels far more extensive than the present-day Hollow Station appeared beneath Meridian’s ruins.
Most of the routes were blocked.
One remained marked in red.
[Hidden objective acquired.]
[Locate the underground station.]
[Future location unlocked: Meridian Station.]
[Distance: 18.7 kilometers below Meridian Ruins.]
[Warning: Sovereign-class presence detected.]
Adrian selected the destination.
The map closed.
[Access denied.]
[Minimum survival requirement not met.]
[Access requirement: Level 15.]
Adrian opened his status.
He had defeated the Rift Hunter, participated in the Temporal Warden’s death, and acquired Calamity Beast. His classes had progressed, his units had evolved, and his army was far more powerful than when he arrived.
But his personal level remained unchanged.
[Adrian Vale]
[Unique Class: Infinite Sovereign.]
[Level: 9.]
[Required Level: 15.]
He needed six more levels to enter Meridian Station.
Six levels to discover how he had ended up ten thousand years in the future.
And six levels to find his own corpse.