Entering a town, Augustine and the others were delighted, hearts like bright lanterns.

Pulis raised a flag and paraded, soaking in stares like sun-warm rain.

Because Fia and Rex were god-tier presences, envy climbed around them like green vines.

Yet as they walked deeper, divinity thickened like incense and pressed like mountains.

“City lords in the Divine Kingdom are gods,” Rex lectured, voice a steady drum in mist.

This city wasn’t central; in the Divine Kingdom it sat on the rim like an eyelash.

Even so, signs of gods flickered more and more, like early stars before dusk.

Pulis tucked his tail, like a rooster smoothing feathers—mostly because Fia had warned them.

At this critical hour, keep your heads down like grass in wind.

The louder the splash, the longer the chain of cause and effect, and the snare of karma tightens.

Time’s hawk would spot those ripples, and the power of time might find them.

So the fewer ties to this world, the better their odds, like a boat shedding cargo.

On the road, they saw people guttering like candles in rain.

They moved to help, but Fia’s raised hand fell like frost and stopped them.

From this border city’s feel, the Divine Kingdom’s master wasn’t weak, a mountain far away in haze.

But he lagged those who built their kingdoms on the firmament, high as a skyline of spears.

After they entered, Fia told them to stay in a quiet corner, like birds in shade.

She slipped away like a shadow into an alley, to do who-knew-what.

Without Fia, even with Rex there, their hearts beat like uneasy drums.

Rex lacked her warmth; her safety was a brazier, his an ember in wind.

Soon, Fia returned, a book in her hand like a sleeping bird.

“Every Divine Kingdom has odd rules,” Fia said, constellations of quirks pricking the dark.

“If the lord’s true body is a monkey, then monkeys are nobles—wild ones, forest princes.

Harm one and you break the law.

Some kingdoms decree odd days for men on the streets, even days for women—the calendar a swinging pendulum.

So we must learn this kingdom’s laws to avoid snags, and from them, read the lord’s temperament like wind on ripples.”

Fia rarely spoke so much, a full moon showing its whole face.

Augustine’s group felt the weight settle like stones in the gut.

In short, it was intel gathering, testing water before crossing.

Use what you learn to mark taboos, and step where the ice is thick.

“What about this lord? Can we borrow a transit channel?” Rex asked, brows knotted like twigs.

He read a cloud on Fia’s face; with the book in hand, they knew why.

The master had been wounded by a human, a scar like ash on snow.

So he wasn’t friendly to humans, faces shut like doors; borrowing was a sealed gate.

“Are we just giving up?” Belle fumed, sparks jumping from dry tinder.

“We find a Divine Kingdom, and it’s this? A god acting that petty?”

Yes, a human had hurt him, but one arrow doesn’t make the whole forest hunters.

Think it through: humans weren’t banned; the gates yawned like river mouths—he was restrained.

He didn’t bar humans from entering, but forcing yourselves before him is poking a sleeping tiger.

Regretful, Fia only shook her head like a willow in wind.

Borrowing here was near impossible, a door rimed shut; we should seek another Divine Kingdom.

As faces fell, Pulis yelped like a startled bird.

“Hey, I see Lady Little Night!”

“Little Night?” Augustine’s mind went blank like white paper, then memory flowed back.

Little Night and Moer were the two most famous little ones of the ‘Source’ world, names like twin stars.

When they went to Ouyang’s castle, they’d met Little Night and Moer.

As Ouyang’s student, Augustine knew more than most, a house cat in the lord’s rooms.

Moer lived on an ancient tree in Ancient Memory Town, roots like rivers.

That tree was said to be the World Tree, its crown holding up the sky.

Inside it, one could tune the continent’s climate and ecology, like mixing rain and sun.

As for Little Night, Augustine heard she came from the Boundless Sea, horizons without shore.

He didn’t know her powers or mission—veiled like the moon behind cloud.

“Lady Little Night!” Lain windmilled his arm at the distant figure, shouting like a gull.

Augustine rapped him with a stick and snuffed him like a candle; this Little Night didn’t know them.

Following Pulis’s gaze, they settled on a figure wrapped in a black robe, a shadow like a monolith.

Little Night sat on his shoulder like a sparrow in dusk.

Staring at the shadow, Augustine found the robe’s pattern familiar, memory ringing like a bell.

A great circle, and within it a silver-blue star and moon, both cracked as if about to shatter.

“The banner of star and moon?” Augustine gasped. “That same banner flies above my teacher’s castle.”

He knew his teacher’s background was frightening, deep as an abyss, tied to a terrifying organization.

Ouyang’s banner lacked the robe’s detail, but the bones matched.

Augustine had heard the emblem marked a dreadful group.

Thanks to Lain’s foolish wave, Little Night and the black-robed one turned like owls swiveling.

When their gazes met, the other’s pupils were ink-black wells with no whites.

To Augustine, in that instant, time froze like ice sealing a river.

Around them, time and space peeled apart like torn silk.

Ouyang is strong—before, a single look from him scythed them like wheat.

Before this black-robed one, strength as a measure fell away, a wrong scale.

They weren’t even the same dimension—fish under water, sky beyond reach.

“Little Night? Are you calling me? I don’t remember you.”

The black-robed one came on slow as a tide.

Little Night on his shoulder cupped her chin, puzzled, eyes like clear pools.

They obviously knew her, yet she searched memory’s shelves and found only dust.

Tap, tap, tap…

He drew closer, and Augustine’s group stood nailed to earth.

It was the body’s fear of death, winter under the skin.

The killing intent, as sharp as Ouyang’s, laid frost on their necks and bound them like barbed wire.

“Pl… please wait… sir… we…”

Inside that dome of killing intent, everything turned bog—like pushing a boat through silt.

Each word dragged and tore; it felt like speaking across different times.

Only Fia forced out a thin sound, a candle-flame of a cry.

It was so weak a breath could snuff it.

Tick. Tick…

A clock began to drip in the air, uncanny as cave water.

Far streets, people, and carts moved slow as if trapped in honey.

At last, all stilled; time congealed like cooling glass.

Except for their small patch, everything was frozen.

Morris opened his mouth, as if to speak to Belle across a fog.

Belle opened hers too, but their words turned to vapor the instant they left.

Hazy and dreamlike, like whispers in sleep.

Only Augustine grasped a thread.

He carried the blood of the White Elf, moon-silver in his veins.

He sensed why words unraveled—each of them sat in staggered times.

A second or two apart, parallel lines that could never meet.

To wield time like this, the other stood above all Augustine had seen, a peak above clouds.

Even in the ‘Source’ world, Anatasya, last of the White Elves, likely fell short, perhaps not half his height.

From start to end, Augustine never saw him move, the blade sheathed in a glance.

To touch time, you use ancient sorcery, ringing it to resonance.

Only then do you borrow a thread from the river.

Yet from notice to secret art, the man made no hand seals and spoke no incantation.

It seemed a technique cast with a single glance, lightning without thunder.

Suddenly, chains clanged, iron notes in the still air.

They looked around: ghost-blue chains thrust from their hearts, stretching like cold rivers.

Not just them—chains pierced distant passersby too, then slid into the void like eels in night.

No one knew where the chains ended, nor where the void ran.

Augustine noticed silver runes riding their heart-chains, moonlight etched in steel.

The ghost-blue links were branded with silver sigils, and a thin, uncanny current flowed.

One thought struck first, sharp as sleet: they didn’t belong to this time.

That explained it; out of time, their chains differed like foreign threads in a loom.

“That man… can he separate beings from different times?”

Augustine reeled; this secret art had sorted future-born from natives like grain from chaff.

The man had likely seen right through them, eyes as clear as winter stars.

The black-robed one gently gripped the chain from Pulis, the closest, a hand on fate’s leash.

In an instant, countless broken scenes floated from the chain and poured into his palm like sparks.

“That’s… Pulis’s entire life!?”

Augustine saw it—those shards, once joined, drew Pulis’s whole life, a river on glass.

The black-robed man was gathering intel this way, reading a soul like pages in wind.