CHAPTER 164: THE PATH THROUGH TIME.

(A/N Big thanks to everyone for the Power stones and Golden tickets, they mean a lot. As usual, please don’t hesitate to comment or drop a review. ENJOY)

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For the first question, Orion didn’t have a real answer.

Not yet.

Mana might be multidimensional. Mana might be present in every parallel layer simultaneously. Mana might even be the very thing that threads each dimension together like stitches of a cosmic fabric.

But until he received confirmation—or denial, or some mixture of both—he kept the idea tucked away in the back of his mind.

It was strange, though.

Dimensions were always described as variations of the original space—similar worlds with subtle shifts. If so, shouldn’t there exist dimensions with no mana at all? Places so barren of energy that magic itself couldn’t exist?

Maybe they existed.

Maybe they didn’t.

But that speculation was not for the present him.

His focus had been on the second question instead.

How did Thaddeus hide his presence when his physical body still interacted with the real environment?

It took months—but Orion figured it out.

Thaddeus unconsciously created a zone around himself, one that blurred the boundary between dimensions. A space where the closest layer of air, the closest layer of ground, and even the smallest vibrations around him were dragged into a state of dimensional simultaneity.

Not fully here.

Not fully there.

Both.

Simultaneous existence.

If Thaddeus extended that simultaneous zone, say, ten meters wide and ten meters deep, then any vibrations produced by stepping on the ground still existed—still propagated—but because they existed across multiple dimensions, mana couldn’t detect them properly. The signals were split, layered, blurred.

If unwanted vibrations traveled beyond Thaddeus’s ten-meter limit, only then could someone sense him—faintly, inconsistently, and often too late.

Orion had realized the first piece during the trial years ago.

Margaret’s entropy affinity, with its inherent ability to destabilize surrounding environments, significantly shrank Thaddeus’s dimensional zone. She forced the layers apart. She distorted the edges. And because of that, Orion—using Protocol—could detect Thaddeus in bursts.

Difficult.

Tedious.

But possible.

The problem was that Margaret couldn’t always be around.

And Orion had a mission.

A stubborn, impossible, infuriating mission.

He had to break through Spatial Veil.

His first thought was enhanced vision—some kind of augmented perception—but that ended quickly. Sight was still influenced by mana. Mana was part of the problem. The Seer worked because he viewed time, not space, but it had limits. His range was too small, barely more than a few meters, and while he could maintain it longer now, it still burned through mana like wildfire.

So he looked to advancement.

He needed a method to detect Thaddeus even when no one else could.

Two options emerged.

First option:

Sync Protocol with mana sense and push both into a multidimensional resonance.

Sense multiple dimensions at once.

A good idea... in theory.

But he wasn’t advanced enough in spatial manipulation to even begin forcing his senses to bridge dimensional gaps. Besides, there was no guarantee it would work. If Thaddeus existed in multiple places simultaneously, sensing all layers at once might scramble detection even more.

Second option:

Use The Seer as a conceptual base, and sense through time rather than space.

Because no matter how many dimensions Thaddeus stood in...

He only had one present.

One continuous thread of existence connecting every layer.

It was like a graph:

—Time on the x-axis.

—Space on the y-axis.

Thaddeus existed across countless y-lines, but they all intersected at one point on the x-line.

The present.

So Orion chose time.

The method felt like cheating—skipping the spatial puzzle entirely—and yet it was the only realistic path forward. Time detection would bypass the misdirection of multiple dimensions. Time did not split. Time did not blur. Time did not become unstable simply because someone’s body existed in three layers at once.

But this new road presented its own storm of complications.

Time was vicious.

Time was sensitive.

Time demanded delicate precision.

The first attempts nearly made him blackout.

The backlash from misaligned temporal resonance had once left him dizzy for a week.

Still...

He kept going.

He refined his frames, adjusted his sequences, restructured his anchor points, recalibrated the mana frequency required to skim the uppermost membrane of present-time flow without slipping into true time manipulation.

He built diagrams, broke them, redrew them, questioned them.

He tested prototypes.

He scrapped entire techniques and started again.

It wasn’t as dramatic as when he tried to pierce the Spatial Veil for the very first time, but it was close. Very close.

He remembered the moment he actually succeeded.

It wasn’t loud.

It wasn’t explosive.

It wasn’t accompanied by a system notification—at least not immediately.

It was quiet.

He had been sitting just like this—legs folded, breath steady, eyes half-closed—and the world shifted in a subtle, delicate way.

He saw it.

A ripple.

Not of mana.

Not of space.

But of present time.

A faint, pale shimmer overlaying his surroundings like transparent paint. Everything in the room existed on a thin line that moved forward in one unbroken direction.

And through that line...

He sensed it.

A distortion.

A presence.

A signature.

Not mana.

Not spatial disturbance.

But a temporal footprint.

Every living thing left one.

Thaddeus left one.

Even if he split himself across dimensions—time still held him together.

Orion’s fingers twitched slightly on his knees.

He had succeeded.

He had created the one thing that would allow him to track someone like Thaddeus.

A skill that looked at the present—not through mana, not through dimensions, but through the thread of time itself.

Finally...

His eyes opened slowly.

He whispered the name in his mind.

*Temporal Locus

A temporal-detection technique that reads the "present-time signature" of targets within range.

Instead of sensing mana or spatial displacement, the user perceives the continuous thread of a being’s temporal presence—allowing detection even if the target exists across multiple dimensions or distorts spatial readings.

Accuracy and range depend on proficiency and concentration.

Orion breathed out.

Temporal Locus.

The perfect counter.

The perfect evolution.

And the first step toward something even more dangerous.

{A/N : Don’t mind my rambling, just wanted to show how he achieved his mission without going too into details}