Chapter 695: Making His Move

"TIME REVERSAL!!!"

The first time Rowan used a Time-related ability it was with a Berserker clone, and the aspect of Time he manipulated was unique to the clone alone. He had not affected the world in any manner except by digging through the past and the future of the clone.

He could not just do this with anyone, because as Rowan had come to realize, he was able to manipulate the future. After all, he had access to the Berserker Clone Soul Origin.

At this time he had not begun to investigate the reason why the Berserker Clone, something that he created without any thought behind it and was just a technique that he could cast billions of times in a single second if he wanted to was able to give birth to a Soul Origin.

Anyway this might have happened, it had given Rowan a great power at a moment's notice that had astonished even him. It was a shame he did not have a second Berserker Clone inside Trion, but he had other options.

With Circe, he was doing the same thing but in a far more limiting manner, he could not access her future, but he could hijack her body as a vehicle and use it to travel to her past.

He could do this because he was also including the power of an Origin Treasure to bring about this effect he wanted. That treasure was the Time Aspected Origin Treasure of Ohrox, the Demon Prince of Destruction—The Tower of Greed.

Of course, there were constraints to using this power, chief among them was that to fool the gods and the consciousness of Trion, then he would need to hijack the body and soul of a Child of Trion, and Circe would serve that purpose.

Rowan knew that the seven gods were taken from the bodies of his siblings and they had passed their bloodlines to the seven great families, that meant that Circe and everyone else on Trion could be regarded as his little nephews and nieces, and although he no longer had any connection with the bloodline of Trion at the present moment, he did in the past.

This would be his key to Trion.

In his present form he was still evolving in an unknown direction, Rowan had limited access to his treasures and armies, but any of his treasures was incredibly powerful, and even if he could only control a few of them, it was enough to change reality as he saw fit.

It was with this connection that Rowan began to dig into the past, and in addition to this, he crushed the seventeen layers of the Tower of Greed that had risen so far.

Even the Great Demon Prince had not managed to develop the tower of Greed past the twelfth layer, even if he had the resources, the process of developing a treasure to this level was astonishingly difficult and time consuming.

With his Knowledge Well Chamber paired with Hollow Forge Rowan had begun actively building this Origin Treasure, and this process accelerated when his Primordial Sight activated and his knowledge of mysticism, especially that of Time, took a leap forward.

Before he had a Will of his own and merged his body with the Destroyer, if Rowan had used this treasure at this level then he would have been sent back years, even decades. A seventeenth-level Tower of Greed was no joke.

Now his Metaphysical presence was just too heavy. If Rowan was a piece of rock before, now he was a mountain, although this new "weight" would not affect his plans because he had calculated the precise amount of time he would need to return coupled with the "load" Circe's fragile mortal form would be able to bear.

Activating the Tower of Greed was simple, at the seventeenth level this Tower was supposed to be immortal and indestructible, but to carry Rowan, he would need to crush it.

When he had used the Tower of Greed in the past, its operations had occurred at such a high level he had struggled to comprehend how it worked, but now it was different.

Rowan could now see beyond Time itself and he began to observe and learn.

The world went still and everything began to reverse, although this was happening at an incomprehensible speed, he could still follow it quite clearly.

The bodies of the gods seemed to ripple as if their presence fought against the effects of Time, but this was a force that surpassed the universal laws, and they had no hope but to obey it.

Their bodies returned to the earth and the continent that was destroyed returned to its previous form.

Massive explosions were reversed, whirlwinds returned to nothingness as the meteors returned to the heavens. The dead came back to life, and the breath of life returned to Trion.

So much knowledge was streaming into his consciousness far beyond what Circe had perceived, even though he was restricted to a large extent by her pathetic mortal perception.

Rowan frowned when he noticed several discrepancies about this world. "Are you just bait, or is there something more hidden in your depths?"

He needed more information, far more than he could collect at this time.

Rowan could feel himself slipping back into space. The single line that made up his body was stretching, and yet this force was almost too easy for him to ignore, not because he was stronger than the forces of time. It was because in a manner he had already transcended it.

The visual phenomena of his current form as a string that was simultaneously as short as a few feet and as long as infinity was not a trick of the light.

Time was pulling him, yes, but there was a lot of 'him' to pull. This made his body flow back with Time like everyone else here, but he was still connected with Circe.

Time flowed back faster and faster and Rowan observed every event that he had missed. He saw the gathering of the Ancestors, he saw the explosion of Mithril, he saw the plans that Circe had been making all these while until the energy from the Tower of Greed became expended.

Rowan dragged the rest of himself from the future into the past, and now he was inside Trion.

The events of the future never happened, and Rowan who was supposed to be countless light years away at this moment in time was now on Trion, and no one, not even the gods knew that he was here. He had made his move, and to everyone else, he had not.

"Father, what would be your next play?"

"I was there when the world ended. The sky shattered into a million pieces. The blood of the gods turned the world red.

No... that was a lie.

I was there when the world ended.

We never knew it did."

—Testament of a Survivor.