The second iteration of the loop proceeded exactly as the first.
Alden didn't panic. Panic was for people who didn't understand the rules of the game. He simply walked over to the wooden bench, standing a few feet away from the seated, violet-eyed girl, and began to watch the villagers.
"Are you just going to stand there, peasant?" the girl suddenly spoke. Her voice was smooth, cultured, and laced with her trademark, haughty arrogance. It was the first time she had spoken since they entered the domain.
Alden glanced down at her.
"You remember the previous loop."
"Obviously," she sneered, adjusting the dwarven blanket around her shoulders.
"A spiritual reset of this pathetic caliber cannot erase a soul of my density. But watching you stare at a baker for three hours yesterday was incredibly tedious. Are you going to solve this, or are we going to spend eternity in this repulsive, cheerful hamlet?"
Alden didn't take the bait. He just looked back at the village square.
"It's a soul stage," Alden murmured, speaking more to himself than to her. "Physical intervention means nothing here."
He needed to test that theory.
Alden walked directly into the path of the three children chasing the fluffy dog. He didn't move. The lead child, a boy with messy blonde hair, ran straight into Alden's legs.
Thud!
The child fell backward onto the cobblestones.
Alden waited for the reaction. Tears? Anger from a parent?
The boy sat on the ground for exactly two seconds. Then, his face twitched. A bizarre, static-like distortion rippled across the child's features. He stood up, completely ignoring Alden, reset his trajectory, and resumed laughing, chasing the dog as if he had never fallen.
Alden nodded slowly. The domain's script was absolute. It forcefully auto-corrected any physical deviations to maintain the stagnation.
'What about absolute destruction?' Alden wondered.
He uncrossed his arms. He didn't draw Vajra, but he reached inward, tapping into the dark-gold abyss of his Chaos core. Utilizing the Manual of the Abyssal Weaver, Alden effortlessly drew a thick, highly volatile thread of chaotic energy into his right palm.
He aimed at the baker's stall.
FWOOSH!
A localized blast of pure Chaos mana erupted from his hand. The dark-gold energy slammed into the wooden stall. It didn't just break the wood; it aggressively devoured the matter, erasing the stall, the bread, and the smiling baker from existence in a matter of seconds.
A large, perfectly smooth crater was left in the cobblestone.
The other villagers didn't scream. They didn't run. The blacksmith continued to hammer a sword. The children continued to play. They completely ignored the fact that a man had just been vaporized ten feet away from them.
Alden walked back to the bench, leaning against the oak tree.
"Violent," the girl commented dryly, not sounding the least bit disturbed. "But pointless."
Alden ignored her. He simply waited.
The day passed. The sun set. The lanterns flickered to life.
BONG… BONG… BONG…
The midnight bell chimed. The world glitched.
The sun was high. The smell of bread filled the air.
Alden looked to his left. The baker's stall was perfectly intact. The baker was laughing, handing a loaf of bread to the young woman. The crater was gone.
'Physical and elemental destruction are completely useless,' Alden confirmed, his crimson eye narrowing behind the mask.
'The domain doesn't care if I break the illusion, because the illusion is just a projection. The real cage is the spiritual anchor holding the projection together.'
He needed to find the anchor.
Alden closed his eye. He stopped looking at the village with his physical sight and shifted his perception entirely to his soul. He breathed in the rhythmic cadence of the Abyssal Weaver, expanding his spiritual awareness outward.
The world shifted from a sunlit village into a dark, sprawling web of pale, translucent threads.
Alden opened his eye, his vision now layered with spiritual sight.
Every villager, every building, every cobblestone was connected by thousands of microscopic, ethereal strings. The strings pulsed with a dull, stagnant energy, forcefully repeating the same loop over and over again.
Alden traced the threads. He followed the pale strings attached to the baker, the blacksmith, and the children.
They all converged toward the center of the village square.
Alden walked toward the wooden fountain. The water bubbled happily, completely normal to the naked eye. But through his spiritual sight, Alden saw the truth.
The fountain wasn't a fountain. It was a massive, tangled knot of spiritual threads. It was the absolute focal point of the domain—the anchor that was generating the time loop.
Sitting on the edge of the fountain, tossing small breadcrumbs to a flock of pigeons, was an old man.
Alden hadn't noticed him before because the old man was incredibly unassuming. He wore a simple grey tunic, his back hunched, his eyes milky white and blind.
But as Alden stared at him through his spiritual sight, he realized something crucial.
The old man wasn't connected to the threads. He was the one holding them.
Alden walked up to the old man, his boots silent against the stone.
"You're the anchor," Alden stated, his voice ringing with absolute certainty.
The old man didn't flinch. He slowly turned his head, his milky, blind eyes fixing perfectly on Alden's masked face.
The cheerful, bustling ambient noise of the village instantly muted. The laughing children froze mid-step. The baker froze with a loaf of bread in his hand. The entire world paused.
"You have eyes that see past the veil, traveler," the old man whispered. His voice didn't sound like a human's; it sounded like the grinding of ancient, heavy stones.
"Many have come before you. Kings. Arch-mages. Heroes with hearts of burning fire."
The old man smiled, a sad, hollow expression.
"They all raged. They struck the sky with their swords. They burned the village to ash," the old man continued.
"But you cannot burn a memory, traveler. You cannot stab an echo. They grew tired. Their souls grew heavy. And eventually... they sat down on that bench, and they became part of the peace."
Alden glanced back. The violet-eyed girl was watching the exchange intently, her arms crossed.
"I don't plan on sitting down," Alden said coldly.
"How do I break the loop?"
"You must Ascend," the old man replied, raising a frail, trembling hand and pointing a finger directly at Alden's chest.
"To break the stagnation, you must untie the knot of the Soul Sovereign. But be warned. The knot is made of comfort. If you try to tear it by force, it will strangle your spirit until you forget who you are."
The old man lowered his hand.
"Untie the threads, traveler. If you can."
The old man dissolved. He didn't turn to ash or teleport; he simply melted into a puddle of pale, spiritual energy that was instantly sucked into the wooden fountain.
The moment the old man vanished, the frozen village violently snapped back to life.
But it wasn't cheerful anymore.
The sky turned a bruised, bleeding red. The warm sunlight rotted into a sickly, oppressive gloom.
The villagers slowly turned their heads. The baker, the blacksmith, the children—their faces melted away, revealing featureless, hollow masks of pure, screaming spiritual agony.
They had stopped repeating their daily tasks.
Now, every single entity in the village was staring directly at Alden.
"Stay with us," the hollow villagers whispered in unison, their voices overlapping into a terrifying, dissonant chorus that physically scraped against Alden's mind.
"Rest. The world outside is cruel. Stay in the peace."
Alden slowly drew his hand back.
"I hate peace," Alden muttered beneath his mask.
The hollow villagers shrieked and lunged.