Veneri stood there silently while staring at the girl sitting on the desk at the back of the classroom wearing a school uniform. The afternoon sunlight passed through the windows and illuminated her teal hair, giving it an almost oceanic glow. Her emerald green eyes looked calm. She swung one leg lazily while smiling at him.
"It's honestly refreshing seeing you make that face. Usually you're either stressed, planning something suicidal, or getting yelled at by one of your beloveds."
Veneri slowly walked closer while keeping his eyes on her.
"You're really the Primordial of Time."
"Mhm. I went to this school in my past life. My name was Thyme Isabella Dela Cruz. I was Mexican. That sounds fake enough to be believable, does it not?"
"You being Mexican somehow makes this even harder to process."
Thyrexxa snorted before hopping down from the desk. Even in a normal school uniform, she carried herself with the strange presence of someone who no longer belonged to reality. Her white shirt was slightly oversized while her black skirt stopped high enough to reveal her pale thighs. She looked like a regular high school girl, if one ignored the fact that she could probably erase causality by blinking.
She walked to the classroom window and rested her arms against the frame while looking outside at the empty school grounds.
"The Original Iteration was the original existence. It was just one universe moving forward naturally. All Primordials come from there. Every single one of us was originally mortal."
"..."
"I was born in Mexico. My father raised me alone after my mother disappeared. He was sick for most of my childhood, but he still worked himself to death trying to take care of me. Eventually he managed to immigrate to the United States with me and we settled in Los Angeles."
Her fingers lightly tapped the window frame.
"We were poor. Like... actually poor. Not the fake 'I struggled' type rich people love talking about online. I mean sleeping hungry sometimes. My father got worse over the years and eventually he died from chronic illness before I even graduated. I was alone after that."
Veneri stayed quiet. She glanced at him before continuing.
"A family took me in after I was taken to foster care. At first, I thought my life was finally getting better. My foster mother was kind to me. She helped me study, bought me books and treated me like her daughter. Then she died. After that, my foster father remarried. He was decent enough, but his new wife hated me. I was the random immigrant girl living in her house, eating her food and existing around her children. When the foster father died too, things got worse immediately."
"She treated you like a servant, huh?"
Thyrexxa laughed.
"Oh, way worse than that. I cleaned the house, cooked, did laundry and took verbal abuse every single day. Her daughters thought humiliating me was entertaining. The funny part is that I still went to school every morning smiling like nothing was wrong. I studied here right in this school. I worked harder than everyone else because I knew I had no backup plan. If I failed, my life was over."
Her eyes drifted around the classroom.
"And somehow... I succeeded. I graduated with honors. Got another scholarship. I entered medical school. I wanted to become a doctor because I couldn't save my father. But people don't like seeing someone they hate succeed. My stepsisters hated me even more after I escaped them. They couldn't stand it. So during my second year in university, they planned an assault. They gathered some of their friends, cornered me on campus at night, dragged me to the rooftop of one of the buildings, and beat the shit out of me."
Thyrexxa shrugged lightly like she was discussing the weather.
"They were laughing the whole time. One of them joked about throwing me off the roof. They thought it would scare me. Then they pushed too hard and I slipped. I still remember the impact. The pain lasted for maybe half a second before everything went dark. The funny part is that death wasn't the end. My soul stayed conscious. I watched everything afterwards. The police investigation, their arrests, the media coverage, the panic from my university and so on. While I watched them crying in court, I wanted them dead. I wanted them to suffer. Then the asteroid came."
Veneri immediately looked at her. Thyrexxa slowly raised her hand and formed a tiny glowing sphere that resembled Earth.
"One impact."
She crushed it between her fingers.
"The entire planet died."
The illusion shattered into dust-like particles.
"That was the end of the Original Iteration and the beginning of the First Iteration."
Thyrexxa slowly walked through the empty classroom while speaking. Her loafers made soft tapping sounds against the floor tiles. The playful attitude from earlier had faded almost completely now.
"When I died, I thought that was the end. But instead, I woke up somewhere else. I found myself standing in a belvedere overlooking a perfectly still ocean. The water didn't move at all. The sky above me was dark blue and filled with stars that looked frozen in place. It felt infinite. My body wasn't human anymore. I could feel time around me. I could hear clocks that didn't exist. I could see moments overlapping each other. Then a voice spoke in my mind."
He heard a lot of clocks ticking.
"It told me that I had become the Primordial of Time. I would be the one responsible for recording and maintaining the flow of time across the universe."
"So the Primordials are chosen by the universe itself."
"Correct. Or rather, created when necessary."
Thyrexxa leaned against a desk while crossing her arms.
"That's when I learned the truth about Earth. It isn't just some random planet. Earth is an Origin Planet. To put it simply, Origin Planets are worlds directly tied to the stability of the universe itself. They act as anchors. Earth's designation is even more dangerous because it's classified as an Iteration Point."
Veneri immediately understood the implication.
"If Earth is destroyed before the universe reaches full maturity, reality initiates a universal rollback. Everything restarts from a new branching point. History rewrites itself. Civilizations vanish. Gods disappear. Entire timelines cease existing."
Veneri rubbed his temple slowly.
"So Ragnarok was the First Iteration, according to Luciana's description. What about it?"
"It happened during the twentieth century. The Norse Pantheon existed back then. Midgard was Earth's name during that cycle. Surtr eventually destroyed it during Ragnarok using his flaming sword. The moment Midgard was annihilated, the universe reset and began the Second Iteration."
Thyrexxa exhaled slowly.
"One of my duties as the Primordial of Time is maintaining the loops and preventing premature collapse but there was a problem. Primordials aren't allowed to interfere directly too much because the universe itself is fragile during early development. The more power we use, the more unstable causality becomes. So the universe limits us."
Veneri narrowed his eyes.
"That's why you couldn't just save Earth yourself."
"Exactly. I needed indirect intervention. So I came up with a solution. A Butterfly Effect. If an Iteration was guaranteed to fail, I would take souls from Earth before its destruction and send it into another world in the next Iteration. The souls would eventually influence events enough to stop future resets. Then I would use one soul to act as the one to initiate the Butterfly Effect."
Veneri's eyes widened.
"The Transmigrators in the Hidden Citadel is your doing. isn't it?"
"Mhm. When the First Iteration collapsed, I selected one soul and placed it into the body of Vastarael Richinaria. The original Vastarael died long ago during infancy in every single loop. The soul I inserted became the Vastarael who would eventually start changing history."
Veneri stared at her.
"So every iteration had a Transmigrator in Vastarael"s body."
"Most of them failed horribly. One became a tyrant. Another tried becoming a hero and got assassinated. One literally gave up and opened a bakery."
"A bakery?"
"He made really good bread, apparently."
"That is the most disappointing timeline I've ever heard."
"I KNOW."
Thyrexxa burst into laughter before calming herself again.
"But the point is that every iteration needed an anomaly. Someone capable of creating enough deviation to eventually save Earth. But, the universe kept dying. Second Iteration with the Egyptians. Third Iteration with the Greeks. Fourth with the Hindus, Fifth with the Mayans and Sixth with the Christians. Every single one ended differently. And then came the Seventh Iteration."
Veneri already knew what she was about to say.
"The Convergence."
Thyrexxa nodded.
"That iteration spiraled completely out of control. Earth was destroyed during the aftermath and you died alongside it. So I chose you as my eighth Transmigrator. You were angry enough to fight fate, stubborn enough to keep moving forward and insane enough to throw yourself into impossible situations repeatedly."
"That sounds less like praise and more like a psychological diagnosis."
"It can be both. You became the Seventh Iteration's anomaly. And unlike the others… you actually succeeded. You stopped the Eighth Cycle before it began. The moon collision would have reset the universe again. So congratulations, Veneri. You saved reality itself from another restart."