Time
Chapter eighteen: Time
Clank!
The sound of dishes clinking echoed through the kitchen as Caelum scrubbed a plate with visible disinterest, the soapy water swirling in the basin.
A cup bumped against a fork, a spoon slid into a bowl with a clatter, and somewhere behind all of that, Caelum let out a low groan.
"Tsk tsk. I have truly grown to hate doing this things now."
Caelum had somehow woken up early today. Which was Unintentional on his side.
By now he already had a decent breakfast—scrambled eggs on buttered toast, grilled tomatoes, and a slice of chicken with a drizzle of pesto. It was a surprisingly refined Italian-style breakfast, at least for someone who usually summoned only Indian or japanese style meals into existence.
But now after all those meal, he was back to reality. Back to scrubbing dishes like the mortal he was.
"I should definitely do something about these chores," he muttered, his expression contorting into one of pure annoyance as he rinsed the last plate. His sleeves were a little wet, and a rogue bubble had landed on his chin earlier. Though It was gone now, his pride was still stung.
After his labour work, caelum dried his hands on a towel with a bit too much energy, then tossed it onto the rack. With a sigh, he pushed the kitchen door until it was slightly ajar and made his way upstairs.
His steps were slow but steady, and as he reached the top floor, he walked into his room with a glance toward the clock on the wall.
10:55 AM.
"Well. It's still early," he said to himself with a small nod. The morning still had plenty of hours to offer.
Caelum turned his head toward the painting that hung quietly on the wall, the one depicting the endless cosmos where stars spun within it like a living canvas.
Lazily walking towards it, he raised a hand and placed it gently on the painting's cool surface.
"I think i should be able to return before midnight, with this much time left," he said under his breath, already focusing his willpower.
But just before he began channeling it fully, he paused and his brows raised slightly as he turned away from the painting.
"Oh—almost forgot about you," he chuckled.
His eyes settled on the quill, still resting silently on his table like a loyal old tool. It practically shimmered under the light, as if waiting patiently for him to remember its presence.
Caelum walked over, picked it up with a firm grip, and gave a quick flick of his wrist. "i would have ended up going inside empty-handed," he joked softly.
With the quill now in hand, he turned back to the painting and began channeling his willpower once more. His willpower pulsed faintly from his body, drawn into the painting's surface. The colors stirred. The cosmos rippled like water disturbed by a pebble.
A few seconds later, his form dissolved into streaks of light as he slowly vanished from this world entirely.
---
Caelum reappeared a moment later, standing in the middle of a pure white room—his fragile body was slowly reforming as if waking from a deep sleep. Barely any dizziness.
Caelum opened his eyes slowly and exhaled. "The transitions between both worlds are getting smoother and smoother with each hop."
He was astonished by how his body and mind were adapting to the transitions, as if it was natural "I'm getting used to this quite a bit now."
He took in the familiar surroundings. The room was medium-sized, but the blankness of the white walls made it feel infinite, like he stood in a clean void.
There were two windows, each on opposite sides of the room, both revealing the surreal cosmos outside. Stars and constellations danced slowly in the void, distant but impossibly clear to caelum's eyes.
He stretched his shoulders. "Hmm, maybe once the other things are done, I should expand this room a bit?" His voice bounced slightly off the white walls, lost in the stillness.
The silence here was different, it was way thicker, weighty and serene.
Caelum stepped forward, making no sound. His feet glided across the floor as he approached the long bronze table that sat squarely in the room's center. Carefully, he laid the quill down.
His gaze then drifted toward the corner near one of the windows, where an oval-shaped structure stood quietly, it was the World Stabilizer.
It pulsed faintly, the soft barely white hue from its crystalline window casting a gentle glow across the nearby wall. A low thrum radiated from it, like a dormant engine quietly at work.
Caelum walked toward it slowly, arms folded behind his back.
"There is still so much to do." Caelum looked intently at the world stabilizer.
'But thankfully as the first foundation, the stabilizer is holding strong.'
-----
--
Caelum stood before the World Stabilizer, gazing at it in quiet contemplation. The device pulsed faintly, an intricate mechanism of his own design, humming with a gentle rhythm.
He hovered his hand above it, allowing just a small trickle of willpower to flow into the structure. And as he did, the view of vision turned ethereal at once.
He closed his eyes, and in an instant, the entire world below unfolded before him.
Mountains stretched across vast lands, a few water bodies carved paths through lush forests, and the fake sky above shimmered with clouds that hadn't existed the day before. The wind rustled through endless grasslands but the grass didn't move, while a small river bank formed as if it was natural.
A world that had been a mere fragment just a day ago, not even the size of a full grown forest, was now breathing and expanding randomly without any predetermined path, just like a naturally formed world.
A flood of information crept into his mind, each detail more overwhelming than the last.
his brows furrowed as the sheer amount of information almost overloaded.
When Caelum opened his eyes, an unmistakable look of shock flashed across his face.
"I never thought it would be this big in such a short time already!"
His voice echoed slightly in the otherwise silent chamber. The sheer scale of expansion had caught him off guard. The world had grown far more than he had expected, adding the fact that it had been less than twenty-four hours since the establishment of the world stabilizer.
He pressed his lips into a thin line. "I did set it to expand faster than normal, but still…"
'it's still a monstrous growth!' caelum thought as he looked at the world stabilizer with a complicated look.
'Maybe i underestimated it? just because of how simple the functions were when i was defining it?' as his mind was thrown into quite a shock, a batch of new questions formed in his head and caelum had to revaluate the value of this world stabilizer.
The way he had designed the World Stabilizer was simple in theory but complex in execution.
It stored the willpower he provided and gradually used it to expand the world as naturally as possible. He had expected growth. But This was beyond his calculations, so the shock was natural.
"Phew." With a small sigh, he withdrew his hands from the stabilizer, letting the connection fade.
He turned away and walked toward the long bronze table in the center of the room, dragging out a chair and sinking into it with a groan.
"Leaving the stabilizer aside, Now the only thing left to work on is the fundamental rules." His fingers tapped against the table impatiently. "Ugh. But that's the hard part."
He reached for one of the notebooks stacked nearby and grabbed a pen, flipping it open with a reluctant expression.
'How do you create something as abstract as time?'
Caelum stared at the blank page, his thoughts running in wild directions, trying to grasp even the foundation of such a concept.
'A world without time wouldn't function properly, at best it would be chaotic and at worst it would be stagnant. But to construct time itself and make it flow?'
He sighed again and began writing, sketching rough ideas, theories, and diagrams.
-----
After a few minutes of drafting, caelum crashed out. "Agh, no. That won't work," he muttered, tearing the page out and tossing it onto the table.
Soon another idea popped up and another page was ripped out.
"This won't work either," he groaned, rubbing his temples. "I need to think differently."
For hours, he went through diagram after diagram, sketching rule structures, attempting to calculate stability factors, and discarding every failed attempt onto the ever-growing pile of crumpled pages.
Time, motion, gravity, balance—every system had to work together, or the world would collapse on itself. He couldn't afford a mistake.
He clenched his jaw, his fingers tightening around his pen. 'If i mess this up, the world itself could break when this is implemented.'
But as he was about to write another line of calculation his pen froze mid-stroke.
Caelum's eyes widened slightly as a new idea sparked to life.
"…Wait," he whispered, hurriedly grabbing a new page. His fingers moved swiftly, sketching out the rough framework of a solution, something that could be workable and stable.
A few Minutes passed, Then an hour and two. And finally.
"Yeah." Caelum leaned back, exhaling deeply. A triumphant smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
"This should work. No—I can't think of anything better than this."
He glanced at the quill resting nearby, a familiar flicker of hesitation crossing his face.
Creating something not physical with the quill felt dangerous to him.
It wasn't like drawing simple objects. If he made a mistake, it wouldn't just 'not work', it would break something fundamental within the world.
But at the same time…This had to work.
Because if he hesitated forever, the world would remain incomplete.
----
Caelum sat with the notebook open before him, making final adjustments. His eyes scanned the complex layout laid out across the pages, columns of rough calculations, diagrams of the world's structure, and a detailed sketch of the World Stabilizer, now modified with subtle but vital tweaks.
He tapped his pen lightly against the margin.
"Just a bit more..." he murmured, adding a final line near the bottom of the diagram.
A curved arrow wrapping around the world sketch, symbolizing the linear flow of time he hoped to generate.
It wasn't perfect. It probably wouldn't be for now, but it was enough.
Closing the book gently, Caelum exhaled and stood up. He reached for the quill resting quietly on the bronze table. Its feather shimmered faintly under the white light of the room.
With quill in hand, he walked back toward the World Stabilizer. The oval-shaped structure quietly waiting.
He stared at it, a few silent seconds passed before he braced himself.
"It's the only way I can think of, at least with the lowest rate of something going wrong," he muttered, squinting slightly at the glowing core.
His plan was simple on the surface, but buried within it was a calculation of complexity.
Rather than forcing the entire painting space to abide by the concept of time at once, a task far too immense for even his grown willpower—he would start on the areas that mattered the most.
He would use the World Stabilizer to create a linear flow of time, beginning in a single point within the world. One that would gradually expand outward, growing and evolving with the world itself. Like a tide, it would move with the rhythm of the world stabilizer's expansion of the world.
Because he didn't have to instill the law of time into every atom of space.
He just had to let it flow, gently, across the living parts of the world.
It was akin to how he let the world stabilizer expand the world area using his willpower as energy source.
"Okay." Taking a slow breath, caelum Raised the quill, pointing it towards the World Stabilizer.
The moment the tip neared its surface, a translucent glow shimmered over the device, as if it recognized its creator.
'Though i could never rewrite something i didn't create, altering my own inventions was natural, it's like breathing.' Caelum tried keeping his thoughts positive as he started redefining the world stabilizer.
The glow pulsed as the device responded to his will.
After a few seconds passed, the glow softened and faded into the structure.
Caelum stepped closer, now hovering his hands above the stabilizer. He could feel it responding.
Closing his eyes, he poured his willpower in. And the stabilizer absorbed it instantly.
He whispered softly. " please...work."
A pulse of translucent energy erupted from its center—an invisible wave of energy. Unlike the slow, careful waves of previous expansions, this one surged with precision.
It rippled through the white room, through the starry space outside, and cascaded down onto the world like a falling veil.
And the moment it touched the surface below.
A breath of wind suddenly swept through the trees that hadn't moved before. Clouds began to drift across the skies that once stood still. Water now flowed in rivers that had only existed as frozen forms.
Leaves rustled. Dust swirled. The sky seems to start its journey across the world.
The world moved and Caelum stood inside the white room with his eyes wide, it felt like he had flipped a switch and brought something monumental into motion.
"…It worked," he whispered. Then a short laugh escaped his lips—half disbelieving but surely half proud.
"It actually worked."
He let his shoulders drop, watching through the stabilizer's interface as the flow of a newborn law began to weave its way across his world.
Time came into being.