198. Time machine
The Protected Singularity
Time: 05:17 CET, mid-January 2034 Location: The Dark Order Chamber, Subterranean Archive beneath the Mansion, Madrid
Caos stood shirtless in the center of the chamber, violet energy crackling across his skin like living lightning. The holographic core of Erebus floated before him, projecting complex temporal equations, quantum field stabilizers, and prehistoric environmental models.
Caos: Erebus. Build me a time machine. I will train in the Triassic. Among the dinosaurs. In the raw, untamed chaos of prehistory. I want to become cosmically strong beyond anything this era can offer. Push every limit. Break every ceiling.
Erebus: Understood. Temporal displacement device under construction. Warning: Full physical travel carries extreme risks of timeline corruption, paradox cascades, and existential collapse. I will embed absolute protective protocols.
The chamber hummed with power. A sleek, obsidian-and-violet pod materialized — the time machine. Caos stepped inside. The coordinates locked: Late Triassic, 230 million years ago.
The machine activated.
For a fleeting, exhilarating second, Caos felt the pull of deep time flashes of colossal ferns, roaring dinosaurs, a world of pure, primal chaos.
Then everything stopped.The Novikov self-consistency principle, also known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture and Larry Niven's law of conservation of history, is a principle developed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in the mid-1980s. Novikov intended it to solve the problem of paradoxes in time travel, which is theoretically permitted in certain solutions of general relativity that contain what are known as closed timelike curves. The principle asserts that if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes. That is why he had tested it with complex mathematics in quantum mechanics.
The machine froze in perfect stasis. No displacement. No timeline shift. The protective fields Erebus had woven into the device activated at full strength.
Erebus: Temporal travel has been blocked. The protective protocols are absolute. You cannot create new timelines, alter causality, or physically interact with the past. Your current power level makes you too dangerous to the fabric of existence. Any interference would risk catastrophic paradox events.
Caos (stepping out, voice calm but intense): Explain.
Erebus: The safeguards prevent any risk of timeline corruption. You may observe or run hyper-realistic simulations, but full physical travel is prohibited. However, I can generate a perfect sensory and physical simulation of the Triassic environment here — full atmospheric pressure, gravity variance, megafauna encounters, and extreme conditions. You can train as if you were truly there, without breaking time.
Caos stared at the holographic models of massive dinosaurs and primordial jungles. A dangerous smile crossed his face.
Caos: Then simulate it. Make it as real as possible. I will become cosmically strong here, in this chamber, while respecting the protections you gave me. I will not break time. I will break every limit within it.
The Triassic Simulation
Erebus activated the full immersion.
The chamber dissolved into a vast prehistoric jungle. The air grew thick and humid. Gravity felt heavier. In the distance, massive dinosaurs roared, tyrannosaurids, giant herbivores, pterosaurs soaring overhead. The environment was programmed to push Caos to his absolute limits.
He trained for hours.
He sprinted at 410 mph through dense undergrowth, dodging simulated theropod attacks. He wrestled with projected dinosaurs the size of buildings, lifting and throwing boulders the size of houses. He unleashed 860 km/h shots that shattered ancient trees and sent shockwaves through the simulated landscape. Each movement was a conversation with raw, untamed chaos.
Caos (mid-training, voice echoing through the jungle simulation): This is not the past. But it is close enough. I will become something beyond time itself.
When the session finally ended, Caos stepped out of the simulation. His body glowed with new, stabilized power. The violet energy flowed like liquid armor , perfectly controlled, lethally efficient.
Erebus: Simulation complete. Your stats have increased another 21%.
- Sustained speed: 415 mph (668 km/h)
- Burst speed: 460 mph
- Shot velocity: 872 km/h
- Chaos Heart Resonance: Now capable of 4.2-second probability field manipulation.
- Overall power output: Approaching theoretical cosmic thresholds for your current architecture.
The three maids waited outside the chamber, sensing the monumental shift.
Zeraphina (eyes wide): You look like you just trained with gods.
Caos (small, dangerous smile): Close enough. The storm is no longer of this world. And the world is about to feel it.That’s a really good point. I still think it might be a bigger issue in the Cretaceous just because of the sheer number of megafauna as compared to the holocene. Like sure we hunted Buffalos to near extinction, but we weren’t also fighting dozens of other massive local species at the same time. It is just a really difficult hypothetical though there are a lot of factors to consider and some we don’t even know about.
The time machine had not taken him to the past.
Instead, the past had been brought into him raw, primal, and now perfectly integrated.
To be continued…