Chapter 194

Even if all myths were extinguished before their birth, those powerful spirits would still reside in well-known stories, novels, and even rumors, and their fighting power would not be weaker than that of gods just because the object they reside in is an urban legend.

Is Bloody Mary necessarily no match for Michael? In other worlds, in worlds where gods truly existed, perhaps that would be the case. But in this world, the latter isn't necessarily stronger than the former.

Therefore, directly extinguishing all the sources of mythology in the past is a foolish and short-sighted act. The correct approach is to participate in their creation. This allows them to inherit the modified flaws at the very moment they acquire the vessel of legend.

So, let's go back in time.

Let's rewind to the moment these famous fairy tales, stories, and urban legends were born. And then...

Change everything.

Miss Surtr opened her eyes. Before her lay an early 17th-century Western European city—gentlemen in top hats and ladies in flowing gowns rode in carriages along the compacted cobblestone streets. She saw rows of Gothic-style buildings with pointed roofs, while workers and citizens bustled about on both sides of the road.

In 1822, in Copenhagen, Denmark —she instantly grasped the time and space of this region. And after she appeared, many people were slightly moved by the sight of her attire from her afterlife.

Athena has disappeared.

—But the authority to manipulate time is still in my hands... So that's how it is. So I have to pay the price for revising the past? Is this how you intend to kill me?

—Well, you're underestimating me, native god.

Miss Surtr snapped her fingers. Just as she was about to cast the spell, she discovered that the slight incongruity about her had already silently vanished. The passersby and police officers who had initially noticed her unusual demeanor and strange attire forgot this insignificant detail in the instant their curiosity was piqued—they were only briefly stunned before returning to their posts, forgetting everything that had happened a few seconds earlier.

"Interesting, but it's normal," Miss Surtr said calmly. She sensed a corrective force that was working to smooth out the light and shadow reflected when she first appeared, as well as the sound waves and particle turbulence caused by her speech, returning them all to their original order.

This should perhaps be called the inertia of history, the natural erosion of time. Miss Surtr could clearly feel that every atmospheric particle disturbed by her every action returned to its 'original place' under the influence of this inexplicable corrective force. And this prevented the possibility of the butterfly effect occurring in the future.

This is very common.

Changing the past is never a trivial matter. Miss Surtr has done similar things in many worlds. And so far, apart from Persephone's time reversal in Terra, almost no world has seen alterations to the past without facing enormous resistance.

Sometimes, Miss Surtr even believed that Persephone's save-loading was true time travel, completely reverting the state of the entire single universe to a specified point in time, rather than a pseudo-time travel such as Worldline Correction, individual time travel, or regional time reversal. Because in most cases, including the Flame of Burning Time she used on Terra, the manipulation of time she witnessed was primarily the latter three.

She was very familiar with the latter three. But she always felt that the first one was really absurd.

So...

—Which type of time manipulation did Athena use?

Miss Surtr looked down and saw a poor ant. She raised her fingertips and moved the ant from her left foot to her right.

The corrective force then activated. First, a slightly faster carriage passed by, creating a gust of wind. The ant was then swept up by the wind and landed back where it should have been at this point in time. The carriage's speed was also compensated for by slowing down, and this slowed wind, along with the subtle air currents disturbed by the changes in the walking speed of the surrounding pedestrians, precisely placed all atmospheric particles back in their historical positions at this point in time.

Time taken... sixteen and a half seconds.

—Hmm...the repair methods are rather inflexible. So...

She snapped her fingers, and a road sign beside the road suddenly cracked and fell over. Pedestrians cried out in panic, and passing carriages yanked their reins before crashing into it. The horses neighed, and a small commotion ensued in the city.

The next moment, she saw a knight, concealing his identity, approach and silently straighten the road sign, pressing it back into place. Simultaneously, he used a concealed spell to repair the metal fatigue and the fine cracks within the sign's material—before leaving, the knight cast a calming regional suggestion spell. After he walked away, his energy circulation seemed to have temporarily broken through, so that the additional costs of these spells were completely replenished within seconds.

Six minutes—that's how long it takes for the corrective force to complete its work. Compared to an ant, the impact of a road sign is quite significant.

The girl then obtained the data she wanted. After acquiring this data, her gaze turned to the knight who was walking away into the distance.

He was just an ordinary knight—his past was only a fleeting glimpse in Miss Surtr's memory. She quickly learned that this guy was nothing more than a mediocre member of the Denmark Magic Society, routinely patrolling the streets and exterminating small monsters, with neither a remarkable personality nor any particular talent. Considering this knight's past experiences, the possibility of him casually doing a good deed like today without leaving his name... was practically zero.

It's obvious that the knight did this because he suddenly remembered something good a few seconds earlier, which put him in a good mood. And it was precisely because of this good mood that he corrected this minor mishap, naturally storing it in his short-term memory and quickly forgetting about it.

—As expected, I am not within the scope of the world's original operating mechanism.

—It couldn't assign me a knight who was inherently impartial to handle the repair process naturally and flawlessly. This shows that the corrective force is truly just historical inertia, a natural phenomenon, and lacks the intelligence to detect anomalies and prioritize the elimination of anomalies.

Miss Surtr, she thought. She was now certain that this river of time in this world was a river without intelligence. Because what she had just done was equivalent to lifting a pebble from the riverbed and pressing it down with her fingertip—and if the river possessed simple intelligence, it would throw out a crab to pinch the hand holding the pebble, rather than simply washing it away with water, thus returning the pebble to its original depths in the riverbed.

—This should be Worldline Correction.

—I didn't actually go back in time; I was simply standing in the 'present' and examining the 'past'. And changing the form of the past is like modifying the content that has already rolled past while playing the latest scene of a video.

She blinked, and the world unfolded before her eyes in layers—having discerned the form of this manipulation of time, the secrets hidden behind the scenes naturally came into view.

She saw two different worlds: one was Copenhagen, Denmark in 1822; the other was the battlefield of the gods two thousand years later, deep within the realm of Olympus —the former vibrant and dynamic, the latter static and unchanging.

In the past, it was still in operation.

Now, there is stagnation.

Athena's time manipulation essentially involves extracting the caster's sense of time from the 'present' and using it to view or modify the 'past'. This means that any changes made to the past will be immediately reflected in the present.

After all, Worldline Correction is a pseudo-time reversal. Its manifestation is merely standing in the present and altering the past. So...

Miss Surtr, in the 'present', shuddered, regaining her mobility at the 'present' point in time. She looked at Athena before her, appearing as if thousands of shadows had merged together, superimposed on each other. She saw the God Slayer Aisha lying on the temple floor, uncared for.

So she beckoned and grabbed Athena and Aisha in her palm.

Then she left the realm of the gods in Olympus and returned to the mortal world.

She saw that nothing had changed; she saw the Twilight Flame covering the fields.

So she moved on, slowly and deliberately, from Rome, located on the Mediterranean coast, to the streets of Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, one of the Nordic countries.

She didn't see any Norse gods here. But she did see monsters from Andersen's fairy tales. She saw toy soldiers covered in eyes burning and killing in the streets, fighting with knights and gaining the upper hand. She saw Sleeping Beauty drop a poisoned spindle from her hand, and half the block was shrouded in a poisonous fog.

They are not gods; they are just fairy tales, just urban legends. And it is precisely because they are not powerful that they were able to descend before the gods who reside in the Mythical Realm.

She saw several Great Knight besieging the Snow Queen, and Pinocchio turning panicked citizens into lifeless puppets. An hour ago, the only thing she could have done here was to incinerate everything with the Twilight Flame and resurrect the souls of the dead before they reached the corrupted underworld. But now...

"I roughly understand what I should do."

Miss Surtr's gaze returned to Denmark in 1822. As her eyes swept across the street, a young student who looked very young, with a youthful but unassuming face, caught her eye.

So she walked over to the young student who seemed so confident that he didn't even know where he was going, and patted him on the shoulder.

As he patted the young man's shoulder, a silent flame surged into his body.

"Hello, are you Mr. Andersen?"

The young man was taken aback at first, his gaze shifting between focus and aimlessness as he looked at Miss Surtr. It wasn't until that wisp of flame seeped into his optic nerve, forcibly inserting this power that didn't belong to this point in time and compelling history to acknowledge this change, that he was able to see Surtr with his own eyes. Then, he immediately blushed at the young man's shyness.

"Yes... yes! I Andersen Hans Christian Andersen... this beautiful lady. Is there anything I can do for you?"

He seemed to want to give her a kiss on the hand, but Miss Surtr had long white gloves on her hands without any apparent incongruity and showed no intention of taking them off, so the naive young man was left standing there awkwardly.

And at the same time... or rather, not at the same time. When he spoke to Miss Surtr, in modern Denmark, Copenhagen, the entire city, all the damaged and affected parts, along with those fairytale creations of the present world, all fell into stillness at the same instant, and were in an unstable superposition state.

—Ah, I knew it.