172 – Timelines and Rifts
It was as if he was calmly admonishing a fussy child to buy a toy. Charlotte was crying inside, but this time she was right that she was wrong, so she forced herself to suppress her anger.
“There’s no way Jim could have forgotten. Everyone remembers.”
ㅡTell me.
“Abandon stereotypes, and don’t think of anything else. Aren’t there two things like this?
The first piece of advice, let go of stereotypes. This might have made some sense.
It was a process of recognizing the timeline, seeing something that ordinary people could never see. Of course, stereotypes that are only accepted in the human world should be discarded.
Didn’t Charlotte almost touch the future, which was considered a taboo act while accepting fragments of the past? This was quite understandable, but then there was the problem.
Don’t think otherwise. I just couldn’t take this advice.
“……I can’t help but think of something else. This is my heart that will never change.”
ㅡWhy?
“How can Jim not think of Giabi? If that day ever comes, it will be the day Jim’s life ends.”
It was. They say that in order to deal with it fully without being swept away by time, you have to shake off your distracting thoughts and not think about anything else, but Charlotte wasn’t confident about that.
Get rid of Giabi’s thoughts? Had it been possible, it would not have started in the first place.
For more than 130 years, it was a love that had never cooled down and never weakened.
It was absolutely impossible for Charlotte to treat that strong mind as a distraction at best and shake it off.
—-That’s right.
However, the dragon’s reaction was a little different from what Charlotte expected.
I thought he would tell me that I had to get rid of it somehow, but that wasn’t the feeling that came through my head. It was like seeing Charlotte and feeling happy.
Before Charlotte could even wonder about that, the dragon spoke first.
—-That’s right, child. Don’t I know your heart too well There’s no way a child could get the boy out of his mind, entangled in fate. A child’s love is not that light.
“If you know why—”
ㅡI should have told you to throw away stereotypes?
This time it was his turn to stiffen his head with embarrassment. Meeting eyes with such Charlotte, the dragon continued to give advice.
—-Ah, I’m not going to focus on the act of looking at the timeline. Focus on your love, on that heart that will never be extinguished. The child is almost there already, so take one more step and you’ll be able to build your own timeline. It’s just a difference in how you take that step. Of course, even if you are satisfied and stop here, you will have achieved an impossible achievement as a human being, but isn’t that what a child wants?
“…”
Hearing those words, Charlotte was lost in thought.
That was right. The dragon only told me to focus on one action, but never said that it pointed to something I couldn’t see unconditionally, that is, to the timeline.
Yes, then the answer was obvious. Instead of trying to fit Charlotte into the world, it was enough to reconstruct the world to fit Charlotte.
It was Charlotte who had already destroyed the mana nullification while thinking about her husband. It was so easy to focus on your love.
Charlotte, who was crazy about that point, raised her mana again. As if the dragon had said all it had to say, it returned to the position of a bystander rather than an advisor.
From now on, it was all up to Charlotte. The dragon was a being that confirmed the fact that we were lost, not a being that showed us where to go.
Raised mana. Because I had been forced out of the timeline a while ago, the inside of my body was a mess, I could still taste the taste of blood in my mouth, and I felt like my eyes would close any minute, but it didn’t matter.
He poured all his thoughts into only her husband and Charlotte’s own love.
I closed my eyes. The surroundings became quiet. Nothing could be heard except for the sound of his own pounding heart and the faint sound of breathing in and out.
what to be aware of The answer has already been determined.
the world has come together Charlotte no longer drifted away in time. They didn’t even isolate their own space to prevent being pushed around. I just sat in the middle of the flow.
The ancient dragon’s ring glowed in a dark grayish white color. He accepted the elements of the dragon with his human body and fused them into one, leading to a higher rank.
I opened my closed eyes The blood-soaked ruby stared at the collapsing space. Beyond that, the tangled threads of even more everywhere were much clearer.
‘Very different from before.’
They were timelines.
Each one of them is a memory that contains the flowing world, and it is something conceptual that contains the past, present, and future.
Charlotte did not reach out her hand foolishly like last time. He only focused on remembering his wife.
If it had been the Charlotte of the past, if it had been the Charlotte who focused on the act of seeing the invisible, she would have put in vain efforts to understand them.
But now it was different. Instead, it made the timeline understand itself.
I focused all my senses on love, all my memories of love, all my thoughts on what I had done for love.
She plucked out Jiabi’s eyes so she couldn’t see other women, observed Jiabi’s every move from a distance with magic, and stored all the objects Jiabi used in a separate created space.
All of that was justified. In the world Charlotte created and ruled by Charlotte, everything was right. It was an act committed only for love, so of course it deserved to be understood.
Time tangled around. Something that normal humans can never see, and should never see, and even if they do, their heads will melt without understanding the concept.
Charlotte reached out to a timeline passing nearby. The moment their fingers met, Charlotte’s body changed.
His height, which had been on the tall side in its own way, had shrunk considerably, his hair that had reached his hips had shortened a little, and an innocence permeated his cold expression.
The black uniform that reminded her of death had also turned into a long yellow and pink dress.
‘Is it a yellow and pink dress? If not, this must be at the age of seven. Since then, I’ve preferred darker colors.’
Only after transforming her body like this did Charlotte truly realize what it meant to see the invisible.
Until just now, it was too much for me to recognize time, so I couldn’t accept it properly and instead just dragged it around.
But now it was different. I could perfectly fathom the timelines that wrapped around my body, even where they led.
‘My dear, did this mean that it was fixed in time?’
The shocking secret of Charlotte’s Jiabi, revealed by the dragon. It was only now that I realized the true meaning of those words. It was only now that I seemed to have realized the meaning of the word fixed in time.
Charlotte searched for the ‘original’ among the innumerable threads, and took her finger. Immediately after that, Charlotte’s body returned to her original Charlotte.
Blinking his eyelids, he took the dragon’s eyes. The threads that bound the world disappeared as if they were dissolved in water, and ordinary vegetation and sky appeared again.
The moon was floating in the sky.
The sun felt bored while waiting for Charlotte and fell asleep first, and instead of the sun, the moon drew a graceful curve saying that it was nice to see the moon waiting for Charlotte. The yellow moonlight covered the black uniform.
—-You’re back, child.
The dragon standing in the moonlight was the same as it always was.
“How much time has passed.”
—-Three days.
3 days. It was an understandable passage of time.
In reality, it must have been a little longer than three days since I was lost in my thoughts when the sun was up and came out when the moon was up, but that was a good thing.
ㅡHave you seen it?
Charlotte nodded without speaking. Feelings of satisfaction flooded into my head.
—-If that’s the case, it worked. Now go do your thing, child. I will be waiting for the child to come back from our nest.
“Not yet. Still, Jim has something to say.”
The dragon, which had just spread its wings and was about to soar into the sky, was stopped by Charlotte.
“What are you? You can guess that things were never done with mere kindness. Was there a reason to give so much to a mere human being?”
—-Didn’t I tell you?
“If I’m going to make the lame excuse that I’ve discovered talent in Jim, I’ll make it clear beforehand that I won’t talk nonsense. It makes no sense to be suspicious of the person who has done me a favor, but if the favor is too great for the recipient’s temper It’s worth suspecting a different ulterior motive. Don’t you think so?”
The dragon folded its wings that were on the verge of unfolding and met Charlotte’s eyes. There was still no negative emotion about Charlotte’s rudeness in those eyes.
Instead, hesitation was felt. It was such a slight hesitation that even Charlotte, who had accepted her feelings directly, thought it was an illusion.
“…… Child, do you know who the woman who kidnapped your love is?”
The dragon opened its mouth. Literally, to wear.
Due to the shocking situation that the lizard, who had never spoken to her directly before and only conveyed her consciousness in her head, opened her mouth and spoke, Charlotte froze for a moment.
The dragon continued to explain despite Charlotte’s reaction.
“It is the existence that has reached the closest to omnipotence with a mere human body.”
“……the closest to omnipotence?”
Charlotte frowned at the thought of the first time she met her. Certainly, the power and magic shown at that time were at a level that overwhelmed Charlotte.
But was that crazy bitch’s ability strong enough to deserve such a modifier?
“If it had had a little more time, if it hadn’t buried itself madly in love, it would have created a world of its own. That’s what she was.”
“If so, it must have something to do with that year.”
“……Yes. There was a very big connection.”
For a moment, the feelings of anger dwelled in the dragon.
“It invaded our dimension to restore its power, slaughtered countless people and ate their souls, and when I managed to drive it out to another dimension, it had already suffered irreversible damage.”
“You mean you couldn’t kill that bitch either?”
“That wasn’t something I could do, child.”
After saying that, the dragon spread its wings and flew up. It was an unspoken protest that they could not tell us more than this. Charlotte also vaguely noticed that fact, so she didn’t catch the dragon that was about to leave.
There were still plenty of questions to ask, but there was no sharp way to elicit an answer.
—-My child, when you feel like it after you’ve solved everything, come over to our world and find me with these words. That the dragon’s lord had declared that he would accept the child. That way, no dragon would dare to stand on the child.
With those words at the end, the dragon opened the space and disappeared somewhere. Charlotte stared blankly at the reverberation of the open space.
“……Dragon Lord.”
Even dragons were now legendary creatures, but there was a separate entity that ruled them. Laughter came out.
Charlotte fiddled with the ancient dragon’s ring, which was firmly set on the ring finger of her left hand. Mana leaked out from the clenched fist.
The leaked mana coalesced into a blue sphere and soon turned into a transfer door, and Charlotte stepped into it with majestic steps.
It was time to get Giabi back.