She felt as if she were threading the starry sea at breakneck speed, a meteor slicing the dark.

When her awareness snapped fully awake, the scene before her was strange yet familiar, like a misted mirror remembering a face.

Familiar furnishings stood like old trees; the softness beneath her rose like tide-smoothed sand. This was her room in Eastern Sea City.

"What... happened?"

She pressed her dizzy forehead, a leaf in wind. She shut her eyes, opened them, then clenched both hands before her, testing stone with skin.

The sensation was real, warmth and weight like sun on slate.

Yet her memory showed no broken shards, no gaps on the riverbed of thought.

It echoed the moment after the assassination in the palace, a shadow crossing noon.

Time travel...

The river of time holds eddies and undertow, its drawbacks like hidden reefs.

After the Phantom God awakened, new knowledge poured into Cerqin like rain, and it lit up parts of Spring Tide’s own situation.

"Did my consciousness fold back to some point in the past?"

Confusion rose like fog, thin yet clinging. If this time and space came from a distant shore,

and there was no way home, small butterfly-wing shifts could twist countless futures.

A lighthouse thought cut through. She remembered discussing the Needle of Time, the Sacred Dragon royal clan’s artifact, with Ninexiao.

The Needle of Time was a relic wound with the rule of time, a blade sleeping inside a clock.

It was a magi-tool blessed by a true god, its activation harsh as winter ice. Ninexiao’s words still rang like bells.

"Normally, pure time travel is chained with heavy limits. Try to carve history wide, and the world spits you back to your node."

The Needle was called an artifact not just because the law of time lets you walk backward.

It let you spend life like oil on a wick and cut back to a very short moment past.

In some measure it slipped past the world’s mending hands and could tilt the future.

That was why it deserved the name artifact, a star pinned in myth.

If her awareness had folded to some far-off point, then a different choice, like a pebble thrown elsewhere, might send her quickly back.

Spring Tide exhaled, a wave receding, yet regret pricked like salt.

Armed with foreknowledge, she could have headed off Eastwind City, Northfort, and this imperial-city storm before it broke.

She swung her legs off the bed. Daylight poured in like milk, and what mattered most was the hour itself.

She had to pin the date on bark and decide how to carve history wide enough for the world’s repair to sling her home.

She pushed the door. A passing Nun bowed with a bell-like hello. Spring Tide smiled back, a curl of spring wind.

The Nun froze where she stood, a deer in a glade.

Spring Tide tilted her head, puzzled, then remembered. Before she met Cerqin, she’d been far more placid, answering many in the Sanctuary with only a nod.

"Holy... Holy Maiden, you..."

"Mm. What time is it now?"

"Ah?"

"Mm. What’s today’s date?"

She watched the flustered Nun scurry off like a sparrow. Spring Tide felt just as at a loss, leaves in a swirl.

Because today was the day she’d meet that pink-haired one.

Falling back onto the day she was moved felt awkward, a blush under cold moonlight.

"But if I just don’t go out today, I can rewrite history in broad strokes and trigger the world’s repair."

With that thought, Spring Tide drifted back into the room like a tide returning, ready to spend this overdue rest day flat on her bed.

"Still, whether it’s a whole soul or bare awareness, does time travel directly replace the me of this strand?"

While Cerqin lay unconscious these past days, Spring Tide prepared for advancement, and she read the tomes Ninexiao lent, lanterns on the bank.

They taught her pieces about time-walking, enough to fit the shape of her power.

There’s a split between awareness-journeys and full-soul crossings.

The latter is rougher, because soul strength anchors mind strength like iron to magnet. It skews power from the original node like a bent compass.

If the gap’s too big, the strand ejects you like a seed from pulp. A complete soul finds it hard to slip into the far past.

Bare awareness isn’t much simpler. It can reach farther, like wind over open sea.

But awareness is hard to congeal, a mist that won’t bead. It’s tougher than probing a soul’s shoreline.

Without deep grasp of soul and spirit, you can’t bind awareness into a soul-like shape, no more than smoke can hold a blade.

This trip through time was most likely an accident, a spark thrown by chance.

Spring Tide couldn’t help thinking of that shining star.

In that moment she’d felt it mattered to her, and she reached for it with her mind like a hand to flame.

Now it seemed that star tied closely to her soul, a knot in the deepest wood. It might even be the core sealed at the soul’s root.

"Cerqin..."

After a while on the bed, Cerqin’s face flashed again in her mind, a petal borne on water.

After reaching the imperial city, the negative emotion energy gnawed like cold. Once inside the Sanctuary, she went straight to the palace.

When they met again, Cerqin hovered on the brink, a candle in a gale. Her body stood at death’s threshold, and her soul had begun to fray.

If Aileaf hadn’t used a potion at once, catching that breath like a net, Spring Tide might never have seen her alive again.

After that, with her soul damaged, Cerqin slept on and on, a lake under ice.

Soul-mending takes time. The imperial-city crisis still hung overhead, and the pressure on her mind was a mountain in fog.

Having walked time once, she grasped it faster, and that sped this early advancement like a tailwind.

"Fine. I’ll go see her."

Cerqin’s face sharpened in her mind like a sketch inked bold. Spring Tide sighed, then pushed up from the bed.

She gathered her emerald hair back with her hands, tying a ponytail like a green ribbon of water.

She rose, opened the door, and headed for the market fixed in memory, footsteps like beads.

Eastern Sea City sat on the far eastern coast, a harbor wide as a whale’s back. Its bustle rivaled the capital’s, lantern for lantern.

It held more people than Eastwind City or Northfort, a tide of lives rolling down its streets.

Hawkers shouted without cease, a flock of gulls. Under a sapphire sky, the air tasted of salt wind, fresh as surf.

The hour hadn’t reached the moment of first meeting. Spring Tide chose to wander for once, to let her heart uncoil like a kite.

Back then too, it had been the same.

She’d been buried helping her master, the Archbishop, with paperwork, ink like rain for days. After the grind, that shameless master tossed her a single day off.

Thinking on it now, she should’ve scolded him harder, a thunderclap over calm sea.

That day, as now, she drifted aimlessly, a boat without oars.

Not knowing what to do, she wandered into this market. Her green hair drew eyes like jade in sun.

Spring Tide noticed sights different from before. Many recognized her and whispered, a rustle in reeds. Back then, she hadn’t cared.

Now, a faint helplessness rose, sour and soft as unripe fruit.

"Didn’t think I’d change this much in such a short time."

To be able to be moved—that was a kind of salvation, a spring thaw for her.

She thought again of Ming Xi’s words.

The Phantom God was too strange a gift. Time’s power is strong, yet it washes feelings thin like color in rain. Its slow grind leaves deep marks.

That’s a side effect seeded in the power itself.

It grows sharper as strength and rank climb, a shadow lengthening at sundown.

Ming Xi always said this while shoving heavy work onto his disciple, dressing it up as “training your emotional swings.”

But Spring Tide knew her own detached heart. If she let it ride, some day in the future, time would crush her flat and erase her like a footprint.

Even knowing, she hadn’t cared much then, a stone pretending not to drown.

Until that day. A splash of pink in the crowd. And her quiet heart leapt, a drum at dawn.