I couldn't even keep food in my stomach and would vomit immediately after ingesting it. Instead of eating, they administered injections to me.

To forget the pain from the drugs, I would bite my fingers, smear monster body fluids or blood on my face or arms.

My misery only continued.

One day, the acidic liquid from an unknown monster, mistaken for something else, was spilled on my face.

—Aaaaargh! My face! My eye!

That day, one side of my face, including my eye, was completely disfigured.

Before anyone noticed, two fingers had been bitten off and swallowed.

I don't feel anything anymore... am I even alive?

My body and mind were in a state of severe devastation.

Furthermore, they could completely paralyze my body, preventing me from doing anything. By externally manipulating my mind, they had total control.

From head to knees, my body was being completely restructured by them through magic.

One of the experiments consisted of making my body compatible to contain mana within it.

I didn't know the details because I had never been able to use magic, but as a result, I could now definitely feel a different energy inside my body.

Just with that, I could have awakened a new power, but that experiment was the most painful of all they had done to me before.

It was as if molten iron flowed through my veins, and due to the ring, my consciousness was forcefully kept awake, not even allowing me to faint.

—Make it stop! Please, make it stop!

It was amazing that I hadn't died from the pain. Even after the experiment, it took time for the sensation of residual heat in my body to decrease.

Thanks to this experience, I could contain energy. Although I still couldn't use it, since I hadn't tried even once.

"Could this be my salvation? Or just another way to torture me?"

But since the control ring on my head was made of magical craftsmanship, then similarly, I assumed I should be able to counter its effect with magic as well.

So I, who could now clearly use magic, had to undergo many other experiments. I had no way of knowing the meaning or result of each one of them.

Several times, they injected me with brightly colored liquids. Once, they even flooded my head with a foul-smelling turbid liquid, embedded various pieces of metal and precious stones inside my body.

And then, with each experiment came successive pain-inducing side effects, such as headaches, stomach aches, nausea, high fever, and then starting with dizziness, loss of vision, full body paralysis, hallucinations, necrosis, suspension of breathing, and many other fatal symptoms, making vital activity maintenance doubtful, also began to appear regularly.

But no matter how lethal a symptom seemed, I always managed to recover my healthy body in the end.

During the endless cycles of destruction and regeneration that my body went through, I began to have hallucinations. I thought that maybe I had already died many times and come back to life each time.

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"Am I alive? Am I dead? I don't know anymore..."

I barely knew how my body had been modified with these experiments. The only visible results for me were that I began to gain sensitivity to mana.

That and the fact that moments like these where my self-awareness was becoming increasingly shorter.

Not because my sleep time had increased, it was a state of semi-sleep, and my body began to move on its own.

My sleeping hours per day didn't even reach two hours. In the first place, I was too unstable to know whether I woke up in the morning or at night.

"Is it day? Is it night? Does it even matter?"

I could only vaguely remember the faces of my ex-wife, and to tell the truth, that was the only thing keeping me alive.

Fortunately for me, after a while, my condition was quite good. My head and body no longer hurt anywhere, and I could clearly feel the sensation of tears running down my cheeks.

"Why was I crying? Was it from relief? Or from despair?"

Days passed, and I still didn't know how much time had elapsed since they brought me to this place. Each experiment, each test, each torture melted into a continuum of pain and suffering.

"How much longer could this last?"

One day, while recovering from another particularly painful experiment, I noticed something different. The energy inside me seemed to move in a way I had never experienced before.

I tried to concentrate on that sensation, trying to understand what it meant. For a moment, I felt as if I could control that energy, even if just a little.

But before I could explore that new sensation further, the door to my cell opened. It was time for another experiment.

"No... please, no more..."

Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Or at least, that's what I believed. Time had lost all meaning for me. There was only pain, fear, and those brief moments of lucidity between experiments.

"How much time had passed? Months? Years?"

During one of those rare moments of clarity, I remembered something I had forgotten long ago: my name.

—Arceus!

—Arceus!!

My eyes shot open while tears continued running down my face.

Everything was still blurry, but I could feel that I was now in my room. My breathing was still choppy and erratic, my right hand holding something soft and warm.

"Did I survive...?"

My memory was blurry, but I thought I would die based on what I felt at that moment.

Then, the visions came like calculations of my most probable futures, but there was something more, a strip of mystery that extended beyond my comprehension.

It was as if my mind was submerging into a timeless stratum, where the winds of the future blew.

Abruptly, as if I had found a hidden key, my mind ascended a step in its consciousness. I felt I was approaching a new level of perception, holding onto a precarious handhold while observing my surroundings.

I found myself in a space between sleep and reality. It was an infinite black void illuminated by a myriad of stars. Among those stars, countless threads of silver light interwove in a beautiful and inconceivably complex network, forming various nexuses and constellations. It was truly impressive.

Somehow, I understood that I was seeing the inner workings of the Tower of Paradise. I couldn't help but think that it looked very much like the celestial equivalent of a neural network. If that was the case... was the Tower alive?

This was a question that countless people had been asking themselves for the past decades. The best answer they had found was that there was no way to know. The Tower was neither alive nor dead, neither conscious nor mindless. It was more of a function than a creature.

I knew this description was only a crude approximation of my sensations, but I couldn't find better words to express it. I remembered once seeing a gauze handkerchief floating in the wind, and now I perceived the future in the same way: like an undulating and variable surface that twisted before my mental eyes.

I saw... people. So many people. So many futures.

I experienced the heat and cold of countless probabilities. Names and places I didn't recognize mixed with others completely unknown. Emotions overwhelmed me, coming from unexplored and innumerable sources.

The spectacle before me was a complete spectrum of possibilities, from the most remote past to the furthest future, from the most probable to the most improbable. I saw my own death repeated in countless versions, each different from the last.

New continents, new cultures. People. So many people.

The multitudes were uncountable, but somehow my mind could catalog them all. The idea of living my whole life with my mind probing that mass of possible futures terrified me. However, a part of me recognized that it was a path, an option.

I had another vision. I saw another landscape, with all paths open.

This thought awakened in me a mixture of security and alarm. Too many places in that other way of seeing things disappeared or spun out of my sight. It was as if the entire universe was playing hide and seek with me.

Were these the Eyes of Chronos?