Fate Written in Time

Darius finally grasped the full truth of his past and the dream his grandfather, Gorpus King, had envisioned for Silvermore.

Huang, his voice steady but urgent, tried to sway him. “We can gather allies in the court. There’s a way to defeat the queen without fighting!”

But Darius saw no alternative to save his people except through battle. The revelation of his grandfather’s tragic death at the queen’s hands only fueled his resolve.

“Allies won’t be enough,” he countered, his tone resolute. “Until we have the power to protect ourselves, we’ll live at her mercy. I’m done running from the truth.”

“What are you saying?” Huang pressed, concern flickering in his eyes.

Darius didn’t answer. Instead, he stormed out of the room, his decision unshakable.

Oliver stepped into the facility, his brow furrowed. “Where’s Darius going?”

Huang sighed, a worried shadow crossing his face. “Hopefully not to doom us all.”

Shaking off the tension, Oliver’s expression brightened.

“Okay, are we starting now? I can’t wait to build the chronogate with you, Dad!”

“Excitement’s good,” Huang replied, his voice firm yet warm, “but this isn’t a game. One mistake could collapse the entire timeline. Start with the control program. I’ll speak with the queen shortly.”

Oliver’s enthusiasm dimmed slightly.

“I thought we’d begin with the quantum core engineering. I’m not great at programming.”

“Don’t rush ahead,” Huang said. “The control program comes first. I’ve written the algorithm—just follow Sapience’s instructions, and you’ll manage.”

With that, Huang departed for the palace, leaving Oliver to tackle the task.

The queen’s gaze was sharp as she confronted Huang. Wanting nothing but to finish the mission and get back home victorious

“How long will it take to finish the chronogate?”

“At least two years,” he admitted, bracing for her reaction.

“We don’t have that long,” she snapped. “You have six months.”

Huang shook his head. The chronogate was an immense undertaking, and the available technology was outdated.

“It’s impossible.” He revealed. “We’re building everything from scratch. The core alone will take a year.”

“Make it possible,” she insisted, her voice cold. “The walls are weakening. I don’t need to tell you of all people that if this drags on, the timeline could rupture. I’ll give you the manpower you need.”

True to her word, the queen ordered ministers and scientists to supply Huang with every resource he requested. Within days, they delivered.

Huang, Oliver, and a small team of scientists set to work on the spacetime synchronization core for the quantum jump drive engine. The project’s scale was overwhelming, but they pressed on.

Oliver stared in awe at the pile of intricate processing chips.

“We need all this for the core!?”

“Yes,” Huang confirmed. “We’re repurposing chips from Sapience, the AI controlling the Radguard wall. We can’t take them all, but half will handle the temporal coordinate synchronization and spacetime oscillations.”

This approach gave them a slim chance to meet the queen’s deadline. They labored day and night, exhaustion creeping in.

And then, three weeks later, they hit a dead end.

“We’ve tried every possible combination,” Oliver said, his voice heavy with fatigue as he stood with the other scientists. “We can’t link it to the temporal coordinates.”

Huang frowned. “Are you targeting all points with the multitargeted resonance effect, like I told you?”

“Yes,” Oliver replied, “but it’s not working.”

Huang explained, “The chronogate we used to get here was a one-way stream. We opened a tiny hole in time, channeling energy from unstable particles—meant to destroy this island—into a doorway between two temporal coordinates.”

“Maybe the future machine’s offline,” Oliver suggested.

“No,” Huang said firmly. “That link should stay open indefinitely. We’re aiming for the exact moment I closed the portal, so our trip here and back would be instantaneous.”

“Then why isn’t it working?” Oliver asked, frustration mounting.

“It’s puzzling,” Huang admitted, determination in his tone. “But we’ll figure it out. We have to.”

“Could the timeline already be fractured?” Oliver wondered. “Maybe the future’s changed.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Huang snapped. “We’d be gone if it had. We ran simulations for three years, planned every detail. To preserve history, we detonated four nuclear devices at Silvermore’s corners when we arrived, mimicking the radiation from the explosion that destroyed this land. The twins then cloaked the island with their powers, and we activated the nuclear dome shield to seal it off. If anything had gone wrong, we wouldn’t be standing here.”

Yet, despite his confidence, every attempt failed.

However, Huang refused to surrender. He continued working tirelessly as his health faltered. His face paled, and he began coughing blood, haunted by the fear that his failure could erase an entire timeline.

Seeing his father’s decline, Oliver worked relentlessly to ease his burden. One night, after persuading Huang to rest, Oliver pored over the data alone. That’s when he spotted anomalies—figures that didn’t match Sapience’s records.

Then it hit him.

He raced to wake Huang, dragging him to the screen. “Dad! Look at this!”

Huang squinted at the numbers.

“What am I seeing?”

“Quantum states of the core particles before and after the jump you made,” Oliver said, breathless. “They’re different!”

“That’s impossible,” Huang said, leaning closer. “Is this accurate?”

“I ran it ten times with Sapience. It’s solid.”

The revelation struck like a thunderbolt. The particles’ quantum signatures didn’t align with a simple trip through their own timeline—they’d crossed into another universe entirely.

Huang tested the data again and again. By morning, he faced the truth.

“We didn’t travel back in time. We jumped universes.”

Oliver’s mind reeled. “So you didn’t discover time travelling?”

“Perhaps that’s not even possible,” Huang said, his voice low. “This universe mirrors ours but lags behind. We didn’t go backward—we went sideways.”

“Should we tell the queen?” Oliver asked.

“No,” Huang said, his expression darkening. “If Zenith learns this, she’ll try to conquer this world. No one will be strong enough to stop her. We need to get back to our universe.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Now that we know the problem, we can fix it,” Huang insisted. “We must.”

Before he could finish, a noise interrupted them—footsteps from behind, retreating fast. Oliver gave chase but found no trace of the intruder.

That night, someone had overheard them. And the secret they wanted to protect was no longer safe.

The threat was now real!