Chapter 6: That’s Not How Time Works

Ye Zhen stared at the mission scroll like it had personally offended him.

Target: Subjugate a [Spine-Tail Beast] nest in the outer fringes of the Broken Mirror Ruins.Location: Temporal Fault Zone 9-B.Objective: Destroy the core beast.Team: Squad Twelve – Ye Zhen, Qin Ping, Zhao Fei, Mu Yan, and Lei Chao.Escort Elder: None assigned.Risk Rating: "Moderate."Reward: 120 contribution points + one Flame Essence Pill (if claimed alive).

Ye Zhen glanced at Qin Ping, who was stuffing dried peaches into his mouth.

"What part of that screams moderate to you?"

"I think 'moderate' is sect-speak for 'it probably won't kill everyone… at once,'" Qin Ping replied, muffled by peaches.

The team assembled at dawn at the outer transport platform. The Broken Mirror Ruins floated far beyond the Cloudveil Sect's mountain range an old battleground cracked by space-time damage. The place constantly shifted, warped, and looped back on itself.

Perfect for monsters.

Terrible for sense of direction.

Their squad leader, Zhao Fei, was a straight-laced Earth Root cultivator with a square jaw and a stick somewhere high up his spine. He eyed Ye Zhen like someone evaluating mold on spiritual fruit.

"Are you even a cultivator yet?" he asked.

"Not sure," Ye Zhen replied. "Does surviving count?"

Mu Yan, a quiet girl with an affinity for water talismans, offered a polite nod. She wore a crescent-shaped pendant and always smelled faintly of pine.

Lei Chao, a smirking twin-saber cultivator, clearly thought he was the protagonist. He scoffed openly.

"Hope you're good at running, Broken Heaven trash."

Ye Zhen yawned.

"Hope you're good at dying loudly. I like to sleep through fights."

They arrived via sect teleport array, materializing in the heart of a fog-shrouded wasteland.

The Broken Mirror Ruins stretched in every direction splintered ground, hovering boulders, and shattered towers locked mid-collapse. Some rocks floated upward. A few hovered, vibrating as if caught between moments. Time wasn't broken here—it was glitching.

"Stay close," Zhao Fei ordered. "Stick to the blue thread lines on the ground. The array maps mark safe time flow."

"Time flow?" Ye Zhen muttered.

"Time is unstable here," Mu Yan whispered. "Walk off the path and… things can happen."

Things happened.

Hard.

Three hours in, while tracking beast trails, Lei Chao too cool to follow the team stepped two paces off the thread line.

"Relax. There's nothing.."

He froze mid-sentence.

Literally.

Ye Zhen turned and saw Lei Chao stuck mid-step, his body vibrating like a flickering candle. His breath halted. His eyes widened—but didn't move.

"He's in a stasis pocket!" Qin Ping gasped.

"Can we pull him out?" Mu Yan asked, alarmed.

Zhao Fei shook his head. "It'll dissipate in about an hour… or a day. Maybe a week. Time doesn't flow properly here."

Ye Zhen walked up to the frozen Lei Chao.

Paused.

Then slapped him across the face.

"What are you doing!?" Zhao Fei barked.

"Testing a theory," Ye Zhen said.

Nothing happened.

Until the moment Ye Zhen stepped into the same time ripple.

Then everything hit at once.

Time fractured.

Light bent.

Sound reversed.

The world turned into a spiral of ticking clocks, broken shadows, and a mirror of himself lunging out of thin air.

"Ye Zhen… you're not supposed to exist."

"Screw that," he muttered.

He thrust his palm into the mirror version's chest.

BOOM.

A glyph lit up beneath his feet: a coiling, spiraling sigil made of gold and black, pulsing in reverse.

The Reversed Fate Array.

A massive pulse of distortion rippled outward. The time ripple shattered like glass, and everything snapped back to normal.

Lei Chao crumpled to the ground, coughing.

Everyone stared.

"You… disrupted the fault?" Zhao Fei whispered.

Ye Zhen dusted off his sleeves.

"I slapped time," he said. "It flinched."

Later, at the temporary camp, Zhao Fei wrote a panicked report to the sect.

Mu Yan studied Ye Zhen from behind her pendant.

Qin Ping offered him more dried peaches.

Lei Chao avoided eye contact.

Ye Zhen leaned back against a broken pillar and looked up at the sky, where the sun blinked twice before settling into one position.

"This place is broken," he muttered.

"So I guess it's perfect for me."