Date: 14th July 2026
Location: Lecture Hall 304 / Main Corridor, London Metropolitan University
Time: 09:15 AM BST
I had massively underestimated the sheer, soul-crushing distance between our Brixton basement and the lecture hall. My lungs were already staging a violent protest against the morning air.
In my previous loops, I'd usually bypass this mundane torture with a high-tier teleportation glitch. That was back when I actually had a budget and a functioning nervous system.
Today, I was just a mortal with a spine made of dry crackers and bad intentions. I'd pulled an all-nighter building a pirate god-system, and my physical body was making me pay the toll.
My vision blurred at the edges as I dragged my feet through the brutalist concrete corridors of London Met. Every single breath was a tactical struggle.
To the world, I was just another scrawny student in a faded coat running late for a 9:00 AM lecture. To me, this grey hallway felt like a trek across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
["Mason, darling, you've stopped moving."]
["Are we waiting for a bus, or have you finally decided to join the choir invisible?"]
Eliza's voice hummed in my earpiece, crisp, aristocratic, and utterly unsympathetic.
["The janitor only just mopped the floors."]
["To die right here would be a grave breach of etiquette."]
"Etiquette can absolutely bugger off," I managed to choke out. I clutched a cold, peeling radiator just to keep my knees from buckling.
A girl walked past me, pausing with a deeply concerned look.
"Hey, Mason! You alright, mate?" she asked. "You look worse than after that massive pub crawl in Camden last Friday."
I blinked at her, my eyes struggling to focus on her face. I had absolutely no idea who she was. Was she in my course? A childhood friend?
To me, "last Friday" was about seven hundred years ago.
I'd seen empires rise and fall in the span of a single afternoon. I'd watched the London Eye get ripped from its moorings by Vanguard demons while the Thames boiled.
The names and faces of my 2026 peers had been violently overwritten by centuries of trauma and complex survival math. As far as my brain was concerned, this girl was already a ghost.
"Last... Friday?" I rasped, my voice sounding like sandpaper scraping across a brick. "Who... exactly are you?"
The girl's face fell into a look of pure, unadulterated confusion.
"It's Sarah, Mason. We've sat next to each other in the bloody lab for two years." She took a step back. "Are you actually mental?"
"Ah. Right. Sarah. Of course," I lied smoothly.
My practiced 'Chunibyo' mask slid back into place with the ease of a veteran con artist.
"Forgive me. My mind was currently navigating the eleven dimensions of M-Theory." I tapped my temple pretentiously. "Names are lower-frequency data, irrelevant to the Great Work. Do excuse me."
She backed away slowly, clutching her tote bag to her chest like I was a ticking bomb. Then she turned and speed-walked towards the stairs without looking back.
["You've spent two years in this institution, yet you don't recognise the girl who shares your workbench?"]
["Your memory is an absolute shambles, Architect."]
Eliza's AR avatar flickered into view on the edge of my glasses. Her digital brow was furrowed with genuine perplexity, dropping her usual Victorian mockery.
["How can you calculate the entropy of a closed system to the fifth decimal?"]
["Yet you completely forget the face of a human being you saw seventy-two hours ago?"]
"Different... storage... partitions," I muttered, peeling myself off the radiator and forcing my leaden feet to move.
Eliza didn't know. She couldn't possibly understand the weight of a thousand lifetimes.
She thought I was just a scatterbrained genius, a delusional kid living in his own arrogant head. She didn't know that for me, this university was a ghost of a ghost.
I had left this campus centuries ago. Walking these specific halls now was like trying to remember a book I'd read in a previous life, while actively drowning.
I tapped the side of my cheap, plastic smartwatch to activate the 'Neural Pulse' command. A faint, golden ripple shimmered across the cracked digital screen.
Miles away, in the damp dark of our Brixton Vault, the primary Tesla Core acknowledged the handshake. Suddenly, a sharp, electric tingle zipped through my calves and lower back.
It wasn't a heal. I didn't have the stats for actual cellular regeneration yet. It was just a forced electron recovery.
The Tesla signal aggressively stimulated the ATP production in my muscle cells, manually flushing out lactic acid with pirated Aether.
It felt like being stabbed by a thousand tiny, burning needles. But the agonizing 'dead-weight' feeling in my legs finally began to lift.
["Oh? Using the Aether to jumpstart your pathetic biology?"]
["I suppose that's one way to compensate for your lack of basic constitution."]
["A parasitic battery for a parasitic boy."]
"It's not parasitic, Eliza. It's just optimised resource management," I rasped, finally straightening my spine.
I still looked like a walking corpse, pale and hollow-eyed, but at least I wasn't a crawling one.
I finally reached the heavy oak door of Room 304. I stood there for a second, my trembling hand hovering over the cold brass handle.
A profound, suffocating wave of nostalgia hit me. It hit so hard it nearly knocked me backward into the corridor.
Through the small glass pane in the door, I could see the lecture hall looking exactly as I dimly remembered it.
The rows of uncomfortable wooden fold-down seats, the scuff marks on the linoleum floor. The overwhelming, stifling normality of it all made my chest ache.
In Loop 412, I had watched this very room get vaporised by an orbital strike. In Loop 88, I had used these exact wooden desks as barricades against a horde of rabid Hellhounds.
Now, it was just a room full of tired nineteen-year-olds drinking cheap flat whites and complaining about their student loans.
The sensory whiplash was staggering. It was a beautiful, boring, heartbreaking slice of a world that didn't know it was sitting on death row.
I took a deep breath, anchored myself to the fragile reality of 2026, and pushed the door open.
This was the absolute territory of Professor Vincy.
Back in this original 2026 timeline, before the loops blurred everything into a bloody pulp of survival, I had a reputation. I was known as the the Professor Killer.
Most academics at London Met absolutely loathed me.
I was the insufferable student who cornered them after lectures with 'forbidden' questions. I brought up theoretical anomalies and quantum paradoxes that made their standard textbooks look like children's bedtime stories.
Most of them would see me coming down the hall and suddenly remember an urgent meeting in another postcode.
But Vincy was different.
Professor Vincy was a man who lived for the 'Dangerous Equation.' He didn't run away. He leaned in.
He was the kind of academic who would rather burn the university to the ground than ignore a mathematical inconsistency.
He answered my questions with riddles that felt like intellectual landmines. He was constantly testing whether I was a true genius or just a well-read lunatic.
I actually liked him, despite the fact that he was the only person on campus capable of spotting the 'glitch' in my reality.
The lecture hall was only half-full. The air was thick with the smell of roasted coffee beans, damp raincoats, and the low, buzzing hum of student chatter.
"Ah, Mr. Pryce," a gravelly voice cut through the noise with the precision of a surgical scalpel.
Professor Vincy stood at the podium, adjusting his rimless spectacles. He was the absolute epitome of London grit, but elevated into an elegant, bespoke menace.
While I survived on the grimy streets of Brixton, Vincy operated in the mahogany-panelled rooms of high academia.
He wore a perfectly tailored charcoal tweed suit, his posture impeccably straight. He looked like he was carved out of old oak and unapologetic brilliance.
"You look particularly... deceased today," Vincy noted, his London accent clipped and brutally sharp. "Did you spend the night fighting demons in your sleep? Or was it merely the Wi-Fi connection failing you again?"
A few students in the front row snickered at my expense. I just gave a tired, cryptic half-smile. My AR glasses were already scanning the sprawling equations on the chalkboard behind him.
Vincy had written a complex derivation of the Third Law of Thermodynamics. But he'd deliberately left an error in the entropy coefficient.
It was a trap, a test for anyone actually paying attention instead of scrolling through TikTok.
"Neither, Professor," I said, sliding into my usual creaky seat in the back row.
I looked at the bloke sitting next to me. I had absolutely no idea what his name was. I just gave him a chin-up nod like we were old mates at the pub.
"I was just recalculating the frequency of the firmament," I told Vincy casually. "It's significantly noisier than I expected."
Vincy's eyes sharpened behind his lenses. The ambient temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees.
He didn't dismiss the comment as 'Chunibyo' nonsense like the other professors would have. He simply paused, his piece of chalk hovering millimetres from the blackboard.
"The firmament? A rather bold, archaic term for a first-year physics student," Vincy said softly. The danger in his voice was perfectly masked by a veneer of academic curiosity.
"Be careful, Mason. If you listen to the noise for too long, the maths starts to talk back. And usually, it's not saying things you want to hear."
"I like it when the maths talks back," I whispered, propping my heavy head on my hand.
My biology was still screaming in protest, but the faint violet Tesla hum in my watch kept me tethered to the waking world.
"It's the only thing in this bloody school that doesn't lie."
Vincy turned back to the sprawling equation on the blackboard. The chalk dusted his pristine tweed jacket like academic dandruff.
He tapped the exact error he had planted. It was a missing non-linear variable in the Boltzmann constant that would, technically speaking, allow a cup of tea to un-stir itself if left alone in a vacuum.
"Now," Vincy announced. His voice suddenly boomed with theatrical authority, snapping the dozing students awake.
"According to the Classical Model I've just outlined, the universe is a slow, miserable march toward heat death. A tragedy in three acts."
He paced the length of the podium, his expensive leather shoes clicking sharply against the floorboards.
"But looking at this specific derivation..." He let the silence hang. "Can anyone in this room tell me why this particular universe would collapse before teatime?"
Silence. Utter, terrified silence filled the room.
The rows of students stared blankly at their desks, horrified at the prospect of making eye contact.
To them, it was just a jumble of Greek letters and numbers. To Vincy, it was a profound philosophical crisis. To me, it was a coded interrogation.
"Anyone?" Vincy prodded. He scanned the room with the predatory grace of a hawk looking for a slow field mouse. "Come now. It's a simple question of causal loops. If Entropy is merely a measure of disorder, why does this equation suggest that disorder can be organised?"
I let out a weary sigh. It was loud enough to be heard over the hum of the projector, but quiet enough to be considered incredibly rude.
I didn't bother raising my hand. I simply spoke to the peeling paint on the ceiling, my voice a dry rasp.
"Because you've treated the system as closed, Professor," I said. "But you forgot that the observer, us, is actively leaking data."
Heads turned so fast I heard necks crack. The entire room shifted their gaze to me. I was just the pale, sickly kid in the back row who looked like he might genuinely faint if the wind blew too hard.
Vincy didn't look surprised in the slightest. He looked absolutely delighted.
He capped his chalk with a sharp click that echoed like a gunshot. "Elaborate, Mr. Pryce. And do try not to sound like you're quoting a cheap science fiction novel."
"The error is in the third line," I said, lazily pointing a finger toward the board. "You ignored the 'Maxwell's Demon' paradox. You assumed the door between the hot and cold particles operates on random chance."
I let my heavy hand drop, meeting Vincy's intense gaze dead on.
"But if there's an intelligence operating the door, a System, if you will, then Entropy doesn't strictly increase. It pauses. It just waits in an escrow account."
"A System?" Vincy challenged, leaning aggressively over the heavy wooden podium. "Physics does not allow for 'intelligence' in the subatomic realm, Mason. Atoms do not have political agendas."
"Don't they?" I countered softly. I was staring down the man who might one day burn the world to ashes. "Or do we just lack the security clearance to read their manifesto?"
I tapped my cheap plastic pen against the desk. The tapping rhythm perfectly matched the violet pulse vibrating on my wrist.
"If you apply a non-linear variable, let's call it the 'God Frequency', to that error you deliberately left on the board, the equation balances perfectly." I paused for dramatic effect. "The tea doesn't un-stir itself, Professor. Someone drinks it. The energy doesn't just vanish into the ether; it gets uploaded."
The room went dead silent. My classmates looked back and forth between us as if we were speaking conversational Latin.
Vincy stared at me for a long, heavy moment. Then, a slow, incredibly dry smile spread across his face.
It was the look of a man playing a solitary game of chess who had just found a worthy opponent hiding in a room full of NPCs.
"Uploaded," Vincy repeated, tasting the word. He rolled the implications around on his tongue like fine wine. "An arrogant hypothesis, Mr. Pryce. Dangerous, even."
He picked up the eraser and casually wiped away his deliberate error. He replaced it with the exact variable I had just hinted at.
"It implies that the universe isn't a natural phenomenon, but a simulated terrarium running on borrowed power." He smirked. "However... for the sake of argument, and because your sheer audacity is the only thing keeping me awake this morning... let's assume you're right. Let's assume the maths is lying to us."
He turned back to the class, his tone dropping back to his usual droning lecture cadence. But his sharp eyes stayed fixed on me for a second longer.
"Mr. Pryce suggests we are merely data waiting to be processed," Vincy announced. "Let's hope, for his sake, the processor doesn't crash before the end of the term."
["He likes you, Mason."]
["In the same way a butcher likes a particularly interesting, well-marbled piece of meat."]
["I must say, human interactions are far more savage than I anticipated."]
["Do try not to get 'carved' before the mid-terms."]
["It would be a catastrophic waste of all that pirated electricity."]
I opened my notebook, my hands finally steady as the electron recovery hit 100 percent. The lecture began in earnest, but I wasn't listening to the basics of thermal dynamics.
I was watching the way Vincy's eyes subtly moved across the room, sensing the heavy weight of the air. He knew something was shifting.
Beneath the veneer of the elegant academic, he could feel the localized distortion of the Tesla signal I was trailing behind me like the scent of ozone.
The game was officially on. The board was set.
My physical body was sitting at a pathetic 0.9 Vitality, as fragile as cheap glass. But my mind was at 999. And in this room, that was the only stat that truly mattered.