Kiwi and Budou’s backstory...

So, like, you remember their predicament, right? They went into a soul palace inside a rabid rat they had bested in combat, and that soul palace turned out to be a laundromat. But when they started using the laundromat, every hour that passed looped back around and around for what seemed like eternity.

And, I hope you remember that they realized that a time loop wasn’t simply something to escape from when you have learned a life lesson. It is a place to train and get stronger in and to also have sex in. A place for rational fiction fans to get absolutely giddy in wonder about just how they would manipulate the system.

And manipulate it they did.

13,143,612 loops.

That’s how many it took for them to finally feel like it was ready to escape the loop and leave their perfectly contained reality.

Thirteen million half-hours. Over seven hundred years’ worth of loops. Infinitely going around like a washing machine that simply never quits.

Lesser men would go mad under that strain.

Instead, they thrived.

Kiwi went on to create with his mind alone the astral projections of countless thousands of war machines, magical conduits, and technological inventions. What started as a jolly romp through the world of fashion eventually became something much, much more. His life had become more like waking dreams, visualizing the grandest of concepts, the most towering of buildings, and being able to pick them apart without much of any effort.

Budou finished his readthrough of the entire Project Gutenberg archives. He consumed every single story on Royal Road, Webtoons, Neovel, Inkitt, Moonquill, Tapas, Wattpad, Smackjeeves, Serial Box, and even continued by purchasing and reading over fifty percent of all novels ever published on the Kindle Store, Google Play Books, Smashwords, Kobo, and even Barnes & Noble ebook stores. Since time reset every single hour, he was able to simply buy a different book each time and it would go through; if he carried his phone with him, its data would carry over with each reset, even if the money in his bank returned to its original number every single time and the web servers got in a tizzy about this unauthorized copy lurking in his accounts. As long as he kept at it, he would succeed.

Then, after finishing their hobbies in a full and holistic way, they turned to something better. They learned all the world’s languages together. English, or whatever language was commonly used in Wuweizi, was no longer necessary as they conversed to each other in over seven thousand tongues, code-switching without even realizing it.

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In front of the Babylon Sisters, who they were currently confronting, the two men bantered softly in Cornish, then switched to Javanese.

Of course, after learning the world’s languages, it started to feel like both of them had ascended the mortal realm in any meaningful way. But that was only with intelligence and communication. They still had one more step to go before they could truly win.

So they sat there, cultivating their daos endlessly. They decided to become the most powerful beings in all of reality, and that is what they would do.

They sat, hands resting against their temples (as if to unlock the “temples” of their Soul Palace which had not fully formed since they were not fully evolved), and stared at the show Avatar on Nickelodeon which played ceaselessly on the CRT television which did not have an off button due to being so old.

Avatar, for all its glory and sci-fi concepts, was a calming presence after a few hundred years of cultivation. Every time Jake Sully tripped over vines, it was a symbol of the time that had passed. But no longer did they comment on the tripping and its high humor value. They simply absorbed the daos in silence and meditation.

They concentrated so hard that their daos collected into spirit teardrops, those watery crystals of energy that fell into the pools of their souls and let their entire beings shimmer for a brief moment.

Their metaphysical selves began to merge with their flesh and blood. Every cell replaced by crystalline light. Every bacteria replaced by purity in essence. Every strand of DNA becoming utterly infused with the daos.

Soon, Kiwi and Budou joined with the currents of the rivers of all of life, and the entire Soul Realm weighed on their shoulders. They were like Gods, only Gods did not have this kind of flawless perfection with no need for food, nor sleep, nor socialization with anyone but each other. Emotion was meaningless when you had already experienced all feelings a mortal could come across. They were no longer in need of any of that.

No. They had become something entirely different.

They had ascended into a new plane—except, physically, and even metaphysically, they could not do that. They were quite literally trapped in a time loop, which meant that they could not exit the mortal plane. Even when they exited the time loop by triggering its off function (it was just supposed to be a puzzle that someone could solve in 10-12 hours), they found that they were still stuck in the mortal plane.

A glitch in the system.

Their system boxes told them that they were each Level 999. But they knew that if IT truly got ahold of their stats, it would increase by a factor of two or three.

The Babylon Sisters saw these two young men—or, by another view, ancient, aged beings—and instantly cowered.

This story was supposed to be about cute girls and vines and cultivation.

But their services as deities were no longer fulfilling that purpose, apparently, because they were instantly evaporated into dust by the sheer force of Kiwi and Budou, who looked on blankly.

It was time for a New Realm, the Babylon Brothers mutually decided.