Nightingale pondered for a moment before finally asking in confusion,
"If, as you say, he truly comes from the future, then I can understand everything he's done. But if he comes from the past, what is the meaning of all this? The past is already fixed. It is history, and history cannot be changed."
Her question stirred even deeper ripples in Sagres's mind.
It touched upon a fundamental issue that, as a transmigrator, he had never been able to escape, and now it had become especially sharp.
In his original world, in the story of Harry Potter, had there ever been a character called Sagres Greengrass?
Perhaps his name had appeared somewhere obscure, but he could never have been a central figure standing at the pinnacle of the magical world, hunting Voldemort, destroying goblin strongholds, and confronting an enemy from time itself.
Then wasn't his arrival the greatest alteration to the original timeline?
The thought gave him a strange sense of detachment.
Was the world before him a genuine reality born from the story he once knew, or had his existence as a variable subtly twisted it away from its predetermined course?
If he had never existed in the original story, then perhaps everything he had done had already pushed the future onto an entirely unknown path.
Could that very future be the catastrophe the mysterious goblin leader had sought to escape, to the point of reversing time itself?
"If I had never existed..."
Sagres muttered quietly.
Then perhaps the original goblins would not have become so aggressive, would never have mastered these twisted bloodline magics, and would never have harboured such deep hatred towards me.
Was it something I did in the future that provoked them and drove them to such extremes?
Did I... perhaps even create the very leader who was determined to travel back in time?
Yet he had never intended to exterminate the goblins.
His goal had always been magic and knowledge themselves, not meaningless slaughter.
So what had caused the future to change?
An irreconcilable conflict?
A war started by the goblins?
Or some misunderstanding, some inevitable opposition?
Or perhaps...
He had been thinking in entirely the wrong direction.
An even more disturbing possibility surfaced in his mind.
Perhaps his existence and actions had not altered the original plot at all.
Perhaps they had always been part of it.
Perhaps abnormal goblin activities had always existed in the true story.
Perhaps a powerful enemy really had emerged from a fracture in time.
And perhaps a wizard named Sagres Greengrass had indeed dealt with these crises in secret, but none of it had ever been recorded in the surface-level story witnessed by Harry Potter.
Everything he had done was not changing history.
It was preserving the normal operation of that predetermined, hidden timeline.
Then did the goblin leader's words, "There's no going back," mean that Sagres's success in the present had caused the enemy's timeline itself to collapse?
Countless possibilities surged through his mind like thousands of intertwining timelines.
They collided, shattered, and reformed.
Every hypothesis branched into countless others.
Every question led into even deeper fog.
He had no answers.
But regardless of which possibility was true, or whether the truth was something he had yet to imagine, he could only continue forward.
The enemy from time believed that no consequence could be worse than the future he sought to escape.
That desperate conviction alone was the most dangerous warning.
And the fact that the enemy had been unable to strike him during his childhood was perhaps his only slight advantage.
No matter what the original plot looked like, Sagres suppressed his chaotic thoughts and forced himself back to reality, at least the current plot remains under my control. The future that leader fears may very well be born from his own actions at this moment.
He looked at Nightingale, his eyes regaining their usual calm.
He no longer obsessed over whether he was a variable.
Instead, he understood that he had to become the constant.
Since that was the case...
Sagres unconsciously tapped his fingertips against the rough wooden pillar beside him.
The noise of the fair gradually faded from his ears, leaving only the tide of thoughts surging within his mind.
Nightingale stood quietly beside him like a silent sentinel, giving him the space he needed to think.
"If... he truly comes from the future," Sagres said softly, more to himself than to her, "then his greatest weapon is not those crude bloodline magics or alchemical creations."
"It's information."
"He knows what I do not."
"He knows the choices I will make in the future. He knows the weaknesses of my power. He knows whom I will trust and what I will overlook."
"He might even know that at some specific moment in the future, I will appear in some specific place."
The thought wrapped itself around his spine like an icy serpent, sending a chill slowly creeping through him.
An enemy who knew every step of his future was almost invincible.
With such knowledge, the enemy could easily construct deadly traps that he, with his present understanding, would never be able to perceive.
"Imagine," he said, turning to Nightingale, a cold glint flashing in his grey eyes, "he could use a magical inheritance that I am destined to pursue in the future as bait, and surround it with curses designed specifically for my magical habits. Or he could launch a precise and lethal strike during some unavoidable moment of weakness."
Even more frightening was the manipulation of human hearts.
"He might even contact those... people I will trust or work with in the future. Through deception or manipulation, he could turn them into blades directed against me without their knowledge. And before everything unfolds, I would have no way of seeing through it."
Such an enemy was almost impossible to defend against through conventional means.
How could one guard against traps built upon decisions one had not even made yet?
There was one thought he left unspoken.
Had all of this already begun?
Silence settled over the two.
Sagres's gaze drifted across Nightingale's tranquil face before finally coming to rest upon the lively crowd in the distance.
Laughing merchants.
Curious tourists.
Wizards maintaining order.
To his eyes, murderous intent could be hidden beneath any of those vivid expressions.
The doubts he had kept buried began to take root.
If an enemy from beyond time could spend years laying plans, then perhaps deadly pieces had already been planted within the network of relationships he had built.
Could someone he trusted already be carrying instructions from the future, waiting for the perfect moment to strike?
And who, then, could truly be trusted?
Harry Potter probably counted.
After all, the essence of a saviour was almost impossible to counterfeit.
As for everyone else, even the silent Nightingale standing beside him, he marked them with a question mark.
At the same time, an almost absurd thought quietly emerged.
If even Harry Potter's identity as the "righteous side" came from his perspective as a reader from another world, then what about himself?
In this real magical world, what role was Sagres Greengrass actually playing?
He forced himself to view his actions from the past hour through the eyes of an outsider.
Tracking.
Infiltration.
Legilimency.
Merciless executions.
Triggering a volcanic eruption without hesitation to erase an entire stronghold.
There seemed to be no essential difference between these methods and those he condemned as evil.
The only distinction was that the targets happened to be his enemies.
"If I am the villain..."
The thought spread like a drop of ink in clear water.
Then do the actions of the goblin leader from the future possess a certain legitimacy?
Is he reversing time and trying to kill me at any cost in order to prevent an age of darkness, one far worse than Voldemort, brought about by me?
His mind raced uncontrollably, constructing one dreadful possibility after another.
Perhaps, in the original timeline, without him as a variable, Harry Potter would eventually defeat Voldemort and bring peace to the magical world.
But his appearance, his knowledge, his ambitions, or merely his existence itself, had been like a massive stone cast into the river of fate, creating destructive ripples.
Perhaps, at some point in the future, in pursuit of greater power or some extreme ideal, he had committed acts more terrifying than anything Voldemort had ever done.
Perhaps he had created a catastrophe so unbearable that the goblin leader had chosen to challenge time itself.
"Power is not a gift, but a price..."
The leader's words echoed once more in his ears.
Could this be the creed of a future Sagres who had become a villain?
And did the words "it couldn't be worse than before" imply that the world ruled by him had become a true and irretrievable hell?
For the briefest moment, a crack appeared in his icy heart.
Then it froze over once more.
Now was not the time for self-doubt.
Whether his future self was good or evil, there was only one path before him.
To uncover the truth.
"Good and evil are meaningless labels," he coldly warned himself.
Even if I truly become a villain in some future, it will be by my own will and my own choices, not because I stumbled in ignorance towards an ending predetermined by an avenger from the future.
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