In the blink of an eye, night turned back into day. With a thud, He-El plunged straight into the ocean. The surprise came too quickly, making him choke on a mouthful of seawater. He pulled through the water with both hands and kicked with his legs, surfacing at last.
Bright sunlight slanted down from the sky.
He-El had always had an excellent memory. Seeing the same sky as before, he identified the same location, the same angle of the sun, and the same constellations. He immediately knew that time had returned to the beginning once more.
"Time loop?" He-El floated on the ocean and looked around. Blue sea and blue sky stretched endlessly before him, the horizon meeting the sea in the distance. Nothing had changed from when he had first arrived in this world.
He-El narrowed his eyes slightly. As he swam toward the previous location, moving his arms and legs, he thought.
"Did it discover that I entered this universe?" He-El's expression darkened.
He suspected that his entry into this universe had been discovered, which was why this time loop had appeared—to make him repeat things endlessly until he died within the cycle.
After all, this was either a conscious universe or one controlled by some living being.
He-El guessed that the other party might only suspect that he had entered this universe, without being certain. That was why it had directly set up this prison of a time loop.
Within this prison of time, the events of the previous cycle would be repeated.
As long as the conscious universe—or the being controlling it—observed where events within the loop diverged from their previous course, it would naturally discover that he had entered the universe.
Of course, the butterfly effect could also occur, triggering enormous chain reactions throughout the