John's phone vibrated with an incoming message, and a sudden thought struck him—a possible explanation for the strangeness he was experiencing. "Could that stone, that last piece of stone that the divine stone gave me, could that be my neuro-core?" The memory of the smooth, warm weight of the stone in his hand resurfaced. "Maybe because of this, my neuro-core is special compared to others." A small, wry smile touched his lips. "Well, thank you, divine stone," he thought. "You did something good, at least." He stretched, feeling a weariness that went beyond mere lack of sleep.
"But I still don't understand one thing," he mused, the earlier mystery resurfacing. "Why do I reach that place after 12 o'clock at night and come back at 9:00 in the morning? I mean, I have to be careful not to go to any place where there are cameras, because if I disappear from there and come back to the same place, all these things will be recorded in the camera, so I just have to make sure that at 12:00 at night I am alone and no one comes there until it's daytime," John concluded, the implications of his nocturnal journeys sinking in. He would have to be more careful, more deliberate in his movements during those lost hours.
Then, another fragment of the divine stone's words echoed in his mind, a cryptic pronouncement that now seemed to carry a deeper significance. The stone had spoken of a chance, a unique opportunity granted to John because of their connection. It had emphasized that becoming powerful was John's destiny to forge, a path he would have to tread himself.
A sudden clarity washed over John. The divine stone hadn't just given him a neuro-core; it had orchestrated this entire situation. The time slips, the perilous journeys into the past—it was all a deliberate act, a chance to tame creatures of a bygone era, beasts of immense power that would render him untouchable in his own time.
"Well," he murmured, a sense of grim determination hardening his gaze, "all the mystery is solved." But even as one puzzle piece clicked into place, another, more perplexing one emerged. "But I still don't understand one thing," he thought, his brow furrowing in confusion. "If all the beasts or all the animals go forward in time and get mutated into monsters, then why are those mutated monsters behind in time? I mean, even dinosaurs got mutated, but why, even though all this happened ahead in time, why is all this happening behind in time?"
The temporal paradox gnawed at him. The evolutionary timeline seemed to be twisted, the past mirroring a future he hadn't yet experienced.
"Leave it," he finally sighed, pushing the unsettling thought aside. "What do I care? I just need something to survive there so that I can stay alive here. It seems this mystery will remain a mystery." In his world, the mutation of Earth's creatures into monstrous forms was a distant future event, occurring millions, billions of years hence. The past, as he knew it, was a different world entirely. Dinosaurs, he recalled from his studies, had been wiped out by a meteor strike. Whether they had undergone some form of mutation before their extinction was a question lost to time.
Shaking off the lingering confusion, John rose from the laptop. He had a school to return to, a confrontation to face. He left the room, finding Dr. Thomas, Dr. Luna, and Principal Anthony waiting for him.