John looked up at the old man in blue robes, seeing him anew—not just mentor or savior, but something sterner, a forge that tempered through fire. “Thank you,” he whispered, voice thick.

  The figure in blue inclined his head slightly. “I did not solve all your problem. Some of Lilith’s poison stayed in her. But she is not in danger.”

  John’s gaze snapped to the Archangela, who nodded faintly, flexing her healed neck—strong, but a shadow lingered in her blue eyes, a faint tremor in her wings.

  Sheepishly, John asked, “Can’t you remove it?”

  The old man’s expression hardened, unyielding as bedrock. “I could. But I won’t.”

  John sank to his knees, desperation cracking his voice. “Please. I’ll do anything.”

  “Anything?” The old man echoed, a faint edge of test in his tone. “Very well. Grow stronger and do it yourself.”

  The old man’s gaze softened fractionally, though his posture remained resolute, staff a steady anchor. “Look,” he said, voice measured, “I know the future. I know how many times I will need to intervene. But as you have already learned, the past is not unchangeable if enough power is poured into affecting the timeline. I might have intervened a bit too much in your life.”

  John knelt there, breath steadying, the words sinking in like stones into still water. He reflected: the old man had first appeared during the weretigresses’ time of need, guiding him through preparation for black tiger confrontations with cryptic lessons on survival and will. Then came the time-manipulation training—bending reality to save the fallen tribe, rewriting death itself and even restoring the powers John had lost due to sending his consciousness back to a self of lesser might. And now, a direct shove against a goddess, portal ripped open by Archangelas under his unseen command.

  Too much. The interventions had carried him far, but left him… dependent? The old man’s philosophy wasn’t cruelty; it was weaning. Grow, or stay a child forever.

  The old man’s eyes gleamed, unblinking. He was reading his mind and no demi-god taught mental barriers stopped this mysterious mentor’s reach who answered as if John had said his thoughts aloud. “These were not the only times. Don’t you have the feeling that your life was a bit too easy? That a little kid should not have been able to pull what you did? As an infant, you and a monk were the sole survivors of an attack of black lizardmen who killed everyone in your village. How do you think the lizardmen lost interest in tracking the monk? Then came your life in Cloudroot. There I let you grow, always watching.”

  John listened, horror dawning cold and sharp. The vial’s visions from Kael had shown it all: flames, screams, black-scaled horrors ripping through the unfamiliar village, his parents cut down in the chaos. He’d been a helpless babe, bundled away by the monk.

  “You were there when my parents were killed?” John’s voice rose, cracking with fury. “You could have saved them? You let a whole village be exterminated? Why? You’re a monster!”

  The old man smiled—not kindly, but with a fanatic gleam twisting his features, eyes alight with zealous fire. “If you want to save them, do it yourself!”

  The words hit like lightning. John staggered mentally. Rewind. He’d bent time before—to hours past for the tigresses, even a full day in desperate pushes. The old man’s training had unlocked that power: consciousness hurled backward, body and world reshaped.

  Could he send himself back further? To the very beginning—infancy, the attack?

  The possibility ignited, terrifying and intoxicating.

  But the spark dimmed almost instantly. Not only was the idea of rewinding his lifetime absurd, considering how much he struggled to rewind a much shorter time but maybe when he got stronger, this could be solved. However, John remembered the cost of his previous rewind: consciousness hurled back, but powers lost. Every skill, every level, every affinity he had gained after the point in time he had travelled back to—erased. If he went back to the very beginning, he’d return as an unawakened toddler, powerless human flesh amid black lizardmen. No claws. No spells. No chance. Maybe just an almost adult consciousness in an infant’s body. Would they even listen if he tried to warn them to flee?

  He didn’t have time to spiral further. The old man continued, voice steady as inevitability.

  “Actually, most of my interventions came at the start of your adventure that began when you first left Cloudroot. Don’t you think that all fell from the sky at that time? Was it not too much of a coincidence that you found a wounded white tiger in a forest? Sure, you found the courage to approach. But is it not remarkable that it was not just a beast but Shira, a weretigress revered by humans and elves? Such a benevolent and powerful being close to your village—which was far away from the struggles of the wider world—and at that in her hour of need so that she would be indebted to you even though you were powerless.”

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  John’s mind flashed to that day: fleeing Cloudroot’s suffocating unfair treatment, stumbling through Old Briarshade, spotting the massive white tiger pinned by wyvern wounds. Shira—fierce, grateful, his first true ally after the monk passed. He hadn’t questioned the luck then; survival left no room for it.

  He didn’t ask how the old man knew Shira’s name—the figure seemed to know everything anyway.

  Horror mounting, John stared at him. “Did you hurt her?”

  The old man smiled faintly, no malice, just quiet certainty. “No, I would not do such a thing. But let us say that I nudged probability and causality to let this encounter happen. The timing when you fled Cloudroot and when Shira was hurt in a fight against a wyvern during her patrols were a bit too impeccable, don’t you think? For you to be at the right place and at the right time and in the right situation.”

  The old man continued, relentless, peeling back layers of “luck” like skin from a wound. “And this is not all. As you came to learn, a weretigress blessing is powerful in the eyes of humans but it should not awaken the connection to the system in advance. The effects are random but the chances of it doing what it did to you… Well, let us say, I helped a bit.”

  He paused, letting that sink in, then pressed on. “But the most broken skill you got was not from there. Granted, you figured out how to use it in an ideal way. But don’t you think it is a bit strange that you just stumbled on a flower that should not exist? You certainly remember the Iridescent Starbloom. And does it not look like someone manipulated the system itself when you think about the result of failing your brew? Did you ever hear of negative XP outside of your own trick? Granted, you were curious enough to experiment—or maybe foolish enough. The black failed potion could have killed you but it allowed you to level down keeping your strength and you even learned how to make it and its ingredients were trivial ones.”

  The old man laughed then—a low, rolling sound that echoed oddly in the shelter, carrying no malice but the weight of absolute certainty.

  John’s world tilted. The Starbloom: that impossible flower in the wilds, its brew birthing the -XP potion that broke leveling itself. He’d chalked it up to genius, luck, paradox-class weirdness. Not… engineered serendipity. The system’s rules bent around him from the start, invisible hands nudging probabilities into miracles.

  The old man continued, voice weaving through the shelter like threads tightening around John’s reality. “Then came the leviathan shark. A bit too convenient that you found an almost dead monster of level 150 that you would as a frail child kill unintentionally and that would grant you the power to breathe underwater to reach the underwater crystal of Oceania.”

  John’s breath caught. The leviathan: that colossal beast, somehow having entered the tunnels of the underwater maze and dying in the shallows, the key to the ocean depths and Oceania’s crystal. A level 150 titan, felled by chance? He’d departed from Cloudroot’s forest , barely stronger than a normal human if measured by his current standards—and there it was, gift-wrapped for his survival.

  Every “lucky break” unraveled further under the old man’s gaze.

  The old man continued, eyes distant yet piercing. “The fact that you could absorb the oceanic crystal’s power is not my doing even if it is remarkable in its own. But as you came to notice later, these crystals housing mortal remains of gods tend to harm those that get close to them. You did something foolish because of ignorance by bringing Shira to the crystal. I had to intervene and shield her from harm unbeknownst to both of you.”

  John’s mind reeled to that moment: the glowing oceanic crystal beneath the waves, Shira at his side, trusting, unaware. He’d dragged her down there post-Shark as an escort for his own ascension, eager to share his “discovery”—and nothing had happened. No backlash, no curse. Just power absorbed by him and no effect for her, alliance deepened.

  He shielded her. Invisible, again. Every step shadowed, every near-miss averted not by his hand, but another’s. The weight settled heavier.

  John’s thoughts fractured mid-reel: Wait—if the old man wasn’t the one who let me absorb the oceanic, dark and luminous crystals’ might, who then? Some other unseen hand? Another god?

  The old man’s gaze sharpened, reading the unvoiced question as easily as open script. “You will find out soon enough,” he answered, voice carrying the finality of prophecy fulfilled in its time.

  John sat there, the shelter’s familiar glow mocking him now. Thoughts cascaded, dark and unrelenting: Every step. Every “miracle.” The village spared just enough, Shira’s wound timed perfectly, Starbloom blooming where it shouldn’t, leviathan dying at his feet, crystal yielding without backlash. To the world—humans, elves, weretigresses, dragons—he was a paradox prodigy, demi-god among children, slayer of horrors, wielding power beyond measure.

  But the truth clawed free: he wasn’t exceptional. He was a puppet. Strings pulled by the old man’s “nudges,” probabilities warped, coincidences engineered. Control? An illusion. His triumphs, borrowed. His life, scripted.

  The old man’s eyes narrowed, sensing the spiral in John’s mind like a hawk spotting a mouse in tall grass. “Oh, there might be a scriptwriter,” he proceeded, voice wry but edged with humility, “but that is beyond even my reach. I am influencing—or I think I am—but I am not in full control of destiny.”

  The old man continued, voice shifting to a detached narration, as if recounting another’s biography from a distance. “Then came the caravan led by the merchant Master Orven,” he admitted. “I ensured it passed near the intersection you had reached after leaving Cloudroot at the right moment, taking you to Stonebridge.” John’s mind flashed: Orven—name so close to the half-dragon-half-dwarf blacksmith Orwen he’d met later in Golddeep, coincidence stacking on coincidence.

  “After that, the stray dog in the streets—dangerous enough to maim, but positioned so you could save Marek, gain a true friend.” John saw it vividly: the beast’s lunge, Marek’s scream, his impulsive shove.

  “And the improbable encounter with Elyndra, high-elf princess destined to become your mentor. Her path crossed yours not by chance, but by a gentle push on fate’s threads.”

  John’s interventions layered thicker: every ally, every break, puppeteered.