The Oracle Paths

"No shit, Sherlock! Yeah, as if I didn't notice the previous three disintegrations."

Jake's words dripped with heavy sarcasm as he laughed with the desperate intensity of a man teetering on the edge of madness.

"I get your sarcasm, but remember, I'm on your side," Xi chided, her finger jabbing sternly at his chest.

Jake's face hardened before a sheepish smile crinkled his features. "Sorry, Xi. I'm a bit on edge..." he apologized, inhaling deeply to regain composure.

Just as he was about to offer a more genuine apology, his vision blurred horrifyingly. Not just blurred, but accelerated so fast it became a chaotic jumble of color and light. Nearly instantaneously, Jake was once again engulfed in a blinding whirlpool of plasma.

"Hsssshhh!" This time, he felt the disintegration as his eyes instantly melted away.

With a final desperate effort, Jake activated his Purgatory spell, but not before his pineal gland had eroded by over a third of its initial mass.

When Jake reappeared unscathed, his body having regenerated instantaneously for the fifth time, he was a pitiful sight, dripping with sweat and radiating palpable anxiety.

"These distortions are happening faster and f-"

He didn't even have time to finish his observation before his vision blurred again. This time, neither Xi nor he had time to panic; he had just finished regenerating his body. Barely a second had passed between the previous temporal distortion and the next.

"Mmmmphhh! FUCK! That hurts!" Jake cursed as his pineal gland evaporated by half before he could regain enough senses to reactivate his Purgatory.

Both Jake and Xi could foresee what their enemy was trying to achieve, which is why his blood ran cold as his vision blurred for the seventh time, with the reconstruction of his body barely underway.

'This bastard is trying to trap us in a perpetual distortion loop,' Jake realized before searing pain ignited every nerve in his body.

Just before his vision blurred this time, his survival instincts finally overcame his shock, triggering two countermeasures. First, he activated the Lucid Aetherdream mode to monitor all abnormal Aether fluctuations. Second, he transmuted all the available Aether to boost his Intelligence and Extrasensory Perception to unprecedented levels, focusing especially on his Spirit Body.

He had already figured that his physical body was too compromised from the successive disintegrations to be reliable. However, his Aether stats were already near their physiological limit, causing his Spirit Body, and even his soul, to rapidly overheat under the attribute boost.

He was risking everything on this last-ditch effort. Either his Spirit Body and soul would disintegrate before finding a counter to his enemy, or he'd discover how to resist or put an end to the temporal distortions and then have all the time in the world to regenerate the spiritual damage with his Grade 10 Energy and Life Element.

In addition, he had entrusted the reins of his body to Xi to activate the Purgatory in his stead, choosing to discard his own physical form to vanquish his enemy.

'Cosmic D Starfeyrves Trance,' Jake thought, a sinister, undetectable ripple of energy emanating from his pineal gland.

This was the first time he had willingly entered this state on his own. Adapt or die trying!

In this heightened state of spirituality, Jake's perception of reality shifted drastically. When the seventh temporal distortion hit, things unfolded differently.

First, he distinctly perceived the way these distortions assaulted him in spasmodic jolts, rather than continuously accelerating his sense of time. It clarified why his Purgatory was repeatedly disabled, rather than perpetually maintained, every time his consciousness appeared to be thrust into the "future."

"But knowing this doesn't give me back my control over my Purgatory," Jake observed with an eerie calm given the circumstances.

The abrupt slowing of his time perception, due to these spasmodic distortions, sent the already deployed Purgatory spiraling, as it received his commands via high-frequency spirit pulses with lag. This latency was enough to disrupt the illusion world.

Within his heightened state of awareness, Jake witnessed as a withdrawn spectator how Xi barely managed to activate Purgatory with only 20% of his pineal gland's normal mass intact. He foresaw that the next distortion would likely prove fatal.

He also watched firsthand as the eighth distortion struck before his body had even the slightest chance of beginning its regeneration, his pineal gland alone regaining its integrity. Yet, Xi astounded him with remarkable clarity of mind, retrieving from his Space Storage not his biomass, but several of the remaining Portable Fortresses.

She then nestled Jake's pineal gland into one fortress, that one into another, and so on, until they had assembled six layers of steel fortifications, each bolstering the last.

With Xi's swift action, Jake managed to weather the eighth temporal distortion. The Oracle AI held out hope of reusing this emergency method by sacrificing even more of its defensive artifacts, but the ninth temporal distortion turned out even more ruthless.

It struck almost immediately following the eighth. Essentially, Xi hadn't even invoked the Purgatory, nor begun to heal his pineal gland when it was thrust back into the midst of the plasma storm, now achieving infernal temperatures.

A wave of despair overwhelmed Xi at the sight, truly believing it was the end for them, but Jake's deep and assured voice suddenly echoed in her mind.

"Thank you, Xi. I'm taking over."

He doubted his chances, but after "dying" eight times, he had finally found a countermeasure. During the seventh temporal distortion, he had gained a more immersive understanding of his predicament, though still had no clue how to counteract these temporal distortions.

The quick fixes he considered involved temporarily amplifying his cognitive speed, but he was already nearly maxed out. His Lucid Aetherdreamer state already gave his Aether stats an astonishing overall boost by subconsciously tapping into the Aetherdream, and none of the Aether spells or artifacts he possessed could outperform that.

Jake was on the verge of giving up, realizing that even by amplifying his perception to its limits, he still couldn't detect a trace of the Time Element. But instead of surrendering, he decided to think outside the box by deciding to measure its flow.

His mind wasn't reliable due to his chaotic time perception, but there was a constant reference on which he could base his calculations: the plasma storm.

With each disintegration, his body would fall apart more and more, indicating that the temperature and turbulence of the plasma were increasing substantially each time. Since he could estimate how much energy and plasma the Magnetic Resonator produced, and pumped into his location, the rest of the calculation was child's play.

In a flash, Jake was able to retroactively calculate how many seconds into the future his consciousness had been projected after each distortion. He expected nothing, but the truth struck him profoundly.

The temporal distortions were getting shorter! Or to be more precise, his body and mind weren't affected as long or severely as they should've been.

Shedding light on this new element, Jake instantly understood why.He was adapting! Or the enemy responsible for this charade was beginning to tire!

In either case, this foe had noticed and decided to time its Time Spells ever closer to the end of the previous ones, wrongly giving him the impression that his resistance was increasingly futile.

Had Jake not performed these calculations by chance, he could have fallen for it. Tough luck for this enigmatic adversary...

Now he knew that he was not the one being cornered.

The eighth distortion came then, but fortified by his initial insight, Jake had another revelation. If he could only perceive time by measuring its indirect effects, why not measure the impact of these distortions on space itself?

For unlike the Time Element, for which Jake had no talent, his bloodline granted him a weak Space Affinity. That was all it took for him to set his plan in motion.

During the eighth distortion, Jake calmly observed how space stretched imperceptibly within a radius of a few cubic meters around his body. It was strikingly similar to how space-time stretches near a celestial object of significant mass.

It was an indescribable sensation. The sort that one needed to personally experience to fully comprehend this notion of space stretching.

Enraptured by his epiphany, Jake hadn't attempted anything at that moment, but when he felt Xi's panic at the approach of the ninth distortion, he finally knew what to do.

"My counterattack is just beginning," Jake chuckled sinisterly as he gently tugged the space around him with a sliver of spirit energy.

Focusing his mind, he felt the very spirit of space start to elongate suddenly, and as though he was compressing an accordion between his hands, he squeezed the ends of the warped area in the opposite direction, effectively counteracting the enemy's temporal distortion.

Xi felt a thrilling surge of jubilation upon realizing that Jake had truly found a counter, but promptly recalling her role, she decisively activated the Purgatory a ninth time to regenerate Jake's body.

The adversary must have felt panic set in, for a tenth, then an eleventh distortion attempt struck in quick succession. Jake, however, staved off each attempt with a monarch's calm and grace.

Finally, Jake's unscathed body reappeared at the Purgatory's center, a smirk of vindication lending a devilish allure to his face of fey beauty.

"My turn, now."