The Celestial Wound streaked through the void, engines blazing with urgency. The moment Jin Long touched the Reality Seed, the universe whispered a terrible truth—one of the five had already been taken. Not stolen, not hidden… claimed.
In the command chamber, the crew gathered around the central map—a starmap rendered in living crystal. Dots of light pulsed softly across it: each a potential location of a Reality Seed. Now, one flickered and vanished into black.
"That was the Seed of Continuum," Elder Ji murmured. "It anchored the flow of time in this quadrant. If it's corrupted…"
"It means the past and future around it will begin collapsing," Yue Lan finished grimly. "If Vael'thyr has it, we may already be too late."
Jin Long stood still, fists clenched. "Where was it?"
Meiko tapped the map. "Novael—Sector 7-Rho. Once a sanctuary world of the Chrono-Saints. But long abandoned after the war."
"And now?" he asked.
The crystal dimmed. "Now… it's been folded into a Time Maw."
—
The ship approached Novael with extreme caution. What awaited them was not a planet—but a sphere of shifting ruins and frozen cataclysms. Buildings hovered in mid-collapse. Explosions hung forever unignited. Trees burned in reverse. Time here had no meaning.
A corridor of stable temporal energy stretched into the heart of the chaos—a passage shaped unnaturally, forced into being. A trap, perhaps. Or a challenge.
"We walk into that, and we could be erased from history," Meiko warned.
Jin Long stepped forward. "If we don't, the rest of history may never happen at all."
—
Inside the corridor, the world warped. Jin Long walked through his own memories—some real, some altered. He saw a younger version of himself training alone in the Wudang peaks, bleeding, breaking… then laughing with his master who, in reality, had died years before Jin was born.
Beside him, Yue Lan was visibly trembling. "These visions… they're showing me things I never lived. Could have lived."
"It's the Seed," Jin said. "It's rewriting possibilities."
Suddenly, the corridor opened into a crystalline chamber where time stood still. Hovering at its center was the Third Seed—twisting through moments like a prism of futures.
And beneath it stood a man.
Cloaked in white, his face hidden by a cracked mask of gold.
He turned slowly, voice like thunder held in silence. "So… the Core-bearer comes."
Jin Long's heart skipped. He didn't recognize the man—but his presence was… familiar.
"You have the Seed," Jin said.
"I am the Seed now," the figure replied, stepping forward. "Merged with it. Bound to it. And soon, I will rewrite all things in Vael'thyr's name."
Jin Long drew his blade. "Not while I breathe."
"Then stop breathing."
The masked figure lunged. Time buckled. Jin parried a strike he hadn't seen, barely registering the blur of attacks. Yue Lan screamed—then vanished. Moments fractured. Jin was fighting not one man, but ten, all versions of him drawn from broken timelines.
"You can't win here," the voice echoed, "because I already have."
Jin Long bled. He fell. But just as the Seed's power reached for him, the Genesis Core blazed in defiance. A voice inside him—clear and ancient—spoke:
"You are more than what was. You are the anchor of what must be."
With a roar, Jin split time itself—casting aside the false futures, isolating the masked figure from the Seed. Their swords met in a final clash, and Jin drove his blade into the man's chest.
The mask shattered.
Underneath… was himself.
A version of Jin Long, corrupted, twisted by despair.
Before fading, the other Jin whispered, "If you fail… I will return."
The Seed snapped free, now darkened. Corrupted, but not yet lost.
Jin Long collapsed to his knees, breathing hard.
Yue Lan reappeared, shaken. "What just happened?"
He looked at the Seed in his hand. "I faced what I could become… if I gave in."
She touched his shoulder. "But you didn't."
"No," he said, standing. "But now I understand. Vael'thyr isn't just collecting power. He's rewriting fate. And we're running out of time."