Hello everyone!
As you may have noticed, I haven’t been very active for the past few months.
Well, I’m back now! There has been a lot of things going on for me, so I haven’t had time to really post or anything.
My schedule should be less packed in the coming months, so expect some changes.
However, I do have bad news and good news.
First, the good news. I’ll be back soon enough with another story, one that should be better thanks to the lessons I learned while writing this story. I’ll post on this novel once the preparations are done.
Now, for the bad news and an explanation.
To put it simply, I don’t really have plans to continue Time.Travel(). I’ll list the reasons below, and also give a rundown of what should have happened when we last left off and how the story should have developed and ended.
First of all, the reasons for why I’m doing such a rushed ending:
-I wrote myself into a corner. For once, the MC was too overpowered and I kept adding new abilities and concepts. This made having challenges and thus a compelling story impossible. Multiple plot holes shouldn’t have happened if I made the MC less op from the start. I thought I could make a time-traveling MC work, but I haven’t added enough limits for the powers of the MC.
-The cult was a bad idea, plain and simple. Adding all of this made me sideline character development and focus on some weird form of kingdom building, which I’m clearly not suited to write properly (not in this form anyway).
- The MC had too many enemies and keeping track of everything was getting out of hand; once again the problem of “feature creep” pops out.
-Power levels. The MC and his enemies kept getting increasingly ridiculously powerful to the point where it became silly.
-The scheduling. I promised two large chapters per week in the beginning since I had time to write them. Then real life happened and I couldn’t keep up. I promised two chapters per week to the people on Patreon so I forced myself to write two chapters, and that kind of burned me out. That’s the reason why the chapters kept getting shorter and shorter, I didn’t have any real inspiration and I had heavy time constraints. It probably contributed to the many plot-holes littering this novel.
-The tone of the story was another issue. I realized that I’m not suited for such a grimdark tone and I’m better at writing something less edgy.
-Character development was too light because I kept adding new ones constantly.
Now, for how the story should have ended. First of all, I’ll resolve all the ongoing subplots.
In the last chapter, the MC ended up in a weird area. As it turns out, that place was an ancient palace of an extinct civilization that was guarded by a race of insect people that had no idea what was in there, just that they needed to keep it sealed.
As usual, MC bumbles about and fucks things up and ends up with the secret techniques of these insect people. He now knows how to make a pure mana construct that has a physical impact. So basically infinite soldiers.
The search for the secrets of the Empire keeps going, and after obtaining that technique the MC just gives up searching and waits for the Order to decode the coordinates.
-The order finds the area, but it is deserted when they finally arrive. In the meantime, the Enforcers attack the Empire, and the two factions clash.
Now for the Riley sub-plot:
-Riley and co would have intervened at some point, and the price of using the power of the Oracle would have been revealed.
At first, they would create massive chaos and disrupt the plan of their enemies by using the tech she gave them. That would make them over-confident as they pull off increasingly daring operations until they are caught in a cross-fire between the two factions, incurring a lot of losses.
MC would have also attacked by then, and the two groups would reunite. Riley would be enraged and sad at this point, and the Oracle would then trigger her power and turn the survivors of Riley’s group into very powerful beasts. MC wastes years trying to find a way out of this situation, but he always ends up fighting a monster-mode Riley.
Riley and his men will die at the hands of the MC, and that will further break him down. Almost resurgence of the voice in his head.
The Steve sub-plot:
-Now for Steve and his cohort. It will surprise no one that Steve was played like a fiddle and all those stories about infiltrators was fake. The people who manipulated him wanted to subvert power for themselves.
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The dim-witted werewolf finally realizes this and tries to do something. He becomes a pariah in his group and is jailed, then escapes and hides. He regroups with MC at some point in the future, tries to kill MC once he learns what happened to Riley and calms down after they duke it out. He becomes a part of MC’s cult, too broken to care.
The Empire sub-plot:
The Empire loses. Fighting on so many fronts is unsustainable, and the Enforcers crush them after the MC dealt a devastating blow. The entire family of the Emperor along with the Emperor is killed by the Enforcers. The remnants of the Empire become warlords that either turn back into Enforcers Families or become mini-Empires trying to regain the glory of old.
The damages they have done to the population cause massive unrest and the Enforcers have more trouble than they expected to pacify the population.
The Enforcer sub-plot:
The Enforcers have destroyed the Empire but are weakened by the battle. The MC sees an opportunity and unleashes everything he has in stock to annihilate the Enforcers Coalition. He immediately makes a declaration proclaiming the territory as his own.
Other enforcers are not too happy about this, but the MC uses the last of his ammunition to bluff them and pretend to be a massive force despite not having anything left. The rest of the Enforcers propose a deal, the MC will keep his territory and not expand.
MC accepts but plans on betraying them later.
The Oracle sub-plot:
Oracle fucks around as usual. MC, after somehow surviving through her last attack, decides that he needs her gone. He let his cult manage his new territory and tries to provoke her. It doesn’t work.
Time passes and other plot points happen, MC now has enough power for a few seconds of Phase 4.
Now to understand how this is resolved, we have to go to another sub-plot.
The Prometheus sub-plot:
MC falls unconscious after over-using his powers and Phase 3. He fragments as usual and goes into his soul world, but feel a strong pull. He is forcefully recombined and ends up in a white space. There, a guy made of shadows wearing the same robes as MC greets him.
The guy is a soul fragment of Prometheus. The fragment is a bit surprised that MC isn’t the real Prometheus and laugh once MC explains that he fucked the enchantments.
Prometheus explains that the real Prometheus was just some random peasant from ye old times who happened to be around when two magical aliens accidentally teleported on Earth. The aliens had troubles adapting to the foreign air since they were not prepared at all, and Prometheus bonked them on the head with a hoe and took their shit.
He learned magic by accidentally using a translating device and read tutorials on the HiddenNet. He had talents for magic and since he was the only magical being on the planet at the time so he grew unopposed and became very powerful.
Then the creation of the cult who were originally the apprentices of Prometheus and started worshipping him. Prometheus wanted to be immortal so he devised a massive and complex ritual to reincarnate himself. It fucked up and Prometheus vanished, the soul fragment being one of the few remaining artifacts.
Prometheus notes that MC seems ‘immutable’ despite the corrosive nature of the enchantment on the robes and of the space around them. The fragment reveals how to enhance his powers at a tremendous cost of his very own soul strength. MC goes back to his body and feels confused. Things happen and the MC fucks with the power of the Oracle. She is not amused by this. She comes down personally and fights MC. MC uses the power he learned from the soul fragment and uses Phase 5. Oracle is greatly weakened and the Order almost empties its stock of ammo by blasting her into oblivion.
Mc should have vanished since he greatly underestimated the cost of using such power. But he doesn’t. Instead, he regenerates to a level where Phase 2 is hard to achieve. Why that happened is explained later in this document.
The Organization sub-plot, and the secrets of the Rewinder:
The World Code of the Organization is the real deal; the rest is just a variation of that.
The Organization would have clashed again against MC, and MC would have somehow managed to learn more about their location. Invasion ensues and he learns about how the Organization brainwashes its members. MC is pissed, steals as much as he can, and puts the members of the Org out of their misery.
Now for how the Rewinder works. At the start of the story, the app made by the MC forced his phone to emit weird waves and it interacted with various energies and forces in ways that shouldn’t be possible.
The MC had a power before the Rewinder, a Self.Save(). This means that he can survive something that should have killed him no matter what, the calculations are handled by the universe. The problem is that MC fucking around at that exact moment with those exact waves caused a chain reaction.
MC should have been vaporized since his app interfered with Chronons, particles responsible for time being the way it is.
However, the MC had to survive because of his Self.Save(). So, it snowballs to the point where the universe is forced to briefly stop; hence the black and white. The universe needs to preserve its integrity as well as the MC, so it decides to make MC a ‘constant’, like gravity for example. This is why he regenerates since he will always stay at the same ‘state’ no matter what. This decision gives the MC another power, Chronon.Immunity().
The Rewinder is more of an activator for his powers than the source of it. Each time he uses it, the MC fucks with the flow of time but because this problem has been resolved by the universe, he just goes back to when the app says since it will restore the ‘normal’ flow of time.
Various people with World Code powers were supposed to appear later down the line.
His P-02 designation also stems from his miraculous survival. The first one on Earth to achieve such a level of almost universe-ending fuckup was Prometheus when he tried to make himself reincarnate, hence the name which means Prometheus-02.
Prometheus wasn’t as lucky since some of his soul exploded while another large chunk just became one with the universe itself.
Now, for the ending. I had different plans for the endings. With how the novel works, I guess you could consider each of them as cannon but in different timelines.
The first one was going full 40k and establishing a world-wide empire before turning his sights to the stars.
The second possible ending was to stabilize his power over the entire continent and making a huge cliffhanger at the end where he starts what is the first ending.
The third one was MC became so powerful and fused with the universe that he decides to isolate his universe from other dimensions, restart the timeline and integrate the World Code to humanity very early on so they’ll develop faster and better.
I believe that I said everything that needs to be said. If you have any questions ask them in the comments and I’ll do my best to reply in a timely manner. Hopefully, I’ll see you all in the next story!