The shard Kaien had uncovered would not stop pulsing.
He wrapped it in cloth and hid it beneath the floorboard of his sleep-chamber, but it ticked all the same—slow, deliberate, and unnatural in the world of constant change. It was the only sound that didn't swell or warp with Expansion's rules. It was… steady.
That alone made it dangerous.
Within two rotations, the elders noticed something had shifted.
Kaien tried to pretend nothing had happened, but the concept-harvesters gave him strange looks. Time around him began to feel "wrong" to them. They whispered of decay. Of stillness. Of contamination.
One duskless night, he found an elder staring at him too long. Her eye had split into three lenses—one for future, one for present, one for past. The past-lens focused hard on him.
"You've been touched," she whispered, voice cracking like brittle parchment. "The Still Flame has burned your thread."
Kaien said nothing.
The next morning, the Watchers arrived.
They weren't supposed to come here.
The Undefined Zone was beneath their notice—forgotten, unwanted, unproductive. But that day, they descended in spiraling cloaks of woven thought, faces covered by mirrored masks, fingers long and jointless.
They spoke in a voice that layered over itself, as if several versions of them spoke at once.
"Chrono anomaly detected. Expansion disruption probable. Object retrieval initiated."
Kaien ran.
He didn't wait to be questioned. He didn't wait to be studied. He grabbed the shard—now glowing faintly—and dashed into the shallow fields beyond the village.
The sky cracked open. Expansion veins in the atmosphere twisted, extending toward him like roots.
The Watchers followed without rushing.
They didn't need to hurry.
They could stretch time.
Kaien's heart pounded, not in fear—but in clarity. The shard had done something to him. As he ran, the world seemed… slower. He ducked before the wind arrived. He stepped between moving blades of concept-grass without touching them. Time didn't obey him yet, but it respected his presence.
And it led him to the ruins.
Beyond the Outer Spiral fields was a land of broken geometry and ancient tech—remnants from before Biggenator's full rise. The world called it The Fractured Step. No one entered. Too dangerous. Too unpredictable.
Kaien didn't hesitate.
He crossed the threshold, and the Watchers halted.
The ruins were protected. Not by laws or weapons, but by memory traps—splintered events that repeated endlessly. One wrong step and you'd find yourself living someone else's death for eternity.
Kaien could feel the traps like cold pockets in the air. The shard in his hand pulsed gently, guiding him between them like a lighthouse cutting through fog.
It led him to a dome.
Ancient. Cracked. Covered in vines made of glass.
At its center, a dial lay dormant. Not digital. Not conceptual. Mechanical.
A clock.
He stepped inside and the entire dome lit up.
For the first time in the Spiralverse, he saw a second hand tick.
A whisper brushed his mind:
"You've found the Forbidden Clock.The place where time still breathes."
A memory, not his own, trickled in: a silver-eyed man sitting cross-legged beneath this very dome, tracing the circles of a floating ring.
Elion.
The vision passed, but the shard in Kaien's hand now clicked into place on the dial like a missing tooth.
The clock began to move.
Far away, in the Infinite Throne, Biggenator's golden brows furrowed.
He turned to his Choir of Infinite Versions and said:
"The dead has stirred.Time seeks a new hand.Send the Purge Choir.The boy must not find the second spark."
Back in the dome, Kaien stared at the clock face.
Numbers he didn't recognize shifted.
A second hand moved.
And his name, freshly carved, appeared on the center of the dial:
KAIEN – POTENTIAL ANCHOR DETECTED
For the first time in his life, Kaien didn't feel lost.
He felt... chosen.