Chương 122: 121. A Lab of Blood and Stars

Kelly realised how to level up her Traits. Finally. It was volume. The key was the mana volume. The raw, screaming density of the thing. That was the ticket. That fueled and boosted how much influence each trait could act on the world. That had to be how—how her traits could increase in grade. It was so stupid it was almost funny. The answer wasn't some magical secret. It was just more. Always more. You crammed so much power into it that it had no choice but to get bigger.

She'd been trying to fine-tune a cannon when the real method was just shoving more gunpowder into the barrel until something gave. She had already leveled up her time attunement. Once. Through enlightenment. That meant the second way to level a trait was by permanently altering the scope of how a trait functioned—through enlightenment. Understanding. That boosted how much influence each trait could act on the world, too. Two paths. One was a violent, overwhelming flood.

The other was a single, stupid click in your head that changed everything. Kelly was a looper. She instinctively understood time, to a degree. Felt it. That was how and why her time attunement was the only trait to upgrade in… ever. Way back in Project Portal, after centuries of slicing humans open to see what made them tick, some lab-coat finally noticed a faint, useless signal. Humans generated tiny, minuscule amounts of dark energy and negative energy.

The amounts were so pathetic they were practically a rounding error—like a single grain of sand tossed into the cosmic ocean each day, expected to matter. They'd been breaking people down for hundreds of years and only just caught a glimpse of it. Where it came from, how it happened, why it existed was anyone's guess. The collective genius of the ages, and the big discovery was that people were leaky on a subatomic level. Kelly's money was on souls. The whole operation reeked of spiritual plumbing issues.

Whatever dimensional closet human souls were crammed into, those little energy spurts were probably just leakage. Like water dripping from a tap that wasn't fully closed. A cosmic design flaw. Human souls were energy misers. They hauled in a pittance from whatever plane they were parked in—mostly dark energy and negative energy, in amounts so small you'd need a few universe's worth of people to power a lightbulb. Then the human body, in a stunning feat of biological ingratitude, ejected it. Rejected it.

Threw the whole package right back into the void with a 'return to sender' stamp. Monster souls, though—Monster souls didn't bother with conservation. The horrors and beings from beyond the portals sucked down power like it was going out of style. More energy, more variety, mana included—the whole buffet. They were siphoning from a main line, overflowing. Naturally. Why play by the rules when you could just eat them?

Kelly realized that as her soul existed in a strange and mysterious dimension nobody else had ever touched, a result of that very first day that shunted it elsewhere entirely—her soul was a gateway, a private 'Kelly-only' door kicked open to extradimensional energies nothing and nobody should have access to. Clearly, the universe was jealous. That's why it wanted to kill her. Or something. She couldn't prove it, but it felt right.

Every orbital strike, every leviathan, every coincidence, every god staring directly at her with murder in its eyes—it felt personal. It was a cosmic landlord and she'd picked the lock to the utility room. So when her personal reserves hit absolute zero and mana was off the menu, Kelly had to get creative. No free lunch. She couldn't rely on mana anymore and had to use nothing but pure, unadulterated scientific understanding. She used enlightenment as a crowbar to boost her abilities.

If the Status wouldn't give her power, she'd hack its system, brute-force comprehension, and build her own generator. Understanding was, after all, the original human magic. Humanity's entire progress report was a group project written in blood, fire, and stubbornness. They stood on a mountain of giants who never agreed on anything except that the universe needed a good kicking. Arabs and Persians dissected numbers from the 8th to 14th centuries.

Figured out how to think like a machine before anyone had a brain made of wire. African metallurgy from the 8th to 13th centuries built furnaces and trade networks that taught the world how to move gold, iron, and ideas—techniques that seeped into Islamic and European commerce and never left. China, in the 9th century, had alchemists who accidentally invented rockets while trying to make better fireworks.

By the 10th and 11th centuries, those rockets were weapons, sketched into military manuals as delivery systems for chaos. America crammed a man into a tin can and shot him into space. The Russians, Germans, Romanians, and Soviets? They took those blueprints and really elevated things—with fire-belching ignition engines, rockets that scarred the sky, and nuclear fission that split the atom and every moral framework around it.

By the year 3000, humanity's resume included weaponizing their own flesh—the first augment that turned a human arm into a strategic-grade weapon. They terraformed planets, conquered stars, and built civilizations on the shattered pieces of physics they'd broken themselves. Then Kelly took a risk. A stupid, beautiful, calculated gamble that would bend the new magical rules—cracked them wide. Humanity's progress was a chain of shared genius—a collaborative, messy, millennia-long brawl without any magical cheats.

They'd already spent eternity figuring out how to break reality their own way. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Compared to the invaders—relying on hand-me-down blessings from overpowered eldritch freaks, waving spells and sharpened metal like it was a medieval reenactment? Humans were pretty fucking enlightened.

Kelly felt that if she went down the path of humanity's enlightenment, she could probably snag some shiny title or trait that handed her health back in a neat little package. The idea sat in her brain, a neat little box labeled 'useful.' A consolation prize for playing along. She could almost see the box. It was a very boring box. Merely getting it wasn't the point. Kelly wanted something greater.

She knew, with the certainty of someone who'd personally tested the structural integrity of a dozen collapsing realities, that there was something much bigger holding the mess together. Some grander, uglier, more interesting box that she could smash open to see what made the universe bleed. So she strained. She fought Ren, her muscles screaming and augments overheating as she traded blows that cracked the reinforced floor.

She struggled, her vision tunneling to a pinprick of light, the rest flooding with static and the copper taste of a body pushed past sane limits. Ren's movements shifted, his strikes becoming measured, his posture telegraphing a concern he wouldn't waste breath to voice. He was about to order her to stop. The command was forming in the set of his jaw. And in that slice of a moment before he could speak, while her own heart was a frantic prisoner in her ribs, Kelly reached an epiphany.

The epiphany was about stopping time. Not slowing it down, but grinding the whole stupid, relentless procession to a halt. Putting the entire universe on pause. The concept wasn't impossible. It was just violently rude, and it hinged on humanity's messy, brilliant, bloody understanding of non-relativistic time, and wormholes, and negative energy, and the unblinking tick of the atomic clock. It was audacious and daring. Hitting pause on everything. An insane idea to even try.

Kelly was too concussed to remember why she shouldn't. So what she really needed was a breakthrough in quantum physics and a profound understanding of the fabric of spacetime. Simple. She just had to reinvent fundamental cosmology and develop a personal beef with the fabric of spacetime while getting punched in the face. It was practically a daily hobby. The driving force was Kelly's Time Sense.

Her ability to feel and see time in all things—the desperate sprint of a decay particle, the glacial age of stone, the countdown clock on a grenade. She took it a step further. She stopped fighting the sensation and threw herself into it, a dive into a river of seconds and epochs. The boundary blurred. She became unsure of where her own nerves ended and the flow of time began. A surge ripped through her, deep and wrong, followed by a hollow ache.

A resource she'd never named was being pulled, stretched thinner than a scream. The personal toll announced itself with clarity. She could lose herself here, dissolve into the stream. Her ability could slip its leash and age her to dust in a blink, reverse her into nothingness, or—a particularly boring hell—unpredictably freeze her forever. A statue. A museum piece of a single moment, standing in this hall for eons while Ren's concerned frown gathered actual dust.

Each fate was just a different flavor of death, and she was sampling the menu. But Kelly never stopped. She didn't quit. She didn't stall. Her willpower was a cliff that waves of hundreds of deaths had failed to erode. It rose each time, asking for more. It could withstand the depths of hell and the specific, creative torture of an eternity spent listening to corporate compliance seminars if it meant the pursuit of knowledge. The risk of freezing was just the admission price.

And so she finally brought it all together. Welded it; the jagged pieces sparking in her grip. The strain, the fight, the vertigo of merging with time, the ache of the drained resource—it all clicked into a terrible, beautiful alignment. The advanced theories and jury-rigged technologies that pretended to harness quantum mechanics, the exotic matter, the stolen glimpses at gravity's hidden, dirty secrets—all of it. They were her tools, levers she could see placed against the framework of everything.

With those elements combined, and with her consciousness so submerged in time's stream she couldn't even discern up from down, her entire being solely focused on the task—she did it. She executed the theory. The universe, for a single, contested point, was told to sit the hell down. There was a sudden, absolute certainty in the middle of the chaos, a solid thing she had built from will and insanity while the world tried to beat it out of her. Kelly felt the strain. The toll announced itself.

It was a physical weight making a serious attempt to crack her spine, and a mental static that worked to scrub her mind clean. It settled behind her eyes as a drilling pressure and wrapped her ribs in a vise of pure pressure. Each attempt to push against the universe's flow carved a little more out of her. Kelly acknowledged the sensation, cataloged it, and then powered straight through it. She gritted her teeth and shoved.

That toll would have unspooled anyone else, this would have been the insanity point, the moment their personality dissolved under the cost, erased by the sheer danger of the act. It was the cognitive weight of touching forces that scoured identity, the danger of inviting the void inside your own head. The cost was a delete function for the self. Anybody else would have frayed, their personality dissolving under the onslaught until they were just a screaming nerve ending, hollowed out and insane.

But Kelly, however, was not anyone else. Her willpower was not a finite resource. It was constant. Infinite? —hard to tell. Kelly was a mechanic elbow-deep in a starships roaring engine, trying to shove a spanner into the main gear to stop the whole insane machine, her feet braced against the cosmic furnace, muscles screaming. Her consciousness was hooked into the Atomic Clock of All Things, the fundamental ticking that kept everything from being soup.

She experienced every moment in perfect, overwhelming harmony with the universe— An ant holding onto a galaxy for the ride. She took several complex ideas from physics and combined them into a single, powerful concept. She recognized time wasn't just a flow; it changed based on physics. Wormholes and exotic materials that bent space offered paths to manipulate it. Quantum mechanics showed time behaved differently at a small scale, which was key. With tools like atomic clocks, she could understand how time operated.

This knowledge pointed toward a way to halt it altogether. It gave her a lever against the fabric of spacetime itself. A way to pause the universe. The Mana Vacuum Title activated. A lung collapsing, a sudden, violent inhale that stripped the little ambient magic from the air around her in a visible, shimmering vortex. The mana flooded into her, a raw, screaming power current. She burned it. Immediately. The cost of her insane application.

A lone woman at the end of the world, trying to grind an entire universe to a halt. [Trait: Time Affinity Grade II → Grade III] [Calculating changes...]