Earth burned.
Cities once shining with glass spires and lush green arcologies were now smoldering wastelands. Massive craters dotted the continents where alien plasma bombs had struck. The skies, once a brilliant blue, now glowed a haunting crimson—tainted by atmospheric ionization and ash from thousands of global wildfires.
The invaders came not in diplomacy, nor in conquest. They came like scavengers.
The alien fleet—sleek, obsidian warships with rotating quantum rings—had no banners, no messages, no warning. One day, Earth's telescopes picked up distortions near Saturn. The next, humanity was under siege.
They weren't an empire. They were pirates.
And they wanted one thing: the Time Loop Artifact.
Deep beneath the Arctic ice, hidden in a self-constructed underground fortress of singular alloy and quantum steel, he worked feverishly.
Gray streaks ran through his once-black hair, and his eyes—no longer merely human—flashed with rotating fractal patterns. He wore a thin neural-suit, wired directly into walls of humming servers. Above him floated a glowing orb the size of a human head, softly pulsing with blue and gold light.
This orb was his last hope.
"Record final sequence," he said, voice cracking. The AI interface, ALIX, responded immediately.
"Final Sequence recording initiated. Protocol: Omega Collapse."
He winced as he watched the main display. Earth's orbital defenses were falling one by one. The moon base had gone dark hours ago. His labs in Tokyo, Cape Town, and Brasilia were either seized or obliterated.
There was no time left.
The artifact, the very device he had discovered decades ago in his past—buried beneath layers of Earth's crust—was not just a data repository. It was a temporal transmitter.
He had used it once.
And now, he would use it again—but differently.
He turned to the orb and touched it with trembling fingers. "This time... I'm not sending tech specs. I'm sending myself."
ALIX hesitated. "Are you certain? Uploading your consciousness to the orb is irreversible. You will cease to exist in this timeline."
He smiled faintly. "I ceased to exist the moment I failed to save her."
A memory surged: Her smile. Her laugh. Her final scream before the terrorist explosion that triggered the mana harmonics in his heart. That moment unlocked a new path—Path of the Singularity—but the cost was everything.
He couldn't let that timeline repeat.
He uploaded all of it—technology, math, emotional logs, cultivation techniques, future history, alien schematics, even his regrets.
"Upload 98% complete... 99%... 100%."
The orb shimmered, now a kaleidoscope of coded emotion and quantum data. It floated into the artifact's central array.
"Send it back," he whispered. "To the moment before I found the orb the first time."
The artifact vibrated violently as the room pulsed with blue lightning. Quantum harmonics roared. Time twisted. His skin peeled back into light.
And then—
Silence.
The aliens breached the lab moments later, but all they found was ash.
And a shattered transmission console.
Back in the present—decades earlier—a single orb appeared silently atop a sleek lab table in an otherwise unassuming apartment lab in modern-day Earth. Its surface gleamed, seemingly inert.
For now.
But the world was about to change.
Forever.