Katie beheld the endless phantom jaw descending towards the Earth at alarming speed with her best attempt at a resolute and calm expression – a type of facial feature she had mastered in her past life.

For the roar that had shaken the heavens and the jaw that was about to swallow the Earth belonged to a creature beyond the comprehension of regular mortals.

He was a deity born aeons before most universes, and yet whose hunger for power had not ever been quenched in all that time.

The otherworldly tomes that she had read in her past timeline had spoken of the monster as the Divine Jade Dragon Emperor and whole libraries existed detailing the endless list of his foul machinations.

Though no one would perish today, as that wasn’t the god beast’s aim, many happy illusions of mortal power would be shattered and nothing, and no one, would ever be the same again after this day.

Every powerful faction and pseudo-nation alike with any kind of interest in progressing would soon start the scramble for any bit of knowledge about the evasive multiverse that they could get their hands on.

After all, they thought, if god beasts of the Divine Jade Dragon Emperor existed out in the multiverse – there might also be a way to attain the power of godhood for themselves, and what ego maniac wouldn’t give up everything they had to become a literal god.

The worst part?

They were right to be greedy.

One could actually become a system-recognised god if one managed to surpass level 100, but none of the current “powerhouses” of earth had reached even beyond the [Titanium] rank in Katie’s past life – she and her fellow revolutionaries had made quite sure of that.

However, she had to remind herself that she had come back in time to prevent what had happened in her timeline from going down the way it had. As the harsh truth was, she and her friends had proved inadequate last time – proving unable to succeed in preventing the Jade Dragon from descending for real.

She felt her face grimace as she recalled her friends’ dead bodies strewn lifeless across the battlefield – the giant serpentine god floating above them without a care in the world.

Not even a scratch had run along the beast’s ancient scales as if killing a group of over 100 [Diamond] ranked humans had been light work to it. In other words, it had been as though all the group’s hard work, their straining night and day to get stronger, had all been for nothing.

Her memories of that day gnawed at her as she once again felt the familiar presence of the Jade Emperor wash over the entire globe as he showed off his tremendous power with a justified flourish and extravagance.

She then spared a glance to the boy who was supposed to be standing behind her but instead found him lying face first on the pavement, unconscious – his new clothes soaked in a new weight of human waste.

Katie couldn’t blame the boy for being so terrified that he shit himself and blacked out – the projected form of the Divine Jade Dragon Emperor had inspired pure terror in everyone back in Katie’s original timeline.

However, unlike back then, Katie wasn’t a scared little girl desperate to get revenge on those who had wronged her and her parents, nor a fool desperate to ascend the ranks no matter the cost to her future.

She had a mission, a divine one at that, and she had decades of experience from her past life to help her to finally defeat the Jade Dragon for good and keep Earth free of the meddling gods of the multiverse.

At the end of her former life, she had been a [Diamond] ranked powerhouse at level 99, on the cusp of achieving the illusive [God] rank and becoming the most powerful person native to Earth’s universe.

So, why, oh why, did she feel a pang of anxiety as the sky was finally fully swallowed into the Jade dragon’s mouth?

Then, her eyes once again focused on the boy who lay unconscious behind her.

He must be the reason that she felt this way she concluded as he filtered through her memories of the past few weeks.

She had been spending far too much time worrying about the boy and his problems, whilst seeing to his education and social advancement – seeing too much of her former childish self in him to be able to resist helping.

She had been suckered in by his sad appearance and uncannily steady growth and had almost forgotten her mission, and that this boy hadn’t amounted to anything in her former life so what was the point in helping him in this one?

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

‘He saved me from dying’ She reminded herself, trying to justify her actions to her clearly panicking mind.

However, whilst she had been helping this boy, she had all but neglected the search for her friends whose memory she had sworn to avenge and restore in this second life of hers.

As the jaws appeared to start to snap shut around the world, Katie couldn’t help but feel the full consequences of her own thought process begin to catch up with her.

She felt anxious not because she thought herself weak, but because deep down she felt that she hadn’t been doing everything right up till now – she had been wasting far too much time, and that was a luxuriant failure that she couldn’t afford.

As the world was momentarily swallowed by darkness, lost in the endless gullet of the jade dragon, Katie recalled each of her friends’ faces in her mind as well as memories she had with them, and she couldn’t help but weep as she imagined letting them down.

She couldn’t let that happen.

She had to hurry before this illusory attack became the real thing and she failed for a second time.

However, as the world once again regained its colour, and the illusory jaw and gullet of the god beast vanished – she couldn’t help but stare in awe as the boy whom she had dismissed moments earlier glowed with an ethereal grey divine light.

‘What the fuck is happening?”

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The world around Peter was an endless crushing darkness that seemed determined to smother his life away.

He had no idea how he had ended up where he was, but that this was no dream was such a certainty in his mind that he barely entertained any opposing thoughts. Unlike in a dream, in this realm of darkness, neither his mind, body, nor magical skills seemed to produce anything other than an odious smell or searing pain.

Though, he needed not to do anything at all to feel pain, as felt like he had drowned repeatedly in the endless coarse grey sand-like substance that entombed him for aeons upon aeons.

Yet, amidst the torture of drowning in the sand, his mind flickered on and off again – stray thoughts occasionally flashing into view before the agony wiped his mind clear again.

However, after who knows how long he felt, between the feelings of his insides being eroded and his body being compressed by an untold number of layers of smouldering sand, he could now vaguely make out whispers that spoke incomprehensible words.

The voice that spoke did so at such a low volume that Peter could almost convince himself that the voice was not external at all, but his own primitive thoughts slowly gnawing away at him and driving him mad.

But something about the feeling of each word spoken into his ears told him that these words could not be his thoughts.

Something about the silent whispers’ words gave off an air of profundity that caused his mind to shiver in delight upon hearing them even though he had no idea what each word was or meant.

Time stretched endlessly before him as his suffering continued, and the whispering torturously tickled at the remnant of his conscious mind – until something clicked.

His mind came roaring back to life as instead of struggling against the sands inside his lungs, he tried desperately to understand it as an element able to be manipulated by his mana.

Earlier, he had tried to blast the sand away from him – not control it. He hadn’t even thought about trying to make use of his [E] grade Earth element affinity to free himself but now that he had he put everything he had into the attempt.

Yet, despite all his efforts, the sand filling his body didn’t truly move an inch.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t successfully tapping into his earth affinity, at least not after the millionth of his attempts.

No. It was that the sand, for whatever reason, just wasn’t responding to his earth affinity.

Either the sand was of too high a grade to be controlled by him, or… it wasn’t sand.

But, if it wasn’t sand, then what was it?

It was coarse and rough and quite literally everywhere, so what else could it be but sand?

His mind racked for answers but even with his [Genius] perk thrumming at full force in search of an answer to his query, nothing came to him.

Until, like an arrow being fired directly into his heart, a bellowed word pierced through the dull and endless non-sand substance and penetrated through the muffling barrier of his ignorance and that word echoed in his mind.

“Time”

The word sent euphoric shivers down his spine as his mind reeled as if he had just been made hundreds of times smarter than before – dwarfing in potency any of the empty whispers’ effects from before.

The sand that surrounded and drowned him was not true sand at all, but his mind’s feeble attempt to grasp the omnipresent incomprehensible reality of time itself.

However, realising that fact didn’t cease the pain he felt, nor did it magically vanish the endless volume of time-sand that eroded his inner organs like the waves of the sea eroded every cliff face.

However, what this new burst of insight gave him was a lead – a hint at what he had to do next.

With every bit of focus he had left, he drew upon his time affinity and instantly the sand around him began to vibrate as his time affinity filled each grain of sand with mana.

Yet, even with his time affinity being one of his best, that did not mean his affinity was perfect – not even close.

Thus, reaching out with his mana and trying to control the sands proved to be an effort equivalent to if he had tried facing the [Bronze] rank beast from the dungeon by himself.

In other words, as his mana reached its limits, and his affinity proved lacking, absolute failure seemed to be the only possible result of his benign efforts.

At one point, he had exhausted all his mana, but he had no choice but to push past the pain and nausea that came with mana exhaustion and keep trying to exert his will on the endless sands of time.

With nothing else to draw upon, his willpower began sucking away at his life force to power his pitiful attempts at a level of chronomancy whose sheer affrontery to the laws of reality defied mortal comprehension.

And as the writhing body of Peter began to fail him, and it seemed that the sands of time would claim his soul forever more – a deep resounding laughter sounded from beyond the constraints of time and space.

The laughter had come from a being who was elated that it had finally, after all these years, found a mortal with whom it could speak – even if only in faded whispers.

And so, for the first time since it had ascended to [Godhood] those trillions of aeons ago, the Eternal Squid, Pertinax, Supreme God of Time, had the closest thing to a genuine smile that a universe-sized squid could have on his endless visage.