I didn’t recognize the town. The owl was gone. The memory of it was fuzzy at best. The owl had pupilless eyes. That’s the only thing in that memory that was clear.

‘Did you do this? You’re not saying anything? How am I supposed to know? How can I know that what I’m seeing is not real and they’re figments and fragments of memories you made?’

I looked around and saw waves and eyes in the periphery of my vision. They seemed to talk but they never moved.

I knew what they were saying. “Do Not See. Do Not Remember.”

I don’t have anything to remember though. There isn’t dangerous to see here. As I wondered, I felt a wriggling worm in the back of my brain.

I felt something erase that worm. Was it him? He erased Zothozeft.

The town started to feel… different. The buildings changed as I changed my perspective.

The angles changed and the sides twisted. It seemed alive. It wasn’t

It seemed awake. It was still asleep.

A pain in the middle part of the outer brain then it was gone. The discomfort was a wake-up call as I saw the buildings change again. This time, the buildings weren’t the ones changing. The things inside were changing. A pile of wood became a puppet with no rigidity whatsoever.

The snow on the ground clumped together to make a creature with spider-like eyes and a centipede mouth with appendages that didn’t seem right. All of them started to come closer.

“GET THE FUCK AWAY ME! YOU WON’T TAKE ME AGAIN!”

An outburst that came from somewhere out of my knowledge. The fear in my heart wouldn’t go away. My vision started to widen as my knees felt like a rusted spring. My hands felt ready to use a spell.

A moment later, the buildings changed once again. The beasts turned to spider-like octopi. They were crying. That made me feel something that was the opposite of that. I couldn’t name what the feeling exactly was.

I tried to make the Eclipse symbol. The mana rushed to my hand. A guttural feeling of dread filled my body as I realized… My ears started to ring.

I looked around. There were no beasts, no twisting and changing buildings, and no fluidly-moving wooden puppets. It was a destroyed town with bodies strewn in the wreckage of the houses and markets.

My hand was gone. My forearm was gone.

I still felt it though. The sensation that I was moving my arm. A pain akin to searing one’s flesh started getting louder and louder. The sounds and lights were getting louder and louder.

My mind fogged up a bit with the searing pain, the ringing, the familiar sounds, and the blinding spirals of lights.

I blinked.

***

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I watched myself. When he lost an arm, I did. I had one arm and was forced to watch everything he did. The old man left and sent one of his servants. The owl sent a shriek filled with knowledge about the ritual of severance. A sacrifice of a great spirit, an amount of any type of blood equal to the weight of the great spirit’s consciousness, ten thousand years’ worth of knowledge erased from your mind.

The puppets, the beasts, and the twisting buildings weren’t from here. They were all other people’s memories. The old man evoked a memory of fear and caused me to cause a plague of pain throughout the ritual.

The spell ran its course, and the owl drew out the blood to complete the ritual. He killed himself soon enough. The old man sacrificed his knowledge and then vanished.

On the screen, I saw him appear before my eyes. He flicked his fingers and my eyes flashed with a hatred and anger akin to the one I felt right when I swore to kill him.

He used that memory against me. I killed him soon enough with the same spell in exchange for my other arm.

Now, I had a fractured lower leg, two missing arms, and was bleeding out. The old man achieved his wish. He wanted to die and stay dead instead of merging with the First Spirit. That was the message he sent to me watching the screen as my counterpart shot out the spell.

Zothozeft was erased, Hyftri was broken with despair, and Solteq died to me in a battle I hallucinated through.

I opened my eyes, and I was pulled back to my own body.

***

The lights were gone. The sounds and ringing vanished, but the searing pain was still there.

I looked at my two missing arms and tried to move my leg. A crack was heard as I tumbled over.

I made a fetal position as I realized I would never escape. There was always a greater power out there whenever it seemed like I was free.

I felt like giving up. The fear came back to me as I kept bleeding.

The heat went away as the northern cold winds swept through the destroyed town.

As I felt a shivering wind, I realized I was the only one safe from merging with the First Spirit. I wasn’t from this world. I couldn’t merge with the First Spirit since I wasn’t a part of him. That could be a reason why I keep going back to that moment.

As I realized why I kept coming back, I wondered if I could have a final death in my home world.

As my eyes started to close, I wondered if I’d see the old man again in the next loop.

Loop: 32

I woke up. The collection of consciousnesses was gone. That proved to me that the old man was gone for good. I readied myself for Zothozeft to take over, but he never came.

I wondered why that is. The only clue was that the old man erased him in the previous loop. That shouldn’t be able to change the past though.

Unless… Did Zothozeft merge with the First Spirit? Could that be why he’s not in this loop? His soul isn’t here; it’s with the first spirit. I heard a shriek familiar to me. Hyftri was crying. I guessed that she saw Zothozeft’s soulless form.

There was still Solteq. He still wanted my body.

Hyftri will probably attack him on sight and win. Every fight they had in the previous loops ended that way. Solteq might land a surprise attack while she’s grieving but it won’t kill her.

I got as far as I could from the forest when I heard a series of rumbles that were caused by their battle.

I ran far. I felt exhausted, hungry, and thirsty all at once. I looked around for water, but I saw something better. I remembered some scenes from the Mind Palace I was stuck in.

I saw a cave that looked the same as on the screen of the fifth loop. It had hints of being lived in. I saw an old skeleton on the ground in a lotus position.

It had ragged old clothes. There was a canister that I stole for the third time. It had some water in it which I drank with fervor. I hadn’t drunk for two whole days of running away. I didn’t know if one of them would catch me after the battle. I was hoping that Hyftri would win and go back to grieving.

I took some breaks from running in those two days to gain my stamina, but they weren’t long.

I decided to take a rest in the cave as I did before in a previous loop.

The only thing the Mind Palace helped me in was the memories of all the previous loops.

Constantly blocking things from your memory, in hopes of keeping info about the loop away from the person who’s possessing you, takes a toll. I forgot most of the info contained in those loops.

As I went through my own mind, checking everything that happened in those loops. I started to drift off to sleep.