The Unexpected

So heavy. Even under the protection of "Anchor," the moment he stepped into the Flowing Gold River, a profound sense of helplessness still submerged Yaxiu's soul. It was not because the current was swift, nor because the water was heavy. In fact, Anchor truly lived up to its name, blocking every external factor that could affect him. In this state, Yaxiu could wade through mountains of flies and oceans of filth without a single speck of dirt clinging to him. Yet Anchor only blocked external effects from acting upon a sorcerer; it did nothing to shut off the channels through which a sorcerer received information from the outside world: the five senses. When one was too weak, an excess of information was also poison. Countless echoes stirred by the river waters, thousands of scenes mirrored in surging waves. Yaxiu seemed to hear the sighs of ten million living beings through birth, aging, illness, and death, and to see vast tapestries of life weaving across endless ages. Merely processing this overloaded sensory flood nearly caused his soul to seize up! With his capacity for information intake, digesting so much at once should have been completely impossible. It was like a failing student in math class: he could only absorb and comprehend the most basic concepts, while the advanced formulas sprawled across the blackboard remained entirely beyond his grasp and memory. Yet the current situation was as though the teacher were driving piles straight into the poor student's skull, forcefully jamming hundreds of gigabytes of study materials into his brain! Even with his eyes squeezed shut and his ears covered, he could still feel that what washed over him was not merely water, but the lifetimes of all living things. When he stroked his hands back to paddle, he brushed past the pasts of millions; when his feet kicked through the river, he inadvertently trampled the glorious history of an entire city. A sudden enlightenment dawned within him: the so-called time faction did not mean the existence of some abstract power known as "time"; rather, it was the flow of all living things that formed time. The very essence of time was flow. Every droplet of the Flowing Gold River originated in reality—perhaps a person, an immortal elf, or a mayfly that lived and died in a single day; or perhaps drifting clouds, motionless boulders, or wilting leaves. Once he understood this, Yaxiu found that while he was still bombarded by excessive information every single second, it no longer disrupted his thoughts. His mind's magnificent forgetting mechanism sprang to work, promptly tossing the newly crammed files into the recycle bin and shredding them completely. It truly lived up to its reputation as the most terrifying natural spectacle of the Time Continent; even Anchor could not fully shield a sorcerer... Just as Yaxiu was growing anxious about his operators, he looked up and saw that both of them were already swimming ahead of him. The Witch was swimming the fastest, followed by Sword Princess. No sorcerer was unable to swim; to meet the basic requirement of crossing the Sea of Knowledge, even a sorcerer born in a desert would become a master swimmer. Facing the river's information deluge, Yaxiu had needed a whole second to update his drivers, whereas Sword Princess and the Witch had adapted to the Flowing Gold River almost instantaneously. Yaxiu sighed inwardly. As expected of the elite genius sorcerers curated by *Aurora's Sorcerer Handbook*; an ordinary person like him really lagged far behind them. Yet they had only cleared the river's baseline threshold. The true danger was about to arrive. Anchor lasted for only five seconds. The moment Anchor wore off, the colossal weight of time nearly crushed the three of them! Yaxiu felt his stamina plummeting. His vision blurred as though captured through a landline phone's camera, his throat rasped like a broken fan as it dragged in fragmented breaths, and his thoughts seized up like a rusted, locked bolt. Although Yaxiu instantly re-entered the Anchor state, in those few brief breaths of exposure to the Flowing Gold River, he had aged by decades! It made sense. After all, merely drawing near the Flowing Gold River accelerated aging; now that they were swimming directly submerged in it, not dissolving on the spot was already thanks to the river slacking off. At the same time, because he was in the Anchor state, Yaxiu could not expend soul energy to restore his withered spirit body; he had no choice but to keep swimming. Although this stretch of the Flowing Gold River was not wide and seemed like it could be crossed with a quick burst of speed, Yaxiu reckoned he could withstand at most two or three more washes. If he did not escape quickly, he would literally be swallowed by the "tides of time." The Anchor from Two-Color Anchor had only a 20% trigger chance after all. Unless that chance could be raised to 100%, the Flowing Gold River remained a forbidden domain off-limits to the living! The Flowing Gold River held many time sorcery spirits. Seeing Yaxiu swim in so boldly, they perhaps took him for a new breed of spirit and flocked over to greet him. Among them, the rare sorcery spirits Yaxiu recognized numbered over a dozen, including the precious sorcery spirit "Listen to Tomorrow" that the Witch had lost in the cabin of lost memories. But he truly did not have the luxury to spare a hand to pick up loot; he could only struggle desperately onward. Perhaps because this section was merely a minor tributary, Yaxiu and the others quickly made it past the midpoint. When they were only a meter or two from the opposite bank, the five seconds expired, and Anchor deactivated once more. Yaxiu was already prepared to endure another scourging from time, but perhaps because the White Ox had wandered farther, the river's current abruptly surged. The churned waves splashed up several golden drops, one of which landed in Yaxiu's ear and slid into his soul as smoothly as milk. Even though Yaxiu re-entered the Anchor state on his very next breath, his ear exploded with noise. Only this time, what he heard was not the echo of someone else's life, but the echoes of his own soul! "What an ugly baby. Looks just like you." "No, he looks more like you. I was never this ugly." "I just gave birth, can't you humor me a bit? He clearly looks ugly like you!" "Excuse me, you two, all newborns look this ugly!" "Brother, why aren't ours the same size?" "Xiu, that's completely normal. Once you grow up, you'll... Σ(っ°Д°;)っ Fuck?! Wait! Why?!" "(*ω＼*) Shh, Xiu, quiet down. She's my classmate, she came over to study..." "Mom! Bro brought a girl home!" "What an ugly baby. Looks just like your dad." "Where are your manners? How could you insult my grandson like that? If you want to badmouth your brother, just say it straight!" "Yeah, exactly!" "I got an internship. If I'm lucky, I might just stay on with this company." "So, did you get a girlfriend?" "It's a mobile gaming company. Fourteen months of salary, year-end bonus, and they even provide a housing stipend..." "So, did you get a girlfriend?" "Can you ask about something else, for fuck's sake?" "How much have you lost on your mutual funds?" "...I didn't get a girlfriend." "I already told you there was no need to come back. Dad just pulled his back, I'm taking care of him." "Y-You stay back!" "What's wrong, Igola? Didn't you want to spar ten times in a row? Right now, you've won once, I've won once, that leaves eight more." "Cough, cough, haha, what a pity, Valkas. You were this close to dragging me down to the grave with you. Good thing the Executioner was faster than you... and good thing you're an elf despised by the populace!" "Freya, come with me. I need you." "A Veela... that race has almost vanished from the Gospel Country... Still, neither of you are even sorcerers, so how did you cross a Void Realm passage? Whatever. Starting today, you work for my Funeral Agency." Echoes stirred memories, and memories churned up emotions! His ears were inundated with these half-familiar voices. Yaxiu's mind was nearly shattered by the noise in an instant, his soul forcibly ensnared in the echoes of the past. He struggled just to keep himself from sinking, let alone swim forward! Years flowing as gold, a lifetime in an instant! Sword Princess seemed to notice that something had gone wrong with him. She fought her way back, trying to drag him along. Yet with that slight delay, five seconds flashed by, and the third scourging of the Flowing Gold River nearly withered the two of them into desiccated husks on their deathbeds! They had lost the ability to cross the Flowing Gold River. ... ... "Alafa Sennheiser," Denzel said. "You have an armor specialty talent. Go and try to drag them back." The named Heroic Spirit Commander nodded silently. Arming himself with his unit, he stepped into the Flowing Gold River zone. The river's temporal power was just as effective against Heroic Spirits, but a Heroic Spirit's armor reduction worked equally well against time. In the case of Commander Alafa, his stacked armor damage reduction reached an astonishing 95%. Although the soul power expenditure was immense, in specific situations it could produce a tactical turnaround capable of reversing the tides. Soon, Alafa returned to the legion, empty-handed. "They are not on the bank," Alafa explained. "Crossing the Flowing Gold River requires breaking through the time barrier. My time faction realm is insufficient." "The time barrier..." Denzel lightly bit her lower lip, a sense of powerlessness rising within her. She had maximized the resources at her disposal to the limit, yet inexplicably, those sorcerers possessed a special unit that resisted the Flowing Gold River. What was more, they could actually break through the time barrier and cross the river. The water was pure poison to sorcerers; only genius sorcerers capable of grasping the essence of time had any hope of touching or harnessing it. This was the so-called time barrier. Put simply, the time barrier was a mechanism that measured a sorcerer's ceiling. Only when a sorcerer possessed the potential to scale the legendary realm of the time faction was it possible to pass through it. Even if it was merely theoretical potential, for all three sorcerers to pass was utterly absurd. Then again, the fact that they could form a team and drive a sports car across the Time Continent was already ridiculous enough; by comparison, all of them being genius sorcerers seemed trivial. Unexpected turns, unexpected turns, unexpected turns... Even though this was only the first pursuit and there were many more Spider Tower rounds ahead—meaning these three sorcerers would definitely remain on the Time Continent for many turns—the mere one-sixth of a soul fragment Denzel possessed told her that the same trick would never work on them twice. *I'll have to use even dirtier means,* she thought.