Lazy Salvation

While Solmara was missing its lord, the man in question was busy lording over a whole other species in a whole other era.

But the race he was lord of wasn't particularly fond of his leadership. After all, who would want a madman at the helm?

Thankfully, for the next dozen loops, Ashen got busy with something else and spared them further torment, not that they'd ever know.

What he was busy with was, of course, the time regression spell.

After finding the last key to his dilemma, the rest had been comparatively straightforward. The bubble wasn't so little anymore as he kept mastering it, and now that he had the basic architecture down, he could pour more mana and different intent into the framework to get the results he wanted.

As long as he stayed within the same structure, he was able to rewind time for more than a couple of seconds. He was also able to push it forward by predicting where particles would move next.

The last few attempts had ended with the object being warped and torn into dust as atoms fought and collided with each other. Sometimes things even exploded.

Ashen was actually quite satisfied with that. It made for an effective attacking method, even if the original intention had nothing to do with offense.

But the majority of the next loops went toward perfecting the rewind spell specifically.

After twenty loops, he could rewind a full day. Two hundred loops later, he could restore an object to its state from ten days prior. From there, he seemed to find the rhythm of it, and progress accelerated until he reached the point where, with his full mana output, he could rewind up to three years as long as the bubble stayed within a manageable size.

By the time he reached that result, his time spell repertoire had grown large enough for him to confidently call himself a Time Magician.

Among the many spells he invented, a few were his favorites.

Lag Step made enemies move a fraction of a second late. It was simple enough in theory, but anything but in application. For someone of his speed, a fraction of a second was more than enough.

Entropy Acceleration was the spell he had stumbled into when he tried to push time forward rather than reverse it. Directed at a target, it pushed matter rapidly toward collapse.

But if he had to choose one absolute favorite, it would be Temporal Drag.

This one was an accident. He had tried to freeze every particle in place and observed what happened. He couldn't freeze everything predictably, but he could make everything within a radius move slower, creating a zone centered on himself where everything dragged the closer it got to him. After the adjustment, he excluded himself from the effect entirely, which gave the spell a whole new meaning.

None of these had stayed at the level of mana and intent alone. They had grown past that, particularly the time rewind, and this growth owed itself to his newly comprehended concept.

It hadn't been new for a while since he had grasped it a couple of hundred loops ago, but the power of the concept seemed to deepen with each loop, until it started directly amplifying his time spells in ways that surprised even him.

He had eventually worked out what it was and how it had come to be.

He realized that it started with his unwillingness to watch Seraphine die.

With each loop, as the three-month mark approached, his dread built until it met the ironclad outcome. Knowing what was coming and being unable to stop it was a different kind of suffering from simply being blindsided… worse, in some respects, because it demanded the same grief over and over with full anticipation.

Loop by loop, the unwillingness to see the outcome accumulate until it became a crushing force, and with hundreds of loops behind him and the environment of an era stranded in a time loop, something crystallized.

The Lethargy of Time.

His fervent desire to delay the outcome, even by a fraction, even knowing it was futile, had apparently manifested across enough years to birth a concept. Sloth seemed to have played a role in its shape, given that its core effect was a fractional slowing of time.

This book was originally published on NovelFire. Check it out there for the real experience.

Its real power emerged when fused with his time spells. The results were, by any reasonable standard, overpowered.

And now, after 2,200 loops and 550 years, Ashen was finally ready to execute the plan he had conceived when he first began the time spell work.

***

"Go on, baby… step onto the circle." Ashen hurried her along with an eager expression.

Seraphine, being half-dragged, followed without particular enthusiasm. "Yes, yes… I'm going."

After her breakdown a thousand loops ago, she had sunk into a kind of sustained lethargy. Even now, with the possibility of her life genuinely being saved before her, she couldn't summon excitement. She knew she should, especially with how many years Ashen had spent on this… But she just could not.

To her immense relief, Ashen didn't seem to mind. He had developed a boundless tolerance for her antics in the same way she had developed a boundless tolerance for his madness.

They stood as exceptions to each other's craziness, accepted it, and loved each other even more.

"Alright, geezers! get ready~"

The sages made their best efforts not to react to being called geezers. Though they didn't exactly know what that meant, they knew from the tone alone that it was nothing flattering.

They refocused on the magic circle beneath the consort. Their job was to trigger it on his signal to catch the soul before it could dissipate and fuse it back with the restored body.

They didn't know why a healthy human woman would suddenly drop dead, or why the Primordial spoke of it with such certainty, and they didn't need to. They were here to do a job, that is all.

Ashen began his chant. Mana gathered into a magic circle of his own construction, drawn in condensed mana lines, floating alongside his open palm. He had developed it when the time rewind started destabilizing past the one-year mark. The architecture was borrowed from how the magicians of this era worked, but adapted until it was entirely his.

"As the first breath was drawn, so shall it be drawn again—……Return me to what I once knew."

Time Rewind—!

When the last syllable fell, the circle blazed and a flood of mana rushed out to engulf her body.

He had timed this for immediately after the last loop, buying an extra three months of baseline. The circle had been drawn entirely by him; the sages were here only to contribute mana.

'...So this HAS to work.'

At first, nothing happened.

Then her breath caught.

Her chest stilled, its rise and fall faltered once, twice, before stopping. The warmth in her skin dulled rapidly, and the color followed as her body slackened lifelessly.

It never hit the floor for he was always there.

But even with her body effectively dead, the spell remained.

Her lips darkened. Her skin turned waxy and brittle. Her fingers curled slightly, joints stiffening unnaturally as a deepening pallor spread beneath the surface.

Time did not stop. It kept reversing.

The stillness of death sank further, pushing her body past freshness into something older. Skin began to decay, and her frame turned hollow, but then something made Ashen's eyes widen.

Her chest emptied.

Where her heart should have been, there was only a cavity. Not a rotted organ. Nothing at all. As if it had been removed from the corpse entirely.

Then…

A twitch. Deep inside, something formed.

The hollow is filled with a presence returning. Something new filled into place, or perhaps, not new, but the original, since time was flowing backwards.

It was her missing heart.

Her body followed.

The looseness tightened. The pallor receded. Decay withdrew like a tide reversing. Color returned last as the stiffness dissolved back into softness.

When Ashen felt the cold flesh in his hands warming by degrees, he knew her moment of death was rapidly approaching from the other direction.

He let the spell run a few seconds more. When he felt like the body in his arms was only minutes from its death point, he said, flatly: "Now."

The magic circle beneath them roared to life. The sages drove their mana into it.

Her soul was yanked back and fused with the corpse his time spell had made as fresh as possible.

Every condition aligned. There was no reason for the resurrection circle to fail this time.

A sudden breath.

Her chest rose, and life surged through her as though it had never left.

And finally… finally… she stood alive before him, as though the countless deaths had been nothing more than a bad dream.

"You're alive," he murmured, voice hazy. '...As if none of it had ever happened.'

Even the madness receded from his eyes for a moment.

"Ashen… am I alive?" Seraphine looked more bewildered than joyful. After countless deaths, she didn't dare believe what was in front of her.

"Ye—"

Caught—!

Blood spilled from her lips onto his face.

The concept of the Lethargy of Time screamed in his mind, as if trying to rip itself from his body in revolt at what was happening to her heart.

'Her heart—!'

He pushed his senses into her until they found it: a minuscule sphere at the center of her heart. Without his time concept, he doubted he would have detected it at all. And now that he was aware of it, pulling from his memories across all the loops, he recognized it: this sphere had never left her body. Not once, no matter how far back the rewind went.

He probed it with mana. It passed through as if the sphere didn't exist.

He tried everything he could think of. Nothing worked. He only pulled himself back from the edge when he felt a soft hand touch his cheek.

"...It's okay."

"No… no… nonononono… please… no…"

"See you soon." She smiled faintly.

Bang—!

The moment he had been closest to saving her became instead the most gruesome death he had witnessed.

"..."

"..."

.

.

.

"Hm."

He lifted his head.

"Well. Seems like this one's a bust too." He let out a small laugh. "Too bad~"

Drip… drip…

"Hehe."

"...My lord?"

He looked at the sages. "Oh, you're still here?" He gave them a sunny smile. "Well. It doesn't matter."

"...what?"

"See you soon~"

Flash—