When she woke, her EQ had dropped back to 2.84. The troll DNA? Scrubbed clean. The reinforced bones? Gone. Her body reset like a bad save file, leaving only her mind untouched.

  Panic flared for half a second before she checked her status—then froze. The Trait changes were still there. That wasn't how this worked. She checked again, blinking through the haze.

  Mana was still useless. Still untouchable. Still hers. But if the status’s changes stuck between loops, then that meant the pathways had dug in, refusing to reset with the rest of her. The troll's bones were gone. But the pathways crossed over. And that meant something. Probably.

  She stared at the screen, blinking. Then at her body; her wounds were back to factory default.

  Healed. Reset. Blood, augments, everything wound back on arrival. Standard issue apocalypse biology. But then changes to her Trait hadn't gone anywhere. The panel still thought she was special.

  Figures. Dr. Harding had called it. He was the first one to theorise the Status Panel wasn't a UI gimmick, but a metaphysical EQ scanner that only worked on the person using it. He’d said it measured more than just muscle ratios and cortical density. It tracked structures most people didn't believe existed, and a few nobody had even discovered yet. His words.

  That meant it scanned everything from biology to parts of us that existed in whatever counted as dimensional overspill. That included anything past 3D, and probably whatever came after that.

  One of those layers probably held the soul, assuming that wasn't just something religions trademarked. The incompatibility trait seemed to think it was real enough to categorise.

  So theoretically...

  What if something else changed every time she changed her trait? Not just her body—something like a soul? Or at least, some part of her that existed on a plane they hadn't cracked yet. Something that didn't restore to baseline on entry. Her neural augments were based on her biology. Flash-copy each loop. Updated every day, each reset. What if her biology was influenced by whatever metaphysical part of her held the Trait’s data?

  It would explain how her memories held.

  If that was true, she could make countless alterations with each reset; stack variables endlessly.

  Kelly thought back to why she was in New York at all—before the sky erupted—back to where all of this started. Project Portal.

  For a month, portals had been appearing across Earth, ripping holes in reality in ways that suggested the universe had finally gotten bored of consistency. She had been a junior researcher on the team assembled to study, dissect, and make sense of the anomaly. But progress had moved too fast, they made strides too smoothly, and had been too damn ambitious.

  "Investigate the portals" had quickly turned into "Recreate the portals."

  A full-scale project to reverse-engineer the impossible. Dark energy's job was simple: push the universe apart, keep it stretching, expanding, never let it stop. Dark matter? That was gravity's backbone, the invisible glue holding everything together so the stretching didn’t destroy everything. It kept galaxies from flying apart, shaped the formation of stars, and made gravity-based tech like flight implants, gravity drives, and orbital stabilizers even possible. One force constantly expanded the universe like a cosmic yoga band, the other kept it from unraveling.

  The second discovery? Dark energy reacted to dark matter. The two interacted. They hadn't cracked the portal yet, but they'd kicked the door open just enough to see what was on the other side.

  In the next loop, Kelly downloaded data after data, everything Vaughn had that she could reach, everything from Project Portal, and everything that could help her, ripping through every scrap of information on troll DNA. In one loop, she dragged in a creature Jackhammer had called a 'goblin shaman,’ intent on studying how it pulled energy from the world. The thing Shrieked, thrashed, and spat furious words, hurling spells as she scanned its screaming form in real time.

  Then the mercenary arrived. Then they both died.

  She took their steps, their knowledge, their data, and every breakthrough they scraped together—then tore past their limits with reckless, chaotic genius, going where they never could have imagined.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Mana was an application of dark matter and energy, the building blocks of existence, unknowable but identified. Dark matter pulled, held, stitched the universe together. Dark energy pushed, stretched, tore it apart. One slowed expansion, the other shoved it forward with no intention of stopping. Using everything she'd learned, everything she'd stolen, everything she'd broken and rebuilt across well over a hundred of loops, Kelly reversed the effects.

  On the first attempt, reality buckled like cheap scaffolding, and the entire United States and surrounding land imploded into itself. The opposite of the Big Bang—no explosion or chaos—it was as if creation had hit the undo button. One moment, a continent. The next, a void where America used to be.

  She died, but Kelly was aware that without the reset, the destruction wouldn’t have ended there. Like dropping black dye in clear water and watching it spread, the results would have been far, far worse.

  On the second attempt, one wrong digit wiped the western hemisphere off the map. The planet cracked in half and a wave of entropy washed through everything.

  By the 86th, she'd narrowed the destruction down to just New York.

  By the 157th, the collapse of reality had been reduced to the size of her fingernail.

  Dark matter pulled. Dark energy shoved. One held the universe together, gripping galaxies in a chokehold to keep them from scattering into the void. The other stretched space relentlessly outward, making sure the universe never stopped expanding. Two opposing forces, keeping existence in check. And then Kelly messed with them.

  She had flipped the script—dark matter repelling, dark energy collapsing, the universe suddenly playing by rules that should never have existed. The result? Reality snapping like cheap wiring.

  Galaxies? Wouldn't form. Stars? Wouldn't last. Existence? Would unravel into a self-destructing mess, collapsing in on itself like it finally gave up trying.

  And at the center of it all? Suspended in her hands, trembling inside a fragile glass vial.

  She had taken everything, every breakthrough, every dead-end, every death-and built something that shouldn't exist. The troll's pathway, the cracked DNA, the marrow she had extracted, the genetic encryption she had rewritten, the reversal of existence itself, and jammed it all into a serum that had no business working.

  It wasn't just genetic splicing anymore. It was biology stapled to cosmology, stitched together with reckless brilliance. Even the lab's systems couldn't fully track it, half the readings flashing between 'ERROR' and 'WHAT THE HELL IS THIS.'

  Outside the loop, this would have won her a Nobel. A discovery like this got your name stamped on research stations orbiting Saturn, and shoved your face into every history book for the next three hundred years. That is, if the world still worked the way it was supposed to.

  She had crammed reversed dark matter, inverted dark energy, and the fundamental building blocks of reality into one unstable concoction, something so volatile that just holding it felt like a really, really bad idea.

  If the vial spilled, cracked, or shattered? It wouldn't just go off.

  It would spread. A slow, creeping unraveling chain reaction that would do more than simply erase the building, or the city, or the planet.

  It would pull the universe into something worse than a singularity.

  And Kelly, standing at the edge of scientific disaster and personal amusement, was going to inject it into herself.

  For science.

  Kelly slammed the syringe into her arm and fired the payload into her veins. Then she grabbed the syringe of troll-to-Kelly gene splicing and slammed that in, too.

  No hesitation. No second-guessing.

  The syringes hit her like a truck made of raw physics. The changes stalled, then they detonated.

  Her DNA was erased, rewritten, and rebuilt from scratch faster than her cells could scream as she phased in and out of existence, no longer tethered by mass, space, or reality.

  Her bones twisted, her flesh pulsed, her nerves fired off so many false death signals that her pain receptors gave up entirely. She felt her brain stutter—memories blurring, realigning, being reformatted alongside her genetic code.

  And yet, she was alive.

  Because the nanotech was faster. Faster than her unraveling, faster than her breaking apart, faster than the universe trying to reject what she had just become. It tore through her cells, carving new pathways, new structures, new rules into her body before she could disintegrate into an evolutionary error.

  She clenched her shattering and reforming teeth, then barked out a laugh. "Alright," she rasped, voice shaking, body barely holding itself together. "This is top three worst ideas I've ever had."

  She lurched forward, hands hitting the lab floor. Her muscles spasmed, her nerves flickered between existence and non-existence, her blood felt thick—too thick, like it was adapting to something physics didn't recognize.

  She was burning, freezing, stretching, shrinking—dying and surviving at the same time.

  She clenched her fists. Her bones flexed. Her skin held.

  Still here. Still her.

  The pain settled into a soft burn.

  She exhaled, shaking, grinning, but alive. Then she looked down.

  Same hands. Same fingers. Same everything. Except... her nails. Very white. Too white. Too smooth. Too perfect.

  Huh. Weird.

  A shadow fell over her.

  The mercenary stood over the wreckage of her lab war zone of broken defenses, shattered emergency walls, smoldering turrets, crushed drones, and shell casings littering the floor.

  Kelly's hand snapped to her blade's handle, and then panels appeared before her, suspended in mid-air.

  She saw them and started laughing.

  [Unique Title: 'The Null' gained!]

  The merc quirked a brow at her laughter, then he fired, his bullet slamming into her skull.

  But it didn't stick.

  Well, it did, but it didn't make it past the bone.

  [Foundational Trait: ‘The Aberration of Mana’ gained!]

  [Rare Trait: 'Troll Marrowed' gained!]