Flipping Back and Forth

Just like last time, the surroundings suddenly changed without any warning, so smoothly that time seemed to have skipped ahead and space shifted along with it.

Fortunately, Julia and Benia had not been lost this time. They were still with Roy.

The three of them had suddenly appeared in pitch-black outer space. Julia and Benia were capable of surviving in space, so neither panicked. They curiously looked around and discovered a massive star shining in the distance, with several planets slowly orbiting around it.

"Time skipped, but where were we teleported to?" Julia asked Roy through soul transmission, curiosity filling her voice. "This looked like some kind of star system..."

"We'll find out soon enough..." Roy did not know where they were either, but based on the previous experience, he opened the System Panel and prepared to check the changes in his strength so he could determine how much time had passed during this jump.

Yet this was where things became strange. After waiting for quite some time, none of the values on his panel changed at all. The expected surge in strength never came.

What was going on? Roy was immediately somewhat baffled. After carefully considering it where he stood for a while, he arrived at a seemingly reasonable conclusion: this time, the temporal jump might not have moved forward at all. Time might have remained in place, or it might even have gone backward.

That was entirely possible. Back then, Roy and the others had been swept into the temporal turbulence stirred up by Murozond. That turbulence had sent them to ancient times, after which they experienced another forward shift in time. But there was no evidence that the temporal turbulence could not send them back to even earlier ancient times again. In short, this temporal turbulence might