The morning air over the camp was crisp, carrying the faint scent of wild grass and smoke from distant cooking fires. Lyndric Fayne stood quietly, his eyes scanning the surroundings as he listened to the old man holding a feather fan. There was calm in the man’s expression, but his words carried weight—heavy, deliberate, and not to be taken lightly.“Powerful energy items… let me think,” the old man murmured. “I have encountered one before. A jade of extraordinary nature. It is called the Celestial Spirit Jade. The energy within it isn’t ordinary. It’s intense… so intense that even I cannot fully gauge its power. Within this jade lies a presence, formidable and sealed. It is strong—dangerously strong. Releasing it would be unwise, even for someone of my experience. If you truly want it, I can send word and have it delivered. Likely ten days, maybe half a month before it reaches you. But if you are not prepared, it is safer to leave it undisturbed.”Lyndric took it all in, his mind alr

Lyndric Fayne hadn’t expected to run into the bald man from the Space-Time Administration here, in this long-forgotten era. He’d prepared for odd encounters before, strange dangers, even attacks from the air—but this? This was on a whole other level.The air felt thick. Heavy, almost like the world itself was holding its breath. History was on a knife’s edge, and he could sense it. The strategist’s trick—borrowing life from the heavens—wasn’t some minor footnote in history. Not at all. This was a turning point. A node in time that could tilt everything, if mishandled.Lyndric lunged forward. Wind screamed past him, tearing at his cloak as he closed the gap. He hovered there, sword ready, heart hammering. But the man didn’t move. Not a twitch. Not the tiniest flinch. Just calm, steady, impossible control. It was unnerving. The kind of control that comes from watching centuries pass and surviving them all.“Why are you here?” the bald man said, voice flat, like reading a textbook instea

From what his future self had once told him, the place where the Cosmic Knight Insect could supposedly be found was already outdated. The timing was wrong, too.But Lyndric Fayne, in the present, knew better.There was another location. One that no ordinary person would ever consider.The Federal Psychiatric Hospital.Yes. That very same hospital that, five hundred years from now, would secretly research time travel.Inside its walls were strange machines and experimental compounds. Tools that could project a person’s consciousness into the future. The hospital had tested these methods on actual patients, injecting them with drugs and locking them into cold, underground chambers meant for corpses.Under such conditions, the human soul could drift forward in time, leaving the body behind. Later, the body would regenerate.It was dangerous. Highly illegal. And absolutely not a place Lyndric could stroll into on a whim.Going alone? Out of the question.After thinking it through, he made

Nothing in Lyndric Fayne’s life—or Little Mary’s, for that matter—had prepared them for this. The creature in front of them shimmered in shades of electric blue, its enormous limbs wriggling and curling in a way that felt almost deliberate, almost hypnotic. Through the communicator, it made a series of strange, drawn-out noises—“waa waa waa”—and Little Mary yelped, covering her ears instinctively.Lyndric frowned, trying to make sense of it. Nope. Nothing. Utterly incomprehensible.Luckily, their starship had a translation system built for exactly this sort of situation. In Lyndric’s time, technology had long moved past simple space travel. Entire star clusters had been colonized. Interspecies encounters were routine. Learning every language individually? Forget it. Intelligent translators were standard on ships of this caliber, and thank the stars for that.The system produced a slightly clunky translation. It didn’t flow like a real conversation—words were stiff and awkward—but it c

After Lyndric Fayne finished speaking, the giant jellyfish let out a slow stream of bubbles, one after another, drifting upward before vanishing into the shimmering water. It took nearly a minute before it finally spoke, its voice calm but carrying a weight that made the chamber feel heavier.“Outsiders,” it said, “you want to leave our star system and obtain information from me.”“The information you seek—the records of spacecraft that vanished over the past hundred years—I have. Not just a hundred years. Two, three, even five hundred years. Every route, every anomaly, every small detail is recorded.”“But I will not hand it over for nothing.”“In our world, exchange is required. You give, and then you receive. That is how it works.”“The things I require… they are rare. You may not even have them. After all, this planet belongs to me.”“Yet, if you help me with one task, I will give you everything you want. Flight paths, approximate coordinates—every spacecraft lost in the last five