The alarms didn't stop. They screamed through the research dome, high-pitched and grating, like metal teeth grinding against bone. But Bai Ling kept her eyes locked on the containment pod, where the impossible shimmered.
The egg had not been ordinary — everyone in the Temporal Research Institute had known that. It had been fished out of a rift in the Blue Star Sector, its shell heavy with energies that distorted sensors, bent gravity, and twisted the clock hands in the labs nearest to it. For months, their brightest minds had studied it. For years, they'd prepared for this moment.
But no one expected this.
The shell cracked, not with a gentle split, but with a burst of cosmic light that rippled across the containment hall. Her colleagues shouted, shielding their eyes. Bai Ling stood transfixed.
A dragon's head pushed through.
Not a hatchling's fragile snout. Not a tiny, squirming wyrmling. Its head was already the size of her torso, scales prismatic, bending light as though they contained entire skies within them. Space folded around its form.
It wasn't supposed to be possible.
"Containment field collapsing!" someone screamed. "It's— it's eating the restraints!"
No, Bai Ling realized, not eating. Overwriting.
The dragon grew as she watched, bones knitting, flesh forming at a rate that defied biology. Within minutes, what should have been a newborn was already the size of an elder wyrm, its wings pressing against the reinforced barriers of the pod.
The walls groaned.
"Emergency protocols!" another researcher shouted. "Shut down everything, now!"
But they were too late.
The dragon opened its eyes.
Galaxies spiraled in its pupils, stars collapsing into black holes and reforming in bursts of creation. To look into them was to feel the ages themselves grind past your soul. Bai Ling's breath caught. Her body stiffened as if those eyes had measured her entire life and found her irrelevant.
The hatchling — no, the Elder Dragon — opened its mouth and roared.
It wasn't sound. It was time unraveling. Clocks exploded, devices crumbled, flesh wrinkled and smoothed in the same instant. Her veins burned like her blood had just aged a century and reversed again.
And then space itself tore open.
The ceiling ruptured into a hole that wasn't a hole, an opening into the abyss beyond. Shadows spilled through — not shadows, wings.
One. Two. Three.
Ten massive figures emerged from the rift, their wings blotting out the starfield beyond, each one vast enough to dwarf mountain ranges. Elder Dragons, grown and terrible, their scales glittering like fragments of eternity.
And they had come for the hatchling.
The newborn shrieked again, and the ten circled it, their roars shaking the station down to its core. Protective. Exultant. Unstoppable.
Bai Ling could not breathe. Eleven dragons. Eleven beings whose very existence bent the rules of creation.
The meteorite fortress on which their research institute had been carved — a floating world larger than any planet in known systems, mined and hollowed and engineered for centuries — shuddered.
And then, in perfect unison, the dragons attacked.
It was not fire. It was not claw or fang.
It was erasure.
A wave of force, time and space collapsing into nothing, rolled outward. Walls folded in on themselves. Colleagues who had stood screaming were gone in less than a blink, their atoms scattered into timelines that would never exist. Machinery that had taken lifetimes to construct disintegrated into particles of forgotten history.
The fortress cracked apart. Chasms yawned where entire cities had once stood. And then the world-sized meteorite — cradle of the Institute, symbol of humanity's mastery — shattered into dust, scattering into the void like the ashes of a burned dream.
Bai Ling's final thought, before everything collapsed into darkness, was not of fear.
It was of waste.
All the knowledge. All the lives. All the years.
Gone.
When her eyes opened again, she thought she was still dreaming.
The ceiling above was not twisted steel or shattered dome glass. It was white — soft, embroidered silk, drifting slightly in the draft of an unseen breeze.
Her head ached. Her body… didn't. She pushed herself upright, blinking at her surroundings.
The room was far too large. Gold-trimmed pillars lined the walls, carved with swirling clouds and birds. Tall drapes framed windows that reached from floor to ceiling, spilling daylight across polished wood.
A bed. A real bed, not the steel bunk she remembered, but a canopy with layers of velvet and lace. She ran her hand across the sheets, trembling.
"Am I dead?" she whispered. Her voice came out raw, almost alien to her own ears.
The memories still pulsed in her skull — the roar of eleven dragons, the collapse of everything she'd known, the sickening weight of a civilization ending in one instant.
She touched her chest. Her heart was still beating.
"Miss Bai Ling!"
She froze. A voice boomed from beyond the drapes. Deep, rough, commanding — and yet oddly polite.
She opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out.
"Miss Bai Ling, second call!"
She stayed silent, brain too fogged, body still fighting to accept this was real.
A pause. Then the voice rumbled again:
"Third call. No response. Executing disciplinary measure."
The bed lurched.
"Wha—"
She shrieked as the mattress tilted, then flipped. She tumbled out with an unceremonious thud, landing flat on the polished wood. Pain shot through her hip.
"W-what the—?!"
A shadow loomed over her.
She turned her head — and stared.
The figure towering above was… humanoid, yes, but only just. A thickly muscled body, broad shoulders, arms like tree trunks — and the woolly head of a ram, curved horns etched with faint streaks of lightning. His fleece crackled faintly with static, his eyes glowing a dignified gold.
And over all that, he wore a frilly pink apron.
In one massive hand, he held a feather duster like a spear.
The beast glared down at her.
"Breakfast waits for no one," he said, voice like thunder rolling across cliffs. "Nor does training. Up."
Bai Ling gaped. She knew that face. Not human, not exactly — but familiar. The Thunder Cleaver Ram. Rank Six beast. Her mother's companion, if her jumbled memory wasn't lying to her. One of the most powerful in this region during the early beast-taming eras.
Her mind spun. She remembered this creature from dusty historical texts, from side notes about obscure battles and forgotten tamers. She had never thought she would see it alive.
And now it was here, dressed in a ridiculous apron, ordering her out of bed like a disobedient child.
"Up," he repeated, tapping the feather duster against the floor. Sparks flickered off the bristles.
Bai Ling pressed a hand to her temple. The headache was worsening — a storm of memories colliding, future and past, death and rebirth.
This wasn't a dream. This wasn't a hallucination.
She had died. And somehow, impossibly, she had awoken again.
In the past.
The Thunder Cleaver Ram tilted its head, frowning faintly. "You look pale, Miss. Do not make me carry you. I will."
Bai Ling swallowed. The dragons' roars still echoed in her bones. Her colleagues' screams still haunted her ears. But here, in this absurd moment, under the stern gaze of a lightning-ram in a pink apron, she realized something terrifying.
The world was real.
Her second life had begun.
And this time… she would not waste it.