Chen Tao opened his eyes.
Time had restarted again.
This should be the 601st time.
He thought about it silently.
Perhaps he was about to begin another cycle of a hundred loops.
He had... he had been at it for quite some time.
He was trapped in this era, trapped in a future that he neither wanted nor dared to break through.
During the first hundred loops, you had been full of ambition, trying every possible way to solve the problem.
You had wanted to bypass the challenge the World Forger had set for you—that damned moral dilemma. Or perhaps you could find a way to move faster, avoiding a direct confrontation with the heroes altogether?
You could put your silver tongue to work, using words to convince those superheroes to obey your every command and defy the World Forger's intentions?
You wanted your teammates from the Dark Multiverse to disguise themselves as you and flee in all directions, distracting the heroes?
You wanted to use Clayface, to exhaust every method at your disposal. You thought this was merely a dispute between you and those heroes. You wanted to stand on the shore, pure and unstained, like before, with no blood on your hands. You still thought you were the protagonist of the era, the one who could ride the tides of Destiny, that you could "always have a choice," just as you had once claimed.
You had done things like that before, hadn't you?
Even though the Anti-Monitor called Earth-15 the source of all evil and claimed that incident was the root of every problem, you had never believed him. You had scoffed at the Anti-Monitor's account of Earth-15.
You had merely pretended to say things like, "You're right."
Creating the Earth-15 incident had been the greatest and proudest