Ch.172Timeline and Fracture

It was a tone as if calmly reasoning with a child throwing a tantrum for a toy. Charlotte felt a surge of anger inside, but since she was indeed in the wrong this time, she forcibly suppressed her indignation.

“I couldn’t possibly have forgotten. I remember everything.”

—Tell me.

“To abandon preconceptions, and to not think of anything else. These are the two, are they not? If you thought I had forgotten, that would be a grave misjudgment.”

The first piece of advice, to abandon preconceptions. This one was somewhat understandable.

It was the process of perceiving timelines—seeing what ordinary people could never see. Naturally, preconceptions that applied in the human world had to be discarded.

Even Charlotte herself had nearly touched the forbidden future while receiving fragments of the past. This advice was somewhat acceptable, but the next one was problematic.

To not think of anything else. This advice she simply could not accept.

“…I cannot refrain from other thoughts. This is my heart’s resolve, which will never change.”

—Why?

“How could I possibly not think of my husband? If such a day were to come, it would be the day my life ceases.”

That was it. Although one needed to shake off distracting thoughts and avoid thinking of other things to handle time properly without being swept away by it, Charlotte simply couldn’t bring herself to do so.

To cast aside thoughts of her husband? If she could have done that, she wouldn’t have started this journey in the first place.

It was a love that had never cooled, never weakened, for over 130 years.

To treat such an intense feeling as a mere distraction to be discarded—such a thing was absolutely impossible for Charlotte.

—That’s right.

However, the dragon’s response was somewhat different from what Charlotte had expected.

She had thought it would insist that she must somehow cast those thoughts aside, but the emotion transmitted to her mind was not that at all. It was more like a feeling of contentment, as if the dragon was looking at her with satisfaction.

Before Charlotte could wonder about this, the dragon spoke first.

—You’re right, child. I understand your heart well. How could a child cast aside from her heart the boy entangled in her fate? Your love is not so light.

“If you knew, then why—”

—Did I tell you to abandon preconceptions?

Now it was Charlotte’s turn to be stunned with confusion. Meeting her gaze, the dragon continued its advice.

—Child, do not focus on the act of seeing timelines. Focus on your love, on that eternal flame in your heart. You have already come so far; just one more step and you can build your own timeline. It’s simply a matter of how to take that one step. Of course, even if you were to stop here, you would have achieved something impossible for humans, but that’s not what you want, is it?

“……”

Hearing those words, Charlotte fell into deep thought.

The dragon was right. It had only told her to focus on one thing, never specifically stating that it had to be the invisible—the timelines.

Yes, if that was the case, the answer was obvious. Instead of trying to fit herself to the world, she needed to reconstruct the world to fit her.

Charlotte had already broken through mana nullification by thinking of her husband. Focusing on her love was all too easy for her.

Having reached this conclusion, Charlotte drew upon her mana again. The dragon, as if having said all it needed to say, returned to its position as an observer rather than an advisor.

From now on, it was entirely up to Charlotte. The dragon was merely there to confirm that she had lost her way, not to tell her which direction to take.

She drew upon her mana. Though her body was in shambles from forcibly extracting herself from the timeline earlier, the taste of blood still lingered in her mouth, and her eyes felt ready to close at any moment, it didn’t matter.

She poured all her thoughts solely into her husband, into her own love.

She closed her eyes. Everything around her grew quiet. Nothing could be heard except the beating of her heart and the sound of her delicate breathing, inhaling and exhaling.

What should she perceive? The answer was already determined.

The world coalesced. Charlotte no longer drifted in time. She didn’t isolate her own space to prevent being pushed away. She simply sat in the middle of the flow.

The dragon’s ring glowed a deep grayish-white. With her human body, she accepted the dragon’s genes and fused them into one, drawing out a higher caliber.

She opened her eyes. Her blood-soaked rubies gazed at the collapsing space. Beyond it, the tangled threads connecting all sorts of places appeared much more clearly.

‘This is distinctly different from before.’

They were timelines.

Each one contained memories of flowing worlds, conceptual entities encompassing past, present, and future.

Charlotte didn’t foolishly reach out her hand as she had before. She focused solely on thinking of her husband.

If she had been the old Charlotte, focused on trying to see the invisible, she would have wasted effort trying to understand those threads.

But now it was different. Instead, she made the timelines understand her.

She concentrated all her senses on love, recalled love in all her memories, and poured all her thoughts into the actions she had committed for love.

Plucking out her husband’s eyes so he couldn’t look at other women, observing his every move from afar with magic, creating and storing every object he had used in a separate space she had created.

All of it was justified. In the world Charlotte created and ruled, all of it was justified. Since these were actions committed solely for love, they naturally deserved to be understood.

Time entwined around her. Something ordinary humans could never see, should never see, and even if they did see, they couldn’t comprehend the concept and their minds would melt.

Charlotte reached out to a passing timeline. The moment her fingers touched it, her body changed.

Her relatively tall height shrank considerably, her hair that had reached her hips shortened a bit, and her cold expression was replaced with innocence.

Her black uniform, reminiscent of death, had transformed into a long dress mixed with yellow and pink.

‘A dress mixed with yellow and pink. Then this must be when I was seven years old. After that, I preferred slightly darker colors.’

Only after transforming her body like this did Charlotte truly understand what it meant to see the invisible.

Until just now, she had been overwhelmed by merely perceiving time, unable to properly accept it and instead being dragged along.

But now it was different. She could perfectly gauge the timelines wrapping around her body, even where they led.

‘My love, so this is what it meant to be fixed in time.’

The shocking secret about Charlotte’s husband that the dragon had revealed—she now seemed to understand the true meaning of those words. She finally grasped what it meant to be fixed in time.

Among the countless tangled threads, Charlotte found the “original” and touched it with her finger. Immediately, her body returned to her original form.

She blinked, withdrawing the dragon’s eyes. The threads binding the world dissolved like water, and the ordinary vegetation and sky reappeared.

The moon hung in the sky.

The sun, having grown bored waiting for Charlotte, had fallen asleep, and the moon, which had waited for her in the sun’s place, drew an elegant curve as if welcoming her. Yellow moonlight covered her black uniform.

—You’ve returned, child.

The dragon standing in the moonlight was the same as always.

“How much time has passed?”

—Three days, child.

Three days. A reasonably acceptable passage of time.

Since she had fallen into contemplation when the sun was up and emerged when the moon was out, it had actually been a little more than three days, but that was fine.

—Did you see?

Charlotte silently nodded. A feeling of satisfaction flooded her mind.

—Then it is done. Now go do what you must, child. I will be waiting for your return at our nest.

“Not yet. I still have something to say.”

Charlotte stopped the dragon just as it was about to spread its wings and soar into the sky.

“What exactly are you? I certainly did not treat you kindly. Even if you could laugh off the words of mortals who live such short lives compared to your kind, I can deduce that teaching me something only your kind can see was not done out of mere goodwill. Was there a reason you had to bestow so much upon a mere human?”

—I told you.

“If you’re going to make the pathetic excuse that you discovered talent in me, I declare in advance that you should not spout nonsense. While it may not be reasonable to doubt someone who has shown kindness, if that kindness is disproportionate to the recipient’s nature, it is certainly worth suspecting other motives. Don’t you think so?”

The dragon folded its wings, which had been about to fully spread, and met Charlotte’s eyes. Those eyes still contained no negative emotions regarding Charlotte’s rudeness.

Instead, there was hesitation. It was so faint that even Charlotte, who directly received the emotion, almost thought it was her imagination.

“…Child, do you know who the woman is who abducted your love?”

The dragon opened its mouth. Literally, its mouth.

The shock of this lizard, which until now had only transmitted consciousness to her mind without ever directly speaking, opening its mouth to speak left Charlotte momentarily frozen.

The dragon continued its explanation, regardless of Charlotte’s reaction.

“She is a being who, with a mere human body, came closest to omnipotence.”

“…Closest to omnipotence?”

Charlotte frowned, thinking of when she first encountered that woman. Certainly, the power and magic she displayed then were overwhelming to Charlotte.

But was that mad woman’s ability truly powerful enough to warrant such a description?

“If she had just a little more time, if she hadn’t buried herself in her obsession with love, she would surely have created her own world. That’s the kind of being she was.”

“Then, this must be related to that woman.”

“…Yes. There is a great connection.”

For a moment, anger took root in the dragon.

“She invaded our dimension claiming she would recover her power, slaughtered many of my kind and devoured their souls, and by the time I managed to chase her into another dimension, irreparable damage had already been done.”

“You couldn’t kill her either?”

“That was beyond what I could do, child.”

With those final words, the dragon spread its wings and took flight. It was a silent demonstration that it would reveal no more. Charlotte vaguely sensed this and did not try to stop the departing dragon.

Though she still had countless questions, there was no clever way to extract answers.

—Child, when you have resolved everything and feel inclined to do so, cross over to our world and find me with these words: The Dragon Lord has declared acceptance of this child. Then, no dragon will dare stand above you.

With those final words, the dragon tore open space and disappeared somewhere. Charlotte stared blankly at the lingering traces of the opened space.

“…Dragon Lord.”

Even dragons were now creatures passed down only in legends, yet there existed a being who ruled over them. She couldn’t help but laugh wryly.

Charlotte fingered the dragon’s ring firmly fitted on the ring finger of her left hand. Mana seeped out around her clenched fist.

The leaked mana gathered into a blue spherical shape, soon transforming into a transfer gate, and Charlotte walked through it with majestic steps.

It was time to reclaim her husband.