"So many people would die." Noi hesitated.
"But don't those people erased by the reshaping of the timeline count as dead?"
Waldo questioned the members of the Time Bureau.
"They were living, breathing people. They had families, friends, minds of their own, and emotions."
"Just because you can't see blood or corpses, do you think you can rest easy and claim that isn't death?"
Waldo's questioning plunged Noi and the others into silence.
What was death?
It was the end of a life's existence, its erasure.
Killing someone with a knife was murder.
Erasing that person from the timeline and making them cease to exist was also murder.
Perhaps the latter was even more vicious than the former.
At least with the former, someone remembered that the dead had once existed in this world.
With the latter, even others' memories of the deceased vanished.
Every trace that they had ever existed was wiped away. How cruel was that?
"Stop being so hypocritical. Accept my lord's proposal."
Waldo looked around at the people of the Time Bureau.
"The number of people murdered by altering the timeline will be no less than those killed in war. What we must do is make the dead more valuable."
"Destroy Eternal Time-Space, preserve the Time Bureau, and give humanity a more glorious future."
Waldo's words swayed many members of the Time Bureau.
If they carried out Waldo's plan, the process would be crueler, but the Time Bureau would be preserved.
The original timeline and its technology would become the foundation for forging an entirely new future.
As long as they destroyed Eternal Time-Space and won this war across time.
Humanity would enter space in the twenty-fourth century and obtain technologies that had appeared in erased realities.
For example, large-scale matter replication, invented more than three