Lucien dismissed the Hourglass only after every calculation had been checked.
The forest returned to its ordinary pace.
He sat beside the young man's body and began separating everything that could not remain.
The Divine Energy Core would return with his original body.
The inner universe would go with it.
The Aevans would never know they had briefly traveled into the distant past.
Rust and Hunger would remain imprisoned in their isolated layers and leave with the universe that contained them.
Lucien's Inventory, Morphis, the Tree of Creation, and the overwhelming reserves he had carried into this era would leave as well.
That was necessary.
If Lucien was going to replace the missing continuation Fracture had created, he could not solve the problem by inserting an Extinction-Grade existence carrying an entire universe into the young man's place.
That would create a historical distortion far greater than the one he was trying to prevent.
