Chapter : 611

It was during this forced inactivity that he truly began to appreciate the genius of his earlier investment. While he was laid up, broken and useless, the work continued. The ping of his Echo completing its tasks was a constant, soothing reminder that his empire was still growing, even while its emperor was indisposed. His Farming Coin balance continued to tick upward with a slow, inexorable certainty.

He had built a system that was more resilient than he was. And that, he realized, was the true mark of a successful leader.

Finally, after what felt like a full seventy-two hours of rest, strategizing, and slow, agonizing healing, he felt ready. His shoulder was still a knot of angry, protesting muscle, and his ribs twinged with every deep breath, but the debilitating, incapacitating pain was gone. He could move. He could fight. And he was burning with a desire to get back to work. He had lost three days of prime hunting time, and the thought of the wasted opportunity was a more potent motivator than any battle cry.

He stood, his movements stiff and cautious, and walked to the shimmering, insubstantial wall of his stone house that served as the gateway back to his world. It was time to return. Time to check in on his real-world enterprises, to reconnect with his team, and to step back into the many roles he was now forced to play.

He felt a deep, profound sense of mental fatigue, the unique, soul-deep weariness that came from three days of constant, focused activity—even if that activity was just healing and thinking. He braced himself for the inevitable disorientation of returning to the Primary Reality, expecting to find the sun setting on a day he had left in the morning.

He stepped through the shimmering portal. The familiar, comfortable scent of old books and oiled wood from his sealed study filled his senses. The harsh, unforgiving light of the savanna sun was replaced by the soft, gentle glow of the afternoon light filtering through his study window.

Everything seemed normal. Everything seemed right.

And then he looked at the clock.

It was a grand, ornate grandfather clock that stood in the corner of his study, a priceless heirloom of the Ferrum family. Its heavy, brass pendulum swung with a slow, hypnotic, and utterly reliable rhythm. Its polished, porcelain face was a testament to centuries of perfect timekeeping.

He had entered the Soul Farm shortly after his meeting with Mei Jing, around one in the afternoon. He had just spent what his mind, his body, and his very soul insisted were three full days in the dimension. Three full cycles of waking, working, and resting. Seventy-two agonizingly long hours.

The hands on the grandfather clock, however, told a different, impossible story.

They pointed to just past seven in the evening.

His blood ran cold. He stared at the clock, his mind refusing to process the data. It was a contradiction of such a fundamental nature that it felt like the world itself had broken.

He had been gone for three days.

And in the real world… only six hours had passed.

The realization hit him not like a lightning bolt, but like the slow, inexorable, and terrifying creep of a rising tide. The world tilted on its axis. The fundamental laws of physics, the unyielding march of time that had governed his entire eighty-year first life, had just been casually and completely invalidated.

He stumbled back, his hand finding the edge of his heavy oak desk for support. His heart hammered against his freshly knitted ribs, a frantic, panicked rhythm. He stared at the clock, then at the window where the sun was beginning its gentle descent toward the horizon, then back at the clock. The evidence was irrefutable. It was undeniable. And it was absolutely, completely impossible.

He had known about the time-dilation effect. He had calculated it himself. A rough 6-to-1 ratio. One day in the real world was six days in the Soul Farm. He had understood it as an intellectual concept, a neat, useful perk of his private dimension.

But he hadn't truly understood it. Not until this moment.

He had experienced it. He had lived it. He had spent three full, subjective days inside that dimension. He had hunted, he had fought, he had been broken, and he had healed. He had felt the sun rise and set three times on that alien savanna, had watched the stars wheel across its strange sky. He carried the mental and spiritual weight of those seventy-two hours within him. It was a real, tangible experience etched onto his soul.

And yet, here, in the world that mattered, he had simply been "meditating" in his study for a quiet afternoon.

Chapter : 612

A slow, hysterical laugh bubbled up in his chest. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated shock, a reaction to a reality so fundamentally broken that the only possible response was a kind of madness.

He had been racing against the clock. He had been fighting a desperate, multi-front war, juggling the demands of his business, the political machinations of the court, the looming threat of his reincarnated enemies, and the agonizingly slow grind for power. He had been living his life on a knife's edge, constantly prioritizing, constantly sacrificing one front to shore up another.

And all this time, he had been sitting on a cheat code of cosmic proportions.

Time was no longer his enemy. It was his greatest, most powerful, and most secret ally. It was a resource he could now manipulate, a river whose flow he could step in and out of at will.

The implications were so vast, so world-altering, that his strategic mind, the mind that had once managed armies and empires, struggled to fully encompass them.

He could now live multiple lives, not sequentially, but simultaneously.

He could be Lord Lloyd Ferrum, the dutiful heir, attending his lectures at the Academy, learning the lessons of the world's elite, and playing the Great Game with his father and the King.

He could be the revolutionary industrialist, the "soap-selling devil," working alongside Mei Jing and Tisha to build his AURA empire, generating the immense wealth he needed to fund his real-world operations and his secret war.

And then, in the quiet hours of a single afternoon, in the space between lunch and dinner, he could step into his private universe and become the warrior. He could spend days in the Soul Farm, grinding, training, fighting, and pushing his power to its absolute limits, accumulating a level of strength and combat experience that should have taken decades to acquire.

He could do it all. All at once.

The mental fatigue he felt now, the exhaustion of his three-day ordeal, was a small, insignificant price to pay for this revelation. It was a manageable cost, a logistical problem. He would need more rest, yes. He would need to carefully manage his mental and spiritual stamina. But the potential return on that investment was infinite.

A new, profound sense of calm settled over him, displacing the initial shock. The frantic, hunted feeling that had been his constant companion since his meeting with Ben Ferrum began to recede. The pressure was still there. The threats were still real. But the timeline had changed. He was no longer reacting to his enemies' moves on a shared chessboard. He was now playing his own, separate game on a board where he controlled the flow of time itself.

He looked around his study, at the ledgers for his business, the textbooks for his classes, the faint, lingering scent of Iffrit’s brimstone from his earlier battle. They were all just pieces of the larger puzzle now, components of the different lives he was now leading.

He walked to the window and looked out at the setting sun, its light painting the sky in magnificent hues of orange and purple. It was the same sunset he had left behind six hours ago. But he was not the same man who had watched it then. That man had been a player in a dangerous game.

The man watching it now, the man who had lived three extra days while the world stood still, was on his way to becoming the master of it.

The dilated day had not just given him more time. It had given him something far more valuable.

It had given him a fighting chance.

The day that followed was a testament to Lloyd’s newfound and terrifying efficiency. He compartmentalized his existence with the ruthless precision of a master strategist dividing his forces for a multi-front war. His life became a perfectly balanced, three-pronged assault on his own limitations.

His public persona, that of Lord Lloyd Ferrum, was a model of aristocratic diligence. He attended his lectures at the Royal Academy, not as a reluctant student, but as a sponge, absorbing the political, historical, and cultural nuances of this world with a rapacious hunger. He engaged in intellectual debates with his professors, his insights now sharpened by the hard-won clarity of his other life. He fulfilled his duties as a Royal Advisor with a quiet competence that earned him the continued, if puzzled, approval of King Liam. He was the perfect, rising star of the nobility, his past failures a forgotten footnote, his future a subject of much admiring speculation in the capital's salons.