I heard excited talking around me. It took me a moment to understand that the three dragons were talking to me, but I still couldn’t understand them.

  When they noticed I wasn’t answering back, they got confused. They asked me something else, but I didn’t answer. The black one rolled its eyes and started speaking to me.

  “I can’t understand you,” I eventually said. I didn’t know if they couldn’t get a hint or what, but maybe, with me speaking a different language out loud, they would understand.

  …

  No, they kept talking with me, even after repeating myself. I could see in their expressions that they were getting more and more frustrated the longer I didn’t answer their questions correctly.

  Eventually, the black one said something to the other two, and they agreed. They walked off, towards the barriered portion of the room.

  The moment each one of them entered, that part of the room changed.

  The black one’s part dimmed, and rock formations rose in several parts, forming a cascading shadow that covered 90% of his area. The moment he entered one of those shadows, he disappeared.

  The white-blue one’s part visibly froze, and snow started to fall from out of nowhere until it settled down as a thick snow sheet.

  The gray one’s changed into something strange. I saw the ground break down and turn into a gray dust, with some of it floating away the moment the gray dragon placed its paws on the ground for the first time since I saw it. I could barely feel how the gravity was turned down a lot due to the barrier.

  After every one of them entered their barriered spaces, they just lay down and stared at me from a distance. I was honestly confused about what kind of room this should be.

  Is this a recreational room of some sort? That would explain the massive floating obstacle course, the giant pool with giant waterfalls, and… whatever those barriered spaces were.

  There were two more spaces with no dragon inside. I approached one of them and turned to look at the other dragons, who kept just staring at me. The only one I couldn’t see was the black one, as it had apparently melted with the shadows inside its own space.

  I poked the barrier with my clawed finger and watched as it offered no resistance whatsoever to me physically, but it absolutely blocked my magical senses. I even created a small flame with [Magical Programming Language] and watched as the flame was blocked by the barrier with ease.

  I caught the red dragon, the one surrounded by fire, staring me more intently in the corner of my eye. A parallel train of thought was made to keep tabs on them. I wasn’t going to just let myself get caught with my guard low.

  I was honestly curious as to what exactly these spaces were, so when I noticed the other dragons had nothing to say about me entering it, I just stepped inside.

  The moment I was fully inside, I noticed two things. The first was that my magical senses were blocked to just inside the barrier, like I imagined they would be. The second was that the inside was fully sterile of magic, and the moment I entered, it started sucking some of my own magicules that I leaked through my aura.

  I felt it being channeled through the crystal in the middle of the room and then amplified before returning.

  Immediately, I was bombarded with temporal energy and some spatial energy. Gravity disappeared, and the ground turned into something like glass before breaking and starting to float around me.

  The other dragons started looking with curiosity at me as the broken glass floating started to reconfigure itself into patterns. They grew until I was inside a prism made of this glass.

  Looking at each one showed the view to the outside, but something was strange. Each glass showed the outside, but with something different. I wouldn’t have caught it if I weren’t paying attention to the other dragons.

  Each glass plane showed them reacting differently. In some of them, they got up and came to me, and in others, they stayed where they were.

  Time also felt different. Usually, I could feel it all around me, like a river pushing me down a path. To slow down, stop, or reverse time meant going against that river, but somehow, I wasn’t inside the river anymore.

  No, I was still inside the river, but the prism of glass I was inside acted like a barrier to the normal flow of time. I could barely see the actual time stream if I focused on it.

  “Are we even friends anymore?” Leo’s voice echoed around me, and I lost concentration.

  “What?” I asked out loud. My heart started beating faster. “Leo?”

  I started looking around, pulling on the temporal energy around me. I saw as the glass started showing different things. I saw myself when I first reincarnated in this world, still exiting my egg. The first time I met Amity. When I fell to the floor after passing through a door to a room bigger on the inside. Some of the loops in Brostin.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Amid those images, there were also some I didn’t recognize. A castle on fire, a zombie-looking person, a furred creature that had a glass-like helmet, and was wearing what looked like an enchanted chestplate.

  I wasn’t sure how I was controlling the glass, but with a nudge of temporal energy, it showed me different parts. I tried desperately to find Leo and Alex. I knew I would find them again. I was just fifteen years too early. If I were there when the ritual takes place, I would meet them. I knew it.

  I flooded the glass panes with temporal energy. Each one fractured into several, and each shard started showing pieces of my own timeline, but it was too fast for me to understand, even with my mind accelerated.

  Suddenly, all the images disappeared, and every one was replaced by an arch made out of emerald green energy, with a pair of doors of the same material filled with inscriptions too dense for me to make out.

  Just as it appeared, it changed to show the image of a black lion with an emerald green mane. It looked at me through the glass.

  “Leniency is not freedom,” the God of Time stated. “You’re not ready for this, yet.”

  The prism exploded, and I was back to before I entered the barriered space, with only my finger poking through the barrier.

  My rapidly beating heart and the wild temporal energy around me were the only things that told me whatever had happened was real and not an illusion.

  The time it took me to calm myself down was the time it took for someone to open the door. I looked over and saw a woman elf with a pair of white wings behind her and golden hair that flowed down to the middle of her back.

  “Found you at last,” she said with an authoritative voice.

  “Lilith!” the five dragons half-shouted and moved to meet the elf. Bowing down and saying something I couldn’t understand when they arrived a few meters from her.

  “Yes, I am aware. I am here to retrieve him,” she said back towards them.

  There was something in her voice that made it a bit strange. It took me a moment to notice that I was hearing her in Portuguese while her mouth moved differently, like a dubbed movie. It was a bit uncomfortable.

  She moved to approach me, the other dragons moving out of her way like. Another thing that made her uncomfortable to be around was that I could not sense her in the slightest. I normally sense other people's auras as they’re constantly being bombarded around, even the five dragons ahead were doing it, but the elf in front of me had no aura that I could sense whatsoever.

  “You must be Denaru Theris, correct?” She asked, and I nodded. “I am Lilith, first Angel of the Dragon King. I apologize for the delay. I was occupied with some matters, and I couldn’t greet you properly when you first entered with Amity.”

  She made a quick bow before continuing. “Amity shouldn’t have wandered off and left you alone. Thankfully, you managed to find yourself with some of the dragonlings.”

  “Dragonlings?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she stated. “Dragons that haven’t yet reached a thousand years of age are called dragonlings, children.”

  “I see,” I said.

  The gray dragon started speaking. It sounded surprised. I just heard Lilith in the middle of her talk, but couldn’t understand a thing.

  “Yes, Korin,” Lilith turned to the gray dragon. “He can indeed speak. Just because you can’t understand him, it doesn’t mean he’s ‘saying nonsense’. That is called a different language. You will learn about it next year.”

  The gray dragon, Korin, averted their eyes, ashamed. The other dragons also averted their gazes.

  “Master is awaiting you,” Lilith told me. “Please follow me.”

  She started walking. The metallic dragon said something, but the elf just stopped and looked at them, and that was enough for it to shut up and look away.

  She walked me to a different room. Just like that room with the teleport matrix and the magical train, the room she had led me to after walking for several minutes consisted of a giant teleportation matrix. It was massive, easily a hundred meters in radius.

  We barely stepped on it when we were already in another place, the transition so smooth I didn’t even feel it. I only knew we had moved because I was suddenly staring at another place made out of gold and black marble.

  Time around me was stirring like a constant buzz, bleeding into reality where it shouldn’t be. It was like a raw wound, constantly bleeding and untreated. I swear I felt the presence of the God of Time once or twice around me, but I couldn’t see him.

  Lilith led me to a massive wall near the teleportation matrix and placed a hand on it. Lines formed on the wall, and a door that was big enough for me to fit in appeared and opened by itself.

  Lilith walked in front of me and stared directly into my eyes with a stern face.

  “You will now have an audience with the Dragon King himself. Respect for him is absolutely necessary,” she said. “Unfortunately, due to Amity’s antics, I hadn’t had enough time to instruct you on the proper etiquette. This will be your warning. Any disrespect towards the Dragon King and you will be smited where you stand. Did I make myself clear?”

  What scared me the most wasn’t the complete lack of emotion in her voice, was that she let a small portion of her aura leak during the last part of that sentence, and I almost fell.

  While Amity’s aura felt like an endless sea stretching in every direction, Lilith’s aura felt like a massive wave crashing down on top of me.

  I could barely do anything but nod weakly at her.

  “Glad you understand,” she said, nodding once and then stepping to my left, allowing me to enter the door.

  As I crossed the door’s threshold, space was stretched so much that I lost all sense of scale. The doors closed behind me, and I stared ahead.

  In front of me, to my left, was a pedestal with what looked like an egg with a strange coloration; it looked like a nebula dancing on the shell. And to the right was a massive tree that glowed with an ethereal blue. It looked like a mixture of a willow and a sequoia. Beyond that was a railing that stopped people from falling into what I could only describe as an iridescent mountain chain

  On the trunk of the tree, I could see ghostly squirrel-looking creatures that hopped around on the tree branches.

  There was something familiar in both of those things, something calling towards me. I didn’t even notice I was walking until my face hit an invisible barrier around the tree.

  Movement on the mountain chain made me look away from the tree and into the mountains themselves, starting to move, and then part of it opened up, and a massive eyeball that easily dwarfed everything I had seen so far, except for the place I was in, opened up. The worst part was that it was staring at me.