Fate was orderly, that was its intrinsic nature.

Fate was the predetermination of all beings. It dictates their rise and fall, their stories, and their endings.

Everything was within fate’s grasp, and only in extremely rare instances would it ever be turbulent, just like now.

This only gimmick here was that the scale of this turbulence could be considered incredibly massive, even by his standards. At most, the largest ones he saw in the last few thousand years would be incomparable to the scale within the city right now, with the turbulence spreading all throughout the city itself.

Considering the densest concentration of turbulent fate was within the southwestern branch, the man concluded that the source of the turbulence should be within there.

Blue light flickered out of his eyes and the information of the world was presented before him. With his will, the space between him and the base became zero, altering his spatial coordinates to a different point.

Reappearing inside the base, he could finally see what lay behind the layer of turbulence and saw a bloodbath; humans scattered all around the floor in a pool of blood, either dead or knocked unconscious with fractured bones.

This trend continued all the way down to the lower floors, eventually stopping at the floor containing a partially opened artifact box where an orange-colored orb lay dormant.

In this motionless world, the mysterious man silently observed his surroundings and his frown deepened.

This… his piercing vision saw through all secrets, yet right now, what he saw made him all the more confused.

With his ability, he can perceive both past, present, and future; he can perceive fate, the mysteries of the universe, and the flow of information, yet right now, what he saw was an inky blotch of darkness, as if knowledge from the world was cut off and trimmed, leaving him with nothing to extract upon.

This inky blotch wasn’t omnipresent though, and he still saw flashes of scenes in his view—some depicted scenes of three different supers massacring their way to the base, or how they infiltrated the base moments after Dark Wind launched his attack, but when they arrived at the Central Hub or were just about to acquire the Orb of Corrosion, darkness immediately pervades and swallows those parts of information.

This strange event made him gravitate to a certain terrifying notion.

This would only happen when I try to perceive the information of beings at equal or higher levels than me, but this shouldn’t be possible, only Zen and Adam exist above me within this world…

So why?

This question stumped the man to no end. For millennia, no mysteries had clouded him as much as today.

He quickly organized all of the information he had gathered in his mind and began to work out a puzzle with an incredibly vague shape.

The turbulent fate, and the clouded past; they were all taken into account among other streams of information.

The shimmering illusion of a grand library appeared behind him once more as books flew out, transforming into various scenes of the past as he trailed along the turbulent paths he could follow.

He looked further back in time and found the past of the base remained the same, vague and elusive, clouded in mystery. He wasn’t just looking at the past of the base though, as he observed the entire past of the city in one go, and found more and more traces of darkness scattered across.

Wait… his eyes turned into slits as, among some of those elusive parts of history, the disappearance of information matched a certain bit of information he received in passing from the city’s police station.

The missing people cases are also covered in mystery.

Although this didn’t mean anything right now, it was still a strange thing.

Soon, the man began to find the pieces he was looking for and locked down on a single man—Lucas Hum.

There were points in history where the base wouldn’t be clad in the mist of mystery and he could observe them without problem, and whenever that happened, there was always one certain person missing.

It was precisely Lucas Hum who was gone, and whenever he was away from the base, the dark splotches began to appear outside of the base. Among those times, they coincided with the time periods of the missing people cases.

The clues began to connect, and the mysteries began to be lit up. The puzzle pieces moved according to his will, and a picture was beginning to form.

Lucas Hum, a being whose past remains an elusive mystery, who was connected to the missing people cases, and was perhaps the suspect behind them. This meant that, if this hypothesis was true, he had found a way to circumvent the restrictions of Heavenly Promise.

Then, considering just how strange he was, the man also gave an educated guess and mumbled, “He might as well be the cause of the turbulent fate within the base too”

Although his tone was light and held no emotions, the dangerous light in his eyes showed that he wasn’t as calm as he appeared to be, because Lucas Hum was too strange, too weird.

His vision continued to go further into the past as he observed the entirety of the city to not miss out on any details, and he came across more strange things.

There existed a ghost child who was watching an inky blotch of darkness for a few short minutes. According to the information he found, this was the same day the Level 3 Monster, Water Serpent, burst out of the sewers.

Although he didn’t get to see the fight itself due to Lucas being there in that part of history, he still saw the reflection of the fight through the child’s eyes and. Then, when the fight ended and the child returned to their house, a trail of darkness followed, erasing history along its path.

When history returned to normal, the family of three was missing, gone from the world just like Lucas’ other victims.

There was also the strange fact that one of the base’s terminals had been hacked, along with one of their satellites.

Moreover, there was this one kid in the past who wielded the same ability as the one Braun was using right now, and expectedly, the wave of darkness also appeared and the superhero wannabe kid also went missing.

More and more cases of missing people appeared wherever the darkness went before the mysterious man eventually arrived at a certain point in time that, for the first time ever in a long while, made him truly surprised.

Because in his view, he finally saw Lucas Hum, back when he was still working in a coffee shop.

This scene was then quickly covered in inky darkness as a person walked into the store. This trail of darkness followed Lucas Hum to his apartment, and after a series of events, Lucas Hum never appeared in history.

So they aren’t even Lucas Hum. They instead replaced him, and through some strange way, acquired the ability to control threads from the wannabe hero kid from before.

It was incredibly hard to piece out the truth before him, and at this point, he was even straining to view the past of the entire city. At this point, he would be hard-pressed to look further back in time, and if he were to do so, he would be unable to save the rest of the city in the present moment.

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How tragic… the man sighed. Unlike the true gods, I’m not powerful enough to view the past so effortlessly. This is as far as I could go, especially at this large of a scale.

If I were to create any high-level artifact right now capable of peering into the past, then I wouldn’t have enough energy to turn reality into an illusion. This is truly the limit of my capabilities.

He helplessly waved his arms and the shelves of books behind him shimmered.

“Lucas Hum, or whoever you were originally, the one that transcends fate and history and spreads turbulence like a plague to the world…” he mumbled emotionlessly. “You will be an interesting piece of mystery to decipher.”

Not willing to waste his time, a wave of energy burst out of his body and covered a large region, spreading from Nuwesca City to the neighboring Civer City as well.

A translucent library appeared high in the sky, with countless books floating and spiraling. The information of the entire region enclosed within the domain of his ability flooded into the books.

Then, using his authority over Truth, reality began to turn into falsehood.

Dark Wind attacking Nuwesca City didn’t happen.

Solar Spear attacking Civer City didn’t happen.

All of the people dying from the two Demigod’s onslaught never occurred.

Everything that happened within the past hour was turned into a mere lie, and time itself regressed.

Time continued moving for the rest of the world, but information within this region was erased and rewritten.

When he opened his eyes, he was met with two cities that hadn’t been decimated.

He silently stepped forward and wordlessly appeared in an unknown room where a cloaked man was staring down at the city before him, with a maniacal light shining in his eyes.

Dark Wind didn’t notice the mysterious man appearing behind him and mumbled, “Soon, I’ll transform my dark winds into a catastrophic disaster!”

The mysterious man snorted at Dark Wind’s proclamation and stabbed his hand forward.

Space around his hand distorted and the distance between his hand and Dark Wind’s heart became zero. With a casual pull, a heart strangely appeared in his hand, with a hole having formed on Dark Wind’s back, revealing the insides of his body.

Crush!

The heart was crushed into a meat paste as Dark Wind’s body fell limp to the ground.

Just like that, a mighty Demigod died in one blow without any way to resist or fight back.

This was the might of Aegis’ Third Seat, the one who controls truth and falsehoods, information and knowledge, and a powerhouse of Level 7—he is Veritas Crowley, a mighty being one step away from the realm of true gods!

With the death of Dark Wind, the attack would never have happened, and all of those unnecessary deaths were prevented.

He successfully saved the two cities, and he could now deal with the mystery known as Lucas Hum.

Dark Wind’s lifeless corpse silently floated into the air, turning into an illusory figure before blinking out of existence.

His figure then disappeared in the blink of an eye, arriving right within the Central Hub of the southwestern Aegis branch in Nuwesca City. The grand series of illusory shelves behind him shimmered, releasing an intense light that illuminated all secrets within the base.

“This…” The light faltered and he stepped through the void, appearing in an empty room with no target in sight.

Information of the past, although clouded by the strange darkness, remained to be perceived, especially when the flow of information is incredibly recent.

In fact, due to how recent it was, he can basically reconstruct an illusion of the past.

A blue light around him gathered, covering the entirety of the room as a simulation of the past few minutes was relayed before him.

A man with unkempt, thick black hair and a sharp beard was hunched on his desk, staring at a golden-framed pocket watch. He held the pocket watch firmly in his hand, as if afraid it would slip out of his grasp.

Then, in less than a second after time was successfully regressed within the region he influenced, Lucas Hum’s body abruptly disappeared, with space-time bending to an extreme degree.

Moreover, it appeared that the one who bent space-time was incredibly apprehensive of anyone potentially tracking them through their actions, and manipulated the fold in such a rough and extreme way that would practically kill even a Level 4 Super without a body-enhancing ability. But because of this, it was simply impossible to observe where Lucas Hum’s body was transported.

His eyes flickered with a dangerous light as his figure once again disappeared.

In the next moment, he arrived at the upper atmosphere of the planet, with the entirety of Dela presented before his very eyes. The same arcane light appeared in his eyes as an endless stream of information flooded his mind, and the thing he saw made him feel a great sense of astonishment.

Spreading all throughout the nation was a cloud of turbulent fate, covering it in a layer of chaos that overrides order. Fate was very quickly overwritten, turning what was once a preordained end to become a free-flowing river of possibilities—

—possibilities that would fuck up their control over Dela at a massive scale.

Aegis was in no way an organization that relied on eternally good measures; they are under the order of old monsters that had been in existence since the dawn of humanity, beings that have seen the good and the bad along with just how depraved humanity could get.

So, even if their measures may be considered the same as trampling on everyone’s free will, it was a necessary act to guarantee humanity’s survival.

Scenes of a long distant past replayed in Veritas Crowley’s mind, of a period of history where fate was also a turbulent mess, back when every single one of humanity still retained their ability to forge their own future; back when the thing he calls turbulent fate was known as destiny.

If fate was a predetermined path, then destiny was the path that you yourself created, unbound by any limitations and holding limitless futures in store.

It was both due to this fact that humanity reached its peaks, and its utter lows—it was due to destiny humanity was able to reach such grand heights, and why Ragnarok occurred.

Grow too big, and one would fall down to their knees, their legs collapsing under the heavy weight they carried.

“To not just transcend fate but to spread free will amongst everyone, granting them destiny—Lucas Hum, you’re truly a plague to humanity!”

Veritas Crowley’s face remained impassive, but a cold glint flashed in his eyes.

To allow this plague of destiny to escape under his grasp, Veritas Crowley could clearly feel just how big of a mistake it was.

If he didn’t have to overwrite truth and turn back time, he could have most likely used the more practical usage of his ability and created himself a high-level artifact capable of viewing the past and observing the entirety of the past year or more.

Unfortunately for him, things just aligned in such a way that he was forced to come to a decision and pick saving the two cities over capturing one man. If he knew that Lucas was this big of a plague though, things would have been vastly different.

He would have prioritized finding out the truth and killing the man before he could have spread destiny en masse.

Or to be more precise, prevent the one who kidnapped Lucas Hum last minute, using him as a tool to scatter destiny. Just who was this person who created that passage in space-time? How did they discover that I winded back time and knew I was going to target Lucas Hum in the first place?

A flurry of questions clouded his mind, piquing his scholarly intrigue.

However, he still had more pressing issues to attend to as one of Aegis’ leaders. Spending his time on a wild goose chase like this and capturing the rat known as Lucas Hum would just be an inefficient use of his time.

There were plenty of problems in the world right now that needed his help to be resolved, problems that require godlike Level 7 beings to deal with.

Fortunately, he wasn’t alone.

This was the very reason why they had created Aegis.

A single human cannot hope to overcome the world. Only by uniting as one could they achieve grand miracles that would forever remain in history.

Even if you remain elusive right now, don’t think you’ll be able to hide forever. Soon enough, the chaos you bring will be quelled, and Dela will once again embark on the path the world created for it, a path that would ensure humanity’s survival!

His figure disappeared, leaving the sky empty.

Just like that, a pressing issue was resolved. A demigod died, their plan remaining as a mere part of an erased time, yet a bigger issue soon replaced the nightmare known as Dark Wind.

Only a few beings had retained their memories of the erased past, namely Abbie King and Christopher Divus.

“So, that’s the power of a Level 7…” Christopher stared off into the distance, his heart still pounding heavily.

“Terrifying, ain’t it?” Abbie King grinned and patted Christopher on the back, “That’s why Aegis is the strongest organization in the world. With the support of ten celestial entities, even the scheme of a Level 4 Demigod like Dark Wind is useless.”

“I see…” Christopher, having felt the sheer power of a Level 7, felt that he should adjust his mindset. If I had more power, then solving a problem like this wouldn’t even be a problem.

…

In a strange dark void, where space-time was cut off from the rest of the world, Braun sat in the air with his legs crossed as he breathed a sigh of relief.

“Fucking hell,” he cursed loudly but his hands didn’t stop moving.

Illusory green threads, along with a clone of his soul, continuously broke free from the void, reappearing in random spots throughout Dela. They would then quickly take control of another person, replacing them with Braun’s soul, transforming them into his latest product—Avatars.

“Just how in the hell was I able to escape from that monster?” he mumbled with an exhausted tone. “And to think that when I first came into contact with zenithral power, I only transcended my humanity and fate. Now, I had even transcended my past entirely.”

His eyes glowed with a green light as his understanding of transcendence deepened.

In a way, I’ve completely transcended my limited self, transforming into a different entity altogether.

Even the essence of my very soul had forcefully changed over the months, not to mention me transcending the fate laid upon me and the history I once lived through.

Braun took a deep breath and mumbled softly, “So, I suppose one could say Freidrich Braun had truly died and was replaced by someone different—me.”