***
"So truths don’t die just because ti resets."
Ren’s voice trembled slightly as he recalled it.
"That’s what that entity said... right before it pulled into that other world."
The room fell silent.
Not even the faint hum of mana crystals could be heard.
Every word hung heavy in the air, entity, ti resets, another world, all too familiar, yet unbearably foreign.
"..."
It was Xiaolung who finally broke the silence.
"Wait, hold on a second,"
He said, leaning forward with a frown.
"When you said entity, are you talking about the sa one Lyrium fought? The one he... absorbed?"
Ren blinked, confusion flashing across his face.
"What? Lyrium fought that entity?"
"Haa..."
Emily sighed quietly, resting her chin on her clasped hands before speaking.
"Yes. Lyrium fought a being, sothing we still don’t fully understand. We’ve been calling it theEntity for now. He absorbed its power afterward... but we’ve never confird if it truly died."
Her tone was grave, calm yet weighted.
Then she added,
"Describe it for us, Ren. The one you saw, what did it look like exactly?"
All eyes turned toward him.
He swallowed hard, recalling the image burned into his mind.
"Umm... that being, it didn’t look human. Its whole body was like... made of darkness, but not the normal kind. It was like staring into a black hole that moved. I could see... stars swirling inside it. Galaxies. Whole constellations forming and dying in seconds."
He paused, his hand unconsciously tightening into a fist.
"There were... eyes too. Thousands of them. Watching from every angle, shifting and blinking like they were alive. And yet, it felt like they weren’t looking at ..."
He looked down, his voice dropping to a whisper.
"...they were looking through ."
The room froze again, a quiet dread crawling up everyone’s spine as the weight of his words sank in.
After a few tense seconds, Rihana finally broke the silence, her voice calm but edged with unease.
"So... when you said You eraseditto that entity,"
She began, her gaze fixed on Ren,
"What exactly did you an by that?"
Everyone’s attention shifted toward her, and then to Ren.
Even Emily’s normally unreadable expression flickered with curiosity.
"...."
Ren froze for a mont.
He felt his throat dry up as he tried to form words.
He swallowed hard, his fingers fidgeting under the table.
"Well..."
He started slowly, eyes darting away,
"That ti, I wasn’t really... myself."
He paused, searching his own mory, but it was like trying to hold onto smoke.
"I think I was saying things I couldn’t even understand back then. Like my mouth moved on its own, words just ca out. I didn’t even know what they ant."
He exhaled shakily, then added, almost to himself,
"So... honestly, I don’t really know what I ant by it either."
Then Alicia, who had been quietly listening until now, finally spoke, her tone soft but layered with sothing sharp beneath.
"Erased, huh?"
She said, the word lingering in the air like smoke.
She leaned slightly forward, her eyes narrowing as if piecing sothing together.
"Ren... earlier, you said that when you were pulled into that other place, it looked like the academy, the sa yard, the sa buildings, but sohow it didn’t feel right, did it? Like it wasn’t our academy. Like it was sothing familiar, yet wrong. As if it existed once... but doesn’t anymore."
"...!"
Ren’s heart skipped a beat.
His eyes widened a little.
He hadn’t ntioned that detail out loud, not fully, not clearly.
But Alicia had just spoken the exact feeling that had been haunting him since that mont.
He turned to her, his voice low.
"Yeah... that’s exactly what it felt like. It was the sa place, sa structure, sa air, even the sa sound of the mana lamps buzzing, but..."
He hesitated, struggling to explain sothing that defied logic.
"It was like walking through a mory that wasn’t mine. Like I was trespassing in a version of reality that shouldn’t exist anymore."
"...."
The room fell into silence again.
Xiaolung tilted his head slightly, his usually easygoing deanor gone.
"You an it felt like... a reconstruction? A space that used to be real but was..."
"...Erased,"
Alicia finished for him.
"Exactly."
Her gaze lingered on Ren for a long mont before she continued, her tone more deliberate now.
"I’ve read about sothing like that. In ancient mana theories, there are records of Temporal Echoes."
Ren blinked, still processing her words.
"Temporal... echoes?"
Alicia nodded.
"Places that once were, but no longer are. They can’t be found or rembered normally, only those who were sohow connected to the event can perceive them. If that you saw was one of those, Ren..."
She trailed off, and for a mont, no one dared to speak.
Emily finally asked, her voice calm but heavy with implication,
"Then that would an... sothing in this academy, or soone, tampered with ti itself."
Ren exhaled slowly, still pale, his mind spinning.
"...That’s insane,"
He muttered.
"But it makes too much sense to be wrong."
Then, Alicia’s tone shifted, her usual composed deanor cracking into sothing grim, almost burdened.
She took a deep breath, as if deciding whether to even speak the words that followed.
"Umm... I an,"
She began, her voice trembling just slightly,
"We’re living in... a reset world."
The words hung in the air, heavy and alien.
"...!"
The entire room froze.
Emily blinked, confusion washing over her calm expression.
"What?"
She asked, her tone sharp but uncertain.
Rihana turned her head toward Alicia, frowning deeply.
"What do you an by a reset world, Alicia?"
Even Xiaolung and Ren exchanged bewildered glances, both of them caught completely off guard, as if she had just uttered sothing impossible.
"Haa..."
Alicia exhaled, long and heavy, rubbing her temples.
"Haa... I guess I have to tell you all the truth since it’s co to this."
The room fell even quieter, everyone’s eyes fixed on her.
She took another breath, steadying herself, then spoke slowly, carefully, her voice trembling with the weight of what she knew.
"...The world we’re living in right now,"
She began,
"Isn’t the first version of itself. It’s already been reset once."
Emily’s brows furrowed.
"Reset? As in..."
"Yes,"
Alicia interrupted softly.
"Reset. Rewritten. Reconstructed from the bones of what used to be."
Her eyes drifted down, unable to et anyone’s gaze as she continued.
"Lyrium... he wasn’t the cause. He was the victim. The entity Ren saw, that thing from beyond comprehension, it used sothing called The Book of Destiny to rewrite the universe itself. It viewed Lyrium as an anomaly, sothing that wasn’t ant to exist, and so it tried to erase him from the flow of ti. But it couldn’t."
Ren leaned forward, his voice low and tense.
"Couldn’t? Why?"
"Because Lyrium was immune to temporal alteration,"
Alicia said, her tone grave.
"He existed outside the tiline, or rather, across them. Even when the entity tried to remove him, his essence lingered in another tiline, as another person entirely. So, when the entity failed, it did the only thing it could."
She looked up, her eyes hollow.
"It rewrote everything."
"...!"
The words struck like thunder.
"The entity rewrote the entire history of this world, every cause, every event, every mory, just to erase Lyrium from existence. But it failed again. Because no matter how much it reshaped ti, Lyrium kept finding his way back. He was... anchored."
Alicia’s voice cracked slightly as she went on.
"After months, maybe years, the entity returned, furious, and reset the tiline again. Tried to bring it all back to what it called the original state. But..."
She shook her head slowly.
"Ti doesn’t heal cleanly. Once altered, it can never return to its pure form. The scars stay. The details change."
She turned to Rihana, her eyes softening.
"For example... Rihana, in the original tiline, you were cold, distant, even toward Lyrium. You never spoke to him. You hated him for reasons only you knew. But now... in this tiline, that hate isn’t real anymore. You can’t even tell whether it ever was."
Rihana’s eyes flickered, but she said nothing.
Alicia’s gaze drifted toward Ren next.
"And Ren, you, Silas, Lily, Margaret, none of us were ant to grow up together. In the original world, our paths never crossed until much, much later. But here, in this one, we were forced to et early, as if sothing was trying to realign fate itself."
Emily’s knuckles tightened slightly, her voice calm, yet trembling underneath.
"So... the entity rewrote the world twice. And what we’re living in right now..."
"...isn’t the original,"
Alicia finished.
"It’s a fractured restoration. A stitched-up world pretending to be whole. The more you look closely, the more you’ll see the seams, mories that don’t add up, feelings that don’t belong, people who exist when they shouldn’t."
Her eyes darkened, voice nearly a whisper now.
"Everything we know, our pasts, our relationships, our history, it’s all the residue of sothing that was broken and forced back together. We’re living inside a copy of what once was."
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Even the faint hum of the mana seed distant, drowned beneath the weight of her revelation.
Ren finally muttered, barely audible.
"...Then what does that make us?"
Alicia looked at him, her expression unreadable.
"Echoes,"
She said softly.
"We’re all echoes, of a world that should’ve never been rewritten."
***
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