A single bulb hung from the ceiling, casting a pale glow over a mess of metal scraps, tangled wires, and notebooks filled with equations that looked like alien scripture. Asashi stood quietly in front of his half-built machine — a chaotic mix of copper coils, circuit boards, and a thick cylindrical core glowing with faint blue light.
His face was calm, but his eyes burned with a kind of restless thrill. The kind of look a child might wear just before opening a mystery box.
He pulled out a weathered black notebook, flipping through pages full of cross-outs, side notes, sketches, and theoretical models. The handwriting was messy but precise. On one corner, a phrase stood out, scribbled and underlined multiple times: "Time is a door. Not a wall."
He crouched down, adjusting a wire cluster that had loosened near the core. The sparks that flew out were small, harmless — but enough to make him wince.
"Damn it... still too much feedback on the return node," he muttered.
With careful precision, he replaced a burnt capacitor, adjusted the frequency dial by 0.05 Hz, then stepped back and rubbed the grease off his forehead. A large whiteboard behind him held a countdown in thick red marker: "Projected Activation Date: 42 Days Remaining."
He allowed himself a small smile.
He wasn't building this to change the world. There were no dying parents to save, no tragic past to rewrite. He wasn’t a chosen one or a hidden genius from a forgotten bloodline. He was just a guy who wanted to see it all — the rise of empires, the collapse of civilizations, the first creature to walk the earth, and the last.
Time wasn’t something to fear. It was something to witness.
He turned to the smaller testing unit — a compact version of the main chamber, roughly the size of a microwave. Inside, he placed a cheap plastic wristwatch set exactly five minutes ahead of his phone’s clock.
He locked the chamber door and typed in a command on his nearby laptop: “Test #042 – Short-Loop Retraction.”
The device buzzed softly. Lights flickered. The humming grew louder. Then — silence.
Whump!
A puff of smoke shot from the side vent, making Asashi cough.
"Close..." he wheezed, waving away the smoke, a grin stretching across his face. "Way too much voltage on the stabilizer. But close."
He opened the chamber.
The watch hadn’t changed. Still five minutes ahead. Still ticking.
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He wasn’t disappointed. If anything, the failure thrilled him. The experiment didn’t need to succeed — it only needed to come close enough to feel real.
He jotted down results in the notebook, then paused, the pen hovering midair.
No one knows.
Not Yumeko, not his professors, not even the government, despite the slightly questionable parts he might’ve “borrowed” from the robotics lab. This was his project, his secret frontier. His path.
Not to fix anything.
But to see everything.
— — —
Morning came too quickly.
Asashi’s alarm screamed at 7:45 AM. He groaned, slapped it off, and sat up with hair that looked like he had fought a tornado — and lost.
By the time he made it out the door, shirt half-buttoned and toast hanging from his mouth, the clock was striking 8:20.
Yumeko spotted him first.
She leaned against a vending machine near the lecture hall entrance, sipping a canned coffee. Her brown ponytail bounced slightly as she turned her head.
“You look like you fought a dragon,” she smirked.
Asashi, mouth full of toast, grunted in response.
“You overslept again?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” he mumbled, swallowing. “I was...uh...reading.”
“Reading all night until your face merged with a soldering iron?” she teased.
He offered a lopsided grin.
They walked into class together, the soft rhythm of campus life unfolding around them. Students chatted, others dozed, the smell of instant noodles wafted from someone’s bag.
Inside Lecture Hall B3, Professor Kawaguchi scribbled the day’s topic across the whiteboard in bold capital letters:
“TEMPORAL MECHANICS: THEORIES & IMPOSSIBILITIES”
Asashi’s eyes widened slightly. Yumeko leaned over and whispered, “That one’s for you, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer. His focus was locked in.
Professor Kawaguchi, a man in his 60s with Einstein hair and the posture of someone perpetually carrying a stack of books, began.
“Today, we explore what physics says about time — what can move forward, what might loop backward, and what must never happen at all.”
A few students chuckled. Time travel lectures were usually good for jokes.
“Let’s assume, for just a moment,” the professor said, “that we had a machine. Not a metaphor. A real mechanism that could shift an object out of sync with linear time. The question becomes: What price would reality pay for that deviation?”
Asashi’s hand rose.
“Depends on the energy source, containment, and whether the movement is anchored to local or universal time.”
A few heads turned.
Kawaguchi raised an eyebrow. “And you are?”
“Asashi. Second year. Physics and engineering.”
“You read Wheeler’s paradox papers?”
“Twice.”
The professor smiled. “Good. You’ll love the next lecture.”
Yumeko leaned over and whispered, “You nerd.”
Asashi just smiled faintly, eyes already drifting toward the possibilities.
— — —
Later that evening, as the sun dipped behind the university buildings, painting the sky in gold and pink, Asashi walked Yumeko home.
They talked about random things — TV shows, a cat she saw on the way to class, and how vending machine sandwiches were secretly evil.
“Seriously,” she said, elbowing him, “you should take a break once in a while. Come with me to the lakeside this weekend.”
He hesitated.
“I’ll think about it.”
Yumeko rolled her eyes. “That means no.”
“No,” he corrected, “it means I’m still building a machine that may or may not implode the universe.”
She laughed, not realizing how literal he was.
At her doorstep, she paused.
“You’re weird, Asashi. But... I like that about you.”
He gave her a small wave, then turned and walked away.
— — —
Back in his garage, the lights were off. Dust floated in the single beam of moonlight slicing through the window.
But something had changed.
The chamber’s status light — which had always remained dormant — was blinking.
Soft.
Green.
A low, rhythmic hum echoed beneath the silence.
The system log on his laptop flickered awake on its own. Lines of code scrolled rapidly across the screen. At the very bottom:
"Temporal Anchor Engaged... Unknown Source Detected."
Asashi wasn’t there to see it.
But his machine had just taken its first breath.