Return to the Timeline

"...It's over?"

When Benjamin came back to his senses, he found himself still standing where he had been in the Consciousness Space. Hardly any time seemed to have passed. The system's shrieks still rang in his ears, as though it had never stopped.

He looked ahead—and, in that instant, he could still see the halo that had caused it all.

The halo had not vanished. It hovered there, seeming to have only just swallowed the Soulheart. But now, that terrifying suction had completely disappeared. The Jesters tumbled down one after another, rolling across the ground. Their shapes had not even fully recovered yet; they were flattened like footballs, taking quite a while to slowly puff back up.

Benjamin felt as though he had awakened from a dream.

The conversation between him and the phantom just now... had not even taken a second in reality?

Though he had already been mentally prepared, personally experiencing that sense of time being severed still felt utterly unbelievable.

Thinking back on what had been said, Benjamin still felt that it was too much information to take in. Elements... were actually creatures from higher-dimensional planes? It was an unprecedented claim, far beyond anything he had imagined, and it overturned every existing study in the world of magic.

When he thought about how the fundamental particles composing magic during his usual spellcasting were actually a group of higher-order life forms, Benjamin could not help feeling that something was strange about it.

But, as the phantom had said, he could not use human thinking to measure their concepts.

It was somewhat regrettable that Benjamin had wanted to ask the phantom how he could become stronger, as well as about the connection between The Church and the Elemental Plane. Yet the phantom had not given him enough time before