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{3rd Pov}
"I wouldn't have minded… if it was you who ended me."
And for some inexplicable reason, that line—those simple, sincere words—made my heart skip a beat.
'Fuck… Am I getting into crazy territory now? And worse—am I going full crazy myself?'
I let out a half-hearted cough, mostly just to buy myself a second to think and steer the conversation back to where it was supposed to be going.
"Let's return to the reason I came here in the first place," I said, trying to keep my voice level.
She gave me a slow, intrigued nod, almost too graceful to be real. "Very well, then. Tell me—what can this maiden do for you?"
'Maiden, she says. Right. A four-hundred-year-old woman calling herself a maiden. That's rich.' I had the perfect snarky comeback ready to go, but I swallowed it. No sense getting sidetracked.
"I want to find a way to return to my world... Earth, I mean," I said firmly, laying it out without any sugarcoating.
The moment I said it, I noticed her body stiffen. Her entire expression just froze up, like I'd slapped her across the face. Her voice, when it came, was tight and laced with disbelief. "Do you... want to leave this world?"
"Well, perhaps," I replied, casual on the surface but fully aware of the bomb I'd just dropped. Her face lost all color in a split second.
"Why are you so shocked?" I asked, arms crossed in front of my chest.
"Why are you so shocked? It's not like I'm abandoning you... or anyone else, for that matter," I said calmly, arms folded across my chest, keeping my voice even.
She stared at me for a moment—eyes narrowed, lip slightly trembling—as if I'd just told her the world was ending in fifteen minutes.
Then, with a dramatic sigh that deserved its own stage performance, she placed a hand near her eye and gave the most exaggerated sniff I'd ever seen.
"Here I was, thinking you wanted to stay... for me," she said, pretending to wipe away a non-existent tear from the corner of her eye.
Honestly, if she'd added a violin soundtrack, I wouldn't have been surprised.
"It's not like I'm abandoning you, or any of you. Don't be so dramatic."
Finally she relaxed taking a deep breath and then cheerfully said, "You should have told me earlier! I thought you were going to leave me!"
I sighed and said, "My parents… they raised me. My whole life. Every day."
'Natsuki Kenichi. My mom, Naoko. And then from my other life, there's my older brother, and my father as Ayan... I want to see them again. I need to. It's not just a whim.'
'My father as my Ayan self had my brother. He'll move on, somehow. But for my mom and dad back on Natsuki's Earth... I was everything to them. I was their only child. Their whole world. They never gave up on me, even when I was wasting away, thinking about ending it all every single damn day. Even when I was a mess, they kept loving me. How are they supposed to move on, now that I've just vanished?'
She hadn't heard any of that except the beginning part that I spoke out aloud, but still, it was like my silence alone filled in all the blanks. My expression must've done the talking for me.
"I see," she said, her voice quieter now, more thoughtful. She didn't need to ask more. She got it.
Then she tilted her head slightly, eyes narrowing with suspicion. "Don't tell me that bitch can't return you?" she said, clearly referring to Satella with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
I let out a long sigh. "I used the taboo. Broke the rules. Met with her again and asked her about it—directly this time. She told me that while she can travel between worlds, going back to my world specifically is a whole other thing. The issue is... she doesn't know where it is. She didn't summon me here because she had some master plan or technical knowledge. It was just raw emotion—her Envy, her obsession with me. She didn't record coordinates or anything useful. So now? Searching for Earth is like trying to find a grain of rice in a universe-sized haystack."
"Truly a bitch," Echidna said matter-of-factly, still referring to the Demon King of Envy like she was a minor inconvenience instead of the world corrupting nightmare that wiped out half the damn planet.
"You know I love her, right?" I said, staring at her.
She gave me a glowing, radiant smile. The kind that could be on a billboard for toothpaste—if that billboard also came with thinly veiled contempt.
"She kidnapped you from your own world, then dropped you—without warning—into the middle of Lugunica's capital, where your odds of becoming someone's slave were marginally higher than being eaten alive by magical beasts or dying on the hands of robbers. Yes, very romantic."
'It was Envy, to be fair... but she's not wrong. Not even close.'
"Anyway," I continued, brushing that whole landmine of a conversation aside, "I wanted to talk to you about Space-Time Magic."
That got her attention. She leaned in slightly, her eyes practically gleaming.
In the original timeline Subaru eventually found a way—working with Beatrice—to replicate something close to the Lion's Heart ability that Regulus had.
Together, they developed a spell they called EMM. It essentially freezes time completely, putting everything into stasis.
But here's the catch—during that frozen time, even the caster is immobilized. So unless you're trying to stall or create a window for someone else, it's kind of a double-edged sword.
They also came up with another spell—also with Beatrice's help—called EMT.
This one completely shuts down the mana in a localized area. Like, full-on negation. It wipes out magic energy like a black hole sucks in light.
Super useful in anti-magic scenarios. It doesn't discriminate either—it'll wipe out friendly and enemy mana alike.
There were also numerous types of magic developed by Julius. And he didn't even have very deep understanding of scientific theories.
Thus, what if a person with both magic and scientific theory was to work upon new spells?
With a deep understanding of scientific theory and decades of magical experience, a person could eventually create entirely new branches of magic from scratch.
It made one thing clear—magic wasn't just about raw power or ancient tomes. With intellect and experimentation, the possibilities were endless.
And Echidna? She was the perfect partner for this kind of conversation. She had access to practically every scrap of magical knowledge that existed in this world. If there was anyone suited to develop entirely new forms of magic based on theory and logic, it was her.
"Ah~, it brings back memories," she said with a dreamy smile, her eyes filled with childlike curiosity.
"When you first mentioned Space-Time Magic to me back as Flugel, I was captivated. I created teleportation spells, dimensional barriers, rudimentary time magic—and countless others—all stemming from the fragments of theory you casually threw at me. Together, we laid the foundation for entirely new magical fields."
I nodded, continuing to talk with her about what she already knew, and added even more explanations—drawing from both the scientific knowledge of my past life as Ayan and what I had come to understand here.
Subaru in the envy timeline hadn't been an engineer, not like me. His understanding was emotional, experiential—rooted in trial and error. Echidna's knowledge of space-time was exclusively shaped by whatever a version like of him had told her, considering how except Satella no one considered me to be the same Flugel from 400 years ago.
But with me? She now had someone who actually understood physics, dimensional theory, and the barebones of how these concepts might translate into magical systems. And I was beginning to realize something: even while dead, Echidna hadn't been idle. She had spent a disturbing amount of time continuing her magical research.
The scope of her knowledge was staggering. She had mastered elemental magic, advanced soul manipulation, dream-based spellcraft, combined elemental techniques, the fundamentals of space-time manipulation, life-force magic, necromancy, and a multitude of unique spell categories that defied classification.
'Yeah, contracting her was absolutely worth it… even if it felt a little too close to enslaving her sometimes.'
She gave a soft giggle, brushing some imaginary dust off her sleeve. "Death Magic and Life Magic aren't exactly my area of expertise. I've yet to create a spell that successfully brings the dead back in the true sense. The Sacrament of the Immortal King was my first real attempt at a spell involving something similar to resurrection, but it's amusing how people keep assuming that's what it was intended to do."
She laughed, like it was some elaborate prank only she understood.
Yeah, no surprise there. That spell wasn't meant to revive the dead at all. It was designed to create powerful undead servants. The people who came after her, generations later, had twisted it—modified it without understanding the original structure. Now while it could ressurect people as long as they weren't dead for long it had a significantly reduced success rate and was practically useless for its original purpose.
The only one who had really taken the spell to its logical extreme was Sphinx. She had turned it into a full-fledged undead creation technique, pushing it far beyond what anyone else had accomplished.
After exchanging what felt like an absurd amount of magical theory, practical analysis, and meta-conceptual rambling, I finally got to the real reason I was here. I began explaining the framework of a theory I'd been working on—something far beyond conventional teleportation or time spells.
"There are two fundamental axis we can manipulate—space and time," I began, sitting straighter.
"Let's say we alter the space axis. That allows for movement from one place to another—what we commonly call teleportation."
There were several theoretical methods of teleportation. The first, and arguably the most elegant, was connecting two spatial points directly. It was efficient and clean—like opening a doorway between two places.
Then there was the more controversial method: breaking down the physical body entirely at the source, and reconstructing it at the target location. It worked, theoretically, but came with a truckload of ethical, philosophical, and existential issues.
'Like, what if the thing that shows up isn't really you? Just a copy with your memories? Yeah, no thanks.'
But if you introduced the concept of a soul—something constant and indivisible—it smoothed out a lot of those problems. The soul would act as the anchor, carrying continuity even if the body got rebuilt elsewhere.
Another method involved shifting one's spatial coordinates entirely—basically ripping yourself out of one point in space and forcing a reconfiguration based on absolute location data. More advanced, less stable, and incredibly difficult to calculate.
"Now, if we manipulate the time axis instead," I continued, "we can move forward or backward along the timeline. Past or future travel becomes theoretically possible."
She listened, eyes sparkling with fascination.
"But then," I said, "what happens when you alter both axis simultaneously? In theory, that gives you complete spatiotemporal freedom. You could pick any time and any place, assuming you have precise control over both."
I leaned forward, more serious now. "But here's where the real problem kicks in... What if space is infinite? What if spatial coordinates repeat themselves? What if the structure of the universe makes some locations unreachable?"
What if the universe truly has infinite space?
If that's the case, then no matter how much you alter your spatial coordinates—no matter how far or fast you move—you would never actually leave the universe. You'd just keep shifting around within an endless, boundless void. You could travel in any direction for eternity and still be "inside."
Even if you tried to jump between worlds using extreme spatial manipulation, you'd still be confined to the same cosmic sandbox. You'd never hit the "edge" because there isn't one.
Now, let's say the universe is finite instead. Sounds better, right? It gives you a boundary to aim for. An "outside" to escape to.
But then you hit another problem.
If the universe is finite, there's a strong possibility that its spatial coordinates repeat. Like an infinite loop. Imagine walking in a straight line only to find yourself right back where you started, not because you reversed direction—but because space itself wrapped around on you.
In such a closed-loop system, traveling beyond the "edge" just dumps you back into the same space, like a video game map that loops when you hit the boundary. Your escape attempt becomes a cosmic treadmill. No matter how far you go, you're still trapped inside the same system—just endlessly circling.
The universe was vast. Ridiculously vast. Even if it had boundaries—and that's still up for debate—that didn't mean you could just leave the universe. Outside of space? There's nothing. No coordinates. No up or down. No 'place' to arrive at.
That was the true dilemma behind world travel. It wasn't just about time or space—it was about existence.
In both cases—whether infinite or looping finite—you're still locked within the same universe. You haven't gone anywhere new. Just... somewhere else in the same prison.
Luckily for me, the structure of world of Re:Zero gave me a theory, which I made up from what I knew from Light Novels and my own speculation.
That led me to a new idea—a strong theory: Re:Zero's world wasn't inside the same universe at all. It was nestled inside a completely separate dimension.
In a separate Universe.
Thus while in conventional space travel, even with magic, isn't enough to reach another universe. To do that, you need something fundamentally different. A way to shift not just your coordinates, but your entire dimensional state.
You need to escape the structure itself—not just move around within it.
"Finally," I said slowly, "I'm thinking of adding a third axis to the equation: the Dimensional Axis. This... is where it gets complicated."
I paused for a second, then decided to go all in.
"Instead of trying to explain every single aspect, let me just show you. I'm going to transmit everything I've theorized—directly."
I activated my telepathy and began pushing all my ideas, memories, and raw thought processes into her mind in one massive stream.
"Ahhh~!" she moaned, her body shivering like she was experiencing some kind of magical climax. Her eyes rolled back slightly, and I just stood there, staring at her with a deadpan expression.
'Yup. She's enjoying this way too much.'
I pushed back my chair and stood up.
"I hope you can turn this theory into actual working magic," I said, cracking my neck.
"I'm the Witch who created nearly every significant magic in this world," she declared with pride, still flushed and breathing heavily. "Advanced techniques? Child's play. Everything you've given me—these formulas, these concepts—they're glorious! To create a magic that transcends time, space, and dimensions? Consider it done!"
She was practically vibrating with motivation.
'Well... that went better than expected. Finally. Time to relax a bit.'
To be continued...
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