The old man sat in a wicker chair outside the Manor cottage, mottled sunlight filtering through the leaves overhead. In his hand was a rough wooden carving, a little boy riding on his mother's shoulders. The craftsmanship was crude, yet it carried an unmistakable tenderness.
"We fell in love," He said in a low voice, as though speaking across time itself. "Like all young lovers, we swore eternal vows to one another."
Ian listened quietly, expecting a tragic tale of forced separation.
But the old man's next words struck him like a bolt of lightning. Ian froze completely, his brain seemingly crashing for several seconds before barely managing to process the utterly unexpected information.
'Married…? And they even had a son?'
'All the tragedy he had imagined, all the obstacles, all the heartbreaking foreshadowing of separation, it had all led to a… happy ending?'
'Then, where had the deep, soul-carved pain on Musa's face come from? Surely all this buildup wasn't just to show off how loving their relationship had been?'
Musa paid no attention to Ian's stunned expression.
The strange look on his face gradually gave way to deep reminiscence, a mixture of sweetness and piercing sorrow. His sunken eyes stared into empty space, as though piercing through the veil of time itself.
Looking upon the distant past.
"My wife."
The old man's voice became extraordinarily gentle, as though afraid of disturbing the shadows within his memories.
"She was like the toughest thornflower blooming in the desert, beautiful, yet covered in thorns, forever filled with curiosity toward the unknown. And our son, whom we named Sohm, inherited everything from his mother, her radiant smile, and a heart that could never be restrained from adventure."
He let out a soft sigh, one filled with endless affection and a trace of helplessness.
"To my shame, even though I traveled to many places alongside Professor, I was still, in the end, an alchemy scholar and a lover of fine food. I was more accustomed to exploring the mysteries of the world inside studies and laboratories."
"But Armani and Sohm preferred to measure the world with their own feet and touch it with their own hands. The hidden canyons at the source of the Nile River, the ancient city-states half-buried beneath the sands deep within the Sahara Desert, the uninhabited geothermal regions of the East African Rift Valley… countless places bore their footprints."
"Sometimes, I would put aside my spice grinder and fermentation barrels and travel with them, gathering rare herbs in the wilderness, roasting hunted game beside campfires. Those were the happiest times of my life."
"But more often, I stayed behind in this courtyard, tending my crops and refining my formulas."
"Waiting for them to return with exotic ingredients from distant lands and thrilling stories of adventure."
A gentle curve appeared at the corner of Musa's lips, but it was quickly crushed beneath an invisible weight. The smile collapsed, and his entire face was once more shrouded in bleak despair.
"My greatest regret in life… the source of all my suffering… began with that one time I didn't go with them."
His voice suddenly turned hoarse and dry, every word sounding as though it had been scraped across sandpaper.
"It happened during the summer when Sohm was sixteen. Somehow, they learned of something, or rather, Armani's insatiable thirst for adventure sniffed out something unusual."
"At the edge of Siberia, deep within the permafrost near the Arctic Circle, there supposedly existed an extremely secret underground nuclear defense facility left behind from the era of the former Soviet Union."
"It was said that during the height of the Cold War, the place had once been a massive base integrating research, defense, and survival functions. Later, it was abandoned in great haste and nearly erased from all official records."
"What attracted them wasn't only the mystery of its history, but also certain… difficult-to-confirm rumors."
"It was said that after the facility was abandoned, it came under the influence of inexplicable 'forces.' Not only had the internal spatial structure become bizarre, but strange fungi and plants mutated by the extreme environment, containing special forms of energy, might also have begun growing there."
Only at this point did the old man's story finally seem to reach its true focus.
Ian held his breath.
He knew the critical turning point had arrived.
"Armani and Sohm were ecstatic. They believed this would be the pinnacle of their adventuring careers. They made detailed plans and prepared vast amounts of equipment."
"And I… at the time, I was completely absorbed in deriving a crucial algorithm related to energy stability during food preparation. I had reached the most critical stage."
Musa's gaze drifted toward a strange plant in the corner of the yard, its leaves glowing with an eerie icy blue hue. His voice sank lower.
"What attracted Armani was the unknown adventure, and the possibility of discovering ingredients that had never before been recorded."
"What attracted Sohm was the pure thrill of exploring a lost land."
"They excitedly made preparations, cold-weather gear, maps, survival equipment. And I…"
"At the time, I was obsessed with recreating an ancient seasoning from legend, one said to enhance the umami flavor of food, using several species of polar moss and volcanic mineral salts. I had reached the most crucial stage of controlling the heat."
"I believed the place was certainly dangerous, but Armani was experienced, and Sohm had grown up enough to handle himself. Besides, I promised them that next time, next time, I would definitely go with them and help identify those strange plants that might exist there."
Musa's voice was filled with endless regret and self-mockery.
"'Next time'… How many tragedies in this world begin because of those two light, careless words."
It sounded like the conclusion to a lifetime of sorrow, distilled into a single sentence.
And honestly, it wasn't wrong.
So many things, so many regrets, were born exactly that way.
He closed his eyes, as though unwilling to look upon the scenes that followed. But those memories had already been carved into the depths of his soul, impossible to erase.
"They left. According to the plan, they should have returned before the brief polar summer ended. But summer passed. Autumn passed… and there was no news whatsoever."
"I used every method I could think of. I even traded my alchemy instruments in exchange for the help of Divinists, performing several long-distance tracking divinations. In the end, all I obtained was a vague and chilling revelation: they entered that underground facility… and never came out again."
The little courtyard fell into deathly silence.
Only the soft bubbling of soup inside the clay pot could be heard, as though mourning the tale itself.
"I settled everything here and set out for the Ice Plains myself," Musa continued, his voice seeming to carry the freezing winds of Siberia.
"I found the entrance hidden deep within a glacial crevice, cold, solid, like the silent mouth of some gigantic beast."
"I went inside. Relying on concentrated food supplies and refined energy potions, I searched for who knows how long. The place was far larger than imagination, its structure completely defying logic. Endless mazes built from freezing concrete and rusted steel."
"But I found nothing."
"No traces of their campsite. No discarded supplies. Not even a single familiar footprint."
"It was as though they had been completely swallowed by that frozen darkness."
He lifted his head and looked at Ian. In his eyes was naked pain and confusion accumulated over decades.
"No bodies. No survivors."
"Do you understand what that feels like, My Lord?"
"For someone accustomed to creating things with his own hands, to tasting reality with his own tongue… this kind of empty, unresolved loss is the cruelest torment imaginable."
The old man's voice was filled with endless weariness.
Ian felt his throat tighten. He silently nodded.
Looking at this old man, who had lived his life alongside farmland and kitchens, Ian could more deeply understand the hollow despair that came after a world built upon tangible reality suddenly collapsed.
"So…" Ian slowly began.
A thought flashed through his mind like lightning, connecting every clue from before: Musa's unusual application of time-related techniques, his knowledge far beyond ordinary culinary alchemy, and the obsession hidden deep within his eyes.
"So your research into time… and even your integration of it into cooking… your true purpose was never simply the pursuit of ultimate flavor."
"It was to uncover the truth behind their disappearance?"
"You wanted to return to the past?"
Ian voiced the conclusion he had already reached, seeking confirmation from the other man.
Musa nodded calmly.
He picked up a small, intricately structured device made from copper and brass. It looked partly like a pocket watch…
…and partly like a miniature distillation apparatus.
"Applying it to cooking, accelerating certain fermentation processes, or allowing the flavors of spices to achieve perfect fusion through subtle variations in the flow of time, those were merely side experiments… and a form of distraction."
"It helped me understand the 'taste' and 'texture' of time."
"What I truly sought was time travel."
"I wanted to return to before they entered that place. Or at the very least… return to the moment when they were still inside it."
He confirmed Ian's guess.
But immediately afterward, an incomparably bitter smile appeared on his face.
"Yes. In a sense, I succeeded."
"I created this 'Time Condiment Bottle.' In essence, it is a localized Time Turner."
"More than once, I adjusted its scales and returned to the past."
"I went back to the days before Armani and Sohm departed, when we still ate together in this courtyard."
"I returned to the moment they first arrived at the Ice Plains, warming themselves with hot soup inside their tent."
"And even… countless times, I followed them into that cursed underground facility."
The old man's voice was filled with helpless exhaustion.
"Hm?"
Ian's eyes widened.
Time travel!
This was practically the forbidden domain that researchers from every field dreamed of touching, yet feared to approach lightly!
And this seemingly ordinary old farmer had truly stepped into the domain of gods for the sake of his loved ones!
One had to understand,
At most, the man was only an elite-level wizard, the sort who would be effortlessly crushed by any one of the four Heads of House at Hogwarts.
And yet… he had actually achieved something like this.
Love.
It truly was a miraculous thing.
Something capable of allowing people to unleash limitless power.
While Ian was still marveling inwardly, Musa continued his story.
"However…" Musa's tone shifted, filled with helplessness. "The laws of time are like an impenetrable iron wall. I could not directly stop them from going there."
"Every time I tried, I encountered a powerful 'corrective force.' Sometimes, the carefully prepared dishes I intended to use to persuade them would accidentally be knocked over. Sometimes, my words would be interrupted by sudden gusts of wind or the cracking of ice. There was even one occasion when my forceful interference nearly caused me to become lost within a paradox turbulence of the timeline itself."
"Time… does not permit such direct alterations to major historical nodes to occur. Especially when those events are closely tied to your own existence."
He paused, lingering fear flashing through his eyes.
"So I understood. Forcefully stopping them was impossible."
"The only thing I could do was 'follow' them."
"To enter that place alongside them and witness with my own eyes what truly happened inside."
"But as I said earlier… it was meaningless."
"Then… did you lose track of them?" Ian could not help but ask.
Inside such a massive labyrinth, losing sight of someone seemed entirely reasonable.
But Musa slowly shook his head.
That strange expression, a mixture of confusion and faint terror, once again appeared on his face.
"No. I didn't lose them."
"That place… it was deeply unnatural."
He searched for the proper words.
"It wasn't some magical secret realm in the conventional sense. There were no illusions, no curses. It was simply a cold, solid Soviet-style underground fortress built from steel, concrete, and massive pipelines."
"But the internal space itself… was 'chaotic.'"
Even Musa himself seemed unable to properly describe it. For an Alchemist of his caliber to be unable to comprehend something only made it seem more bizarre.
"Chaotic?" Ian asked in confusion.
"Yes," Musa confirmed.
"Once you pass through the main entrance and enter the core region, space itself ceases to remain continuous."
"You are randomly 'thrown' into some area within the structure."
"I experimented countless times. No matter which entrance I used, no matter at what point in time I entered, even when I tried entering shoulder to shoulder with Armani and Sohm…"
"The result was always the same."
"The moment we crossed that invisible boundary, we would inevitably be separated and appear in different locations."
"I could neither control nor predict it."
"I returned to the past countless times and followed them inside, but every single time, I failed to appear in the same area as them. All I could do was wander aimlessly through whatever region I had been randomly assigned to."
"I searched for traces of the unique spices Armani carried… or the scent of the pine torches Sohm always used…"
"But in the end, everything vanished into the smell of cold steel and dust."
The old man's voice trembled faintly.
It was the frustration of confronting something incomprehensible and impossible to resist.
"I traversed many corners of that underground facility."
"I saw enormous abandoned kitchens, cold-storage vaults filled with frozen unidentified meat, cultivation chambers packed with strangely glowing mushrooms…"
"I even suspected that the spatial anomalies there might have been related to certain forbidden experiments the Soviets conducted back then, experiments involving spatial compression or dimensional overlap."
"But I never… never managed to find them."
"I could never discover where they ultimately went… or what happened to them."
An underground Soviet nuclear defense facility…
Influenced by unknown forces…
Chaotic and randomized internal space…
Possible existence of bizarre ingredients…
Ian's thoughts raced rapidly.
Suddenly, a flash of realization struck him.
He immediately connected it to the mysterious "former Soviet frozen goods" Musa had mentioned earlier in the Vault!
Ian abruptly raised his head and looked at Musa, shock filling his eyes.
"Wait! Mr. Musa!"
"The canned food, meat, and vodka from the former Soviet Union in your Vault… don't tell me they were brought back from that place?"
Musa did not seem surprised that Ian had made the connection so quickly.
He calmly nodded.
"Yes."
"When conducting time-travel experiments, especially crossings targeted at that specific point in time, it is inevitable that one comes into contact with objects from that era and location."
"Bringing back a few insignificant items was simply part of testing the stability of temporal traversal and the capability of 'material transportation.'"
He spoke those words with alarming calmness.
Yet what he had just described was an alchemical achievement that even Nicolas Flamel himself had never accomplished.
(End of Chapter)
You can read ahead up to 110 chapters on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darkshadow6395