The loop had no end.
For a billion years the Wonder Magician let it spin, each cycle folding neatly into the next. The medieval age repeated itself endlessly, kings rising and falling, wars fought and forgotten, while the modern era remained frozen in silence. He could have broken it. He could have shattered the wheel of time and released the world into chaos. But he did not. He let the loop play, believing it flawless, believing it eternal.
And so his legend ended.
Yet perfection is fragile.
Within the endless repetition, a single mind began to resist. It carried memory forward where all others reset. Each cycle twisted it further, deforming thought, reshaping identity. What was once a boy hollow‑eyed and starving became something else. He no longer knew if he was human. He was reborn, a new being with old memories, a paradox walking inside eternity. His name was Tri.
The Breaking of Imp
Tri's mind strained beneath the weight of memory. Each cycle added more fragments, more contradictions, more lives lived and lost. He tried to contain them, but the flood was too great.
Then, in a moment of collapse, Imp surged into his brain.
Imp — the energy of controlled brokenness, the essence that had given the magician his power — now poured into Tri. But unlike the magician, Tri could not master it. He had not trained his fracture, had not learned to bend it into wonder.
Imp overflowed.
Memories collided, identities fused, and Tri's mind became a storm. Reality bent around him: landscapes formed from memory, storms born from grief, shadows shaped by fear. He was both the boy who suffered and the man who endured, both human and not human.
The Memory of the Boy
In the chaos of his mind, Tri saw himself as a child again. Hollow‑eyed, starving, crushed beneath despair. The boy tried to hold back the flood of pain, hunger, and unanswered questions. But it consumed him.
The old version of the boy tried to hold back the flood of memories and the broken ones, but he could not.
That collapse became the seed of his rebirth.
Tri realized he was both the boy and not the boy. He carried the scars of humanity, but he was no longer human. He was a vessel of persistence, haunted by echoes of pain.
When Imp broke inside Tri, the loop faltered.
The medieval world continued its endless repetition, but the modern era froze — paused in silence. Time itself shuddered, caught between cycles.
The magician's empire of wonder cracked.
Through Tri, truth began to seep into the illusion.
Tri's Awakening
Tri stood in the fracture, trembling, uncertain. He did not know what he was. His memories told him he was human, but his body and mind had been reshaped by the loop. He was not the Absolute Eye, but he felt its gaze upon him.
And in that silence he whispered:
"I am broken, yet I endure. If wonder cannot contain me, then truth will find me."
And so the Wonder Magician's legend ended — a tale of wonder, brokenness, and exile.
But in that silence, in the pause between loops, the truth began.