Bai Ye offered no explanation as he looked at the bewildered Du Jingzhe.
He merely raised his hand slowly, and a dazzling golden light suddenly burst from his palm.
It was not a flood of brilliant light, but golden streams, strand after strand, beam after beam, spreading freely from his palm.
The beams seemed to slice the dim room into countless pieces, half gleaming gold, half thick as ink.
Light and darkness crisscrossed Bai Ye and Du Jingzhe, the boundaries between them sharp as knife cuts.
Du Jingzhe began to tremble involuntarily. In that moment, he felt as though he had seen his teacher's true self, a god who stood above space and time!
"This... this is..."
He stared fixedly at his teacher's palm. A gilded hourglass floated there silently, its sand like grains of gold, trickling down bit by bit. Each falling grain marked the passage of time.
"Time?!"
Du Jingzhe's mind reeled. Teacher is controlling time!?
He did not know what this was, but he felt as though he had seen time given physical form.
"Teacher, you..."
To his horror, he discovered that his voice was beginning to distort and stretch, along with his body.
Everything around him grew hazy and insubstantial. Only Bai Ye, standing at the center of the golden light, seemed eternally unchanging.
"Time... Loop."
Bai Ye's indifferent voice sounded like a divine decree.
Invisible fluctuations in time rippled outward from the hourglass, spreading in concentric waves.
The next instant, everything abruptly flowed backward!
Du Jingzhe retreated from the room in reverse.
The light outside the gaps in the window streamed backward. Light and shadow receded, faded, and rewound at a speed that defied all reason.
The world was like a film played in reverse, everything racing madly back toward yesterday.
Bai Ye stood motionless