Omni Pov
"Sit," the Patriarch said flatly, already turning his back.
Chrono obeyed without a word.
The black stone beneath him felt colder than usual.
The Patriarch didn't look at him at first.
He lit a cigarette with a flick of the thumb—mana-fire, careless and crackling.
"This next bit, boy," he exhaled smoke through his nose, "is going to hurt more than the body ever did."
He turned then, slow, letting the silence thicken.
"Because this pain? It's clean."
"And personal."
Chrono said nothing.
"Let's talk about the mind."
He paced again, every step deliberate.
"Most people think it's a place."
It's not. It's a battlefield. And most people? They don't even know they're bleeding."
He jabbed the air.
"But you—you're going to weaponize it."
"Strip it."
"Reinforce it."
"Lock it down."
His grin returned, that thin, deranged little curl.
"Think of it like this."
"The average mind is a rotting house."
"Rats of memory running in the walls."
"Doors that never close."
"You ever try to cast a spell with a screaming memory at the back of your throat?"
Chrono didn't blink.
"No."
"Exactly."
"Because yourtype survives by not looking inward."
The Patriarch knelt in front of him now, sudden, fast.
"But we're going in."
He leaned closer.
"We're going to make you build something."
"A vault."
"A citadel."
"A fortress of recall."
"We call it the Mind Palace—but really, it's more like a prison where you're the warden."
He tapped Chrono's forehead once.
Not hard.
But it felt like a bullet.
"You'll store everything there."
"Every incantation."
"Every sigil."
"Every conversation."
"Every moment of pain."
Chrono's voice was calm and cold.
"What's the method?"
The Patriarch's smile stretched into something like admiration.
"Good."
"You're learning how to ask the right questions."
He stood, snapped his fingers, and the Time Room shifted.
The world bent around them like glass being turned in fire.
Shadows rippled, and a void opened behind him—a shape made of mental space.
"This is Occlumency."
"You'll learn how to seal your mind from intrusion… and how to open it like a scalpel when needed."
He pointed to the darkness behind him.
"The method is simple."
"I break in."
Chrono stood slowly.
"I don't defend," he said.
"I build."
The Patriarch clapped once, grinning like a conductor.
"Now you're getting it."
He approached again, eyes alight.
"I'll invade your thoughts. "
"You push me out."
"But more than that—you organize. "
"You start creating the foundation of your palace."
"Visual memory architecture."
"This war will be in your head."
Chrono nodded once.
"Then let's begin."
The Patriarch didn't chant.
Didn't speak.
Just looked.
The spell was silent, invasive, clinical.
Chrono's mind exploded.
He was nine again, watching his mother's last breath in the back of a broken-down transport.
Then five, standing beside his father's bloodied boots in a nameless desert.
Then eleven, his hands slick with another boy's blood in an alley filled with screaming flame.
Snap.
Chrono dropped to one knee, jaw tight.
"Come on," the Patriarch whispered.
"Don't let me see that one again. It's boring."
Chrono grabbed the memory—mentally, violently—shoved it into a cold steel box in his visual field.
The Patriarch grunted.
"Not bad."
"Start building."
"Use your memory—turn it into rooms."
"Construct traps"
"Reinforce the walls"
Chrono's breath was steady now, his vision full of shadowy halls.
Bookshelves made of trauma.
Floors paved with spell diagrams.
A ceiling of perfect silence.
"Anchor it," the Patriarch said. "Something real. Something impossible to forget."
Chrono's mind latched onto a chair—a black, iron chair he'd seen in a dead wizard's sanctum when he was a child.
Every curve remembered.
Every bolt rusted into place.
He placed it in the center of a vast library of firelit memory.
"Good," the Patriarch muttered. "You're starting to see."
Chrono stood inside his mental architecture now. He could feel the edges of it growing sharper.
Outside, in the Time Room, his body barely trembled.
Minutes passed in silence.
Then hours.
Then a breath.
The Patriarch stepped back, finally withdrawing.
Chrono opened his eyes.
The Patriarch raised a brow.
"Still here?"
Chrono didn't answer.
He didn't need to.
They sat across from each other again later, as the Time Room softened into stillness. Smoke curled lazily in the air.
The Patriarch stood motionless, arms behind his back, watching Chrono in that same way he always did—like a man observing a weapon still being forged.
"You ever ask yourself," he said quietly,.
"Why you don't flinch?"
Chrono said nothing.
"Why your reflexes are too sharp for your age? Why your instincts… aren't learned, but inherited?"
The Patriarch smiled faintly.
"Of course you didn't. "
"That's not your nature."
"You don't ask why."
"You ask how."
He took a drag from his cigarette, the ember casting a red glow against the pale slash of his grin.
"That's not training, boy."
"That's architecture."
He stepped closer.
"You think your mother drank those potions for nutrition?"
"To make sure your bones didn't snap when you kicked too hard in the womb?"
He exhaled the smoke like a curse.
"Wrong."
"They weren't potions."
"They were rituals in liquid form."
"Designed by our family."
"Precision-forged."
"They didn't just nurture you—they rewrote you."
Chrono's eyes narrowed. His posture didn't move.
The Patriarch's voice dropped lower. Intimate. Surgical.
"Those elixirs carried my DNA."
"Suspended in arcane medium".
He took a big drag from his cigarette.
*Huff*
"In fact , that is another application of time magic , froze the content inside for a period of time"
"Subtle, beautiful alchemy."
"When she drank them while pregnant… they didn't enhance the child."
"They replaced the father."
A silence followed, thick as blood.
"The man she loved? Hahahhahaha Gone."
"Burned out of the equation at the genetic level."
"You are, in every meaningful sense, mine."
Chrono blinked once.
"I made sure of it," the Patriarch said, smiling. "I didn't trust fate. So I became it."
He gestured with the cigarette, drawing a spiral in the air.
"My point?"
"You weren't born Chrono… You were engineered."
"My spell."
"My template."
"My obsession."
"Not born of love."
"Born of design"
"Of Purpose."
He paused, letting the words sink like a blade into bone.
"I didn't raise a son."
"I drafted the ultimate weapon weapon."
Another pause.
Then softer, almost reverent:
"And I gave you my name."
"Zion."
He turned, the sound of his boots echoing across the obsidian floor.
"I didn't do it for you."
He glanced back, eyes gleaming like a storm waiting for lightning.
"I did it because I needed to know… if someone like me could be made better."