Recaps

Benjamin completed a cross-system version of Li-Fire Extinction Divine Light and tested its powerful light-speed attacks, but discovered that charging time limited its use. He realized traditional Wizard Artifacts could solve the problem and began designing a launcher to carry the spell before his departure for the Samsara Plane.

• Benjamin completed a modified Li-Fire Extinction Divine Light model that combined wizard runes with cultivation talisman Seals.
• Benjamin tested the spell's light-speed beam, flexible coverage, and ability to damage Level 6 defensive shields.
• Benjamin recorded that the spell required at least half a second to charge and could not be fired rapidly.
• Benjamin recognized that traditional Wizard Artifacts could store charged spells and recharge them automatically.
• Benjamin began designing a Li-Fire Extinction Divine Light Launcher powered by a Level 5 Elemental Pool.

Benjamin completed three staffs that could store the Li-Fire Extinction Divine Light and chose a cautious, streamlined force for the expedition to the Samsara Plane. He arrived at the military assembly point with five thousand elite Black Giants, where thousands of wizards gathered and a Level 8 Archwizard appeared with two Level 7 wizards.

• Benjamin finished three staffs, each capable of storing and releasing one full-power Li-Fire Extinction Divine Light.
• Benjamin decided to bring Mount Magma and five thousand elite Black Giants, leaving the Black Giant Priests behind because he feared the time-reversal mechanism might affect his Internal Grotto-Heaven.
• Benjamin teleported to a Ship Plane serving as the military assembly point and observed that most of the arriving wizards were low-level newcomers.
• The gathering grew to around thirty thousand wizards, with fewer than ten Level 4 wizards among them, including Benjamin.
• A circular platform rose from the ground, and an elderly Level 8 Archwizard appeared with a Level 7 wizard on either side of him.

Artorius briefed the reinforcements on the Sickle-Skull Race’s repeated adaptations and assigned Benjamin to command the First Tactical Battalion. As the 138th cycle began, Benjamin led his battalion through the planar rift in an aggressive wedge formation.

• Artorius explained that the Sickle-Skull Race had learned the wizards’ tactics over more than a hundred cycles, so the high-level wizards would hold back and fresh battalions would be deployed in stages.
• Benjamin received command of the First Tactical Battalion, a thousand-wizard force with attached war puppets, summoning arrays, and other units.
• Benjamin watched the battlefield reverse in time, restoring the Sickle-Skull Race and the terrain to their initial state after the 137th cycle.
• Artorius announced the start of the 138th cycle and ordered the First Tactical Battalion to prepare for teleportation.
• Benjamin chose a wedge charge formation and led the battalion through the black rift.

Benjamin joined the wizard army as reinforcements and discovered that his Internal Grotto-Heaven preserved evidence of previous cycles, including missing Black Giants and used weapons. As the Sickle-Skull Race charged, Benjamin realized the enemy remembered the cycles too.

• Benjamin presented Star-Forged Artorius's order to Frost and received command of the 203rd through 207th formations.
• Benjamin found that half the Black Giant Legion was gone, three Li-Fire Extinction Divine Light Staffs had been used, and Recording Crystals held notes from earlier cycles.
• Benjamin sent one thousand Black Giants into the cannon fodder formations as the Sickle-Skull Race's massive army advanced.
• Frost ordered the wizard army to change its battle formation, but Benjamin saw the Sickle-Skull Race adjusting to counter the planned movements.
• Benjamin concluded that the Sickle-Skull Race remembered each cycle as the enemy began its charge.

The Sickle-Skull Race countered the Wizards’ standard attacks with precise evasions, energy absorption, and mental interference, inflicting heavy losses. Frost ordered the Wizards to abandon coordinated templates, and their unpredictable tactics disrupted the enemy as the black insect tide finally reached the expendable units.

• The Sickle-Skull Race dodged the Wizards’ opening volley, absorbed its energy, and fired beams that destroyed at least a million expendable units.
• The Sickle-Skull Race used precisely timed mental shocks to interrupt most Wizards’ spellcasting, while Benjamin released his Li-Fire Extinction Divine Light.
• Frost ordered the army to abandon standard tactics and fight freely in squads.
• Benjamin ordered the Black Giant Legion into Temporal Disorder mode and authorized devouring evolution as the Wizards adopted chaotic, unconventional attacks.
• The Sickle-Skull Race’s evasions and mental interference faltered, and the black insect tide slowed before crashing into the Wizard Legion’s expendable units.

Benjamin fought off a Sickle-Skull Race force equipped with counters tailored to his abilities, then broke their encirclement with his enhanced physical strength. The Wizards won the landing battle, but the enemy’s orderly retreat left Benjamin expecting a more dangerous next cycle.

• The Sickle-Skull Race used specialized devices to neutralize Benjamin’s Rune Artifact attacks, spatial wizardry, and the Black Giants’ abilities, while two warriors held Mount Magma at bay.
• Benjamin revealed the Li-Fire Extinction Divine Light Staff, confirmed that the enemy knew his previous-cycle tactics, then put it away and charged the weakest point in their encirclement.
• Benjamin broke through the formation with a body-tempered punch and attacked the Sickle-Skull Race warriors’ weak points, while a hidden attacker’s anti-magic spike failed to pierce his skin.
• Nearby Wizards and the Black Giants rallied to Benjamin, and they defeated the remaining Sickle-Skull Race warriors after more than ten minutes of fighting.
• The adjutant reported that the squad had lost 42 percent of its cannon-fodder units, seven Wizards had minor injuries, and none had died as Frost directed cleanup and the Sickle-Skull Race main force retreated in order.

Benjamin reviewed recordings from previous cycles to uncover the Sickle-Skull Race’s tactics and the dangers awaiting his forces. He learned that Light Transformation had been anticipated, leaving him to plan around an exposed escape method and an unknown cycle device.

• Benjamin examined recordings showing that Sickle-Skull Race Guard Insects emerged from underground fissures to ambush wizard squads.
• Benjamin reviewed intelligence suggesting the Sickle-Skull Race used guerrilla tactics and might also fear the cost of the time cycle.
• Benjamin discovered that a suspected cycle device was a trap that unleashed temporal turbulence and killed three wizards.
• Benjamin relived an encounter with a Level 8 Sickle-Skull Race creature, during which Iron Wall sacrificed himself so the squad could escape.
• Benjamin read a warning that the enemy had seen his Five-Skandha Rainbow Mirror's Light Transformation and might counter it next round.

Benjamin recorded a warning about his exposed physical strength for his next cycle, then brought intelligence from previous cycles to Frost and proposed cooperating with the military. Frost promised him access to research on the time loop and prepared the legion to use the enemy’s loop against them, leaving Benjamin to prepare for the next cycle’s battle.

• Benjamin engraved a warning about his exposed physical strength on Plate No. 3 and placed it beside Plate No. 2.
• Benjamin brought several dozen Recording Crystals to Frost, explaining that they contained information left by his previous-cycle self.
• Frost accepted Benjamin’s offer to cooperate and promised to seek him credit and qualification to study the time-loop ability.
• Frost reviewed the crystals, recognized the Sickle-Skull Race was exploiting the loop, and ordered a meeting for commanders of Level 6 and above.
• Benjamin declined to attend the meeting and left to prepare for the next cycle’s war.

Frost’s Wizard Legion ambushed and annihilated the Sickle-Skull Race army after anticipating its night raid and trapping it in a vast Composite Array. Benjamin recorded the battle and noted the enemy’s reliance on time-cycle foresight as a weakness, while the Wizard Legion suffered almost no losses.

• The Sickle-Skull Race commander led a night raid, using an Interference Array to shut down the Wizard Camp’s shields.
• The Sickle-Skull Race army entered the three-hundred-kilometer Composite Array, and the camp’s Illusion vanished to reveal the waiting Wizard Legion.
• Frost ordered the Wizard Legion to fire, and its prepared attacks and countermeasures overwhelmed the trapped Sickle-Skull Race forces.
• Benjamin watched from a protected platform, confirmed that all his Black Giants had been retrieved, and recorded the enemy’s tactics and weaknesses.
• The battle ended in less than an hour with the Sickle-Skull Race wiped out, fewer than five percent of the cannon-fodder units lost, and no wizard casualties.

Benjamin accepted Frost’s offer to archive battlefield records and research Sickle-Skull technology, gaining permission to study and experiment with the materials. As wizard teams exploited their intelligence to advance across enemy territory, Benjamin’s research uncovered links between Sickle-Skull metamorphosis and the time cycles, leading him to propose simulating the race’s information-transmission mechanism.

• Frost assigned Benjamin to preserve battlefield data and granted him access to study archived Sickle-Skull technology, then ordered Logistics Department wizards to begin the Reincarnation Decoding research program.
• Over the following month, Frost sent small wizard teams across Sickle-Skull territory to gather intelligence, and their rapid victories revealed that the enemy was abandoning outer strongholds and concentrating in key regions.
• At the research center, Benjamin and Allison examined a worker-bee variant and found that Sickle-Skull variants were controllable metamorphic forms of the same species, likely artificially created.
• Allison reported that a fluctuation called the Reincarnation Ripple accelerated larval development, suggesting Sickle-Skull growth was linked to the plane’s time cycles.
• Benjamin proposed that the mechanism controlling Sickle-Skull development might reveal how the enemy reversed time, and Allison agreed that they could attempt to simulate its information signals if they obtained more samples and computational resources.
• Benjamin offered to apply to Frost for the resources needed to investigate the simulation.

Benjamin realized that the wizard army had entered its fourth time cycle, while the Sickle-Skull Race neared defeat. He recovered information saved from the previous cycle and brought it to Frost, who had left it for himself.

• The wizards deployed targeted technologies that disrupted the Sickle-Skull Race's defenses, communications, and breeding grounds, allowing them to seize more than half its territory in under two months.
• Benjamin felt the plane's laws shift and was pulled into a new time cycle.
• Benjamin recognized that he had arrived with two thousand people as reinforcements, confirming that this was the fourth cycle.
• Benjamin found three numbered plaques and mountains of Recording Crystals in his Internal Grotto-Heaven, then reviewed a specially marked crystal containing his prior-cycle memories.
• Benjamin told Frost he had important information and gave him a Recording Crystal that Frost from the previous cycle had left for him.

Benjamin gave Frost the previous cycle’s intelligence, and Frost slowed the war to preserve research opportunities while the wizards studied the Sickle-Skull Race. After a year of breakthroughs, the Sickle-Skull Race launched an overwhelming assault on the Wizard Camp.

• Benjamin reviewed his previous-cycle records and gave Frost the Recording Crystals containing vital intelligence and research results.
• Frost ordered the Wizard Legion to slow its offensive and maintain controlled pressure on the Sickle-Skull Race so researchers could gather more data and specimens.
• The wizards advanced their research into the Sickle-Skull Race’s pheromone language, social structure, and time ripples, while Frost captured two Level 8 leaders alive.
• A year later, a global alarm announced that nearly one trillion Sickle-Skull Race troops, led by three Level 8 lifeforms, had breached the buffer zones and approached the main camp.

Benjamin and the Logistics Department wizards observed the Wizard Legion's battle against the Sickle-Skull Race as a chance to study the civilization and the time-reversal phenomenon. When the survivors neared the Samsara trigger threshold, Benjamin gathered the research instruments and data into his Internal Grotto-Heaven before the world reset, and the fifth cycle began.

• Benjamin and the Logistics Department wizards rushed to the front line with research equipment to observe the Sickle-Skull Race's all-out assault.
• Commander Frost authorized Observation Plan Three, and the Wizard Legion used specialized creatures, gene bombs, and targeted spells to devastate the Sickle-Skull army.
• Benjamin and the research teams recorded battlefield data, including the Sickle-Skull leaders' coordinated energy fluctuations and changes in the pheromone network.
• A monitoring wizard warned that the surviving Sickle-Skull Race members had fallen to the Samsara trigger threshold, so the researchers pushed their instruments to maximum sampling.
• As time reversal began, Benjamin pulled the research instruments, uncollected Recording Crystals, and nearby crystal tablets into his Internal Grotto-Heaven.
• The world reset, and the fifth cycle began.

Benjamin realized that his growing déjà vu came from memories surviving repeated time cycles, and that his Internal Grotto-Heaven preserved both information and objects across resets. He and the wizards began experiments on time paradoxes, but Frost said the Sickle-Skull Race had changed its tactics, making high-level specimens difficult to capture.

• Benjamin recognized that the repeated déjà vu was memory from past cycles and confirmed that his Internal Grotto-Heaven still held accumulated records.
• Frost discovered that supplies stored in Benjamin’s space had vanished from the reset timeline, and Benjamin explained the anomaly to the research group.
• Benjamin and the wizards designed experiments to store native matter, energy, and living samples in his space before a time reversal.
• Benjamin asked Frost for Level Eight Sickle-Skull Race specimens, but Frost explained that high-level members had gone into hiding after learning from previous cycles.
• Frost agreed to have combat units seek severely wounded or dying Level Six and Level Seven Sickle-Skull Race individuals for further experiments.

Benjamin and the wizards fought off an all-out Sickle-Skull Race assault while collecting specimens and testing how time reversal affected stored samples. As the fifth cycle ended, Benjamin preserved new instruments and Recording Crystals in his Internal Grotto-Heaven.

• The Sickle-Skull Race launched an early, aggressive attack, and Benjamin asked Frost to preserve high-level specimens for his experiments.
• The Sickle-Skull Race countered the wizards’ familiar defenses, but swarms of evolving Biochemical Beasts overwhelmed the enemy forces.
• Benjamin sorted and stored Sickle-Skull Race specimens by level, keeping whole bodies and body fragments in different locations for study across cycles.
• Five Level Eight leaders and more than a hundred Level Seven warriors attacked the Wizard Camp, but Frost and the Level Six wizards defeated them and secured valuable corpses.
• Benjamin collected Glory Carapace fragments from the Level Seven and Level Eight corpses and stored selected samples in his Internal Grotto-Heaven.
• As the fifth cycle began to reverse, Benjamin swept new instruments and Recording Crystals into his Internal Grotto-Heaven before darkness took him.

On the sixth passage through the spatial rift, Benjamin’s emerging memory anchor lets him anticipate events and preserve research from the previous cycle. His team confirms that foreign equipment was erased by the reset, then discovers that several fundamental properties of the plane have shifted slightly from the previous cycle’s baseline.

• Benjamin recalled fragments of earlier cycles and knew that this was the sixth cycle.
• Benjamin gave Frost a prepared summary, and the wizards defeated the expected Sickle-Skull Race ambush within half an hour.
• Benjamin, Allison, and the research wizards found that warehouse shortages matched the materials for two sets of instruments, confirming that the older set had been erased in the reset.
• Benjamin’s team compared current planar measurements with the previous cycle’s data and found consistent deviations in elemental abundance, void energy, spatial stability, and life-field activity.

Benjamin investigated whether time reversal or the wizards’ experiments were degrading the Samsara Plane and set out with Roland and Vivian to inspect locations where he had collected Sickle-Skull Race samples. They reached a deserted Sickle-Skull Race outpost, where Roland warned that remnants or automatic defenses might remain.

• Benjamin argued that more cycles of systematic monitoring were needed to determine whether time reversal and the wizards’ experiments were damaging the plane.
• Frost approved Benjamin’s investigation and assigned Roland and Vivian to accompany him, marking all three with warnings that could block an attack and alert Frost to their location.
• Benjamin chose a deserted Sickle-Skull Race city where the wizards had collected more than a thousand corpses in an earlier cycle.
• Benjamin, Roland, and Vivian traveled toward the city in secret, and Vivian noticed that space seemed unusually fragile along their route.
• The three reached the silent city at dusk, and Roland confirmed that the Sickle-Skull Race had withdrawn while cautioning that dangers could remain.

Benjamin, Roland, and Vivian raided a Sickle-Skull Race camp to investigate how time reversal affected samples removed during the previous cycle. Benjamin concluded that whole individuals isolated from the timeline were erased by a temporal paradox, and realized their corpses had been marked for erasure as soon as they left his Pocket Dimension.

• Vivian scouted the camp, and Roland shielded it before leading an assault that destroyed its defenses and restrained the surviving worker bees.
• Vivian and Benjamin killed the camp’s high-ranking Sickle-Skull Race members while Roland captured the commander and divided the remaining low-level members into cages.
• Benjamin identified a living combat-type member whose partial collection from the previous cycle had been fully restored without scars.
• The wizards confirmed that all fifty Sickle-Skull Race members Benjamin had stored whole were absent from the camp’s history and memories.
• Benjamin removed two preserved corpses of the missing members from his Pocket Dimension, and they vanished instantly upon entering the current plane.
• Benjamin reasoned that time reversal had erased the whole samples through a temporal paradox and realized the plane had already marked them for erasure.

Benjamin, Roland, and Vivian tested what caused objects and living beings to vanish when removed from the timeline, but an unexpectedly large Sickle-Skull Race legion forced them into battle. After Benjamin annihilated most of the army with four simultaneous beams of Li-Fire Extinction Divine Light, the three continued toward an Ash Crystal Ore valley while Benjamin reported the enemy’s unusual deployment to the main camp.

• Vivian and Roland compared the Sickle-Skull Race’s disappearance with that of stored instruments, and Benjamin chose to test native mineral samples at an Ash Crystal Ore valley.
• Vivian spotted a million-strong Sickle-Skull Race legion approaching, and Benjamin ordered Roland and Vivian to handle its high-level fighters while he cleared the main force.
• Roland bound five seventh-level leaders with Gravity Chains, and Vivian teleported creatures at level five or higher into the sky.
• Benjamin used four staffs to sweep a fan-shaped curtain of Li-Fire Extinction Divine Light across the legion’s main formation, annihilating nearly all of it.
• Roland and Vivian killed the remaining high-level Sickle-Skull Race fighters, and the three resumed their journey to the valley.
• Benjamin recorded the unexpected deployment and sent its details to the main camp through the Magic Network Terminal.

Benjamin, Vivian, and Roland tested how removing nonliving matter affected the timeline and concluded that the Sickle-Skull Race’s memories might be altered because it was a living civilization with a web of causality. An emergency warning forced them to abandon their investigation and race back to the main camp as the Sickle-Skull Race prepared a massive assault.

• Benjamin excavated the cliff at the recorded site and found a smooth gap that exactly matched the Ash Crystal Ore he had stored away.
• Vivian and Roland examined the gap and confirmed that the ore had vanished abruptly, leaving a physical void rather than being erased from the timeline as if it had never existed.
• Benjamin, Vivian, and Roland reasoned that the Sickle-Skull Race triggered memory correction because it was a living, socially connected civilization, while inanimate matter did not.
• Frost sent an emergency communiqué warning that the Sickle-Skull Race was moving to encircle the main camp and major forward bases ahead of schedule.
• Benjamin called off the investigation, and the three raced toward the main camp to report their findings.

Benjamin used the sixth cycle’s battle to verify how the Sickle-Skull Race’s apparent restoration and deletion worked, then carried the research records and memories into the seventh cycle. His checks showed that the plane’s earlier energy loss had come from experiments that partially removed Sickle-Skull individuals, not from time reversal itself.

• Frost ordered the wizards to delay the Sickle-Skull Race’s massive offensive while Benjamin gathered battlefield footage to study their Glory Carapaces and markings.
• Benjamin and the image-processing team confirmed that partially collected Sickle-Skull individuals had been restored whole, while individuals entirely removed from the timeline had no matching battlefield records.
• After half a month of fighting, Frost ordered the final clearing procedure as the Sickle-Skull forces approached the cycle’s critical threshold, and Benjamin saved the research materials in his Internal Grotto-Heaven before time reversed.
• Benjamin awoke in the seventh cycle with his memories of the sixth intact and led the preparations to begin again.
• Benjamin compared the plane’s constants against stored records and concluded that the previous cycle’s 0.3 percent energy decay came from the plane repairing partially collected Sickle-Skull individuals.

Frost and the Logistics Department sought a way to preserve research across cycles, and Benjamin proposed adapting the Sickle-Skull Race’s resistance to memory resets. Frost committed the Wizard Legion to aggressive raids to secure samples and five uninterrupted years for developing Memory Anchoring technology.

• Frost explained that the Sickle-Skull Race’s increasingly rapid offensives kept interrupting the wizards’ research before they could reach lasting breakthroughs.
• Benjamin proposed studying how the Sickle-Skull Race retained memories through cycles and using that knowledge to help wizards preserve crucial research.
• Allison and other specialists supported the idea, and a sixth-level wizard estimated that developing a testable Memory Anchoring prototype would require at least five uninterrupted years and a steady supply of high-ranking specimens.
• Frost ordered the Wizard Legion to abandon conservative attrition tactics and launch elite-unit raids to disrupt the enemy’s preparations and capture Sickle-Skull Race members.
• Frost accepted the expected casualties as the price of securing research time, and no wizard objected to the plan.

Frost’s wizards developed Time Anchoring, allowing the legion to carry memories and research across reincarnations and transform the war into an uninterrupted investigation. By the fifteenth cycle, they had uncovered nearly every surface mechanism but still found no evidence of the force that seemed to direct the time reversals.

• Master Moreas presented Phase I Memory Anchoring, and Frost ordered priority modifications for Logistics Department researchers and senior commanders.
• Over later cycles, the wizards refined the implant into Phase II and then developed Time Anchoring Wizardry, which let wizards preserve their full memories across resets.
• With memories and research carried forward, the legion fought more effectively while studying the Sickle-Skull Race and the plane’s time-reversal laws.
• The researchers determined that time reversal was tied to the plane’s laws, the Sickle-Skull Race’s population, and a civilization survival anxiety index, and they predicted future reversals.
• In the fifteenth cycle, Benjamin and Allison found that exhaustive investigations had produced no evidence of a hidden will, leaving the apparent intent behind the resets unexplained.

Benjamin realized that the wizards’ research into the Sickle-Skull Race had not reached the core of the time cycles and suspected Artorius had arranged their deployment to introduce more variables. Artorius appeared to Benjamin as a Mass Projection and confirmed that the reinforcements were meant to increase those variables.

• Benjamin reviewed fifteen cycles of research and concluded that the wizards had studied the Sickle-Skull Race and the effects of time reversal without reaching the cycles’ underlying mechanism.
• Benjamin reasoned that Artorius could likely have overcome the cycles’ memory effects himself but had instead sent limited reinforcements at regular intervals.
• Artorius answered Benjamin’s question about the reinforcements, saying their purpose was to increase the variables.
• Benjamin recognized Artorius and noticed the other wizards could not perceive him.
• Benjamin inferred that Artorius was a Mass Projection, and Artorius praised his knowledge and confirmed the identification.

Benjamin learned that the plane’s time reversals came from a Time Paradox Generator, and Artorius planned to overload it by flooding its limited processing capacity with new information and variables. Artorius revealed that he used only a projection because his true form had already been badly injured by the plane’s paradox defenses, leaving the plan dependent on the reinforcements entering in stages.

• Benjamin asked Artorius why he had projected himself into the plane and what he meant by increasing variables.
• Benjamin explained that the plane’s time reversals behaved like a preset war machine, and Artorius identified its core as a Time Paradox Generator that forcibly resolved causal contradictions.
• Artorius proposed overwhelming the machine’s error-correction systems by injecting more information and variables than it could process, using the Million-Strong Vanguard Legion as a baseline and thirty incoming support squads as major changes.
• Artorius said the machine could withstand roughly twenty-five significant tactical changes, while the squads and their resulting tactical shifts would create at least sixty information shocks.
• Benjamin asked why Artorius would not enter the plane himself, and Artorius explained that his true form could trigger an immediate, destructive paradox countermeasure.
• Artorius revealed that the plane had already injured him when he pulled the Legion out of a cycle, and warned that its time attacks could stack immense damage within a single moment.