Never-ending River of Time

Sponsor selection, huh? He remembered editing one of those chapters before, back when his novel had just begun, he had edited a chapter about the sponsor selection.

Opening his Wattpad account, Shisui clicks on the chapter called Sponsor Selection.

Skimming over the chapter, Shisui quickly categorizes the key information he needs to know for this scenario into several categories. Namely characters, scenarios, and information.

The basic summary of this arc was, Adrian was at home when the scenario began with his mom and sister. The scenario was limited to his entire apartment complex instead of the individual housing units due to the lack of living organisms in those apartments themselves. He kills a spider on his desk to pass the scenario and is traumatized by his mom exploding into bits because she panicked yada yada.

He gets zero sponsorship offers due to how boring his scenario was in general without the grand speeches and whatnot of the other incarnations. He leaves the apartment complex with his sister. They get separated, and he stumbles upon a base and, without much difficulty, disguises himself as one of the people who had always been there. Made possible due to the chaos there happening due to the scenario, making people there think he was always part of the group and they just forgot about him.

The next scenario starts, and the arc ends, and there really is nothing of value for Shisui to use.

First of all, he is in a completely different place from the main protagonist of the novel Adrian. He’s at the Avira Mall, on the second floor near the San Francisco Bay Area. This means that all the characters or people he will meet will be completely unknown to the story, as he’s in a completely different part of the city than where he assumes Adrian was. Which is probably somewhere near the sea with his descriptions of the cold sea wind in the third chapter.

And because of this location difference, it means there will be a completely different demon monitoring the situation. Along with different constellations watching.

Is it smart to use a novel he wrote while blacked out as his main source of information for how the scenarios will go? Probably not, but Shisui is too tired to care at this point. Plus, taking risks is necessary to succeed. Which is just an excuse for his impatience.

(He’ll really need to work on his impatience. Being so relaxed for the last 16 years of his life is not going to bode well for his survival.)
The blackout writing process backstory was not a joke for anyone wondering.

He blacks out and wakes up with the completed chapter just there.

Is it concerning?

Yes, undoubtedly so, but seeing as this weird blackout condition of his doesn’t do anything other than provide him with written chapters with way too many typos and a minor headache when he wakes up, he didn’t do anything about it. The weird blackout syndrome was harmless. From what he could see he seems to have a neural disease that is a mix between an odd form of parasomnia, seeing that he could somehow write out an entire chapter within the time he blacked out and could still chop himself some apple slices during that time without cutting himself.

Maybe it was due to his past skills as a shinobi that enabled such things while asleep. He still thinks it has something to do with the event that caused his reincarnation which he has somehow lost all memories of. All he remembers is that one day he died in a cave, and a few moments later he woke up in a new world as a baby. While he was aware that something had happened between those two events, he still couldn’t remember what it was.

He’s still 99.99% sure that he made some dumb deal with a god and that’s how he ended up here. It was the only theory compatible with his reincarnation and what happened in his past life. As far as the elemental nations are concerned, no ancient item or healing ninjutsu could bring someone back to life, especially after the person’s soul had already passed into the pure land.

But Shisui is in a different dimension, and there were only two known dimensions back in his old universe; the pure lands and the physical realm. As he is clearly not in his old world anymore, so the rules of his old world can be forgotten in a trash heap. Making it possible that some divine being, humanity has yet to contact was the one that did this to him.

Enough of the reincarnation theories, he has a sponsor selection to do. Damn it.

Because of how off-track he had gotten, he only had twelve minutes left. Maybe it’s finally time to review the sponsor choices in more detail.

So choice #1; Guardian of the Mandala wheel, which is the Buddha. He remembered editing and to an extent reading a chapter where the main protagonist Adrian and the rest of his team went to the Isle of Reincarnation in order to gain possession of the wall of Samsara and to get some items that would help them pass the 56th scenario; namely the scale of Karmic judgement, which would then be used to weigh the souls of people. Which will help considering the 56th scenario was to retrieve some divine item from the Egyptian underworld, an underworld that requires you to have your soul weighed. And if your soul is too heavy, it’ll be eaten and whatnot.

The people he sponsors are called Truth Seekers, allowing them to traverse off the Isles of Reincarnation in an attempt to find the universal truth; which is beyond the fourth wall. Basically, they were seekers of the end but less bloodthirsty. Nirvana themselves was a bit of an exception as he was following the left-hand path to the truth. All the truth-seekers that he had read about were pretty normal, if not a bit nosy and preachy, like the Buddha himself.

As for the samurai of the five-ring path, Shisui has no clue who he is. All he knows is that he is Japanese as the samurai are Japanese. Other than that, he has no clue.

In his defense, he was too busy doing other things to remember every single important Japanese samurai in the 900 years ever since the job of being a samurai had been created. Plus, his school wasn’t even teaching the history of Japan in that much detail. They were in America, not Japan, making such in-depth knowledge of a foreign country largely unnecessary unless said person is a historian, an author or a weeb. Sure, he remembers going to a museum in Japan that had the first copy of the “Five Rings book” or something, but he doesn’t remember the which important samurai wrote it.

So the samurai was sadly automatically crossed out. He was not risking making a sponsorship contract that resembled that of his book world with an unknown constellation. Those contracts, when done incorrectly, could literally cost you your soul.

As for the Buddha, he really does not know what to do with the offered contract. One, there are some pretty hefty restrictions placed on those truth-seekers stating that everything they do must be for the sake of humanity and enlightenment, which also forbids killing as a precaution, only until it’s absolutely necessary for the sake of humanity, not the sake of the incarnation.

Despite how the buddha is portrayed, being some weird religious preacher. He truly did want to save humanity, through the elimination of arrogance and knowledge.

Which is bad, because most preventative measures will involve killing, and not being able to kill is a bad thing.

Fuck it, he’ll be lucky if he even survives to the age of twenty with this apocalypse going on. Shisui isn’t even sure if he can survive the first day in this new world, never mind surviving until the thirtieth scenario. The limited things he can do already lowered his chances of surviving in this hellish world. He doesn’t need another restriction to make this situation even worse.

The Buddha may be one of the strongest constellations in the star stream. Who also founded one of the most popular religions in the world. The Buddha can help him in the later scenarios on Reincarnation Islands, his territory making some rules null for his incarnations. Despite that, Shisui still did not risk an early death during the early scenarios for the chance to become one of the Buddha’s many heirs.

The no-killing rule was only one of the many restrictions placed on the truth-seekers. A few of the others included not being able to eat meat, which is another ticking time bomb. Because edible plants during the scenarios were pretty hard to find without the right knowledge and Shisui’s not going to get poisoned just to adhere to some random god’s laws.

No lying, as it is seen as contradictory for beings seeking the universe’s ultimate truth. Which is another big issue, because common sense dictates lying will help you survive in such a harsh world, where only the most irrational people got awesome powers while all the good people died in the first scenario because they refused to kill their fellow man.

Another issue involved the Buddha’s stigmas, such as “No Ownership” and “The Palm that Covers the Sky”.

The issue is most of those skills only work if you are a reincarnator, and a very experienced one at that.

 Sure, the Buddha’s skills were useful, but they only really worked when you already lived multiple different lives and amassed countless stories. This sponsorship won’t work out well for a newbie reincarnator like himself. Because even with Shisui’s life as well... Shisui in his pocket, Shisui in his past life was still nowhere near the level of some of the most powerful shinobi in his time and the major powers in the world of Shatter the sky were very unpredictable.

Well, that was a bit of a lie, as he himself was pretty talented in the ninja arts. But it doesn’t hurt to be humble considering that in the later scenarios, he will be facing off literal gods in battle. Like Yoo Joonhyuk and Anna Croft, both lived this timeline over nine hundred times and can match up to some god-kings under the right circumstances. He'll likely be fighting Yoo Joonhyuk in the future because he's American, and thus automatically on Anna's side. Making Yoo Joonhyuk kill him for some coins and popularity.

And unlike in his old world, where only clansmen got special powers, everyone has a special power that is usually based on their personality and profession, making it extremely hard to decode how somebody’s powers work without some insider info, making it harder to track those people and kill them before they become a threat.

So that sponsorship offer was a no-no.

[You have selected your choice.]

It may not be the best choice, but for now, he’ll be going with no sponsor. Hoping that he somehow survives the scenario with no sponsor, which should be possible seeing that it is still early in the game and most of the scenarios should be doable with some luck and competent allies.

Additionally, most smart constellations are not willing to spend a lot of resources on one individual until they’ve proven their worth. So incarnations without sponsors aren’t exactly a rarity during the second scenario, and if those newbies could survive, then so could he. Hopefully.

He still has to prove himself as somebody worth sponsoring and hope that a compatible sponsor is interested in him, or else he is screwed.

[So welcome back to my channel, even though we’ve only been away for 30 minutes. Oh wow, I knew you guys were impatient, but not this impatient. But don’t worry my dear constellations, the action will resume in about an hour, so stay tuned!]

Watching as Conroy talked to an invisible screen in front of the grandfather clock, Shisui made some mental notes from the information he earned from this exchange.

One, the constellations that were observing this channel showcased impatience reminiscent of all constellations and loved action. Which barely helps, as it is the vaguest possible description of the constellations as a group as they all love action and are impatient as hell.

Moving on, if Shisui remembers correctly, in his book “Shatter the Sky” most of the constellations there could be divided into three broad genres or “fandoms” if you wanted to be technical.

One of those fandoms are supporters of genres like slice of life and romance, or just generally chill stuff, who were not catered to well during the apocalypse as it is in fact the apocalypse. So whenever a channel came up that did cater to that group’s tastes, they all rushed forward and began subscribing to the channel.

Unfortunately, those subscriptions never lasted long because the incarnations either got killed or became so traumatized they become a shell of their former selves. If he could remember correctly, there had been a character named Jaiden whose channel’s genre was mainly humor and just heartwarming stuff, outside all the monster killing and betrayal happening on a daily basis. Well, that was before he joined Zarathustra to save the world and ended up being sacrificed in the final scenario.

Another piece of information was from when Conroy said the action will resume in roughly an hour. What he really meant was that there’s going to be an absolute bloodbath among the incarnations in about an hour, if Conroy wanted to be on schedule.

But seriously, can’t the developers of these scenarios slow down a bit and let everyone rest a bit? The world ended less than an hour ago and they already want to move on to the next scenario.

[For this sponsor selection, we had some rather interesting choices. Whether the offers were accepted or not was a decision left up to the Incarnations themselves. But I believe we already knew that. Don't file a complaint with the bureau if you're disappointed about not being chosen as a sponsor. As we demons cannot influence the choices made by the incarnations.]

Listening to Conroy’s talk about the sponsorship complaints, it didn’t take long for Shisui to realize what kind of manipulation was happening to the constellations behind the scenes.

Placing blame on the incarnations instead of the demons offering the contracts is a good marketing strategy. Make yourself seem like the innocent messenger and blame the issue on the consumers or on people lower on the ladder.

[So now, back to what I was talking about before. Everybody here has exactly forty minutes of free time to do whatever you want. There are no rules in what you choose to do during this time, only that this time, if used wisely, will be integral to your survival in the first few scenarios. With that said, I wish you all the best of luck, and let the scenario begin!]

...

Out of all the scenarios Shisui had expected to be given, he was not expecting the scenario to be a “grace period”. He actually was expecting it to be a battle royale for the constellations’ entertainment, but it seemed like the system wasn’t dumb enough to kill off all their actors during the first round.

This makes sense, because without characters to move the story forward, there would be no story to tell. Based on the assumption that the live-streaming demons were not just sadistic assholes and are trying to tell a story.

So they have one hour of safe time before the second scenario starts. All they have to do is survive, and you’re guaranteed to pass. Way easier than the first scenario where you had to kill something.

While there seem to be no other conditions for clearing other than the rudimentary reason of survival, but at the same time you don’t gain anything from surviving this scenario.

The scenario does seem to be a resting period of sorts, even though he knows he should be more cautious about the scenario’s intentions since he is dealing with an alien gaming system. Shisui still decided to trust the blue screen labeling out the scenario's clear conditions, leaving him some room to plan.

But even if the scenario didn’t place any challenging clear conditions on the scenario’s participants, that doesn’t mean that this grace period is going to be safe. It’s just going to be slightly safer without the external pressure given off by the system to kill someone.

Hopefully, nobody on his floor will decide that everyone else on the floor is an alien due to a government conspiracy and kill them for the sake of humanity. It seems unlikely until you hear about what conspiracy theorists regularly get up to around Market Street. Shisui knows, mostly because he almost got dragged into a cult while shopping there.

The best possible scenario for everyone involved is for nothing to happen and for everyone to hopefully calm down enough to proceed. Which renders most of his plans about making a few allies on his floor useless. In most cases, killing off a fellow human due to outside apocalyptic circumstances doesn’t put people in a good mood.

To put this possible scenario into perspective, it was like when you and your team play flag football in the school gym and the coach gives you a break which could be used to plan for the next game. Except nobody is motivated to do anything, so your team ends up losing the next game. This may or may not be from personal experience.

Worst-case scenario, there actually was some secret condition or hidden scenario. Or if everybody refuses to cooperate, due to the belief “The world is now ruined, I can’t trust anyone. I can only survive by myself.”

Like, the reason why you have teammates is to improve your chances of surviving. Don’t be scared, socialize with the other murderers.

He may or may not be referring to Kakashi with that line. 

To be fair, he was just joking. If anybody here was choosing to interact with people who knowingly murdered people for their own survival without any context to what their character would be, he would be worried about their mental stability. Everyone here was a ticking time bomb from the perspective of a person who just got trusted into a new world where not following orders will kill you. Shisui was fine because he had enough PTSD to rival a veteran soldier of both world wars.

Nobody is moving, Shisui notes to himself from his little corner. Sure it was not the best place to spectate what was going on. Since his back was against two walls, cornering him was easy, but it was better than being stabbed in the back by some paranoid maniac.

In addition, Shisui doesn’t want to be the person who triggers the group’s collective mental breakdown.

From his own observations, nobody seems to be freaking out about the new scenario. And as a result of committing murder, they seem to all be experiencing a silent mental breakdown.

From the corner of his eye, Shisui spots two people.

The two people were heavily wounded and seemed to be in the process of dying. Instead of letting them die from slow and painful blood loss, Shisui wonders if it would be kinder to just bonk them on the head.

It’d be a nicer fate than letting them be eaten by the monsters outside because if Shisui was right then once this sub-scenario is over monsters would be let inside the mall. And even if that wasn’t the case, dying of blood loss did not make for a nice death.

In the cave, Shisui died this way. That’s why he knows how unpleasant it was.

(It was torture. He couldn’t imagine how much worse it would have been without Kama.)

It feels cold and the blood loss makes you feel lightheaded and sluggish. You feel like you’re dumped into a vat of ice water as warm blood slowly leaks out of your body and onto the cold stone floor. Your mind is vividly aware of everything going around you, but your body is too tired to move, that is until your mind gradually begins to slow down too. It was a slow process. Shisui should have asked Kama to take him to the hospital when he realized how slow his death would be, because deep inside, he wanted to live.

After his eyes were stolen, it just seemed too late, even though he knew he wanted to live. Paralytic poison ran through his veins, his body was riddled with gruesome injuries. Shisui miscalculated how long it would take for him to die. He had seen people bleed out on the battlefield. It was supposed to be quicker. It took nearly four hours for him to die, but for many of his teammates on the front lines, it took only around 20 minutes for them to bleed out and die.

One of the many major factors Shisui forgot to take into account while dying was that his body was stationary. He wasn’t high on adrenaline like many of his teammates when he bled out. He was calm and still. Causing the process to take way longer than it would have otherwise.

He imagines it would be the same for the people here. The environment they were in might have been much less stressful compared to the shinobi battlefields. The thing is that their bodies and minds were not trained to handle such dire injuries like many of his comrades had been. Despite their high adrenaline and panic, the chances of them bleeding out were lower because they were still.

Approaching the two people, Shisui began to analyze their injuries.

How much longer did they have to live? How bad are the injuries?

The injuries were not too bad, in all honesty. If they had been rushed to the hospital way earlier, they could have been saved. But the hospitals near this mall are likely facing the exact same scenario they had faced only 30 minutes before, and forget about having specialists to help them. They would be lucky if even a single doctor had survived in this mall.

(Desensitization to death and excessive workload are unfavorable for survival during the apocalypse. Was it any surprise that most who did survive later went insane?)

So the lady whose name he does not know. Her injuries were okay. She had a pretty long scratch on her inner arm, probably from some ceramic shards. She also has what seems to be a broken elbow, or it can just be bruised. But from how little she’s trying to move her elbow, Shisui thinks it’s broken or at least sprained.

Walking away from the lady, Shisui approached the other person. He was in a much worse position than the lady was in. For one, he had a pocket-knife of sorts lodged in his shoulder, hitting an artery if Shisui remembers the placement of human arteries correctly.

He may have some anatomical knowledge from his days as a shinobi and his national science Olympiad competitions. He’s still not reliable compared to an actual doctor, but one thing is for sure; even if they do let the man live, he will not survive for long in such filthy conditions.

Most people do not survive stab wounds without immediate medical attention, and medical attention is the last thing they have here. Stab wounds get infected way too easily and the fact that it’s so close to his vital organs will just make the impact the infection will have on his body worse.

 A few other survivors were also approaching the injured people as well, most of them being frightened yet mostly untouched. With nothing other than a few cuts or bruises from crossfire to show for the mess they were in.

“So what should we do with them?” a girl asked. She was wearing a KFC work uniform and smelled distinctly of grease. She’s also probably the only other person in this food court who wasn’t having a mental breakdown of sorts. Her apathy towards the situation was familiar in a way, as it reminded him of Kama.

It was as if she was a person experienced with death, and immediately Shisui knew she definitely had some form of childhood trauma.

(This childhood trauma diagnosis was from his inner Gen Z corruption peeking through.)

In an attempt to not look like a psychopath to everybody here, Shisui replies in a quiet voice.

“Does anybody here know First Aid? We might be able to help them... at least a little.” He asks, faking some form of hope in his voice. His voice is cracking, as if he was mere seconds away from a breakdown, which, to say, was the truth in a way.

He’s not dumb, certainly not naïve. He knows there is little way for them to survive here.

Sure, the lady’s head injury might be a lot better than first perceived due to how much blood there is in the human head. But Shisui really doubts it. The amount of blood coming from her head is way more than a regular wound would give. Plus, she also seems to be having a seizure.

Jerky arm and leg movements, short erratic breathing, way too much drooling.

All those signs point to her having a major skull fracture.

So it looks like both of them are going to have a hard time surviving here.

“I did a first aid class for health back in college, but I forgot half the things we learned there so…” somebody said, intruding on the conversation and the fake stage performance put out by Shisui. It was a dude. He was wearing a white Kirkland T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

He later walked up to the lady and observed her, before flinching and backing away from her injured body.

“That is way out of my league.” He said, before approaching Shisui and the fast food lady next to him.

All Shisui could think was, What a valiant offer my guy. If only you could have mentioned that last part a bit sooner before getting my fake hopes up. Shisui was actually not really expecting anyone to stand up if he was honest with himself.

At least somebody tried to help. That was more than most people could claim to do in such a scenario.

Which also brings him to another realization. If he was so sure that this scenario apocalypse was happening all around the world, then wouldn’t it have affected his family as well?

What about his friends, his classmates?

Are they all dead, who survive-

While there may be a little hope in him that at least somebody from his social group survived, the chances were still pretty low. 

While it was pretty likely for at least one person to survive, that doesn’t guarantee the fact they’ll make it out of the scenario.

Heck, even Shisui isn’t sure whether he would make it out alive and he’s way more prepared than like half the people here. As he has a book that hopefully contains the world’s future in it and isn’t an absolute idiot when it comes to survival situations like these.

So most of his friends and family are dead. He’s going to have to accept that. But this isn’t the time to grieve over his potentially dead family. He needs to get himself some allies and hopefully survive the second scenario.

After all, does it really matter whether your family is alive if you’re not alive to even grieve them?

“I don’t think she’s going to make it…” Shisui said, the words becoming a mere whisper at the end. As the fake anxiety he faced squeezed his throat, unable to make him talk.

“So should we kill them? It doesn’t seem like they would survive and even if they do survive all, they’ll be is a liability to our group.” KFC girl said while poking the security guard lady to see if she was responding to the stimuli. It wasn’t working well. She was reacting, but only barely.

“You can’t do that. They’re human beings. You can’t kill them like some livestock just because they’ll be a liability!” The nervous Asian kid in glasses hissed, glaring at the KFC lady as if she did something wrong.

Well, all Shisui knows is that KFC lady was right and the glasses kid will soon get a reality check as he witnesses things way more depraved than mercy-killing two injured people happen in the future.

The things that happened during the course of the novel were no freaking joke. It was seriously some brutal Third Shinobi World War levels of depravity.

Shisui, deciding that having two of the people on this floor go on a moral argument that can go on for who knows how long is just going to waste everybody’s precious safe time.

Taking a deep breath before switching the topic, Shisui said.

“Before this entire apocalypse moral debate breaks out among you two, how about we have some introductions? As judging from the scenario title of ‘Grace Period’ we will not have time to introduce ourselves so casually in the future.”

Starting with his own introduction to get it out of the way, Shisui said.

“My name is Adrian Iwashimizu, but you can call me by the name of Shisui, which is my Japanese name. So let’s move on to our next introduction, so KFC lady, what’s your name?”

Shisui said, pointing at KFC lady, the person who he was most interested in, KFC lady responded with a interesting smile.

“My name is Bianca Scott. And it's nice to know at least one of my future teammates has a functioning brain.”

Never-ending river of time

Time is like a river

A river that forevermore descends towards stagnation

A pond of timeless stars for which it houses

Covering the hardened earth.

The inhabitants of the starry sky were interesting indeed

The harmony in your tongue lifts

Into a song of adoration.

In the church where you sang, it was all for the star who is known as the messenger of god

They watch from above through electric blue screens given by the absolute one above

Beautiful indeed, as stories weave into a figure, one that needs to consume the souls of others to live

I saw one of a being this degree when I was young

It was at a church of sorts, where a man with silver eyes embraced my very being and saved my life

Black birds flock, dulcet yet mourning, an uproar of need,

It was a bit of a familiar scene

I know I saw it once in the veering animation of one of my favorite animes

But I feel like I have experienced it beforehand

(Firsthand, the sky erupts into a world of burning embers.)

The blackbirds danced across the ash-ridden sky

Announcing a scene for all to flee

Bodies as far as the eye can see

I know one day I’ll find out the familiarity of such a site

But today is not the day

Speaking in an angelic tongue, I turn to the starry sky

Something will change 

Forevermore, in my mind, I leave

Not knowing the value of the vision that I received,

( I stare at the burning skyline from the windshield. That’s when I realized those dreams were neither lies my mind created while asleep. The end has commenced and so warning I have received will finally come true.)

P.S I know this makes no sense, this is also a reference to the first fic of this series which is a 10k oneshot and the series which this a fanfic of.