204 Outside

A long time ago, Remides wanted to be like her fellow kinsmen and throw herself into the Phoenix Holy Fire to end the torture that the years had brought her.

500 years was the limit most High Elves had set for themselves, and this limit referred to the time spent on the concept of draining emotions.

Emotion was consumable. It used beautiful memories as a carrier to slowly accumulate in the first half of one’s life before being slowly worn down, depleted, and forgotten in the days to come.

Memories with emotions were fresh, but perhaps it took more effort to recall them. To reduce the burden of memories on her soul, those fresh memories began to fade after a few centuries. Finally, only simple logic remained.

She still remembered the first time she met the Presiding Judge in Ravenwood’s forest. The other party had saved her life from the Demon Pigs, but she couldn’t remember the weather that day or whether the air was filled with a forest’s unique earthy fragrance. She also couldn’t remember if the wind back then had the mellow singing of birds that allowed her to lean against the tree and enjoy rare peace after her life was on the line.

She had been saved from the Demon Pigs by a human named William Kane—this was the only information she still remembered. It was like a document written on parchment and forever sealed in wax.

There were only dry records.

She would, at times, wonder why she had joined Doomsday Watchers, a very suspicious organization back then because of this.

No matter how beautiful, glamorous, and touching the memories were, they would become cold logic after time got to it.

What was more terrifying than forgetting?

Typically speaking, many High Elves chose to participate in the Holy Fire Ritual in advance when they were over 400 years old. They couldn’t stand the increasingly blurry memories and thinning emotions.

As for Remides, it took her about 400 years to completely forget the voices of her former friends and 800 years to completely forget their looks. Then, she used another 100 years to confirm that her feelings had completely dried up.

Nothing could stir up any emotions in her.

She originally thought so…

However…

“Don’t do anything stupid. I’m already back.”

Remides’s memories of the past seemed to come alive again the moment this voice sounded.

She looked at the person who suddenly appeared in front of her.

“Presiding Judge… Your Excellency?”

But it’s impossible…

She hadn’t finished weaving the closed loop on her side. She hadn’t written her will into cyclic time and made him a phenomenon that existed in this world like the rising and setting of the sun. She hadn’t connected William Kane from 1,008 years ago to the concept of the Eighth Holy Spirit, allowing him to return to the mortal world as the Eighth Holy Spirit.

Then, who was this person who looked like William Kane?

“Is it really you?”

She seemed a little excited and terrified.

“Who else could it be?” the person replied tersely.

“But I haven’t…” With that said, she hesitated for a moment before asking, “So, is what they said true? You left us only to find a way to ascend as a god?”

Otherwise, there was no way to explain why the other party was here.

The stratification of time didn’t have a clear boundary like water and oil. It was more like two cups of water mixed. In other words, time passing through different levels wasn’t going from one place to another, but changing one’s perspective of everything in the world.

This sounded very simple, but if the difficulty of crossing the World Shell to other planes was to extend one’s fingers from the oil layer to the water layer, then changing one’s perspective of time was probably equivalent to using the naked eye to distinguish which drop of water was poured out of the first cup.

At least technically, this was impossible.

Only by becoming the spokesperson of a Holy Spirit or a Void Sovereign, thereby allowing him to escape the restraints of karmic time could he appear here.

“They? Who?” William muttered and asked, “You think I’m a god?”

The other party nodded and said, “Otherwise, how did you get here?”

William smiled faintly and said, “You also came here by your will. Does that make you a god?”

Remides shook her head and said, “My situation is a little special. There’s a shortcut.”

Ritual magic, anthropomorphic worship of the Holy Spirits…

As well as the complete fragment of creation… the soul.

The Mist Soul was relatively intact among the fragments of creation.

People who died in it would constantly reappear. Due to this nature, some scholars speculated that it was probably related to the Holy Spirit, the Dead, who symbolized memories. It might be a fragment that wasn’t complete when the world was created.

As long as one was in the Mist Soul, mortals could stroll through a cycle with themselves as the axis of observation and temporarily become a part of the cycle. If one ended their life in it, they could completely become a part of this cycle.

This was why those who died in Ava State’s mist would appear in the world again as Mist Spirits.

The essence of the Mist Spirit wasn’t a strange spiritual body, but a phenomenon.

Remides had relied on this to temporarily enter.

William spread his hands and said, “Therefore, like you, I came here through the Mist Soul.”

He had to admit that this was an extremely wonderful experience.

When William stepped into the thick egg-shaped mist, he could clearly sense that he was still in the throne room. However, what he saw wasn’t limited to his surroundings.

Following the backtracking of time, William skipped a long period of emptiness and arrived in the afternoon 1,008 years ago.

This was when he left.

Strangely—or rather, it wasn’t strange. This was his limit. William would only see nothingness if he continued. He couldn’t theoretically see the birth of a character like him.

This certainly wasn’t time travel because it didn’t change the past or the future based on the tracing of cyclic time.

As for him, he could only see “everything he knew” and “see” everything he knew.

If he wanted to make changes, he had to consume a huge amount of fuel to bend his time axis into a ring and close it, completely becoming a part of the cycle of time.

However, when that happened, he would become a phenomenon.

Phenomena were phenomena precisely because they didn’t need to rely on an individual’s will.

Even if millions of bright lamps were lit at the same time to illuminate the night, the night wasn’t the day—this wasn’t something that could be changed by human strength.

However, from another perspective, this also proved that an individual’s will was a product of karmic time.

William felt an ensuing headache and didn’t ponder over these questions. He looked at Remides and frowned subtly.

Remides was like a Parkinson’s patient sitting on a roller coaster using an inferior DSLR in her hand to take a human silhouette through a layer of frosted glass. She could barely make out a vague outline.

This was probably a phenomenon caused by the overlapping of her countless selves on the timeline.

William lowered his head and looked at his hand.

Normal hands didn’t even have any double images.

If a reader-like third party looked at the two of them from an omniscient point of view, they would see a dazzling phantom looking at a complete person.

William didn’t exist across the entire timeline like the other party. He was still him, independent and unique.

It was like an outsider hung above all systems.