Assimilate All Talents

Wendy’s voice reassured him from beside him. "In here, we don’t have physical bodies. We are projecting our consciousness outside the constraints of time. Try using your mind to move."

He did as she suggested, and after some initial struggle, he managed to turn himself around. Finally, he saw his surroundings. Below him stretched an amorphous mass, constantly shifting, at times a river, a straight line, an endlessly branching road, boundless oceans, twisting loops, and other incomprehensible forms.

The sight was overwhelming, and he felt his sanity slipping away the longer he watched.

"Sol, look at me!" Wendy called out.

Her words snapped him back to his senses, and he turned to what appeared to be a small blue cloud.

"Is that you, Saintess?" he asked uncertainly.

The cloud bobbed up and down as if nodding. "Don’t look directly at all of time. The human mind can’t comprehend it all at once. We can only process small pieces. I brought us out here so we wouldn’t be dragged into a random moment within it and waste our energy."

Wendy, herself, wasn’t confident in looking directly at time for long. When she first encountered it from this perspective, she had nearly lost her mind if not for running out of energy and being expelled back to her body.

Sensing his curious gaze, Wendy said, "It’s not just me who looks like this. Take a look at yourself."

Sol looked down and saw his own cloud like body, but unlike Wendy’s blue, his form was a light yellow with traces of orange.

He spread his awareness around himself. "It feels weird, like I’m here but also not at the same time."

"You’ll get used to it in time."

"Haha, ’in time,’ I get it." Sol chuckled at the unintentional wordplay.

Wendy’s cloud puffed with a sigh. "It wasn’t on purpose... Come on. While we have more time here due to our shared energy, we still don’t have that much to work with. Let’s head to Crestel."

"To Crestel? How—WOAH!"

Before Sol could finish his question, they dived straight into the ever changing embodiment of time, which now resembled a spiraling hourglass. Sol saw images of people and places flash by rapidly, too fast to process, and then suddenly, they appeared above the city of Crestel. Below he could see people moving about in their everyday life with carriages entering and exiting the city like a colony of ants.

Sol recognized the city and asked, "Where—I mean, when are we? And what do we do now?"

Wendy looked around. "We’re a few months in the past. Normally, I experience random visions at certain moments in time, but with your help, we should be able to move through the city’s fate."

As they shared energy, Wendy discovered just how much Sol had within him. With both of their fate powers combined, she was able to exert more control over time. Alone, she could only slightly guide her visions in the right direction, but together, she felt confident they could navigate time with much greater accuracy.

"Are you ready?" Wendy asked.

Sol nodded.

"Okay, follow my lead."

Suddenly, the sun dropped below the horizon, the moon replaced it, and then quickly set as the sun rose again. The city below blurred as its people turned into streaks of light, going about their day while time sped by. Sol and Wendy, however, remained still, they were moving as well only, not in any normal direction, but through time itself.

The cycle of day and night repeated rapidly, and as they moved forward, Sol asked, "Why are we going forward in time? Weren’t the waves you detected in the past?"

Wendy continued. "They covered their tracks well. Even with your help, I doubt we’ll find traces in the past. What I do know is that their tampering has impacted this city’s fate. So instead of focusing on what they changed, let’s look at the future and see the consequences."

Sol understood the logic. It didn’t matter what had been altered, it was the resulting consequences that mattered. Since Wendy mentioned large waves of change, the impact on the city should be visible.

As they moved further through time, Wendy suddenly sensed something. "I feel it. Something big is ahead of us."

Sol, still trying to keep up, didn’t fully understand, but followed along anyways. He didn’t have the luxury to ask how she could know that as the process of traveling through time like this was draining, and he felt his energy quickly depleting.

’How are you not even tired?’ He thought to himself as he looked at her in amazement.

Unlike Sol who was new to interacting with time and fate, Wendy had long grown accustomed to this. This wasn’t to say she wasn’t draining energy rapidly as well, their energy was shared after all. She was simply more used to working with less and now that she had a large supply of energy to work with it felt much easier by comparison.

Just as they neared their destination, the two clouds were abruptly knocked back, and the city around them froze in place. They lost control and fell into the main street below. Fortunately, their incorporeal forms weren’t harmed, nor did they affect the frozen city.

"What happened?!" Sol asked, shaken.

"I don’t know!" Wendy replied, equally confused. It was the first time she had encountered such a phenomenon.

As they tried to make sense of it, footsteps echoed behind them. In the frozen city, someone else was present.

"It’s rare to see two newbies exploring time together." a voice said. "You should count yourselves lucky I stopped you in time."