Chapter 342: Time Loop

Su Mu stood at the bustling intersection like an outsider, completely out of place.

Seeing this, he formed a faint guess: the Shadow God's power had suddenly erupted and destroyed the city, yet some other force had subsequently restored it.

It felt just like... a refresh!

It was like clearing the mobs out of a game's dungeon, only for all of them to respawn when you entered a second time.

To verify this theory, he deliberately waited a while before returning to the previous café. Sure enough, he saw the same short-haired college student and the female office worker who had hit on him earlier.

Su Mu ordered a cup of coffee and sat in the exact same spot. As a result, the identical scenario played out again.

They acted as if they were seeing him for the very first time. The short-haired college student hesitated repeatedly before summoning the courage to strike up a conversation, while the office worker tossed out a ball of yarn and falsely blamed her naughty cat. Everything was exactly the same.

Except this time, Su Mu ignored the office worker and simply walked out of the café.

He stood by the street and pulled out the phone he had just swiped from the office worker. It was 4:55.

He waited quietly as time ticked by. When the clock struck five on the dot...

Boom!!!

A deafening explosion rang out as a terrifying black light burst forth from the center of the city. Like a detonating atomic bomb, the black light expanded madly in the shape of an inverted hemisphere until it swallowed the entire city.

The surroundings were once again reduced to absolute nothingness.

A moment later, a brand-new city slowly rose from the void.

Su Mu looked around. He had returned to the previous intersection.

Back to the starting point? This isn't a refresh; it's a time reset!

He pushed up the Tinted Glasses on his face, a gleam of crystalline blue light flashing across his eyes.

Every time, he returned to the exact spot where he had first entered the Nightmare, and the passing pedestrians were identical.

It was the Shadow God's power that destroyed everything at five o'clock. Afterward, this Nightmare would undergo a time reset, returning to its initial state.

Swish!

Su Mu's figure instantly vanished. When he reappeared, he was directly above the center of the city. He waited in silence, wanting to pinpoint exactly where the Shadow Divine Power was erupting from.

When the clock struck five, boom!!!

The Shadow Divine Power erupted once more, and he finally locked onto its source. It was a skyscraper hundreds of meters tall; the divine power burst forth from directly behind it.

Time reset again, and Su Mu went directly behind the skyscraper. The sunlight was blocked by the building, casting a long shadow behind it.

Within that shadow lay a small alley. Several office workers in crisp suits were huddled together, puffing on cigarettes and venting about their bosses' dirty laundry.

Su Mu revealed his figure and walked toward the office workers. They glanced at him before completely ignoring him, continuing to smoke and chat.

Was the Shadow Divine Power erupting from them?

Su Mu frowned slightly. To his perception, these people were entirely ordinary, without a trace of anything supernatural.

Just then, an aged voice suddenly rang out from a pile of garbage deep within the alley. The voice was incredibly hoarse, as if the speaker hadn't talked to anyone in a long time, and it carried a trace of excitement.

"Are you... are you new here? How come I've never seen you?"

A rustling sound came from the garbage pile, and a filthy, hunchbacked figure stood up, his eyes locked dead onto Su Mu.

Su Mu narrowed his eyes, studying the homeless-looking man in front of him. He was unkempt, his face obscured by grime, and his clothes were in tatters.

He looked like an ordinary tramp, yet Su Mu could sense the power of the Shadow God on him, along with the source of his soul's earlier throbbing!

Earlier, he had followed that throbbing sensation in his soul all the way to this Nightmare. Now he had finally found the source of it: this very tramp.

"I just arrived," Su Mu replied.

Hearing this, a flash of excitement crossed the tramp's eyes, but it was quickly extinguished. He gave a bitter smile. "What time did you come in?"

"Around four thirty."

"Heh..." The tramp let out a meaningless sneer. It sounded like mockery, but more like self-deprecation. "Then you've got it rough. You only get half an hour a day."

Su Mu narrowed his eyes, understanding what the tramp meant. The man knew that everything would explode at five o'clock, and he could clearly retain his memories through the time reset, unlike the others whose memories were wiped clean.

"What about you? How much time do you have?"

The tramp held up a single filthy finger. "One day."

"A day? The time resets every day at five, yet you have a whole day?"

The tramp nodded. "That's right. The time loop begins the moment I enter. It starts because of me, and it ends because of me."

"Who are you?"

The tramp grinned. "I've been looping here for five years. Five years shouldn't be long enough to erase my name from Hell. You must have heard of me. I am... the Pope of the Primal Cult!"

The Pope?

Su Mu frowned deeply. Another Pope? If the man in front of him was the Pope, then who was the Pope on the outside?

"What? You don't believe me? Judging by your expression, you must have seen the fake on the outside." A hint of hatred flashed through the tramp's eyes, though it quickly faded into numbness.

"It's a long story. You don't have to believe me, but I don't care. I don't care whether you believe me or not. I just want someone to talk to. This dreamscape only allows entry, never exit. Time is forever looping in this single day, and the people here are all just ordinary humans.

"When I talk to them, they can't understand a thing and just treat me like a madman. Of course, you can treat me like a madman too, or even kill me if you find me an eyesore. It doesn't matter. After the time loop cycles hundreds or thousands of times, you'll eventually come looking for me."

Su Mu slowly walked toward the tramp and sat directly on the ground. He didn't care in the slightest about the filthy garbage around him; he wouldn't need to wash his clothes anyway since they would just reset in a moment.

Seeing Su Mu sit down, the tramp grinned. "You're an interesting guy. Maybe the days ahead won't be so boring. By the way, how did you enter the Abyss? Although I've lost all my power, I still have my eye for things. I can tell you're very weak.

"With your level of strength, there's no way you could have survived passing through the Evil God's Sealing Land up ahead. Hold on, don't say it. Let me guess. You must have run into a once-in-a-century temporal rift and got swept inside, right?"

Su Mu didn't answer. Instead, he carefully scrutinized the tramp's grimy face. He couldn't shake a sense of familiarity, as if he had seen him somewhere before.