Star-Forged

The fifteenth cycle, the core laboratory of the Wizard Camp.

Outside, the roar of battle and surging energy fluctuations were sealed away by the heavy Protective Array, leaving only a low hum in the background.

Inside the laboratory, the lighting remained soft and constant, the air pristine. Only the faint hiss of active runes and the quiet sweep of data streams across light screens broke the stillness.

Benjamin was not focused on any particular experiment or data analysis before him, unlike the other wizards.

He sat alone at a circular workbench in one corner of the laboratory. Spread before him was not a research report, but a macro-level map of research threads and an overview of the war's progress spanning fifteen cycles, both compiled by his own hand.

Once every wizard had gained the ability of "Time Anchoring," and the vast research system could sustain itself without relying on him as its sole information hub, Benjamin was finally freed from the role of a firefighting squad.

He now had the breathing room to truly calm down and sort through everything that had happened over these long cycles as a genuine observer.

And the more he sorted through it, the clearer that sense of something being wrong became.

From the very beginning, I was never unique.

After piecing together every clue, that was the first thought to surface, stabbing into his mind like an icy needle.

Everything he had done—using the Internal Grotto-Heaven to preserve information, evolving through the Body Tempering Method to resist memory resets, driving the wizards to reverse-engineer the Sickle-Skull Race's memory mechanisms—were these things truly something only he could accomplish in principle?

No.

Benjamin knew very well that at least one person could certainly do them.

And do them better than he could.

That person was Artorius,