Book 8, Chapter 39 - Final Evolution (1/2)
Book 8, Chapter 39 - Final Evolution
To control time, Cloudhawk had to understand time.
What sort of creature could control time more perfectly than a Quintessence? The God King was a spirit that existed beyond the multiverse. An avatar of time, one with it!
Cloudhawk didn’t have the luxury to learn these mysteries at his own pace. His only path forward was a desperate risk, to face the strongest dangers that time possessed in order to grasp all that it meant. He had to trust in himself, that he would not be so easily struck down by his enemy.
A dozen temporal blades bite into the young Demon King’s body.
In that moment Cloudhawk felt the God King’s essence dissipate. His domain vanished. The demons, Sumeru… everything was swallowed up by a perfect nothingness.
A host of semi-translucent blades jutted from him, glowing with power. Their power hung over him in an egg-shaped shell. Inside was a realm of only time. Here there was no matter or space, no light or temperature. Nothing, except time. Cloudhawk could only float inside and let the flows pass through him.
An hour.
A day.
A month.
Here he remained, sealed, but conscious of every passing second.
There was no hunger or thirst to worry over, not that it would be possible to get any in this place without matter. A mortal thing would die quickly in this stasis, but Cloudhawk was supported by the Demon King’s Cuirass. It would not let him die.
He was lucid, but it was the only part of him that functioned. His body would not move, his powers were meaningless. All he could do was be here and feel every moment and time stretched on without end.
Was this how the God King’s ‘temporal sword’ worked? He’d watched a number of demon Elders turn to dust when struck. But while it seemed like just an instant to him, the truth was far more cruel. Victims were flung into a cage of time just like the sort he was in now. Time stretched… and stretched… and stretched until the body completely broke down.
To the world outside it all happened in the blink of an eye, but to the target it was a tortuous eternity. Millions, even billions of years. Even the most tenacious being eventually succumbs to the passage of time. The youngest and most brilliant stars lose their spark at some point.
No possibility existed to escape from this ruthless damnation.
As the God King’s blade’s struck their power was unleashed. Unless an even greater power was used to reverse this temporal prison, the victim was condemned to suffering every second of their long decline.
Were any other creature in Cloudhawk’s place they would not retain their power of thought once locked in the shell. Their bodies and souls would erode over time and disappear. Thanks to Cloudhawk’s evolved constitution and his talent for spatial power, he was able to keep his wits.
But this was not necessarily a good thing.
If he failed to free himself he would be forced to experience himself slowly wither and decay. An unimaginable loneliness, an emptiness he could never escape. An eternity of static solitude without anyone or anything to interact with. It was like digging one’s brain out and throwing it alive into the vast nothingness of space. No consciousness could suffer such torment.
Cloudhawk continued to feel the flows of time. Over a month passed like this, by then he was growing tired.
Two months passed, second by agonizing second.
Three months. Four months. Five….
A year. Two years. Three years…
His resolve began to crumble. To be stuck for so long…
Time marched on, stable and unending. The minutes continued to add up without fail until it all blended together until there was only numbness. At some point he realized he had lost the ability to measure how many years had passed. About as long as he’d been alive, or so he figured.
He’d experienced so much in his thirty years. Even counting the crawling time within his sub-space cube, Cloudhawk wasn’t more than thirty years old before his fight with the God King. That seemed right, that twenty or thirty years had passed since then.