"Do you want to know what’s truly happening to you, Kairi?" Selene said, her tone flat.

"Do you want to know why you returned to this point, why Arthur is missing, and why everyone in this room is looking at you as if you are some kind of center of everything?"

I didn’t answer. But my body tensed.

"It’s because you didn’t return." She placed Mytheia in her palm, letting it float gently. "You... were released."

Azalea furrowed her brow. "Released? What do you mean...?"

Selene looked at us one by one, then directly into my eyes. "Mytheia is not just a time trigger. It’s not a portal, not a dimension-traveling device. It is... a rejecter of continuity."

Helena tensed. "Selene—"

"What you experienced, Kairi, was not a ’return’. Return-By-Memory is merely a side effect."

I gripped the blanket. My heart shook my ribs. "What do you mean... side effect?"

"Mytheia severs the line of cause and effect around you. When you use it—or more precisely, when it activates because of you—reality doesn’t know where to place you."

Azalea looked shocked.

Selene added softly: "So the system does the most primitive thing it knows: it throws you to the last reference point. Which is... here."

I stared at Mytheia. Its glow... now felt far more terrifying than before. As if the object was not just a tool, but also something alive.

"You have become part of Mytheia, Kairi," Selene continued. "And now, whether you like it or not... we all move according to your orbit."

I looked at Mytheia floating in Selene’s palm. Still glowing. Still silent. Like a heart that never stopped beating—though not for a human.

"Mytheia... doesn’t rewind time," Selene began, her voice calm, without theatrics. "What happened to you wasn’t a rewind. But something far more complex—and far more dangerous."

She walked slowly towards a screen on the side of the room and turned on a transparent digital projector in the air. A timeline appeared. A single straight line—but cracked. Bending. Twisting. Shifting.

"This is what we call Adaptive Temporal Shift."

I hadn’t even had time to take a breath when she continued: "When someone with too high an existential intensity—like you, Kairi—connects directly with Mytheia, then the timeline is not strong enough to bear the weight of your existence."

I frowned. "My existence... is heavy?"

"Existential momentum," Selene replied softly, then nodded.

"Every action, thought, decision—everything carries a burden of momentum. Like a snowball. And when that point of accumulation reaches a critical mass, then time is no longer enough to contain it."

"So... this world... what? It warps just because I’m alive?"

"Not alive," Selene cut in. "But... persisting."

I froze. "Every time you should have died—and didn’t die—reality has to adjust. And because you have Return-By-Memory—a residual effect of Mytheia—time keeps ’yielding’, rewinding, reshaping. But that’s just a band-aid solution. Until finally..."

She pointed to a part of the timeline that looked torn. "...Time gives up."

Helena glared at her sharply. "So all this time... you’ve been letting her keep returning just to observe how the timeline adapts?"

"And what if I have?" Selene retorted without a hint of guilt. "This isn’t about letting or not letting. This is about understanding... how one person can force the world to adapt."

I slowly looked down. "I... just wanted to save people. I never asked for any of this."

"And that’s the irony," Selene countered, looking directly at me. "You, the savior, are the reason the world constantly has to be saved from itself."

Azalea remained silent. But this time, her face wasn’t just shocked—it was... scared.

I looked at Mytheia. Its glow was like eyes. As if looking back. Persisting too long... accumulating too much... and this world had to keep adjusting. I began to understand now. I wasn’t just a victim. I was... the gravitational center of this chaos.

Selene looked at us one by one. Then she switched the digital projector screen to overlay mode, displaying three colliding temporal curves.

"Alright," she said, adjusting her voice to be more... academic. "If you still want to play in the basic class, please exit the room."

Azalea squinted. "Hey—"

"But if you want to understand what’s happening in this world—and why Kairi is at its center—sit down and listen." 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

She changed the screen display. A straight line appeared. Then a moving mass emerged, bending the line. Then... the line broke into two.

"In general relativity, spacetime curves due to mass. That’s textbook. But the question is: what if what’s bending it isn’t mass, but existence?"

Helena crossed her arms, beginning to hold back a scolding. Azalea... began to gape.

"Existence in this context means the accumulation of interactions, choices, death defiance, personal impact, and subjective continuity. Every time someone defies their point of demise, they store residual momentum—existential energy. The more often you persist when you shouldn’t, the greater your gravity becomes."

Kairi murmured softly, "...Existence as a local singularity."

Selene turned, smiling slightly. "Precisely."

Azalea looked at Kairi with her mouth half-open. "Wait, you understand?"

"Yes," Kairi replied casually, her voice quick. "If my existence is too massive, time can’t maintain linear coherence. So the system triggers a local shift with the last reference point as the nodal vector. Return-By-Memory is a manifestation of collapse."

Helena also turned. "You understand all that?"

Kairi looked at the screen. Her eyes didn’t blink. "It... makes sense. Because a system like this doesn’t make decisions. It’s just adaptive. It just... reacts to deformation."

Azalea was now genuinely shocked. "What is she even talking about...?"

Selene chuckled. "It means, Azalea, this world reshapes itself every time Kairi insists on living." Then she swiped the screen, revealing a back-and-forth spiral schematic. "And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the ’forced rectification scheme.’ At this point,"—she pointed to the outermost spiral—"time is no longer linear. The world is no longer chronological. And Kairi... is no longer just a subject. She is the nexus."

Kairi nodded slowly, her face still serious. "...So basically, I’m a bug."

"Not a bug," Selene said. "You are the newest feature for the experiment."