Time didn't stop.
It just… lost interest.
One moment, Rakan was mid-step. The next, he watched himself take that same step again—slightly delayed, slightly off-sync, like a memory trying to remember how it had felt the first time. His own shadow arrived before he did, stretching ahead like it had somewhere better to be.
The wind fractured.
Not just changed direction—but cracked. It came in slivers now. One gust hot, the next cold, the next silent. Leaves fell sideways. The pollen in the air moved in reverse, like thought being sucked back into a mouth before it could become sound.
Sound didn't echo anymore.
It hesitated.
Each word had an aftertaste. Footsteps happened before they landed.
Somewhere overhead, a bird let out a single chirp—drawn-out, hollow, and backward.
Yori floated at the shrine's center.
Not glowing brighter. Just… steadier.
Calm.
Unshaken.
Its radiance pulsed with a rhythm that didn't match anything natural. Not heartbeats. Not breath. It moved like gravitational breathing—pulling the air inward, pressing against the bones behind Rakan's skin.
Above it, the spiraling glyphs now defied logic. Some spun with violent speed, blurring like blades. Others rotated so slowly that their movement could only be seen in periphery, like time was embarrassed to let them be noticed.
Shugoh turned slowly, one hand shielding his eyes. "Okay. Okay. This is fine. We broke the sky a little. That's fine. This is like… the Ka'ro version of weather."
Rakan opened his mouth to speak.
And heard his voice come out first.
"Shugoh. This is bad."
The words rattled past his ears before he even formed them.
Shugoh froze. "Yeah, that's what I'm saying—wait. Did you just talk early?"
"I think we're desynced."
"Either that or you've unlocked Time Travel Proficiency."
"You lagged through time, Rakan."
Rakan turned to argue but caught his own expression half a second behind his body in the reflection of a mirrored glyph.
His heart tightened.
They turned again—
And saw it.
The platform beneath them was no longer solid.
No longer singular.
It repeated.
Over and over. A spiraling fractal of tiled stone, bleeding outward in every direction. Like they were standing not on a structure, but inside a memory trying to remember its own shape. Every line curved inward. Every line bent toward a centre they couldn't reach.
No edges.
Just recursion.
A loop pretending to be still.
Even the air felt stacked—layered, like breathing through centuries.
Shugoh stumbled backward and pointed. "Okay, that version of me over there just scratched his nose. I didn't scratch my nose."
"You might," Rakan muttered.
"Do I have to?"
"I don't know!"
Rakan's gaze shifted—
To Yori.
Yori had changed again.
Not its shape. Not its structure.
But… presence.
Before, it had been a floating artifact. Curious. Responsive.
Now it felt like a focal point.
A constant.
A god watching the ocean curl around it.
It hovered perfectly still, centered among spirals of memory-light.
Its glow wasn't cold or warm—just right.
It didn't need to shine.
It belonged here.
Rakan stepped forward.
Not fast. Not with purpose. Like walking into a room that had always waited for him.
His hands were trembling and he didn't know why.
As he neared, the air went still again.
And from somewhere within Yori—
Not from its voicebox. Not from a mimicry pattern. But from something beneath the surface of meaning—
A heartbeat rang out.
Not his.
Not human.
Not a thump.
A drum.
Heavy. Low. Familiar.
So familiar it made his teeth ache.
It echoed through his chest like an echo from behind the womb.
Rakan gasped.
Because it felt like something inside him had just turned to look back.
He staggered slightly, eyes locked on Yori.
And in the silence that followed, the words came again.
Not aloud.
Not spoken.
Just… known:
Echo returns to source.
Cycle resumes.
He has arrived.
Teruko stepped into the village square and ducked just in time to avoid a bowl of soup flying at her face.
It exploded against a tree behind her with the force of a minor kitchen war.
"Hey!" she snapped, spinning around.
The soup stall woman blinked at her.
Then blinked again.
Then blinked again.
Three identical blinks.
Each motion perfectly repeated—same expression, same breath, same twitch of her apron ties.
Teruko narrowed her eyes.
She looked left.
There were three versions of the same woman, all standing at the stall counter, all shouting the same thing in the exact same inflexion:
"Hot soup—watch your face!"
All three voices echoed out of sync by half a second.
Behind Teruko, a man bolted down the street clutching a sack of vegetables. His footsteps kicked up a puff of dirt.
Then he bolted again.
And again.
Same motion. Same stumble. Same panicked glance over his shoulder. Three copies of him chased themselves through the same street like he was trapped in his own reflection.
"Something's wrong," Teruko muttered.
Something was off about the air. It was thick. Like walking through memory syrup. The sunlight stuttered every few seconds like a blinking eye. The pigeons overhead flew in triangles and then flew in triangles again, and again, and—
"Something is very wrong."
A goat across the square coughed three times and fell asleep mid-scream, its mouth still open. The scream repeated but no sound came.
Then—
"Found you," said a familiar voice.
Mazanka stepped out from a swirling alley, dragging Itomei by the back of his collar like an annoyed babysitter carrying a reluctant trash panda.
Mazanka looked unusually focused.
Itomei looked exactly the same as he always did: vaguely hungover, completely unimpressed, and already holding a match he hadn't struck yet.
"We've got a problem," Mazanka said.
"No kidding," Teruko shot back. "There are three of everything."
"Four in the baker's district."
"Four?!"
"And a half."
Teruko's eye twitched. "How do you have half of someone?"
Mazanka pointed. "That guy."
Teruko looked.
Sure enough, a man near the edge of the square was only half-present—cut vertically, flickering in and out of visibility like he was in a stuttering dream. He walked forward, but his feet never touched the ground. His voice came out of his left elbow.
He kept trying to buy a cabbage that no longer existed.
Teruko turned back to Mazanka. "Explain."
"Time's looping," he said. "But not cleanly. It's fractured. The Ka'ro in the area is spiraling around a central point like a whirlpool made of cracked mirrors."
He tilted his head, eyes narrowing.
"And based on the resonance I'm feeling—guess where the centre is."
Itomei raised a finger, not even looking up. "Shrine."
Mazanka nodded.
"Shrine."
Teruko scowled. "Those idiots."
Just then, a tree to their left exploded into leaves—leaves that flew upward, froze midair, and then rushed backwards, reforming the tree in reverse until it was a sapling again.
Then the sapling burst into flames, twisted, and reformed into a perfect wooden statue of itself, screaming silently.
Itomei calmly lit his cigarette off the burning version.
"Loop's accelerating," he muttered, exhaling smoke that hovered sideways, paused midair, then reversed.
Mazanka turned, voice low. "If we don't break the spiral soon, this place is going to fold inward. Ka'ro memory is stacking. Eventually, it'll eat the now."
Teruko's hand gripped the hilt of her blade. "So we fix it."
Mazanka pulled a worn glyph-stone from his coat pocket and examined it. "No breaking through directly. It's too nested. We need to disrupt the Ka'ro resonance field."
"How?"
Mazanka glanced at her with a smirk. "We overload it."
"Overload it with what?"
Mazanka looked toward the horizon.
A shockwave rolled over the jungle in the far distance—brief and gold.
"…Them."
Back at the shrine, Rakan stood at the edge of the platform.
And below him—
Himself.
Walking.
Turning.
Kneeling.
A thousand small moments, all overlapping like reflections on shattered water.
They weren't perfect echoes. They were slightly wrong. Slightly off.
Some moved before him.
Some after.
Some didn't move at all.
It was like watching the spine of time break open and spill its chapters—every step he had taken in the last minute, the last hour, the last life, replaying in stacked transparencies.
Like pages flipping themselves to find the right version of him.
Shugoh spun in dizzy circles behind him, holding his head like a top that wouldn't stop spinning.
"I think I just sneezed backward," he gasped. "Is reverse-sneezing a thing? Is this a thing?"
"Shut up," Rakan muttered, eyes locked on Yori.
Yori—
Was changing.
It was no longer glowing.
It was radiating.
White-gold light poured from the box like sun through glass, rippling in slow-motion arcs. The glyphs no longer spun—they hovered, orbiting gently like planetary rings, each one pulsing in rhythm with something deeper.
Something older.
It tilted, just slightly.
And the world slowed.
Not the wind.
Not time.
Rakan.
His own body fell out of rhythm.
His breath stopped syncing with his lungs.
His Ka'ro stuttered—not blocked, but echoed, like it was being played through a second version of himself just half a second off.
The air wasn't air anymore.
It was memory.
It pressed against his skin like steam from a bath you'd once died in.
Then—
Heat.
Not fire.
Not pain.
Just… recognition.
Like a mother's hand on the crown of a forgotten child.
Rakan staggered.
His Ka'ro flared, unbidden—a violent pulse that knocked him sideways with no source. No input.
It just reacted.
To something in the light.
To Yori.
He dropped to one knee, gasping.
The world rippled once—inward.
And from the air, not through ears but bones, came a voice.
Not Yori's.
Not human.
Not spoken.
Just there, like it had always been waiting for him to be still enough to listen.
You are not new.
It echoed through his ribs. Through his veins.
You are the breath that circled the beginning. The flame that did not die.
Rakan gasped.
His fingers scraped across the glowing stone beneath him. The surface felt like skin stretched too thin over something ancient.
He wanted to speak.
To ask.
To scream.
But the voice continued—gentle, crushing:
You are the ripple of a name forgotten. You are what was left behind. You are what cannot end.
Rakan's throat closed.
Yori hovered lower.
Its glyphs burned like miniature suns, spinning now in perfect rhythm with his Ka'ro.
A sync had formed.
He could feel it.
His Ka'ro wasn't being read. It was being mirrored. Merged.
He was seeing himself through another lifetime.
A thousand lifetimes.
All stacked on top of him like transparent armor, like a crown of echoes.
And then—
A final whisper.
Cycle acknowledged.
Source… recognized.
Rakan's heart stuttered.
Something broke in the sky.
Light collapsed into itself.
And from behind his own breath—
He heard Yori giggle.
Rakan stood still.
But everything else moved—too much.
The glyphs above spun faster. So fast they became rings of blinding light, spiraling upward in layers, overlapping, collapsing in on themselves like burning galaxies.
Yori pulsed brighter and brighter—its color no longer a color, its glow so full it bled into the edges of the world.
Reality rippled.
Not shattered.
Just… folded.
The stone beneath their feet melted into shifting patterns—platform, mirror, platform again. The shrine was no longer a place, but a moment, stuck between echoes.
Shugoh was yelling something—his voice slowed to a crawl, warped like it was underwater and skipping through layers of time. His arms waved, Ka'ro sparking uselessly.
Rakan couldn't hear him.
He couldn't hear anything.
Because suddenly, there was only Yori.
And it was speaking.
Not aloud.
Not with sound.
But through the bone of the world.
Cycle anchored…
Source stabilized…
Return denied…
And then—
The spiral stopped.
Not gradually.
It slammed to a halt—like a pendulum hitting its apex and freezing.
The entire world held its breath.
Rakan's body shuddered. His Ka'ro roared inside him—not burning, not breaking—but responding. Resonating. Like a note held across centuries finding its matching chord.
Yori hovered in front of him.
So bright it looked like it was breaking apart.
Correction applied.
And then—
BOOM.
Light didn't explode.
It erased.
The shrine vanished into a column of gold, white, and deep violet Ka'ro that screamed upward into the canopy, vaporizing air and sound.
The trees around it bowed inward.
Stone shattered, lifted, and froze mid-air like caught in a dream.
And then—
A wave of light blasted outward in a perfect circle, flattening foliage, ripping bark from trees, throwing debris across half the ridge like a god exhaling too hard.
Back in the village, silence fell like a dropped curtain.
Time snapped back with a soundless snap, like a stretched string finally giving up.
The soup woman blinked once.
Twice.
Then looked down at the ladle in her hand, which had somehow refilled with soup despite never moving.
"What was I just—?"
A merchant stepped out of his stall, looked up at the perfectly intact sky, and fainted.
Children picked themselves up from the dirt where they'd been mid-loop. One of them turned to her brother and said, "I don't like Tuesday anymore."
Mazanka stood in the squar, watching the skyline above the ridge.
The light was gone.
But the pressure still lingered—like the air remembered being something else.
Teruko broke into a sprint.
Didn't say a word.
Just ran.
Boots thudding across stone, hands clenched at her sides, teeth gritted. She didn't know if Rakan or Shugoh were even alive. She didn't care. She ran like the world might fold again if she hesitated.
Mazanka followed, silent.
His coat snapped behind him, Ka'ro already coiling around his shoulders like instinct. His expression unreadable. But his pace was fast. Too fast for someone pretending he wasn't afraid.
At the edge of the village, Itomei stood alone.
He looked up at the column of dissipating energy.
Took one last drag of his cigarette.
And tossed it aside with a sigh.
"This," he muttered, "is why I left the Kenshiki."
Then added:
"And this is why I never go hiking with teenagers."