No one bothered to rein in their strength, so a certain black cat’s stray surge crushed this fragile, stand-alone world like a glass orb under a paw.

“Idiot!”

“Dumbass!”

“Moron!”

…

With the blame pinned on sheer power, the catfolk dove straight into the stream of time, like shadows slipping into a moonlit river.

Phantom gold gears turned; a colossal clock drifted overhead. Rivers—really ribbons of scenes—were strung across the gear-filled void: crowds singing like lanterns in a festival, lightning clawing the clouds, shoals weaving through the dim sea.

Those “rivers” ran like endless film, a long reel unfurling under silent stars.

A prickle ran through Ouyang. “No… why are there so many time axes?”

Outside, there’s only one timeline—the Long River of Time. In an independent world, there’s only one as well. Seeing multiples was Ouyang’s first.

They picked one axis at random, like choosing a path from a grove of bamboo.

Under a bruised sky, the broken earth bled magma. The air was thin as ash; most life couldn’t breathe. Bones lay scattered like driftwood after a storm. In Ouyang’s senses, the world had already died; even the naive world will had guttered out like a spent candle.

They hopped across that axis’s thread, returning to a segment where the world hadn’t fallen, like stepping from winter into a held-back autumn.

A vast head bloomed in the sky, coalesced from black fog. Red lightning flickered where its eyes should be, like serpents coiling in a storm.

“If we stop that thing, does the world live?” White Cat flicked her tail, curiosity humming like a gnat. Saving worlds wasn’t her creed—she grew up on a knock-off console and didn’t carry saintly morals. Not kicking a world when it’s down already made her a model citizen in her book.

Saya lifted her gaze to the bleak dome and the distant carnage, then shook her head, face calm as still water. “No. If we change this ending, the axis will split, birthing a new line. The destroyed world stays destroyed; what we change is a newborn world on a fresh thread.”

Theory says changing the past drags crushing karma, might even erase the changer like fog burned off at dawn. Yet here, the instant a change lands, the world peels from its axis, buds into a new world, then runs on a new clockwork.

“Parallel spacetime?” The thought rang in Ouyang like a bell in a temple hall.

Tests backed it up. The big gray cat—Dufei—refused to accept the script. He forced a new ending, blew the sky-thing into grit, and wore “savior” for a heartbeat like a red scarf in the wind.

The moment Dufei acted, everyone felt it: the world shifted, like a boat crossing a hidden current.

Call the ruin they first met World A. At the forced change, B split from A, like a shoot sprouting from a scar on the trunk.

They reentered the axes. They had marked them before—two rivers stood out in the flood like braided strands with bright threads. They entered the axis with the earliest mark.

The sky stayed sooty; the land remained shattered. When they returned to the pre-destruction moment, the black-fog head still hung over the vault. Weeping, war cries, and roars rolled across heaven and earth like thunder.

On the second, later mark, a vibrant world greeted them—green shoots, clear water, a different path catching sunlight.

“This… is unbelievable. We left a mark before Dufei acted, then another after. From our angle, we just marked in one axis…” Devila smoothed his whiskers with a paw, thoughts rustling like leaves. To him, it was tossing a sign one second earlier, then another a second later. Who knew the earlier sign would vanish, and the first would appear in another world entirely?

They sampled more axes. Each concluded the same way: ruin. Every ruin traced back to the sky-borne mystery, the one Dufei had slapped into dust like pollen from a petal.

“Interesting. The splits must come from someone else trying to change fate like us, only too weak to succeed.” Ouyang crouched on Saya’s shoulder, lost in thought like a monk watching rain. “Countless attempts to change spun countless axes. As for who tried—we don’t know. They’ve vanished from the failing lines like a fish slipping the net.”

The splits weren’t endless; it wasn’t the boundless lattice theory dreamed up in lecture halls. Finding that someone was still hard. If they could vanish from an axis, they might be a god; only gods leave no footprints on time.

But that conclusion wobbled.

“The ‘world-ender’ that our big guy smacked was about sub-god tier. If the changer was a true god, they shouldn’t keep losing to a sub-god weakling. I lean to a second guess: the changer holds an artifact that lets them vanish from an axis and step onto another, but they themselves aren’t god-tier. That explains why they keep changing fates yet can’t beat that featherweight monster—he can move across lines, knows the script, but his hands are too small.”

Ouyang watched the void of gears and clocks, the drifting “long rivers,” and his mind set like ink on paper. It was still just a guess. Maybe he was a god, and the world-ender beat him like a drum anyway.

Anything was possible, like mist shaping mountains.

Across all axes they explored, aside from the lines split by their own changes, every other axis ended in ruin, like candles blown out in a row.

“Fascinating. Truly fascinating.” Ouyang couldn’t help admiring this independent world, a rare orchid in a hidden valley. Maybe the outside axes hide the same phenomenon. Scale a sealed world to a whole cosmos, and only gods in an independent world could spot such strangeness. In the vast star sea, what would it take to perceive ‘parallel universes’?

God Above Gods? The Third Rung? Or…

He shook his head; the knots wouldn’t loosen. Why did the Other Shore’s records on independent worlds never mention parallel splits? Those records say: go back, change an ending, and the entire axis upheaves in a butterfly storm—yet no parallel worlds.

So what’s different between those worlds and this one?

“It’s the presence of a god.” Saya’s calm words fell like a pebble into a still pond. The reminder hit Ouyang: in the Other Shore’s surveyed independent worlds, none had birthed gods. Here, godhood exists—the world-ender is god-tier, even if Dufei smacked it into particles like chaff. That doesn’t erase the tier.

Think deeper—another key point. The world-ender felt more like code than will, a programmed thing with thin wisdom, wind-up thunder with no mind. That alone wouldn’t trigger a split. The other one—the fate-changer who can vanish from an axis—that’s the true engine.

“Why guess so much? Let’s just catch the guy and ask.” Dufei puffed up, pleased with his own idea like a cat under a sunbeam. He meant the fate-changer. They’d already caught the world-ender in earlier trials, but got nothing useful: its mind was sludge, memory a gray smear.

“Idiot.” Ouyang shot Dufei a glare, cold as frost. “He can vanish from an axis; that means he has ‘uniqueness’ like a god. Even if we’re on the same axis, if we’re not in the same second, we can’t meet. We’re in this second; he’s in the next. Uniqueness keeps us forever apart—unless we step into his second, or he reenters ours.”

Like that, one person in the previous second, one in the next—because of uniqueness, the earlier can’t appear in the later. The world glitches; the axis splits. You in this second, me in the next—parallel and never touching, like two moons on different tides.

Take the axis Ouyang accidentally drowned with seawater: if Ouyang alone walks the line back before the flood, uniqueness prevents him from finding Saya and the others. That world would split anew, like a branch breaking clean.

“Wait… uniqueness? Then why does the world-ender appear on multiple axes? A god’s existence in an independent world should be unique, right?”