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Translator: AnubisTL
Vivian's figure completely vanished into the void as she slipped into the city for a deep reconnaissance mission.
Moments later, her voice transmitted through the encrypted mental link: "Secure. No organized enemy forces detected. Only a few first-tier worker bees wandering aimlessly in the lower pipelinesâlikely abandoned or naturally hatched later. We're clear to enter."
Jieming and Roland landed on the roof of a tall tower at the city's edge.
From here, they could overlook a vast expanse of the urban area.
Without wasting a moment, Jieming produced a recording crystal containing the detailed logs of the wizard team that had collected samples here during the previous cycle.
As his mental power swept over it, the past scene materialized: A battle had erupted in a distant high-rise. The wizard forces had charged in from the main eastern channel, while the Scythe-Skull defenders mounted a final stand in the western plaza. After their defeat, the remnants attempted to escape through the underground network, only to be purged by pre-laid rune traps...
"That area, huh..."
After reviewing the recorded information, Roland also cast a detection spell toward the location.
After a moment, he nodded. "Indeed. Although the camouflage is excellent, the energy fluctuations are far too smooth compared to the other areas."
Soon, Vivian's field reconnaissance results came back: "The enemy's camp is indeed in that precinct..."
Jieming nodded and looked at Roland. "It's good that nothing has changed. In that case, I'll have to trouble you, Excellency. Please ensure that not a single one escapes."
"A simple matter."
Roland raised his palm toward the sky. In the blink of an eye, a super-massive energy shield expanded.
The erected energy shield, resembling an inverted translucent giant bowl, silently enveloped the entire Scythe-Skull Race outpost camp.
The faint sounds of chitinous plates scraping and pheromone communication emanating from within the camp were instantly cut off.
"Strike," Vivian's voice rang out through the mental link, cold and concise.
As the primary assault force, Roland swung his staff. Above the largest spiral building in the center of the camp, which served as the command post, dozens of meteorites wreathed in blazing white flames suddenly materialized, trailing long tails of fire as they crashed down!
The explosion and flames instantly engulfed the building and its surroundings, as panicked shrieks intermingled with the crisp shattering of energy shields.
Roland, however, had controlled his power with remarkable precision. This single spell had destroyed the enemy's defense system and sowed massive chaos, yet caused virtually no casualties.
Seizing the collapse of the defense system, Vivian slipped inside, transforming into a reaper in the shadows.
Her figure flickered between the sentry towers, supply depots, and small hatcheries at the camp's edge. Each appearance was marked by a faint spatial rift slicing through the air.
Scythe-Skull soldiers caught in these rifts froze instantly, a smooth cut appearing on their carapaces before they silently split in two.
Her targets were the higher-ranked Scythe-Skull Race.
Jieming's objective was the same.
His mental power had already locked onto several energy signatures that stood out in the camp. He locked on, raised his hand, and instantly unleashed a space distortion.
Vroomâ!
Invisible spatial force erupted around several fourth- and fifth-tier Scythe-Skull squad leaders, twisting the area like a giant, unseen hand.
Chitin, limbs, viscera... everything shattered into fragments amidst the spatial dislocation and tearing. The targeted Scythe-Skull Race couldn't even utter a scream.
As for the sole sixth-tier Scythe-Skull commander, it had just roared in fury, launching itself from the burning wreckage of the command post. But before it could even attempt to organize a counterattack, Roland pointed a finger at it from across the battlefield.
A "Gravity Anchor" rune, condensed to its absolute limit, instantly branded itself onto the creature, slamming it back into the ground like a meteor and carving out a deep crater.
Before it could struggle to its feet, Roland's second spell, "Molecular Stasis," descended, completely solidifying its massive body and the small area around it, rendering it utterly immobile.
The battle had been a one-sided slaughter from the very beginning.
Over ten thousand Scythe-Skull Race members stood no chance against three fully prepared wizards who possessed overwhelming power and a clear tactical plan.
Aside from the low-rank Scythe-Skull Race that were deliberately spared, all high-rank members within the camp were slaughtered in short order.
The truly time-consuming and arduous task was what followed.
"Seal!" Roland shouted softly, his hands forming a mudra.
The energy shield, originally used to isolate the area from the outside world, shrank and reshaped itself inward, transforming into thousands of independent energy cages of various sizes.
The remaining low-rank Scythe-Skull Race in the camp were trapped in individual energy cages, suspended in mid-air. This arrangement prevented them from self-mutilating or attacking one another and made them easier to observe.
"Let's begin the identification." Jieming waved his hand to dispel the wizardry and walked to the nearest energy cage.
Inside were a dozen or so trembling Scythe-Skull worker bees.
To an ordinary person, these insects might have looked identical. But to Jieming, who had extensively studied their physiological structure, mutation lineage, and even the subtle differences in their carapace growth patterns, each one was distinct.
He began comparing them one by one against the sample information stored in the recording crystal.
The first oneâno.
The second oneâthe curvature of its carapace edge was wrong.
The third one...
When he reached the seventh cage, Jieming's gaze locked onto a second-tier combat-type Scythe-Skull.
On the second joint of its left forelimb, there was a very faint, naturally dark marking, shaped like a broken triangle.
The records showed that during the previous round, he had collected a sample of a Scythe-Skull with a similar marking on its left forelimb, but he had only kept half its head and a portion of its body, discarding the rest of the carcass.
Jieming immediately retrieved the sealed "half-skull" from the corresponding area of his internal grotto-heaven.
He shrank the energy cage until it only enclosed the live Scythe-Skull, pulling it close and displaying the severed surface of the half-skull.
The Scythe-Skull shrieked in terror upon seeing the skull in Jieming's hand, its voice filled with unbelievable horror.
And with good reasonâanyone would scream the same way if they saw another person holding their own head.
However, Jieming ignored the creature's terror and focused on a careful comparison.
The shell's color, the density of its patterns, the subtle paths of its energy circuits, and even the activity imprints at the cellular level... a perfect match!
More crucially, the special shell on the live Scythe-Skull's chest, known as the "Honor Shell," was uniform in color, showing no discolored patterns from recent healing.
This meant it had never lost that half-skull and the rest of its body... at least in this cycle of life, it was complete.
"Partial collection... body fully restored. Honor Shell shows no new healing marks," Jieming recorded in a low voice, returning the half-skull to his grotto-heaven.
They continued their inspection.
As each Scythe-Skull was identified, the results gradually became clear:
Every sample that Jieming had "partially collected"âstoring only a limb or organâhad been completely restored to life in this reincarnation.
They were flawless, without a single scar. Even the Honor Shells showed no trace of having been "lost and then restored."
The power of time reversal seemed to have perfectly repaired this "partial loss," resetting the individuals' states of existence to their pristine, "uncollected" origins.
However, for the Scythe-Skull Race members whom Jieming had stored in his internal grotto-heaven in their entirety, the situation was starkly different.
Jieming and the two sixth-tier wizards meticulously cross-referenced every trapped Scythe-Skull individual, searched every possible corner of the camp, and even employed small-scale undead detection and memory-tracing wizardry.
Ultimately, they confirmed that the fifty Scythe-Skull members who had been stored in the grotto-heaven in their entirety had all vanished.
In this camp's timeline, it was as if they had never existed.
To further verify this, the three randomly selected several hundred living Scythe-Skull members and used soul-memory reading wizardry, specifically searching for memory fragments of the "missing individuals."
The results were intriguing.
In the memory images of these Scythe-Skull members, the camp's life, work, and combat training all matched the recordsâyet the figures and interactions of those fifty "companions" were completely absent.
In their memories, the camp had always consisted of only this many people; those fifty individuals had never existed.
The time reversal had not only erased the physical existence of those individuals but seemed to have simultaneously revised the associated causal logic and collective memory, making the "absence" itself rational and unnoticeable.
"Individuals completely removed from the timeline have their existence thoroughly erased, and even the related causal traces are 'rationalized' and revised..." Roland stroked his chin, lost in thought. "This is more thorough than simple 'deletion'; it's as if they 'never existed' at all."
Jieming remained silent as a bolder idea for verification arose.
From his internal grotto-heaven, he retrieved two perfectly preserved corpse samples of the Scythe-Skull Raceâprecisely two of the "missing fifty."
The two well-preserved corpses appeared in his hands, their carapaces still bearing scars from the previous battle.
However, the moment they completely left the grotto-heaven and came into contact with the space-time of the current Reincarnation Plane...
There was no sound, no energy fluctuation, no visual effects.
It was as if they had been instantly wiped away by the most masterful eraser, or as if they themselves were fragile soap bubbles under the sun.
The two corpses vanished into thin air.
Not decomposition, not teleportationâjust the most direct form of disappearance.
Jieming's pupils constricted sharply. Then, an intense light erupted from his eyes.
"Just as I thought!" he nearly roared. "The existence of these specimens was directly erased by a time paradox!"
"When time reversal occurs, everything in the current plane is forcibly reset to a certain 'save point.' For individuals who were only partially sampled, the reset power tries to repair their 'missing parts.' Since the missing parts (inside my grotto-heaven) and the main body (in the resetting plane) are already separated in space-time, the reset power seems to 'default' to the main body being complete, or 'fills in' the missing parts in some way, allowing the individual to 'recover.'"
Jieming's mind raced, rapidly synthesizing the various pieces of information obtained from the experiment.
"But for individuals stored in their entirety, the reset power finds that this individual 'completely does not exist' at any time node in the current plane (because they were isolated). It can neither 'repair' them (because there is no main body) nor 'ignore' them (because the individual should have existed at the save point). Two contradictory statesâ'should exist at the save point' and 'does not exist at any save point due to being isolated'âcannot be reconciled, creating the most fundamental space-time paradox."
"The Plane Law resolves this paradox in the most brutal way possible: by utterly erasing the fact of the individual's existence from the current timeline's past and future. Thus, they 'never existed,' and all related memories are revised."
"By removing the body, I effectively 'pasted' an individual whose existence had been erased back into the current spacetime. This immediately triggered a second paradoxical conflict: something that 'never existed' had suddenly 'appeared.' The Plane Law then intervened again, instantly annihilating it to maintain the continuity of spacetime."
"No, that's not right!"
Jieming suddenly realized something and overturned his previous line of reasoning. "It wasn't a second paradoxical conflict. It's still the first one. Unlike objects I bring in from other planes, something from this plane must have been pre-marked. That's why it was erased the instant I took it out."
"Otherwise, it should have been like those measuring instrumentsâonly erased when this round of time reversal occurred!"
(End of the Chapter)
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