7th January, 2032.

Near TEDA, Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area, within the vast stretch of Binhai New Area, nestled close to the port.

While the rest of the city gleamed in celebration, spring festival lanterns swaying in the wind, cultural performances echoing with joy, a giant spinning wheel glowing against the skyline, this part remained barren.

Desolate and forgotten.

Dark.

And in the silence of that darkness...

Boom!

Boom!

Two cars tore through the empty industrial roads, engines roaring like beasts off their leash.

But that was just the beginning.

More followed, sleek black machines, neon underglows, exhausts spitting flame.

One after another, the streets came alive with underground racers.

Young masters and heiresses from Beijing, spoiled and untouchable, fleeing the capital to indulge in chaos. They couldn't race recklessly back home, not under the Emperor's shadow. So they came here.

To this ghost town of steel and smoke.

It was a cold night.

But the tires?

They burned.

Screeching against asphalt like devils dragging chains.

No police showed up, not with the kind of surnames these drivers carried.

The streets stayed empty, save for a few drunkards collapsing near the port edge, howling into the wind, half-dead on imported liquor.

A few "magicians" put on a show, party tricks really. Manipulators of aether, tossing glowing sparks or lifting cans to impress girls.

Some had more combat-worthy tricks, able to enhance their bodies to leap, punch, or run faster. But real spellcasters were rare, even among the rich.

Their connections got them scrolls and secrets, but talent? That couldn't be bought.

A few trained in secret.

Although it had been eight years since Aether returned to the world, it was still reshaping human life quietly.

Even these reckless cars, more daring now, thanks to an invention three years ago.

Airbags were obsolete.

Replaced by protective aether-shields embedded into luxury models.

A crash?

Even at 200 km/h, you'd survive.

They called it an engineering marvel.

Created by a mysterious student under nobel prize winner scientist Isabella's supervision.

No one knew it was actually Wang Xueying.

Unpaid.

Uncredited.

The world moved on.

And she?

She was stuck in Shanghai, alone.

It had been a week since her brother vanished.

Not a single clue.

Not a soul knew where the hell he went.

He just... disappeared.

"Hm? Where?"

Inside a sealed, spacious container, though it resembled more an illusionary realm than a physical box, waves of light flowed like spectral sea tides, rising and receding with an eerie rhythm.

"Zero-Entropy Shell" designed to mimic quantum fluid states.

A lone woman stood amidst them, gently weaving the current with her fingers.

White hair, short and tousled.

A long white shirt barely covering her pale, cream-like skin.

Luna.

A strange existence.

She traced her fingers through the air, manipulating strange flow, each ripple causing the wave-logic to spiral into beautiful visual anomalies.

The strange flow of energy was "Chronoether", a fabricated time-sensitive energy Wang Xiao left behind for her to toy with.

She and Wang Xiao… were clearly working on something unnatural.

But then he turned away, mid-conversation, and began talking to thin air.

Luna's brows twitched twice.

"...You're doing it again," she said, annoyed but curious.

This bizarre habit of his, conversing with things that shouldn't talk.

Apparently, he could communicate with atoms. Even the tiniest fragments.

And not just communicate, learn from them.

He could pull traces of memory from matter itself.

Reconstruct incidents.

Make sub-atomic particles perform scheduled tasks, obey his will.

She didn't quite understand the mechanism, no one did, but the terrifying part was what he once told her:

"If I really tried… I could break the concept of time. Learn everything every atom remembers. But if I do… my consciousness might collapse and dissolve into omnipresence across the entire reality thread."

He said it with a casual sigh, like it was a minor inconvenience.

So instead, he settled for a simpler method.

He kept them, these entities of matter, as pets.

Good, obedient pets.

And one of them was speaking to him now.

A phantom adorable hound, formless yet tangible, like mist wrapped in instinct. It circled him playfully, its body composed of pure Dark Matter, unstable and collapsible, capable of traveling at near-infinite speeds.

Not just through space, but through realities.

Its intelligence, however, was... disappointing.

Barely sentient. Like a child,.or worse, like a soulless computer program.

It followed instructions with no emotion, no judgment.

Just pure function.

A perfect spy.

An absolute headache.

Wang Xiao had many of them, he called them "Phantom Pets".

They weren't like his skeletal avatars or his tangible fragments.

She stepped closer, brushing her damp hair behind her ear. "Is this one... smarter than the last?"

Wang Xiao scoffed lightly. "No. Still dumber... But it saw something."

He tilted his head, eyes dim, and spoke to the creature made of whispering darkness.

"…Show me."

The phantom lowered its head once, and the air itself ripple, like a memory shivering.

Luna flinched slightly. "Creepy little thing… you really made that?"

She reached out to touch it... It shattered.

The creature collapsed in silence, disintegrating like dust on the wind. But that dust twisted the rules of space, reality bent sideways, and the container they stood in... ceased to exist.

Luna's lips parted.

A new world had taken shape, outside of space, time, even logic. A state she had only brushed using Chronoether when cheating the flow of seconds, but even that was a child's scribble next to this.

They were nowhere, yet staring through a window... a portal... or perhaps a ripple in causality.

The scene beyond: a nightclub. Time moved, yet it didn't. The people laughed, danced, but the moment remained eerily frozen.

Then it reversed.

Luna frowned. She had recognized someone.

"What... was that?"

Wang Xiao's voice was low. "Causality chain. Every event… links to another. If I plant a dark seed..."

He raised his hand slightly, tracing invisible threads.

"... it sends ripples across the entire chain. The farther the disturbance, the harder it is to predict."

Luna narrowed her eyes. "So you see the future?"

He shook his head. "Not the future. The outcomes. I see how choices lead to consequences. In short timeframes, I can force precision. But in larger ones... too many wild variables."

He made it sound mundane. She knew better.

He could rewrite reality.

She processed the implications. Then chuckled, lightly, ironically.

"Sounds miserable. Living while already knowing what comes next? Like you're acting in a script you already read. No freedom. No surprise."

He didn't deny it, he looked at her.

"You never chose to be born… yet here you are. You know death awaits… yet you live. So what difference does it make, dying now or a hundred billion years later?"

He looked away, voice soft but heavy.

"Even a man who knows he's doomed still walks forward. Choice is relative. Freedom is a luxury tied to ignorance."

"Choices are merely illusions cast by the narrow view of time. What's freedom to you… is ignorance to me."

His gaze unfocused. Somewhere deeper, he had already touched the answer, but chose not to fully grasp it, like a god refusing omniscience out of pity for his own mind.

To him, timelines were like memories.

They existed. But until he focused, they meant nothing.

Right now, the chain he followed belonged to his elder sister, Wang Jiarong.

Her thread had collapsed.

"Strange..."

His eyes narrowed.

There was no trace, no attacker, no cause.

The thread simply vanished.

Possibilities flew past his mind.

Death? Soul broken? Or pulled so far backward in time it no longer existed within his range of sight?

The last option felt... off. Unlikely.

It felt instead like something, or someone, had cut it off. Erased it.

That wasn't possible. Unless... someone with strength like his.

Someone who could completely destroy the chain and trap the fragments within their own body, a pocket reality outside of all time.

Just like he had done with Maliketh once.

One part of his body, eternal agony.

Another part, frozen in stasis.

Entirely cut off from the timeline.

From the outside? They simply ceased to exist.

Even a fate-seer like Yuriko would only witness a sudden void where destiny once was.

That's what had happened to Wang Jiarong.

Her causality chain disappeared beyond a certain point. No traces... No aftermath.

And even Wang Xiao, who ruled the dark threads of reality, had no idea how.

For the first time in aeons, a chill crept beneath his feet.

His pupils contracted slightly.

Subtle anger flickered in the depths of his eyes.