The Starblade careened through hyperspace, its hull breached and bleeding atmosphere. Kara dragged Li Wei into a makeshift med-bay, his body a mosaic of spear shards and glowing cracks. The Oculus shard flickered erratically, its visions leaking into the ship's systems—walls warped into screaming faces, consoles displaying timelines that hadn't happened yet.
"Stabilize him," Kara ordered the ship's AI, her voice shaking.
"Unable to comply," the AI droned. "Subject's energy signature conflicts with known physics."
A hologram flickered—an encrypted signal from a rogue faction called the Chronos Collective. Kara recognized the symbol: an hourglass encircled by a dragon, the same emblem etched into the Skyrend Spear's shaft.
"Fine," she muttered, inputting the coordinates. "We'll do this the hard way."
The Collective's sanctuary orbited a temporal wound—a scar in spacetime where past, present, and future bled together. The station was a patchwork of salvaged ships and quantum anchors, its inhabitants a mix of rogue cultivators and time-displaced refugees.
Their leader, Aria, met Kara at the airlock. Her eyes glowed with fractured timelines, her body flickering between youth and decay. "You carry death in your hold," she said, staring at Li Wei's stasis pod.
"Can you save him?" Kara demanded.
Aria's smile was a razor. "For a price."
The Ritual
In the station's core, Li Wei floated above a quantum array, spear shards pulsing in his flesh. Aria chanted in a dead language, her hands weaving temporal threads.
"The shards are anchors," she explained. "They tether him to the Prisoner's will. To save him, we must fracture his soul across timelines."
Kara gripped her pistol. "That'll kill him."
"Or make him something more."
The array activated. Li Wei's body split into spectral duplicates—each a version of him from a different timeline:
The Sovereign Unbroken: Clad in Azure Dragon robes, his core pure gold.
The Ascended: A silver monstrosity, Elysium's puppet.
The Void: A shadow with the Prisoner's eyes.
The duplicates fought, their clash warping reality. Kara lunged, her mechanical eye interfacing with the array. She pushed, merging the fragments back into Li Wei.
He awoke screaming, the spear shards now fused into his bones.
The Ninth Core
Aria handed Kara a data crystal. "Your next destination."
The hologram showed a planet that flickered in and out of existence—Xuánwǔ Prime, a world trapped in a time loop. The Ninth Core pulsed at its heart, a paradox made manifest.
"It's a trap," Aria warned. "Veyra's already there."
Li Wei emerged, his eyes twin voids. "Then we walk into it."
Veyra's Gambit
On Xuánwǔ Prime, Veyra knelt in a temple of frozen time. The Eighth Core throbbed, its tendrils piercing the ground.
"Soon," she whispered to the Prisoner. "Soon, we feast."