Neo took a careful look at his surroundings.
He was trying to ignore what had happened in Tyr’s Nightmare World by focusing on the things before him.
He crouched and scanned the broken stones with a careful gaze.
“Yeah, this is the same place where I fell before. But where are the spider monsters? How can they not be here? I fought them here last time.”
Neo wondered if the timeline was glitching.
He had forced Time to merge artificial Timelines into the main one. It was bound to create errors, or ‘bugs’.
However, he felt that the disappearance of the spider monsters was not part of the timeline bug. The cause was something else.
“It might be because of True Darkness. Since it devours everything, even their existence, it makes sense that the spider monsters cannot exist in any timeline point where I exist.
“But why did I appear in the same place twice?
“After I was thrown out of Tyr’s World, I would fall into another Nightmare World. The location should be random. There’s no way I ended up in the same place twice…
“Unless, it’s part of the good luck that I’m being given by Percival.”
Neo looked around. Good luck, here? All he saw was an empty cavern.
Not finding any answers, he focused inward.
While Neo’s emotions were a mess, and he wanted nothing but to tear everything apart, he understood he had to focus on growing stronger.
He had multiple powerful abilities. All-Shadow. Shadow Supreme’s Treasure. His World.
Yet he was weak.
Why?
Because he didn’t know how to make proper use of his abilities. He couldn’t even activate some of his powers.
‘I must study my abilities, and only then can I grow fast.’
He took a careful look at himself.
Time Erosion was breaking his body apart.
His Blessing’s regeneration combined with his natural regeneration, and Life and Holy elements, saved him from falling apart completely, but the progress was slow.
In simpler terms, he was losing 85 Health Points per second due to Time Erosion, and all his healing abilities gave him 86 Health Points per second.
Thus, he regained only 1 Health Point per second.
“Time Erosion is also making it hard to generate energy freely. If I create too much energy and put more burden on my body, I might just break like a porcelain vase.”
Curses rolled off his tongue.
As if it wasn’t bad enough, he felt vibrations in the ambient energy.
Neo raised his head, and sure enough, a giant maw tore down from the ceiling. The size of it still made him wonder how big the actual monster was.
“Hahaha! Such pure energy! From a weak being like that! Today the heavens must be shining on me!”
Learning from last time, Neo did not use Hydraulic Movement Technique with Pseudo Gap. He didn’t want to burst his legs.
But without combining those techniques and using them to their limit, he couldn’t get out of the attack’s range in time.
‘Should I try to use Beelzebub?’
‘No, that won’t work.’
‘This monster is stronger than me. I doubt I can stop its time. Besides, that would take too much energy.’
Neo felt his situation was laughable.
He always had far more energy than anyone of his rank would have, but now the Time Erosion had forced him to recover his energy slowly, stopping him from brutally churning his Will to recover his energy at high speed.
The monster’s jaw snapped at him.
At the last second, Neo used All-Shadow to move a few thousand meters away.
The monster seemed angered by his actions.
“Do not resist, vermin! Be honored the Great I am going to feast upon you!”
The ceiling of the cavern broke as a terrifying giant clawed hand descended.
Neo churned his energy to use All-Shadow. At the last moment, a portion of his abdomen exploded, unable to handle the strain of energy, and the All-Shadow was canceled.
The cavern shook for kilometers as Neo was crushed beneath thousands of tons.
“Hahaha! Today is my day! Since I am so happy, I would let you speak your last sentence before sending you away, vermin!”
The giant hand rose, and the monster brought its face close.
Its neck was still coming down from the ceiling, and every movement caused dozens of kilometers of the cavern to collapse.
The monster was too strong to be afraid of a ‘little’ environmental collateral damage.
“Speak, vermin!”
Its black scales seemed to shine in the darkness of the cavern, and smoke billowed from its nostrils as it breathed.
Neo stared at the monster… the dragon.
“I feel like shit.”
“What?”
“So I’m going to beat the shit out of you to feel better.”
Before the dragon could respond, Neo devoured his hand.
He used the energy to take hold of his mimicked River of Time with mimicked Tyrant, and rewound time—
Neo woke up with a stagger.
He looked around, noticing he had successfully turned back time to before the dragon broke through the ceiling to kill him.
“I put enough energy in the River of Time to go back by 20 minutes, but this isn’t even a minute earlier.”
He had hoped he would wake up while his body was falling out of Tyr’s Nightmare.
If so, he would be able to know in which Nightmare World he had ended up.
He clicked his tongue and looked at his arm. Sure enough, it was missing, probably because he used True Darkness to devour it.
“I should be able to heal it back since I was the one who devoured it.”
Neo realized True Darkness was powerful if it could affect things beyond Time.
As he came to this realization, the ambient energy started to vibrate.
The ceiling fell, and with it came the gigantic maw of a black dragon.
“Hahaha! Such pure energy!”
Neo tried to use All-Shadow to enter the dragon’s body to kill it from the inside. From the previous attempt, he knew his body could take only one activation of All-Shadow before failing.
He zipped through the Shadows. The energy within the dragon acted like a force field and stopped him from going inside it.
His All-Shadow was canceled mid-way.
“Vermin, how dare you try to sneak upon the Great I!”
Its gigantic maw was moving towards Neo, but the danger didn’t even register in Neo’s mind.
‘I can move between timelines with All-Shadow, however, I can’t enter a dragon’s body?’
‘Why is it like this?’
‘Again, I need to look at it again.’
Neo gathered whatever energy he had. He used it to take hold of the mimicked River of Time and used it with mimicked Tyrant to go back into the past again.
He appeared in the empty cavern.
Immediately, he sat cross-legged and started to gather energy.
‘I can devour my body to gain energy to go back in time, but it’s best if I don’t devour myself with True Darkness unless I’m sure I regain my body parts.’
The reason Neo had been using Time to fight the dragon again was simple.
The dragon was too strong.
Neo wouldn’t be able to fight it in his current state.
He understood he needed to be calm and approach his current situation with caution.
Even though he could fight the dragon to death, and he would likely not die thanks to his Eternal, it wasn’t a good choice.
He wouldn’t grow fast with that method.
As Neo meditated, his thoughts churned:
‘The Dragon appears in roughly 30 seconds from this moment.’
‘In 30 seconds, if I combine Infinite Mana with my World Energy, I can recover one-tenth of my energy.’
‘While it is a good amount, it’s not enough for powerful abilities like going back in Time or using All-Shadow to enter an artificial timeline.’
His thoughts came to an end when the ceiling broke.
“Hahaha! Such pure energy! The heavens must be blessing me today!”
Neo tried to use All-Shadow to enter the monster’s body again. As expected, he was met with resistance by the energy surrounding the monster’s body, and his All-Shadow was interrupted.
The monster was angered by his ‘insolent actions’, but before it could kill Neo, he turned back time.
He instantly started to meditate to recover energy after he came back.
Meditation allowed him to think calmly and thus generate more energy with his Will.
Though, with True Darkness tearing his mind apart, how much meditation helped him calm down was another question.
The ceiling broke, and the monster came.
This time, Neo made no motion of dodging. At the last moment, his Foresight sub-skill of Sphinx’s blessing activated as he had expected.
He saw a future vision where the monster ate him.
After confirming the future, he devoured his lungs. The energy allowed him to overclock Sphinx’s blessing.
Two more future visions appeared.
In one, he used All-Shadow to dodge. In another, he used Hydraulic Movement Technique with Pseudo Gap to move away from the attack’s radius.
Neo could do either of those by himself. He did not need All-Shadow for it.
Yet he used All-Shadow to enter the second artificial timeline.
Time erosion increased. The damage he was receiving every second shot up.
But his gamble worked.
He received the answer.
Artificial Timelines did not have any resistance to his intrusion, as they were created by him.
Unlike them, the dragon was a being and hence had elemental resistance.
‘This makes me question another thing. The dragon’s resistance to All-Shadow is a bit too high.’
‘That’s not normal elemental resistance that everyone gains from the planet as they grow old.’
Neo decided to trick the dragon into answering him.
He let the dragon crush him, which exhilarated the dragon.
“Hahaha! Today is my day! Since I am so happy, I would let you speak your last sentence before sending you away, vermin!”
“Why is your elemental defense so high? I tried to use my Shadow technique to enter your body but failed.”
The dragon was a bit surprised by Neo’s calm tone.
It didn’t understand why Neo was asking such a question.
In its eyes, Neo couldn’t turn back time, given how bad Neo’s condition was.
“Haha! Your Shadow technique must be a Concept!
“My defensive technique is a Dragonian Spell that only a pure-blood dragon such as myself can use! It increases my defenses and stops any outside interference from attacking me from the inside!”
Judging from its wording, the Spell was made to block Concepts that target the opponent’s ‘inside’.
Neo realized a Spell like this could be used to block Elizabeth’s Tyrant.
After all, the River of Time was a spiritual manifestation that was inside everyone. Tyrant had to enter one’s body to take hold of the River of Time.
‘A Spell, huh. Can I copy it with Shadow Supreme’s Treasure?’