Stanley couldn’t think of any other possibility. He had to be reversing time. Dreaming of a future made no sense if he dreamt of the past as well. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

But if he considered reversing time then... that made it all fall into place. Even more so, the trigger of the passive time reversal made sense as well.

It had been each time he had died.

Death.

Stanley couldn’t believe how many times he had died. Was this the third time already? If his conjecture of the situation was true, then the Lightning Nova was strong enough to kill him.

He needed to be careful.

’But time reverses when I die,’ Stanley thought. ’Is there a point to me trying to remain alive? I can just turn back time.’

Had he gotten that powerful?

’No,’ he thought. He couldn’t trust his suspicion just yet. Until he awakened this power and knew the effects and rules surrounding it, nothing was set in stone.

’I need to know the rules about my own power.’ He wondered how long that would take and if he even had the energy for it.

"John?"

He looked up, only to realize that Nova had been staring at him the whole time, waiting for him to respond. "Yes?" he asked.

"Are you okay?" she asked him.

"Uhh..." Stanley paused for a second, looking at the free Sol. This was not the same as the time he had seen and experienced before. This was a different one. "I’m alright." He looked at the time on his watch. "My leg got pinpricks because I sat for too long."

Nova looked at him weirdly and looked back to the front, ignoring him.

Stanley sat there with a curious look on his face, trying to list out all the information he had and then see what was useful for him. Going through the multiple instances of the same hours, Stanley realized something.

He had returned back in time to different periods of the same day. The first time had been inside the van, and the second time had been before they even boarded the van. And now, he was in the van once again.

Where was there a discrepancy to when he returned to? Was it based on when he died?

If that was the case, the 2nd and 3rd reversals should have been at the same time. And somehow, the first one where he fought the Lightning Nova, and the third time when he died in the explosion had been the same.

Where it would make sense for the 1st and 3rd returns to follow a very different time frame, it was close enough.

’That is not it then,’ he thought. There had to be another possibility. ’How painful my death was?’ That wasn’t correct either.

Going through a bunch of possibilities, Stanley landed on one that was most likely the correct one.

’The amount of energy I have,’ he thought. ’My Soul energy.’

As a Nova, his soul didn’t generate its own Soul energy. As a result, his soul had to absorb the soul energy produced by other souls, along with the souls themselves. How much Soul Energy a nova had was based on how many souls they had absorbed.

Since that was the case, Stanley had enough energy to turn back time for just 4 hours it seemed. Maybe even less.

’What happens if I use up too much of it?’ he wondered. He didn’t want to think about it. Soon, he let go of that train of thought and was immediately plagued by another.

’What was that explosion?’ he thought, remembering what had killed him. ’Was that one of those nuclear explosion thing that they were talking about in the history drives?’

That was the only assumption he could make. Despite his clearance level in the AAA, there wasn’t much for him to learn about those topics as they were non-existent in the current world.

Due to their planet not being larger than most plants in their solar system, or even the other planets that scientists had managed to find, a strong nuclear weapon could do a lot of damage.

He couldn’t be sure if the explosion was nuclear or some other bomb with a large amount of plasmium stored in it. Whatever it was, Stanley had seen the effect firsthand and had seen it crumble buildings like it was nothing.

He would not survive it. No one would.

’I need to stop it,’ he thought. He did not think of himself as someone heroic, or someone who wanted to do good. But this was beyond him. This was beyond his revenge.

There were so many people who would die in this explosion. Innocent people going about their innocent lives. Children, elderlies, men and women, so many people that were just there.

And they would die.

They would die if he did not stop it somehow. He had to find a way.

’Is that bastard trying to kill so many people to improve himself?’ Stanley thought. He got more angry toward the Lightning Nova than he had been since the start of this journey.

He had promised Nova to kill the Lightning Nova, but that had been for an ulterior reason. He had to find the person or group that was improving the strength of criminals.

Ning had to find that person, and everything else had been a necessity to get to that point. However, now, he wanted more. He wanted to kill the Lightning Nova not because he was Nova’s sister, or because he ran a cult.

He wanted to kill him because he put the lives of so many humans at risk. Was it not for him, there would be no explosion.

Stanley had decided it then. Whatever the cost, he would kill the Lightning nova as he had done in the other memories of his. After that, finding the warhead wouldn’t be that hard.

Only when the bomb was deactivated would he finally get a chance to save each and every human living in the entirety of East Vanli.