< Dragons > infighting event became the talk of the town for some time. But to the average person, the gossip soon ended since the impact on the outside was so minimal. The commonfolk can only stomach so much while talking about tremors and some beam towards the sky. For them, this gossip didn’t have enough substance.

However, inside New Horizons, the discussion did not stop. Not only was the one involved from their Sect, but also someone leaving their Sect. Because of that, their shock was intense.

In addition, the powers around had gained a new insight towards < Dragons > firepower. And from everyone around the region, the Clearsky Auction House must be the happiest towards the event.

While Ginn became the limelight, his faction showed no further movement. His group using this time to throughout plan their next moves.

—

Sometime later, Ben finally wakes up.

Opening his eyes, He takes his time looking around.

[breathing sounds]

The room is dim, and within the silence, Ben can hear his breathing sound and loud. Although he is fully conscious, he still takes his time sharpening his sense and feeling his living body.

Feeling the connection with his shell stable, Ben sits up.

[deep breath]

Eventually, Ben begins to stretch his muscles. First, his neck, then, his arms and back. Soon, he stands up and begins to warm up his whole body.

Once his blood flows through catches up, Ben walks towards a shower head to his right.

Arriving there, he touches a drawing in the wall, the water flowing in the ditch bellow then flows up through an open indentation in the wall. The water flows until the top where it begins to fall from the showerhead.

‘So fancy…’

To help wake up, Ben takes a long shower.

Afterward, feeling refreshed and alive, Ben searches for a towel rather than using some fancy system to dry himself up.

Looking around, his awareness of the surroundings increases. Finally, he goes for his backpack and moves to sit at the table on the other side of the room.

Sitting down, he turns a few lights on. Slowly, he retrieves everything from the bag and put it on the table.

With the towel on his shoulder, he begins to organize.

‘Work! Work!’ He thinks.

[plop] From his chest, he removes an old hand-clock, some flasks, some small gems, and a few tools.

[whistle melody]

As he spins a tool in his hand, Ben examines the old hand-clock artifact.

Eventually, after tinkering for minutes, he finds the way to open the clock.

Exposing the insides, he sees the tiny circuits that form a very complex but small system.

“Eight centuries, and it still impresses me deeply.”

In some unknown ruins in a middle-sized civilization cemetery, Ben found this artifact. His best estimation is that this clock is at least 1 million years old, and from a long-forgotten specialized institution.

Despite tinkering with it for so long, he never could decipher its content thoroughly. Furthermore, due to the level of fragility and specialization that everything was built with, Ben chose not to dissect it.

After examining the artifact, he indeed figured out the auxiliaries system, since many carry some resemblance with the current industry standards. However, when considering the core pieces, he could at best guess that those touches the subject of time.

“Below a broken clock, is some broken time. Beautiful bastard! I really would hug and kiss the joker who decided to make this thing into a clock.” [chuckles]

“How unfortunate that the technology is lost. If this thing, at least, wasn’t overused.”

Ben classified the machine-array mix inside the clock as out of gas. After many uses, the system has no ability to be activated again. Despite its broken state, Ben still worked on it, trying to understand the concept of time.

If this object was on the hands of someone else, perhaps they would find such research useless. However, one thing had always bothered Ben: his fellow Earthlings had all died within a hundred years, but they were born at different times here. Consequently, the annoyance of the misfit timelines had made him wary of how definitive is the flow of space-time.

Unfortunately, his research never amounted to anything substantial. Given his tool-set, his conclusion so far was that time seems very rigid.

After carefully fiddling with the object for some time, Ben drops the towel in his lap. Next, his chest becomes filled with tattoos, as they grow towards his arms until they reach his fingertips.

Tiny black needles grow from his fingertips, so he can begin the task of modding the clock. While today he could by no means fix this artifact, Ben’s expertise gave him the ability to try to overclock the clock. Rather than breaking it, he chose to trigger its ability one last time.

“Little thing. I would love it if you could talk. Sorry to wake you up after such a long time, but wakey-wakey little thing. Show me at least a shadow of your past glory! I will not waste it. Wakey, wakey!” [whistles, whistles]

With his acknowledge and material gathered using centuries of work, Ben start the most exciting journey of his whole life. To him, personally, Time had always been the most mystical variable.

Minutes pass and then hours. Eventually, the table fills with little circuits and drawings. And inside the clock, Ben broke some auxiliary nods while fixing others.

Even while focusing his mind to the extreme, Ben would still whistle some melodies often, and sometimes he would talk alone out-loud.

“Smoooll sun thingy, what do you do? Fucker, wake up!” [deep breath]

After long hours of no success, Ben begins to swear at the inanimate object. Even while knowing that would change nothing, he still does it, for his sanity.

“Why is your brother, space, so much easier to hang out with?”

By now tentacles extend from his chest, some are supporting him, others are controlling some array or circuit, while a few are only hanging and waiting for something.

The view would give even people from this world, shivers. However, anyone who would look deeper would find the whole process beautiful. As beautiful as seeing a master blacksmith forging, as beautiful as seeing a master musician compose, as beautiful as seeing a master swordsman train. Mastery…

Drawing… Tinkering… Small changes, one by one. Breaking and rebuilding things around the core of the clock.

Ben keeps playing with it.

—

In this enclosed and silent room, Ben lost the sense of time as he kept working.

[whistles, whistles] “WAKEY WAKEY MOTHERFUC” [ZOOM] He shuts up, due to ripples in the space-time.

Finally triggering the artifact one last time, Ben’s high senses notice the small changes in his surroundings.

In this instant, all the dull black tentacles aim for the clock, trying to seal its phenomena.

[swish] They all move fast, surrounding the artifact and pulling it into Ben’s black tattooed chest. [plop]

Once the clock is gone, space and time stabilize instantly.

Not trying anything else, Ben closes his eyes and controls his mind to focus on the memories of not long ago.

He goes back repeatedly in his memories, trying to feel the changes one more time.

He engraves all the small things in his mind so that he doesn’t forget it.

After reviewing that moment for a few minutes, Ben finally open his eyes.

“Like a mortal reaching for the moon…” he whispers.

Tears begin to fall from his eyes as he holds a shocked and powerless expression.

Fear and despair, he cries.

Ben is so chocked that it takes some time for him even to try to stabilize his mind and control this deep emotion. However, when he attempts, he still finds it difficult to calm down. He finds out that biological changes affect it very little, so he ends up giving up, letting his mind calm down by itself.

Once his logic comes back somewhat, his eyes slowly move and focus on the table before him. Looking at the result of his mastery, he finds it laughable.

“I play with rocks by my foot, while thinking about the moon…” he whispers.

“No. No. No. No…” [unstable breathing]

He puts his leg up the chair, relocating it closer to him. He hugs them, and moves in smaller, trying to occupy the least space he can.

He sits on the fetal position, his head laying down on his naked tights, and his eyes closed.

There Ben stays, silent, slowly digesting his unstable mental state.

Fortunately, this isn’t the first time his mind breaks-down like this. While the shock was never this great, his life so far has trained him well. Over the years, he became somewhat resistant against fear and despair.

His wild emotions numbed down, that, now, his reactions are mostly systematic. Most of his humanity is due to his effort in preserving it, and not a natural outcome after the experiences of his long life.

However, some things never changed. There below what he, himself, considers a monster is still a consciousness from Earth.

Ben may be able to change and protect his body and mind, but until today he never chose to forget his instinct or completely numb down his sense of self. Indeed, he believes that doing so is not much better than killing himself little by little.

Adopting this path made the occurrences of today possible.

However, until he chose otherwise, he will keep accepting his own fragility coming back to bite his ass.

Slowly but surely, he comes back to himself. His state of consciousness brings him back.

He may not have all the answers, but he feels alive.

His legs go back down, his hands fall to the side. Laying down on the chair, he relaxes.

He puts his trouble in the back of his mind for later. Although he doesn’t forget, he focuses on his sense now.

His tears dry, his heart beating normalized, Ben feels alright.

He opens his eyes and looks above.

“Who am I?” he asks. ‘Philip. Ben. Carl. Dyn. Leo. Me.’

“Where am I?” he asks. ‘Spirit World. Qhechan Empire. Evergreen City.’

“What am I?” he asks. ‘Barely human.’

He touches his head and then his chest and neck.

“Am I okay?” he asks.

He fixes his sitting position into a straight-up posture.

His eyes move about randomly, looking at what is before him.

Inside his head, he keeps running a few mind exercises.

And once he finally feels alright, he takes a few deep breaths.

Ben then begins to organize the mess. Since most of the built system are auxiliaries only, nothing else is worth keeping.

‘The clock is inside…’ He looks at his chest. The flower-shaped tattoo gained its eighth petal.

‘Worth it? Hm, I don’t know…’

Ben cleans everything.

What could still be used, he puts it back in his storage. Then, he uses a little furnace available in the room to burn all the trash, including the now useless backpack.

After finishing all the work he set himself up to do involving the clock, Ben takes another shower.

Once refreshed, he sits on the low bed and meditates, removing and consuming one small white marble from his chest while at it.

Later, without much difficulty, he finds full sets of clothes, from where he chooses one: a gray robe set. Then, he dresses up, putting the golden statue in his right pocket.

One last time, he looks around, searching for anything irregular. Besides cleaning, he also makes sure he sees no signs of anything too essential left behind, including the little white marble from sunset ruins.

Only after checking everything about the room and his states twice, he prepares to leave.

—

A few hours earlier, outside.

Inside an office, Ginn is meeting with Brian Highpeak about the continuous investigation the Highpeak Unit has been doing.

[knock, knock]

“Come in,” Ginn says.

Opening the door, Louis Krat enters the room.

“How was it? Any news?” Ginn asks.

“Nine weeks and four days, and no signs yet. But food is ready if both of you want to eat.” Louis says.

—

More than nine weeks later, Ben leaves the isolated room.

[snoring sounds]

Right outside, Ben finds a teenage girl napping.

Of course, he would rather not interrupt her healthful sleep time, so he begins to walk out while trying to remember the building layout.

Walking along the corridor, Ben finds himself surprised at how the girl is the only one in the watch out. Moreover, in the end, he finds himself unable to leave because the area is closed off.

Thus, he walks back, but he finds no success in the opposite direction, either. On the other side, he only finds more rooms, some open and others closed, until the end of the corridor. Despite wanting to avoid it, he ends up coming back and waking up the girl.

[cough cough]

“Greetings, young lady,” Ben says.

“Ah!” the girl wakes ups surprised. She readily stands up from a meditating position, organizes her appearance, and greets back.

“Good morning, Sir!” she says.

“I am locked in here, could you show me the way out?”

“Oh right,” finally remembering what job she is doing, she takes the key from her pocket and says: “Please follow me, Sir.”

She leads the way out, but due to the grogginess from waking up, she forgets to inform where they are going.

Yet, Ben still follows her without saying another word.