Chapter 419: Paradox

Vivian’s figure completely merged into the void, slipping ahead to conduct deep reconnaissance of the city.

Moments later, her voice came through the encrypted mental link: “Clear. No organized enemy detected. Only a small number of first-tier worker drones wandering aimlessly in the lower-level pipelines—likely abandoned or naturally hatched later. You may enter.”

Jie Ming and Roland descended onto the roof of one of the taller towers at the city’s edge.

From here, a large portion of the urban area lay visible below.

Jie Ming wasted no time. He immediately took out a recording crystal containing the detailed log of the previous loop’s sample collection in this very city.

His mental power swept over it. The scene from that time emerged: combat erupting in the distance near a high-rise; wizard troops breaching from the main eastern passage; Sickle-Skull defenders making their final stand in the western plaza; routed remnants attempting escape through the underground network, only to be eliminated by pre-placed rune traps…

“That area…”

Roland, having also viewed the recorded information, sent out a scouting witchcraft in that direction.

After a moment, he nodded. “Indeed. Though well camouflaged, the energy fluctuations are far too flat compared to other regions.”

Soon, Vivian’s on-site reconnaissance result came back: “The enemy outpost was indeed in that sector…”

Jie Ming nodded toward Roland. “No changes. Then I’ll have to trouble you, my lord—try to ensure no single one escapes.”

“A small matter.”

Roland raised his palm toward the sky. In the blink of an eye, an enormous energy shield spread outward.

The raised shield formed an inverted, semi-transparent giant bowl, silently enveloping the entire Sickle-Skull forward outpost.

The faint sounds of carapace friction and pheromone exchange within the camp were instantly cut off.

“Begin,” Vivian’s voice rang coldly and concisely through the mental link.

As the main assault specialist, Roland swung his staff. Above the largest spiral building serving as the command center in the camp’s core, dozens of blazing white meteors suddenly coalesced, trailing long tails of flame as they crashed downward!

Explosions and fire instantly engulfed the building and surrounding area. Panicked shrieks mixed with the crisp sound of shattering energy shields.

Yet Roland controlled his power with extreme precision. This single spell merely destroyed the enemy’s defensive systems and sowed massive chaos, while deliberately avoiding casualties.

Seizing the collapse of their protective systems, Vivian slipped inside like a shadow reaper.

Her figure flickered between sentry towers at the camp’s edge, supply stacks, and small incubation pools. Each appearance was accompanied by a faint spatial tear.

Any Sickle-Skull grazed by those rifts froze instantly. Smooth cuts appeared on their carapaces, and they split silently in two.

Her targets were all higher-tier Sickle-Skull.

Jie Ming’s targets were the same.

His mental power had long since locked onto several points of conspicuously high energy reaction within the camp. Lock—raise hand—Spatial Distortion, instantaneous release.

Hum!!!

Invisible spatial power erupted around several fourth- and fifth-tier Sickle-Skull squad leaders, like an invisible giant hand savagely twisting the entire area.

Carapaces, limbs, viscera… everything was shredded into fragments by the dislocation and tearing of space. The targeted Sickle-Skull didn’t even have time to scream.

As for the only sixth-tier Sickle-Skull commander, it had just let out an enraged shriek and burst skyward from the burning ruins of the command center when Roland pointed from afar.

A highly condensed “Gravity Anchor” rune branded itself onto its body in an instant, dragging it downward like a meteor and smashing it into a deep crater.

Before it could struggle back to its feet, Roland’s second spell—“Molecular Stasis”—descended, completely locking its massive form and a small surrounding area in unbreakable rigidity.

From the very beginning, the battle was a complete one-sided crushing.

Tens of thousands of Sickle-Skull stood no chance against three wizards who were fully prepared, overwhelmingly superior in strength, and clear in their tactics.

Aside from the deliberately spared low-tier Sickle-Skull, all high-tier individuals in the camp were slaughtered in short order.

The truly time-consuming part was what came next.

“Seal!” Roland shouted, hands forming seals.

The energy shield originally meant to isolate the outside world contracted inward, morphing into thousands of independent energy cages of varying sizes.

The surviving low-tier Sickle-Skull—panicked and disorganized—were segmented and trapped, suspended in midair. This prevented self-harm or mutual attacks while facilitating observation.

“Begin identification.” Jie Ming shook out his hand, releasing his spell, and walked to the nearest energy cage.

Inside trembled more than a dozen frightened Sickle-Skull worker drones.

To an ordinary person, these insects might appear identical.

But to Jie Ming—who had deeply studied their physiology, mutation lineages, and even the minute differences in carapace growth patterns—they each had distinct features.

He began cross-referencing them one by one against the sample information stored in the recording crystals.

First one—no match.

Second one—the curvature at the carapace edge was wrong.

Third one…

When he reached the seventh cage, Jie Ming’s gaze locked onto a second-tier combat-type Sickle-Skull.

On the second segment of its left forelimb joint was a very faint natural dark marking, shaped like an incomplete triangle.

The records showed that in the previous loop, he had collected a sample from a Sickle-Skull here with a similar marking on the left forelimb—but only half its head and part of its torso. The remaining body had been discarded.

Jie Ming immediately retrieved the sealed “half-head” from the corresponding area of his Inner Cave Heaven.

He shrank the energy cage to enclose only the living Sickle-Skull, pulling it close while displaying the cut surface of the half-head.

The moment the Sickle-Skull saw the head in Jie Ming’s hand, it emitted panicked, shrill cries filled with utter disbelief and terror.

Understandable—anyone would scream the same way upon seeing their own severed head held by another.

Yet Jie Ming paid no attention to its fear. He conducted a meticulous comparison.

Carapace color, texture density, the minute paths of energy circuits, even cellular-level activity imprints… complete match!

Most crucially, the special chest plate known as the “Honor Carapace” on this living Sickle-Skull showed uniform color, with no new heterochromatic patterns indicating recent healing.

This meant it had never lost half its head and part of its torso… at least in “this loop,” it had always been whole.

“Partial collection… body fully restored. No new healing marks on Honor Carapace.” Jie Ming recorded in a low voice and returned the half-head to the Cave Heaven.

They continued the inspection.

As each Sickle-Skull was identified, the results gradually became clear:

For every individual that had undergone “partial collection” (only a limb or organ stored), the corresponding living specimen in this loop had revived completely intact.

No scars, no new healing traces on the Honor Carapace.

The power of time reversal appeared to have perfectly repaired such “partial absences,” resetting the individual’s existence to an intact original state as though the collection had never occurred.

However, for those Sickle-Skull stored entirely within the Inner Cave Heaven, the situation was radically different.

Jie Ming and the two sixth-tier wizards carefully cross-checked every trapped Sickle-Skull, searched every possible corner of the camp, and even employed small-scale necromantic detection and memory-retrospective witchcraft.

In the end, they confirmed that all fifty Sickle-Skull stored whole in the Cave Heaven from the records had vanished completely.

In this camp’s timeline, they might as well have never existed.

To further verify, the trio randomly selected several hundred living Sickle-Skull and used soul memory-reading witchcraft, specifically searching for memory fragments related to those “vanished individuals.”

The results were intriguing.

In the memory scenes of these Sickle-Skull, camp life, work, and combat training matched the records perfectly—except for the complete absence of those fifty “comrades” and any interactions involving them.

In their memories, the camp had always had exactly this many individuals. Those fifty had never existed.

Time reversal had not only erased the material existence of those individuals—it had synchronously corrected the associated causal logic and collective memory, rendering the “absence” itself logical and unnoticeable.

“Individuals fully removed from the timeline have their existence completely erased, with all related causal traces ‘rationalized’ and corrected…” Roland rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “This is far more thorough than simple ‘deletion.’ It’s as though they ‘never existed at all.’”

Jie Ming remained silent. A far bolder verification idea rose in his mind.

He retrieved two fully preserved Sickle-Skull corpse samples from the Inner Cave Heaven—precisely two from among those “vanished fifty.”

The two intact corpses appeared in his hands, still bearing the wounds from the previous loop’s battle.

Yet the instant they fully left the Cave Heaven and came into contact with the spacetime of the current loop…

No sound. No energy fluctuation. No visual effect.

Like the most skillful eraser wiping them away in an instant, or like fragile soap bubbles under sunlight.

The two corpses simply vanished into thin air.

Not disintegration. Not teleportation. Simply the most direct disappearance.

Jie Ming’s pupils contracted sharply—then his eyes blazed with incredibly bright light.

“As expected!” He almost growled the words. “These samples were directly erased by the time paradox!”

“When time reversal occurs, everything in the current plane is forcibly reset to a certain ‘save point.’ For partially collected individuals, the reset force attempts to repair their ‘missing parts.’ Because the missing parts (inside my Cave Heaven) are spatiotemporally separated from the main body (in the resetting plane), the reset force seems to ‘default’ that the main body was originally complete—or somehow ‘completes’ the absence—thus allowing the individual to ‘recover.’”

Jie Ming’s mind raced at extreme speed, rapidly integrating all the information obtained through experiments.

“But for individuals stored entirely, the reset force discovers that this individual ‘does not exist at all’ in any time node of the current plane (because it was isolated). It can neither ‘repair’ (no main body) nor ‘ignore’ (since the individual should have existed at the save point). These two irreconcilable states—‘should exist at the save point’ versus ‘due to isolation, exists in no save point’—create the most fundamental spacetime paradox.”

“And the way this plane’s laws resolve the paradox is the crudest possible: completely erase the very fact of ‘this individual’s existence’ from the history and future of the current timeline. Therefore, they ‘never existed,’ and related memories are correspondingly corrected.”

“But wait!”

Jie Ming suddenly realized something and overturned his previous thought: “It’s not that a second paradox conflict was triggered—it’s still the first paradox conflict. Unlike items I brought in from other planes, native plane items are likely pre-marked by this plane’s laws. That’s why they were erased the instant they were taken out.”

“Otherwise, they should have been erased only when this loop’s time reversal occurred, just like those monitoring instruments!”