Midnight found Zǔ Zhòu returning to the temporal scar, this time properly equipped.
He'd brought measurement tools—spirit stones to gauge energy fluctuation, incense sticks to track temporal variance, and most importantly, a test subject. The servant walked behind him in silence, a middle-aged man whose primary qualification was being utterly unremarkable. No one would investigate his disappearance too carefully.
"Tell me," Zǔ Zhòu said as they descended into the twisted cave system, "do you have any particular attachments to linear time?"
The servant stammered. "Young Master?"
"Never mind. You'll understand soon enough. Or you won't. Either way provides useful data."
The scar pulsed in greeting as they entered its chamber, reality rippling like disturbed water. By lamplight, the distortions were even more pronounced. Shadows fell in directions that shouldn't exist, and the air tasted of mathematical errors.
"First test," Zǔ Zhòu announced, lighting an incense stick. "Temporal variance mapping."
He placed the incense at the scar's edge and began counting. In normal time, the stick should burn for exactly thirty minutes. Near the scar, however...
"Fascinating." The incense consumed itself in ninety seconds, ash falling like temporal snow. "Approximately 20:1 acceleration at the boundary."
He lit another stick and threw it through the scar's center. It emerged on the other side still burning but wrong—the smoke fell downward like liquid, and the ember frozen mid-glow.
"Time inversion past the event horizon. The stick experiences negative temporal flow." He made notes on a jade slip. "Useful for preservation. Or torture. Imagine experiencing death backwards, repeatedly."
The servant had pressed himself against the cave wall, as far from the scar as possible. Smart, but ultimately futile.
"Your turn," Zǔ Zhòu said cheerfully. "Approach the scar. Slowly."
"Young Master, please—"
"Would you prefer quickly? I can arrange that, though it reduces data quality."
The man approached on trembling legs. Three meters from the scar, nothing. Two meters, his hair began graying at the temples. One meter—
"Stop." Zǔ Zhòu circled him, observing. "Accelerated aging in extremities but not core body mass. Your fingers are experiencing next week while your heart remains in tonight. How does it feel?"
"Wrong," the man gasped. "Everything feels wrong. My left hand is hungry for tomorrow's breakfast. My right eye sees shadows that haven't fallen yet."
"Excellent descriptive data. Continue forward."
At half a meter, the temporal shear became visible. Parts of the servant moved at different speeds—his left arm gesturing frantically while his right moved like thick honey. His face cycled through expressions that wouldn't match his emotions for several minutes yet.
"The boundary layer causes temporal fracturing," Zǔ Zhòu noted. "Non-lethal but profoundly disorienting. Pain response?"
The servant screamed, but the sound emerged in stutters as his vocal cords operated across multiple timestreams.
"Significant. Now touch the scar itself."
"No! Please, Young Master—"
"Science requires sacrifice. Specifically, yours."
The servant's hand made contact with the sphere of absence. For a moment, nothing. Then his fingers began to branch—not physically, but temporally. Zǔ Zhòu watched in fascination as multiple versions of the hand occupied the same space, each from different potential moments.
"Quantum temporal superposition," he breathed. "You're experiencing every possible future simultaneously. Tell me what you see."
The servant's eyes had gone white, pupils dilated across probability. "I die. I live. I never existed. I always existed. I am my own grandfather and my own grandson. Time is a lie we tell ourselves and—"
His hand began to physically transform, flesh running like wax as paradox infected cellular structure. Zǔ Zhòu yanked him back before permanent damage set in.
"Survival threshold: 1.3 seconds of direct contact. Beyond that, paradox cascade begins cellular rewriting." He examined the servant's warped hand. "Fascinating scarring pattern. The flesh remembers being elsewhere."
While the servant whimpered, Zǔ Zhòu tested other properties. Spirit stones placed near the scar either supercharged or drained instantly depending on positioning. One stone aged ten thousand years in minutes, becoming a crystallized fossil containing enough compressed time-energy to fuel major formations.
"Temporal gradient can be harnessed," he noted. "Accelerated cultivation becomes possible by positioning correctly within the field."
He tested spatial properties next. A straight stick pushed through the scar emerged bent at impossible angles. Water poured near it flowed upward. A released bird flew in circles, confused by gravity that changed direction every few feet.
"Spatial laws suffer approximately 40% coherence breakdown," he recorded. "Navigation requires constant adjustment for reality drift."
Most interesting were the law fragments themselves. With careful probing, he identified twelve distinct pieces of corrupted reality embedded in the scar:
Time (forward), Time (backward), Space (three standard dimensions), Space (theoretical fourth dimension), Causality (standard), Causality (reversed), Entropy (increase), Entropy (decrease), Identity (singular), Identity (multiplicitous), Existence (binary), Existence (quantum).
Each fragment could be carefully extracted and absorbed, granting comprehension of laws that shouldn't be accessible until far higher realms.
"The servant lived," Zǔ Zhòu noted with mild surprise, finding the man curled in the corner. "Mostly. Your left hand appears to be aging backwards now. Interesting side effect."
The man stared at his hand, which was indeed growing younger—wrinkles smoothing, skin tightening. But only that hand. The asymmetry was disturbing to watch.
"Young Master," the servant whispered, "what is that thing?"
"A wound in reality. A place where the universe made a mistake and can't quite figure out how to fix it." Zǔ Zhòu smiled. "My mistake, specifically. From when I tried to eat God."
The servant's remaining sanity visibly cracked.
"Oh, don't look like that. You're part of something magnificent now. The first successful human trial of temporal scar exposure. You'll probably die in horrible ways, but think of the contribution to knowledge!"
He spent another hour refining his extraction technique. The key was filtering—taking the useful paradox energy while avoiding the reality-warping contamination. Like distilling poison from medicine, it required precise control.
By session's end, he'd developed a sustainable method: meditate at exactly 1.7 meters from the scar's edge, where temporal acceleration reached 3:1 but spatial distortion remained minimal. Extract energy in seven-second pulses with thirteen-second recovery periods. This allowed absorption without triggering paradox cascade.
"One hour of meditation here equals three hours elsewhere," he calculated. "Combined with the paradox energy's cultivation enhancement, I can achieve a month's progress in three days. Careful scheduling will let me advance rapidly while appearing to progress normally."
The servant had stopped whimpering, staring at his backwards-aging hand with broken fascination.
"Can you fix it?" he asked eventually.
"Probably. But why would I? You're much more interesting this way. A living temporal paradox, aging and dying simultaneously." Zǔ Zhòu tilted his head. "Actually, that gives me an idea. Would you like to become truly useful?"
Hope and horror warred in the man's eyes.
"I can stabilize your condition. Make you my temporal anchor—someone who exists partially outside normal time. You'd be able to detect temporal anomalies, navigate paradox fields, even survive exposure that would kill others." He smiled. "Of course, you'd never be fully human again. But then, was being human really working out for you?"
The servant looked at his warped hand, at the cave of impossibilities, at the young master who spoke of eating gods. "What would you need me to do?"
"Terrible things, probably. But interesting terrible things."
"I... accept."
"Wonderful! We'll begin your transformation tomorrow. For now, practice existing in multiple timestreams. It's like patting your head and rubbing your belly, except your head is yesterday and your belly is next Thursday."
They left the cave, master and temporarily-fractured servant. Above ground, Zǔ Zhòu felt the paradox energy settling into his cultivation base. His Body Tempering had solidified dramatically—what should have taken months achieved in hours.
But more than raw advancement, he'd gained something precious: understanding of how this reality's wounds functioned. Each scar would have different properties, different corrupted laws, different opportunities.
One hundred and twelve chances to break reality's rules.
He laughed, and somewhere in the cosmic machinery, an alarm tried once more to sound. But the signal was lost in temporal static, confused by paradoxes that shouldn't exist trying to warn about things that couldn't be.
Heaven remained unaware that its wounds were being systematically exploited.
For now.