Chapter 455: Going Home
"Going... home?" Kir asked, realizing that what he’d thought was a mere anomaly could only be one thing...
"What do you mean home?" Kiryu raised his voice.
"I mean that Earth is not gone. It’s still there. Where we are, time is practically frozen on their side compared to us. A necessary thing I imposed on this reality to help move things along to a point where life could thrive."
"Are you saying you control time?" Kiryu asked.
"I was able to, yes. Until life appeared, the presence of other observers anchored things somewhat, so I could only do the same within the dungeon, which used to be part of a space station until the Recreationists made their power play. Nearly broke everything, they did..."
Luda shook his head, "I think things slowed down around... Four hundred million years after Genesis." He shrugged. "By my estimate, it’s been... 1,531,215,311 Earth years. Give or take a few minutes. A little over one billion five hundred million in Ayther years. And I kind of cheated on the iron content, heheh."
Kir’s mouth dropped. This universe was practically a baby.
"Took me a few hundred million years to make my own biologicals. Ayther was something of a passion project, before, well, people."
"Couldn’t you have stopped them?" Kir asked. "The ones who broke things?"
Luda shrugged. "Everything got really unpredictable when I made the first prophets. I went a bit overboard on quantity before they pruned themselves down. All those contesting futures... I barely managed to set the limit at two before the station got separated from me. Courtesy of, well, the first Aiko clone. I hope the original isn’t too mad at us if we make it back..."
"If?" Kiryu asked.