Time Twister - 88 Investigation

After the meeting had ended, Xander ended his [Divine Eyes] mode as well, rubbing his head while he was inside his bedroom. He had taken a cursory glance and saw that no one was a Sage-9, the strongest being a Sage-7 cultivator. Most of them were stages Sage-3 to 5, and a few were Sage-1 and Sage-2 cultivators.

Although he couldn’t kill them, he can easily run away from them. But these are Sage cultivators, they aren’t stupid. If I sent a mirror image and lead them far away, sooner or later, they’ll realize that it was a diversion. He sighed. I can just make things up as it goes then, Xander told himself.

Letting out another groan, he headed instead inside of Eden and began to fight and play with the other sprites and magic beasts. The different species of magic beasts and non-magic beasts were increasing, as selective cross-species breeding was possible in this dimension.

This meant that certain species thrive in a particular environment, most would die as they do not process the characteristics to survive in the same environment or in another.

If he was to make a database, which there was in the libraries he made (as an added feature), there would be around a total of 396,540 different species that have been discovered and cataloged in the past 3.7 million years inside the space. Around 40% of these species were extinct in Eden, with the remaining 60% divided into either being a magic beast or a normal beast.

Concerning plant diversification, this was something he found interesting, reaching around a total of 140,879 different plant species, of which 10% are already extinct, the remaining are subdivided to Sprites, Sentients, or Non-sentient plant species. The number of plant materials and magic beast byproducts he had collected in the past 3 weeks was enough to even cause the eyes of a God-class cultivator to be envious. He had enough amount of Class-8 materials to actually buy a small-sized empire if he was willing to.

He had to even modify his a portion of his portable pocket dimension into some sort of a Bank Vault that continuously extended, with rows and columns of containers of specific plant products, species origin, magic beast species, etc., reaching as high as 10 kilometers in height. Each of the containers was able to hold around hundreds of thousands of items of the same kind. It was the kind that he just needed to chuck in an item, and it would automatically be sorted. Of course, if it wasn’t any of the ff: Plant materials, Magic beast materials/byproducts, or elemental/magic crystals, it was sorted to a different section of the pocket space.

After playing around for around 2 hours or 14,400 years, he headed out and played some mobile games in his communicator, challenging his classmates for fun. This lasted for about an hour before he decided to stop playing and headed to sleep.

Given their time frame, the investigation of the first 2 countries would take 2-3 days total, before they reach Eta to conduct the test. It’s better if I place some false leads and positives, Xander told himself as he closed his eyes.

Although he was sleeping, his consciousness was quite active, and he began to control one of his mirror images to head to different locations in Nema and Castille._______________________Nema country, above Barrow City. A group of 8 cultivators was floating above the skies at night.

Maria Brightcroft was standing opposite to Margus Morningstar, and the two looked solemn.

Calissa asked the two, “Are you both ready?” in which the two nodded in reply. Calissa, seeing this, nodded in response, and raised her right arm, signaling the two that they could start.

Immediately, the two began to form numerous runic symbols and writing in the air, layering on top of one another, merging into one consistent writing. As they released the symbols, they continued to move outward, covering more and more areas of the spell. They had selected Barrows city as a focal point due to the fact that it’s right smack in the center of the country, allowing them to have an easier time to cover and control the spell matrix. After 3 minutes, there are now 4 layers of runic writing and symbols produced, suspended in the air, continuously crawling outward from their position, already at a radius of 12,000 kilometers, and it wasn’t slowing down.

After another 8 minutes, there were now 9 layers, and the runic writing and symbols had stably covered the entire Nema. The spell was finished by the two’s last hand gesture, producing the last rune.

“Let everyone fall into a starless dream, let everything be repeated. [Dreamscape]!” the two said in a deep, guttered voice. Once they said these words, the entire landscape of Nema began to produce clouds and streams of white mist, covering everything and everyone in the area of the spell, no matter where they were.

Although some powerhouses were confused by the situation, before they could even react, they also fell into the illusion of their dreams, repeating over and over again the situation that they experienced 4 weeks ago.______________________…Where am I?

Huh? I’m at my job? I swear I was just about to go to bed, what the heck?

After a few moments of disorientation, the man continues to work on the desk job, not realizing anymore that he was dreaming.

Wait? Wha-

Before the man could think, everything was wiped out, turning his consciousness into nothing. Yet, this didn’t last long, as the man appeared once again, confused.

Huh? I’m alive? What just happened?

Then he blacked out. Then appeared once again, repeating the whole thing, having no idea that he had been repeating the situation over and over again.

The same scenario was happening to every resident of Nema, no matter what their positions were or what their power rankings were at. At the same time, above the skies, both Maria and Margus were continuously observing and filtering everyone that was experiencing the event. They began to check for anomalous reactions, facial expressions, and even the actions these people were doing.

After a total of 16 hours, they finished up and rounded up 10 suspicious people, all of which were Divine magicians and higher, with one of them being a Sage-2 cultivator.

One by one, they rounded them up, moving to an undisclosed location. It was then the rounds of interrogation began._____________________

“What the hell are you doing? I’m a member of the Garland family! How dare you kidnap one of the grand elders!” A man was shouting frenziedly inside a mirror glass room. He wanted to use his powers to break out, but for some reason, he couldn’t channel his magic energy at all, or stably communicate with the ordered system.

In front of him were two Sage cultivators, observing him calmly. One of them, Parker, snapped his fingers, causing a small spark to appear on the tip of his fingers, one of which headed straight to the cultivator from the Garland family. When it touched the man’s body, the man froze, before screaming in pain after a few seconds, his body twitching several times. His insides, however, were quickly being toasted, vibrated at very high speeds, causing each of his organs to slowly burst due to intensity and frequency of the vibrations. His blood vessels and veins were bursting, most of his nerves were fried.

The man’s sight began to blur in and out of focus, and he could barely keep his consciousness. He barely heard what the other man said to the other cultivator.

“Heal him.”

And that was when he felt his body chill. Before he could even react, his organs and damaged internal parts were healing at a rapid speed. After a few minutes, his body had completely healed, confusing him for a moment before realizing his current situation, causing him to pale: He was being interrogated. When Wuhshan saw the change in color in his face, he nodded, before saying,

“It seems you realize now your position here. You are being interrogated by the investigative team made up of all your Sage-ranked ancestors that came from Eteria, including your Garland family.”

When the man heard this, his pale face turned whiter. It seems that was the case. He was, after all, one of the grand elders of his clan that welcomed two of their ancestors.

“Now we got it out in the plate, can you tell us your involvement concerning the phenomenon that occurred in Eteria roughly 4 weeks ago?”

When the man heard the inquiry, he quickly calmed down and began to tell the information he knew about that situation, as well as his experience of that phenomenon. However, he adamantly denied any involvement in causing that phenomenon.

Even after being subjected to numerous tortures by Parker, he continued to insist on his innocence. This caused Wuhshan who overseeing the situation, to look at the window to his left and shake his head. Immediately, the man being interrogated fell asleep, unconscious for the time being. One of the glass panels turned into a door, opening to reveal the figure of one of the analysts, Hailey.

Parker, on the other hand, was curious how Wuhshan could determine whether the man had any involvement. “What made you so sure about your assessment Wuhshan,” he asked him.

Wuhshan replied calmly,

“You can see it in how he described his experience and his actions afterward. He held a yearning for it to happen once again. If he had any involvement in the situation, there should have been a smaller or similar situation that occurred within 4 weeks. Not only that, even after repeated tortures, but he also continued to push his innocence, and his tone had not changed at all, no inflections or fear in his voice. The lack of these things means that he was quite sure that he had nothing to do with the situation.”

When Parker and Hailey heard his analysis, they agreed; it was a sound conclusion. Calissa then mentioned on the side that they should continue with the interrogation of the other magicians.

For the next 4 hours, that was what they did. All of the people they brought in were ultimately innocent, causing them to return them back to Nema. However, once they did so, Calissa raised an interesting point.

“Have you noticed that their statements were all similar to one another? Like there was some variation, but after inputting the recordings, they had 98.76% similarity in their statements. It is as if something or someone purposely planted cues in their memories and subconsciousness or influenced them.”

When others heard this, their faces turned grave in an instant. Even Maria was surprised, because she didn’t discover any anomalies with their memories, and everything was normal. The only reason they only discovered the anomalies was that their thought patterns at the time showed fulfillment and joy… wait. She then looked at Margus, who also had the same look of realization.

They were tricked!

This meant, the target was well-versed with their forte, and probably more advanced than the two of them!

It was Hailey who basically summarized the thoughts running in the minds of the other Sage cultivators.

“It seems our target has already known that we would be investigating and placed the necessary traps and delays that would impede our investigation. Sadly, we can’t do anything about it, since it managed to even fool our experts in the Emotion and Mind element series.”

Parker, with a grimace, said coldly,

“Then we’ll have to entertain him then. Pick up all those that pass the check and interrogate them. It’s better to err than to let the enemy safely pass through.” Wuhshan nodded in Parker’s statement, but he felt something was off with the situation.

With troubled looks, they then headed to Castille for the next round, the country from which Brutus, a dwarf cultivator, came from. They repeated the same spell, with Maria and Margus even using their personal stock of elemental crystals to supercharge their powers.

Once again, [Dreamscape] was activated, enveloping everything and everyone in a misty haze in Castille. However, the moment it was activated, it was forcefully canceled by some unknown power, causing a backlash to the two casters.

The faces of the other sage cultivators changed, and looked around, alert and ready to deploy their attacks at the first sign of danger.

However, for the next few minutes, no hint of attacks or the presence of other beings was detected. Harvers and Brutus were still in alert mode, as well as Parker and Wuhshan, while the other two were tending Maria and Margus.

It was Hailey that asked them a vital question:

“What happened? Explain it clearly.”

It was Margus who replied, his voice containing a hint of puzzlement.

“The moment we finished using our spells, we couldn’t connect with the ordered system through our primary elements. It was as if the elements themselves were disconnected in our area, causing the spell which requires the power of the ordered system, to collapse.”

Maria’s voice sounded after Margus, her voice no less alarmed by the situation.

“That’s not all. The important nodes of the spell were clearly disrupted the moment the spell matrix was cast. The elements began disordered and collapsed on its own. The only reason there is still a country of Castille right now is that we took most of the force rather than disperse it to the surroundings.”

“…We’ve played into the opponent’s hands then if the purpose was to delay the investigation. You would need time to recuperate, roughly two to three days. We would have to pause our manual investigations and resort to data collection.”

Hailey looked at the two and sighed.

“Rest up for now. Calissa and I will be in charge of this field of data collection.” The two nodded in reply, before beginning their magic meditation.

Hailey looked at Calissa, who just shook her head, indicating that she didn’t discover anything of value in the servers; her Rank XIV personal A.I. didn’t seem to discover any anomalies in the data streams of the servers.

They continued their data collection, however, not realizing that her personal A.I. had already been compromised.___________________High up in the sky, on the other side of the planet, Xander was just putting the finishing touches of his ‘master plan’ to divert the attention of these Sage cultivators, when he heard a notification come from the System.

Detected attempt to scour personal data from a Rank XIV A.I. registered to a Calissa Heavenwood.Bypassing defense mechanisms…complete.Inserting code…complete.Re-writing software…complete.Repackaging…complete.

The host can now remotely control the personal A.I.

Xander was surprised, as he didn’t realize that these people had their own personal A.I. programs as well just like him. However, it didn’t matter much for now, because the plan had initially succeeded, with the two of their information gatherers incapacitated, delaying the investigation.

Although he felt kind of guilty doing that on one of his ancestors from the mother’s side, he had to prioritize his freedom and safety first.

Checking that everything was in order, he nodded to himself before disappearing in place, deactivating the mirror image and waking up his real body.

Xander quickly dressed up and ate breakfast before being chauffeured by Danes and Ryan. In fact, he didn’t really need to attend this week’s class, since they’re going to discuss the results of the midterms for the whole week anyway.

However, he attended classes to talk to his friends and classmates, as well as give general guidance to all of them. Generally, all of them had their cultivations raised to Elite-7 or Elite-8 in the past 3 weeks, a good improvement from their original cultivation of Elite-2 to Elite-4 when school started roughly 3 months ago.

For the rest of the day, all he did was talk with his classmates, sleep, eat, talk with his classmates, sleep then head home. By 5:30 pm, he was back, and seeing that the sage cultivators had not moved from their current location, as the two sages were still recovering from the backlash, he headed first to the laboratory and continued his experiments on the seeds, attempting to hybridize them with one another. Since he found out that the trees can produce fruits with seeds, he decided to go all out with the experiments, with each of the 10 trials lasting roughly 2000-2500 years.

First trial: Dream seed + Destruction seed. Failed. No common points of intersection nor did the two seeds attempt to integrate; the latter attempted to devour the former while the former attempted to melt the latter.

Second trial: Dream seed + Creation seed. He changed the ratios, starting with 1:1, 2:1, and 1:2. Xander after all didn’t have enough seeds for more ratios. However, the three experimental models failed as well. They were almost at the verge of fusion in the third attempt, but it failed ultimately. This caused Xander to think that there must be another factor that must be noted when fusing the seeds; maybe an external force, or the appropriate environment to do so, or another type of seed?

Third trial: Dream seed + Life seed. With the same ratios, he managed to succeed in the 3rd attempt of 1:2 ratios, creating a hybrid seed. It was almost similar to a Creation seed, but it contained hints of chaos and randomness, a characteristic of the Dream dimension. This caused him to reevaluate the seed combinations that should be done.

Fourth trial: Life seed + Creation seed. It was a success. The hybrid seed had the characteristics of Order but had more elements related to Life elements. Basically, it was an improved version of the Life seed. Increasing the ratio did change the expression of the characteristics, favoring one over the other.

Fifth trial: Life seed + Destruction seed. It was a success, with characteristics related to Chaos, but had more elements involved with Life elements. Upon deeper scrutiny of the hybrid seed produced, Xander postulated this can stimulate the evolution of beings, those that eat the fruits or those that are within its sphere of influence if it was planted. Huh, interesting. Changing the ratios did affect how the concentration of life vs chaos elements was present, which if he was right, can influence how volatile the evolution is for those under its influence. He decided to name it as Evolution seed.

Sixth trial: Destruction seed + Creation seed. Failed to combine. Xander thought about the relationship and believed he needed to have a space-time seed of some sort to stabilize the reaction of the two. He had tried influencing it with his space-time power, but it didn’t work. However, he didn’t know how to make those, so it is going to the back burner for now.

Seventh trial: Creation + Life + Dream seeds. It was a success, but it created an illusory seed, phasing in and out of the physical dimension. Xander wasn’t sure how to plant it, and he wanted to try doing it in his dream bubble once he goes back to the dream dimension tonight. The ratio didn’t affect the structure of the seed, so 1:1 was enough for him, and named it as CDL-Seed.

Eighth trial: Creation + Destruction + Dream seeds. This was considered a success, although it initially failed. When he applied space-time elements as he was combining them, they successfully merged, forming a special seed, wherein once planted, it can give birth to a dimension; specifically, each fruit it produces is an individual dimension. How did Xander know this? He analyzed the runic symbols and writings, as well as the numerous elemental particles compressed and contained in the seed.

It took him a total of 4,000 years to completely understand the seed, although it was still limited by what he currently knew about the origin elements. Can this be considered a Space seed? Xander shook his head because he felt that naming it as such was wrong. The seed doesn’t encapsulate the power of ‘Space’ but only a certain aspect of it. He named it as Dimension seed, However, he would test this after the pesky sages left Eteria. Hopefully, the fruits grow fast.

Ninth trial: Destruction + Life + Dream seeds. It was similar to the 5th trial, resulting in a seed that would seem to affect one’s evolution and growth, but it had an added power surrounding it: Imagination. Xander took another 3000 years to completely comprehend the seed with his current knowledge and realized the possible potential of the seed. Not only can the seed cause faster evolution of organisms, but it could also be directed by one’s imagination.

For example, if the organism desired to be a dragon, continuously following this belief as he devoured the fruit continuously or was basked by the Evolution tree’s aura, their body would continuously change part by part, bit by bit, to become a dragon based on their imagination. But this was if the seed was planted in the physical dimension. How about if it was in the Dream dimension? Can dream creatures, beings that only exist in the dream dimension, instantly transform because of the power and abundance of imagination in that dimension? Can they even evolve? This was an interesting seed, and Xander named it as DDL-seed.

Tenth trial: Destruction + Creation + Life seeds. For this last trial, Xander was confused about how it succeeded, creating a hybrid seed with the same fluctuations as the Chaos seed, but was directly the opposite of it. Could this be an Order seed? Xander thought about this for a long time before coming to the conclusion that this was highly likely, due to the relationship between Creation and Destruction. It’s a cycle, meaning, it’s an ordered process, and from it, Life arises. He had added space-time elements when attempting the fusion, and that was enough to produce an Order seed?