Honkai Star Rail: Saving the World with a Mobile Game — Chapter 30

Chapter 30: A Brand New Path, The Authority of Time

Ash double-checked the holographic interface, his eyes scanning the data streams twice over.

There was no mistake. He had indeed used his official Interastral Network account to release the game’s promotional video. To be completely honest, he wasn’t terribly shocked by the sudden influx of attention; it was only natural to draw the gaze of the cosmos after pulling a stunt like that. He just hadn’t expected Firefly’s inquiry to trace a direct line straight to his developer alias.

Should he call it a telepathic connection, or just a twisted stroke of fate?

Either way, he and Firefly shared a deep bond. After surviving the dreamscape of Penacony together, they had essentially shared life and death. Because of that, a faint twinge of guilt pricked at his conscience for using her Stellaron Hunter persona to drum up hype for his game.

Then again, Firefly wasn’t exactly a paragon of total honesty herself. Among the Stellaron Hunters, she operated as a ruthless, highly efficient weapon, cool enough to trade snarky banter with Kafka. Yet, whenever she stood in front of him, she melted into a sweet, gentle girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

When others donned mecha armor, their true identities were plastered across IPC wanted posters. She, however, kept her face hidden beneath cold steel. Once her Entropy Loss Syndrome was finally cured, she could simply vanish into the crowd without a trace.

The IPC is hunting the Stellaron Hunter Sam. What does that have to do with me, a totally normal girl named Firefly?

Ash chuckled softly to himself. It was just a joke, of course. Considering Firefly’s ultimate goals, having her reputation spread across the stars probably wouldn’t upset her. Deep down, she might even be secretly pleased by the recognition.

He opened his right hand. A void-white, slightly hollow energy began to circulate over his palm, bending the light around his fingers.

‘Should I tell her where I really am?’

He mulled it over. If it were just Firefly, it wouldn’t be an issue. However, the Stellaron Hunters operated as a tight-knit unit. They were definitely gathered together right now. Drawing the entire faction to his location at this delicate stage would absolutely derail his current objectives.

Out in the wider universe, Elio’s script was still proceeding exactly on schedule. Ash had no desire to spark a premature collision between their two sides.

So, he opened his personal social account first. Playing the part of the concerned friend, he pretended to learn about the situation directly from her, offered some warm comfort, and harshly denounced the “vile, shameless behavior” of the game developer known as `[Tonight Eat Roast Chicken]`.

How dare this hack developer provoke our precious Firefly?! Unforgivable!

But when she inevitably asked about his current location, Ash found himself in a tight spot. To prevent her from immediately flying across the cosmos to find him, he lied, claiming he was currently stranded on Amphoreus. According to his knowledge of Elio’s script, the Astral Express Crew was indeed handling the treacherous waters of Amphoreus around this time. It was the perfect alibi.

As for dealing with “Sam” in the game’s private developer messages, that was a much simpler task.

`[Tonight Eat Roast Chicken: Apologies, but there are currently no such plans in development. If any changes occur, please wait for an official in-game announcement.]`

He hit send and immediately closed the channel.

He played dead. By offering zero useful information and hiding behind corporate speak, he successfully brushed the Stellaron Hunter off his trail. He would explain everything to her properly once the dust settled.

Right now, his absolute priority was mastering his newly acquired Path and its terrifying abilities.

For the first time in days, Ash stepped out of his small, confined room. He wandered through the bustling streets of Okhema, observing the vibrant marketplace. The city was alive with merchants and citizens, yet beneath the surface, a fragile, illusory tension hung in the air.

There was no doubt in his mind. Among the three event options presented by the System, he had made the right choice by selecting the third.

Beyond simply craving greater power, Ash’s most urgent task was to save Amphoreus from its impending collapse. Everything he looked at now felt eerily similar to the final days of the Eternal Page—existing in a precarious, dream-like state that could shatter at any moment.

For a seed to sprout, it requires time.

Ash simply couldn’t wait that long. A Genius Society member’s brain was undoubtedly formidable, but he didn’t have hundreds of Amber Eras to emulate Herta and the others, burying himself in research until he ascended as an Emanator of Erudition.

The authority of Abundance was equally powerful, but the entire universe knew the horrifying price it extracted. It gave life but stripped away humanity; it promised immortality, but delivered a half-dead, agonizing existence. Blade could certainly attest to that nightmare.

Thus, only the final, most unpredictable option remained.

The Path Ash ultimately obtained was something entirely unmatched—a brand new Path that had never existed in the grand mix of the cosmos.

For ordinary mortals, defining the true desire of their heart was an impossible hurdle. Humans simply couldn’t comprehend a Path they had never witnessed. Theoretically, this third option should have been a guaranteed failure.

But Ash was different.

He deceived reality itself.

The power of the Enigmata could forge anything out of nothing. Even if the foundation was entirely fake, it only required a single, fleeting moment of absolute truth to manifest into reality.

Treating the cosmic laws like a custom character creation screen, Ash deceived the universe—and himself—into believing that the Path he desired above all else was the Path of “Time.”

Through this grand deception, he successfully mastered the exact authority he needed.

Unlike the localized divine temporal magic native to Amphoreus, or the memory-hoarding nature of the Path of Remembrance, Ash’s new Path operated on a fundamentally higher order. If one had to categorize it, it was akin to how the Path of Permanence eventually splintered to birth The Propagation, or how Time itself had originally fragmented to create Remembrance.

Ash paused near a quiet stone flowerbed in the city district. He knelt down, reaching out to cup a small, multi-legged insect crawling across the masonry.

A void-white light suddenly flared from his fingertips. The moment the light enveloped the tiny creature, it withered at a terrifying, visible speed. Its exoskeleton cracked and sizzled, turning to ash like a raw steak thrown onto a scorching griddle.

Watching the insect crumble, an irrepressible thrill lit up Ash’s eyes.

But if it were merely decay, it wouldn’t be worthy of a higher-order Path.

He exerted his will once more. A phenomenon that would leave even the greatest minds of the Genius Society paralyzed with awe unfolded over his palm. Total entropy reversal.

The pile of ash lost its gray hue, pulling together in a reverse-cascade of matter. The withered insect reformed, its legs twitching back to life, completely restored.

It was as if the last ten seconds had simply been erased from existence.

Ash stood up, a quiet, satisfied smile playing on his lips.

‘Exactly as I calculated. The Enigmata’s deception worked flawlessly.’

The Path of “Time” allowed him to freely dictate the temporal state of any organic or inorganic matter. Unlike Remembrance, there was no need to painstakingly collect or record data. Ash was now a viewer holding the remote control to reality, casually dragging the progress bar back and forth, able to handle to any precise second of existence he wished to observe.

And the potential didn’t stop there.

If he ever reached the moment of true ascension, he could theoretically drag the entire universe to its absolute end in a single instant—or decree that the universe would never experience an end at all. If existence were a slider scaled from one to a hundred, Ash could lock it at any number, freezing the cosmos for eternity.

For the current crisis on Amphoreus, this was the ultimate solution.

Herta had once theorized that Amphoreus was like a dormant seed. Spreading its stories and waiting for it to finally sprout into reality might take a thousand Amber Eras, or perhaps just a year or two.

A thousand Amber Eras was far too long.

So, what about one second?

He was getting ahead of himself, of course. Having only just forged the Path, Ash was far from being an Emanator. His current range of influence couldn’t force the entirety of Amphoreus to ascend in a single heartbeat.

However, adjusting the temporal rate of the world’s maturation was entirely within his grasp. Once he reached the level of an Emanator, or even stepped infinitely close to it, forcing Amphoreus to bloom in a single second would be trivial.

Ash focused his mind, extending his right hand toward the sky above Okhema.

“Unveil the curtain of time, stir the ripples of eternity.”

He had borrowed the incantation from Tribios, tweaking the phrasing until it connected perfectly with his own authority.

As the words left his lips, the physical landscape of Amphoreus appeared completely unchanged. The merchants still haggled; the wind still blew.

But Ash could see the underlying truth. On the invisible timeline governing reality, the dormant “seed” of the world had shifted. If the stories of Amphoreus originally required a thousand Amber Eras to bear fruit, Ash had just violently compressed that requirement down to five hundred.

He had literally altered the flow of time, executing the cosmic equivalent of turning on 2x speed in Honkai: Star Rail.

“Things are finally moving in the right direction.”

Not only did he possess the sheer firepower to protect himself, but he also held the key to resolving the world’s greatest dilemma.

Ash took a deep breath, stretching his arms over his head to shake off the lingering tension.

“Even so, the game development grind never stops.”

He pulled his phone back out, handling straight to his livestream interface. Upgrading this new Path to its maximum potential was going to require a massive influx of Cosmic Shards, and the only way to get those was by keeping the players engaged.

But what Ash didn’t realize…

Reality was far more complicated than a simple game of hide-and-seek.

Far away on the Herta Space Station, Sam stood in the center of a dimly lit server room. After abruptly ending the brief, frustrating communication with the developer, the towering mecha turned around.

“How is it, Silver Wolf?”

Slouched on the nearby sofa, Silver Wolf furiously tapped away at a customized holographic console. The usual bored smirk was completely gone from her face, replaced by a rare look of absolute solemnity.

“Nothing. Zero clues.”

She popped a bubblegum bubble, the sound sharp in the quiet room. “Or, you could say the lack of clues is a massive clue in itself. I tore through the Interastral Network searching for the IP address attached to Ash’s account, but it doesn’t exist. It’s completely blank.”

Silver Wolf looked up, meeting the glowing visor of the mecha. “In other words, he isn’t just hiding. He might not even be in our current timeline or space-time continuum.”

Silence fell over the room as the two Stellaron Hunters processed the data.

It was obvious.

Something had gone terribly wrong.