Ezra had to face it. He had to return to the bs. Had to clean out Haru’s dormitory. Mr. Key had given him time off. But it still felt too soon. Too raw. Too final.

  He stood outside Haru’s door. His stomach twisted. For a moment, he thought about turning back. Then— He exhaled sharply. And opened the door.

  Chaos.

  God.

  It looked like a hurricane had gone through. Clothes were scattered everywhere. The floor was a disaster. Ezra took one look at the mess and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Jesus Christ, kid."

  It was such a stark contrast to how Haru kept his workpce. There? Everything was organized. Every tool perfectly pced. But here? Oh, this was a kid’s room. A nerd’s room. And, Jesus Christ, he was such a weeb.

  Posters lined the walls. Not just any posters. Tenzai Raikou. Figures, model katana, even a goddamn body pillow of Raikou’s hot sidekick, Ezareena. Ezra groaned. "You little shit."

  Despite himself—Despite everything—He smiled.

  Then, he got to work. He had brought trash bags for the garbage. And dear god, was there garbage. Unfinished pizza. Takeout containers. Loose notes, some covered in drawings of anime fight choreography. Ezra shook his head, carefully sorting everything.

  The memorabilia, he packed with care. Every little figure. Every katana. The body pillow? …That was going in a separate box. As the room began to clear up, Ezra’s eyes drifted to something odd.

  A graviton battery. Sitting near a novelty psma bulb toy. He didn’t think much of it. At first. Then, on a whim—He plugged the psma bulb in.

  For a while, he just sat there. Watched it hum with electricity. Just took a breather. Tried to remember the good times. Then—Something strange happened.

  The psma flickered. Like an LED bulb recorded by a phone. But—that shouldn’t be happening. Electricity should be smooth. Ezra rubbed his eyes. Was he just staring at it too long? He blinked. No. No, something was happening.

  On instinct, he picked up the graviton battery and moved it to the other side of the room. The flickering stopped. "Hey…" Ezra frowned. "That’s kinda funny."

  He moved the battery closer again. The flickering returned. Stronger. Then he moved it away. It stopped. Back closer. Stronger.

  Ezra’s pulse quickened. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, he had some experiments to run.

  Ezra wasted no time. He set up shop in the b. If something was off, he was going to find out why.

  Step One: Observations.

  Just what the hell was the psma bulb doing? Ezra didn’t trust his own eyes. So he bought a slow-motion camera. Something high-speed, precise. He ran the first test.

  The bulb flickered. At first, it looked normal. Then, he repyed the footage. And his blood ran cold. Electricity doesn’t move like that.

  It wasn’t just pulsing. It was going back and forth. Like it was being slowed down. Ezra leaned forward, watching frame by frame. The pulses were not just deyed. They were being actively restrained.

  Almost like… Like they were fighting against something unseen. Ezra sat back in his chair, rubbing his chin. "What the fuck…"

  Step Two: Measurements.

  Voltage reader? Check. Oscilloscope? Check.

  He set up two different circuits. One for AC power. One for DC power. Then, he ran the numbers.

  At first? Everything seemed fine. But when he compared the readings? Something was definitely wrong. The electron flow was slower. Much slower.

  Electricity was not supposed to slow down. Not like this. This wasn’t resistance. This wasn’t a capacitor dey. This was something else.

  He ran more tests. The pulses? They weren’t natural. And the most disturbing part? Ezra had slowed footage before. Typically, to see electric pulses clearly, you needed to slow the footage by 100,000x. And for that, you’d need dozens of cameras firing simultaneously.

  But his slow-motion camera? It wasn’t even close to that range. Not only that—It was capturing the effect smoothly. Like the distortion was already happening in real time. Like he was seeing something that wasn’t meant to be seen.

  Ezra’s pulse quickened. "This ain’t normal." He leaned forward. Eyes locked on the screen. It wasn’t just electricity behaving strangely. It was something deeper. Something fundamental.

  Ezra could see it. Which meant…He could map it.

  Ezra stood before the whiteboard, marker poised mid-air, staring at the tangled mess of equations and theories he had scrawled across it. Something wasn’t adding up. Something small—a minuscule detail lost in the grand picture. He could feel it, hovering just outside his grasp, taunting him.

  He went back to square one, running through what humanity knew about gravitons. The batteries were like transformers, keeping gravity waves trapped in a closed-loop system. When energy was needed, it was simply transferred from one form to another, a seamless transaction. But the time dition effect—that had always been accounted for. It was a known variable in graviton technology.

  And yet…

  Ezra frowned, tapping the marker against his chin. How in the hell was it affecting electrons? Circuits weren’t supposed to behave this way. Electrical current operated in predictable ways, even under gravitational influence. So why had no one ever noticed this before?

  Then it hit him.

  Systems running on graviton energy took time dition into account—but what about the circuitry itself? The very wiring, the resistors, the pathways conducting the flow of electrons? Had anyone ever thought to measure how gravitational forces influenced the internal mechanics of electronics?

  Ezra dropped the marker, stepping back.

  "That’s it," he muttered. "That’s the missing link."

  Setting up his next experiment was tedious, but necessary. He collected several graviton batteries and prepared a small breadboard circuit on his workstation. A simple setup—LEDs connected in series, each pced carefully to observe how the current flowed under different conditions. Right before the battery terminals and the inverter, he installed two diodes, effectively turning the circuit into a one-way street for electrons.

  He ran the control test first. Power on. The LEDs lit up smoothly, flickering in predictable pulses. Nothing unexpected. So far, so good.

  Next came the real test.

  Ezra powered up the graviton batteries, directing their energy toward the setup. The LEDs glowed just as they had before. Smooth. Stable. No disruptions.

  He leaned in, brows furrowing. Nothing seemed different. Still, he knew better than to trust his own eyes. He reached for the slow-motion camera. At maximum FPS, the footage showed nothing out of the ordinary. He exhaled sharply. "Come on, give me something…"

  Lowering the FPS setting bit by bit, he scrutinized the screen, watching the recorded pulses in real-time. At first, it looked identical to the control group—smooth, rhythmic. But something in his gut told him to keep going.

  So he did. As the FPS dropped further, a subtle shift emerged.

  A flicker. A disruption in the current. Ezra narrowed his eyes. "Wait… that’s not right."

  The pulses weren’t just oscilting—they were behaving erratically, almost as if they were resisting something unseen. Electrons weren’t just flowing one way anymore; they were slowing down, pushing against an invisible force. He cross-checked the data with his oscilloscope. The AC current appeared to function normally. No deviations. No anomalies. But the slow-motion footage told a different story.

  He sat back in his chair, arms crossed. "This feels right," he muttered to himself. "But it’s still not all of it. Something’s missing." He tapped a finger against the desk, frustration creeping in. The puzzle pieces were right in front of him, but they weren’t fitting together the way they should. What was he missing?

  What was he not seeing? Ezra took a deep breath. He wasn’t done yet.

  Ezra spent weeks running test after test, diving into every possible variable he could think of. It wasn’t just about setting up the experiment anymore—it was about understanding what he was missing. Every time he thought he had a lead, the data would slip through his fingers like sand, teasing him with near-perfection, only to leave him stranded without a definitive answer.

  His instruments were perfectly calibrated.The slow-motion camera captured every flicker, every pulse.The oscilloscope readings were stable, normal.

  Too normal.

  That was what gnawed at him the most. If there was something happening here—something new, something big—then why did the readings insist that everything was behaving as expected?

  He spent hours locked in deep thought, rerunning possible hypotheses in his mind. Maybe his setup wasn’t picking up the right signals. Maybe his tools weren’t sensitive enough to catch the anomaly.

  Or maybe… he wasn’t looking at the right thing.

  Eventually, he had to take a break before frustration burned him out completely. He threw himself into mindless scrolling, binge-watching videos, saving memes, soaking in whatever fun facts he could to keep himself occupied. Anything to pull his mind away from the relentless obsession that this experiment had become.

  And then, te one night, with his mind clouded by Auntie Ciarra’s penjamin, it hit him.

  The phone.

  Ezra turned it over in his hand, staring at the case. It wasn’t just durable—it had a built-in sor cell. Not a full-scale one, nothing powerful enough to keep the device running indefinitely, but just enough to pull in a trickle charge in an emergency. It was designed to keep the phone’s essential functions alive even when it was off. Even when there was no battery left.

  That was how emergency services could still track you. A tiny reserve of power, just enough to keep the system checking for signals.

  He sat up suddenly, phone in hand. That was it. "Ki Ki," he muttered, voice thick with haze.

  The AI assistant booted up smoothly. "Yes, Ezra?"

  His thoughts were scattered, racing faster than his ability to form words. "How much power can a sor cell provide?" Ki Ki listed the standard output, detailing various types, efficiencies, and use cases. Ezra licked his lips. "How much would it read if it were pced next to an LED?" The AI assistant calcuted again, responding with another set of figures.

  His heartbeat picked up. "And how much should it read," he said carefully, "if I were using the LEDs I’ve been experimenting with?" Ki Ki processed for a moment before delivering the answer. The numbers didn’t match.

  Ezra exhaled, his pulse pounding. He had a new experiment to run.

  The next morning, Ezra set up the sor cell right next to the LED circuit. He ran the test with standard conditions first. Control group. No graviton energy. Everything worked exactly as expected. The sor cell picked up a steady, predictable output.

  Then he activated the graviton batteries. The readings changed. At first, it was subtle. Barely noticeable. But as Ezra increased the graviton energy, the sor cell output began to drop. That didn’t make sense. Light was light.

  If anything, increasing power should have made the LED glow brighter. The sor cell should have picked up more energy, not less. Ezra frowned, moving the sor cell away. The output stabilized. He moved it closer again. The output weakened.

  His breath caught in his throat. That could only mean one thing. The LED wasn’t just dimming. The photons weren’t reaching the sor cell.

  Something was slowing them down. Ezra sat there, staring at the setup, feeling like his mind was being rewired in real-time. Light didn’t just slow down. Not unless… His blood ran cold. "Ki Ki," he whispered, unable to look away from the experiment.

  "Yes, Ezra?"

  "Run the numbers again. Based on the drop in output, how much of a dey is happening here?"

  Ki Ki processed the data. Ezra’s foot tapped anxiously on the floor as he waited, his stomach twisting into knots. Finally, the response came. "0.00000042 seconds per photon dey detected at maximum graviton exposure."

  Ezra blinked, his breath hitching. That was impossible. But if the photons were being deyed—If light itself was being affected—Then that meant electrons weren’t just moving backward.

  Time was.

  The realization hit him all at once. He shot up from his chair, knocking over his notes. He grabbed the slow-motion footage, pying it back, frame by frame, studying the flickers—the inconsistencies that shouldn’t be there.

  It all added up. The LED pulses, the irregur osciltions, the feedback loop that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t an error. It wasn’t a malfunction. It was time itself, being stretched, bent—deyed.

  Ezra let out a sharp breath. Then—He whispered it aloud. "Holy shit…" His fingers shook. "That’s—" He swallowed. "That’s time travel."