Timorath advanced with measured, unhurried steps as he approached the first stair of the spiraling staircase. The instant his foot touched it, an overwhelming force erupted around him.
Blades of condensed time energy manifested from nothingness in front of him, slicing through the air and striking in relentless succession.
He dodged backward, leaping off the tread. Each blade shimmered with golden light, leaving ripples in the mist where he'd just stood, before vanishing.
"What was that?" he murmured, his voice edged with confusion. Instinctively, he scanned himself, eyes narrowing as he inspected his body, there wasn't a single mark, not even a scratch on his body.
He furrowed his brow, thoughtful. "Were those attacks made of time energy," he said after a moment of reflection.
A grin spread across his face as excitement bubbled within him. "I've only taken the first step, and I'm already learning something new. What a perfect opportunity," he murmured, his voice charged with eager anticipation.
Without hesitation, he stepped onto the second tread, moving steadily and focusing intently.
What he didn't yet realize was the true nature of the "time blades."
They were not meant to wound flesh but to shear away lifespans, each strike a silent theft of years, reducing the unworthy to dust in moments.
But he remained untouched. His immense power and absolute command of the time Law rendered him immune to the very force meant to unmake him.
Unknowingly immune to their effects, he pressed forward, his excitement masking the danger that would have been fatal to any other being.
He climbed the spiraling staircase steadily, his eyes narrowing as he ascended each tread with focus.
After several steps, he noticed the time blades were becoming sharper, faster, and more relentless.
Their power increased exponentially with every step he took. Though their attacks didn't faze him much initially, he began to feel the shift in intensity.
The numbers ticked in his mind: 50 steps, 5,010 steps, 52,000 steps, 550,000 steps. Throughout this, he was tanking the time blades, which did little to no physical or soul damage.
By the time he reached the 550,000th step, the time blades had become fierce enough to force him to stop tanking them.
At first, he dodged them easily, weaving through the strikes with fluid grace. But then, a single blade grazed him.
His movements froze as he felt a strange sensation, one he hadn't experienced before.
"What! how?" he said, his voice tinged with surprise. His gaze flickered toward the edge of the river of time where his apparition stood, maintaining its connection to the river.
To his shock, the apparition moved slightly backward, shifting closer to the river's edge.
His eyes widened as he realized what was happening.
The time blade didn't affect him physically or spiritually, but it did something far worse: it momentarily reversed his position in the hierarchy of time itself.
This was a monumental revelation for a primordial, whose standing was often judged by their distance from the river of time.
To regress toward the river instead of moving farther from it was something unheard of.
"This…" he gasped. "This changes everything," he mumbled, standing still for minutes as he processed the weight of his discovery.
If the monolith's trials could influence one's connection to the river, it offered him a potential advantage over the other primordials.
Additionally, this newfound knowledge gave him a unique advantage. If he learned the ins and outs of these time blades, he would acquire a powerful means of attack; he could even turn his fellow primordials into mortals.
His lips curled into a faint smirk, and his gaze lifted toward the monolith above. "The challenges from here on will be harder," he mused, his voice steady and filled with determination. "But I must reach it."
Fueled by the weight of his discovery and the ambition it ignited, Timorath resumed his climb, weaving skillfully through the relentless barrage of time blades.
By the time he reached the millionth step, the nature of the attacks had shifted.
A new threat emerged—time storms. Whirling torrents of condensed time energy lashed out at him, starting as harmless gusts but quickly escalating into deadly hurricanes.
Each storm twisted reality around him, forcing him to dodge endlessly, his movements precise but increasingly strained.
Occasionally, a storm struck him, and he stumbled. The experience was jarring.
"I never thought time could turn against me," he thought. Though he embodied time itself, it showed him no mercy. His mastery was being used against him, and the very domain he ruled was now his greatest obstacle.
He stopped and scanned the chaotictime storms.
His sharp eyes identified a spot where the storms were weakest. Without hesitation, he moved there, sitting cross-legged to think.
"If I'm to succeed, I must adapt," he thought, determination hardening his gaze.
He began to draw intricate runes around himself, each one faintly glowing purple.
Then, focusing inward, he accelerated his personal time by millions of folds.
The abundant time energy in the air was quickly drawn into him, its immense power fueling his rapid contemplation.
His consciousness plunged deep into his soulsea, it was a boundless expanse of shifting time energy in a starry void.
He attempted to condense the chaotic time energy in it, into a small, stable form but failed repeatedly. Each attempt collapsed into raw energy, testing his patience.
On his 900th attempt, he succeeded. A tiny, solid object formed, pulsing with pure, refined time energy.
It hovered in his grasp like a seed of infinite potential. He observed it intently for several minutes, countless ideas swirling in his mind.
When he refocused on the outside world, he noticed that the surrounding time energy had thinned considerably.
His accelerated state had swiftly siphoned it, leaving behind a fleeting calm. Yet, in that stillness, clarity dawned and an epiphany struck him: What if I could create my own time energy?
His resolve crystallized. Without hesitation, he plunged deeper into the vastness of his soulsea.
Inside, what felt like thousands of years unfolded—centuries of introspection and refinement—while only hours passed in the outside world.
During that time, he deepened his understanding, each moment sharpening his comprehension with greater precision.
Through trial and failure, his knowledge about the time laws grew more profound.
His technique became interwoven with cosmic truth. He tirelessly experimented with time energies, probing their essence from every angle.
However, no matter what he tried, he couldn't produce them. It was as if an unseen force barred him from accessing their core.
After what felt like hundreds of thousands of years in the Soul Sea, he finally relented.
But he did not emerge empty-handed from this relentless mental marathon, instead, he emerged with several groundbreaking Law-Techniques etched into his consciousness; refined, resilient, and brimming with potential.
He stood up with a calm but focused expression. The chaotic time storms still raged around him, but he now had the ability to fight back.
With a wave, he activated his first technique: Future Mirage.
Two shimmering illusions of his future selves appeared, each representing a potential version of him from different timelines.
The storms hesitated, confused by the conflicting targets. Attacks struck the wrong versions, allowing the real Timorath to weave through the chaos unscathed.
He climbed higher, step by step. Each storm was a challenge that tested the limits of his endurance.
His mirages walked ahead of him like spectral vanguards defying the tempest and paving the path through chaos.
With each trial, he refined, mastered, and deepened the essence of his newly forged techniques.
Now, he could summon three additional mirages, each sharper, more defined, and more enduring than the last.
With each step on the stairs he overcame, his confidence deepened, not as arrogance, but as a certainty forged in tribulation.
He advanced purposefully, turning the trials into opportunities to perfect his craft, no longer merely enduring them.
Elsewhere, the three Primordials stood together, their eyes fixed on the spiraling stairs. "What now?" Noctyra asked, shifting his gaze to the others.
"Hmmm..." Luscith thought, his face calm and unreadable. After a moment, he added, "We wait."
Hearing this, the group fell silent, returning their attention to the monolith.
Each of them harbored their own thoughts, concealed behind stoic expressions.