Wizard: Start with Biological Transformation to Grind Experience
Chapter 155 - 030: Aging

Chapter 155: 030: Aging

For the past decade, every time Lynch entered the laboratory, the sound he heard the most was the endless "tick-tock, tick-tock," always echoing, never ceasing. It was, in fact, the only aspect of the laboratory that dissatisfied him.

But at this moment, the annoying ticking of the past was replaced by an eerie silence—every trace of it gone, leaving the whole lab enveloped in complete stillness.

Lynch looked around. The walls were adorned with all sorts of clocks: grandfather clocks, mechanical clocks, wall clocks. Beneath transparent glass domes, each hour hand and minute hand displayed different times, yet now all of them had come to an abrupt stop.

The small wooden door of a cuckoo clock was ajar, the cuckoo bird frozen mid-air. The swinging pendulum had tilted to one side and hung there, stuck.

Hands, gears, everything had ceased, as if the world itself had been frozen in time.

"What’s going on?"

Surely this many clocks couldn’t all be broken at the same time?

Lynch stepped closer and grabbed a pocket watch hanging on the wall to look at it. That’s when he saw something strange.

The pocket watch was distorted.

Yes, upon closer inspection, Lynch realized the pocket watch on the wall wasn’t normal—it was warped, curling and twisting like seaweed drifting in water.

No...

Not just the pocket watch!

The wall clocks, the grandfather clocks, the cuckoo bird sticking out of its clock, even the entire wall itself—no, the entire room—all of it was twisted, bending and curling, like a surreal hallucination.

Unnoticed, the laboratory had somehow transformed into a completely warped space!

"What the hell?"

The incessant ticking had abruptly stopped. The once intact laboratory had contorted and faded into an unreal phantom—too strange, no matter how you looked at it.

Suddenly, Lynch felt a chill crawl down his spine, a profound sense of foreboding wrapping tightly around his heart.

"Huh? My Magic Plants..."

At that moment, something even stranger occurred.

Lynch discovered that the Magic Plants he had been cultivating on the windowsill were dead.

The towering Big Eating Flower had withered into mere brittle branches, the once radiant Starlight Grass was reduced to empty husks, and even the soil they grew in looked parched—dry and powdery like sand.

It was as if countless years had passed in an instant, ravaged by the turning of time.

"What’s going on?" Lynch furrowed his brows tightly.

He extended a hand to sift through the soil, picking up a fragment of the Big Eating Flower’s remains to examine it.

The Big Eating Flower was known as a hardy Magic Plant with extraordinary Life Force. Once fully mature, it could survive for long periods under harsh conditions—without water, sunlight, elemental environments, or even being left in a random, neglected corner, it still wouldn’t wither easily.

Magic Plant apprentices often joked that making this thing wilt naturally would take longer than advancing to a Wizard.

Yet here it was, this resilient plant—a Demon in its own right—rotting quietly without warning?

Lynch pinched the remains lightly between his thumb and forefinger, and with a series of crisp "crack, crack" sounds, the corpse of the Big Eating Flower disintegrated in his grasp. Even the soil in its pot crumbled like dried-out sand.

"Hmm?"

Right then, Lynch noticed something strange about the skin of his fingers.

It seemed... aged?

Looking closer, he realized his hands had become mature and coarse. The skin had lost its earlier smoothness and now appeared rough, weathered.

Panicking mildly, Lynch turned toward the nearby table, where a mirror was placed—a tool he often used to tidy up his appearance.

Thanks to his ever-enhancing Life Force, Lynch’s face hadn’t changed in all these years, retaining the fresh, youthful look of a seventeen or eighteen-year-old. For ten years, the mirror had shown him the same youthful face countless times.

But now, the reflection staring back at him was no longer the face of a boy—it was a man in his thirties: rugged features, coarse skin, magnified pores, and a ring of stubble circling his lips.

"What the hell is this?"

Lynch was utterly shocked by this sudden transformation, unable to comprehend why he had aged so much all at once.

Before he could grasp the situation, something even more horrifying happened—

He was still aging!

Yes, in the reflection, Lynch saw his face continuing to deteriorate, aging visibly, second by second. His skin was losing moisture, his hair was starting to fall, and his eye sockets were sinking deeper.

He was decaying at a pace that could only be described as instantaneous!

"Oh, God!"

This was a disaster. When Lynch opened his mouth to shout, the voice that emerged was that of a middle-aged man—deep, resonant, powerful.

Feeling a surge of terror, Lynch spun around and dashed toward the exit.

He didn’t know what was wrong, but he was certain it had something to do with the current state of the laboratory. He had to get out as quickly as possible.

In three steps turned into two, Lynch bolted out of the laboratory.

Outside lay the familiar, worn hallway, but this corridor, like the lab, had become twisted and warped.

Without a moment to lose, Lynch hurried forward, desperate to escape.

However, the hallway, which ordinarily wasn’t very long, now stretched endlessly, as though it had no termination point.

He began by walking, then speed-walking, and then running—full sprinting in the end.

He even cast Gale Technique on himself and enveloped his entire body in Fighting Spirit, pushing his speed to its limits.

At this point, he moved like a supercar at Extreme Speed, capable of covering hundreds of meters in mere seconds.

But he still couldn’t reach the end of that absurdly short corridor.

"Huff huff! Huff huff!"

Lynch’s panting echoed loudly, his breath growing heavier and more labored with each passing moment.

Wrinkles multiplied on his face, his dark hair began to fade to gray, then white, his skin grew parched, and his once strong muscles shrank.

Youthful vigor, middle-aged strife, elderly fragility.

Lynch was like a traveler on an unending road, one that led irrevocably to Death’s door—a tunnel of warped time, pulling him into the Abyss.

His body aged visibly, second by second, but the end of the hallway remained obscured.

Seconds stretched into seeming eternities.

By now, Lynch had grown ancient, his back hunched and stooped. Deep wrinkles carved across his face, making his skin resemble brittle bark. Loose, coarse flesh slumped against a bony frame in lifeless gray hues.

The once vibrant hair atop his head was gone, leaving behind a bald scalp. A few stubborn wisps of silver hung miserably around his ears or nape, stark against the void where vitality once dwelled.

A crumbling candle holding out against the storm.

He shuffled onward, trembling and unsteady, each step requiring monumental effort, every breath echoing like a heavy bellows dragging air through brittle confines.

And still, the hallway never ended.

Finally!

"Thud!" With a loud crash, Lynch slipped and toppled forward onto the floor.

It was then that he realized he had fallen directly at the laboratory’s entrance. Half his body hadn’t even crossed its threshold yet—all his efforts down the corridor had merely brought him back to where he’d started.

"Huff huff! Huff huff!" His breathing sounded faint now, weakening further.

Curled on the floor in a fetal position, Lynch’s spine recoiled naturally, his body riddled with the inevitable signs of decay.

Life Force drained from him, heartbeats slowed into whispers, and every organ roared toward collapse. Consciousness blurred as Lynch’s mortality carved itself deeply into his bones.

He...

Was dying.

Strength seeped away entirely. Lynch felt his eyelids grow unbearably heavy, begging for one last rest.

Slowly, he closed his eyes...

Was this the end?

No...

Lynch realized with a sharp clarity: if he closed his eyes now, he might never open them again. He forced them open with his last reserves of energy.

That was when he saw it—the door.

The door on the far side of the laboratory.

A conversation from ten years ago surfaced in his mind:

"I spend all my time in this lab conducting experiments. It’s incredibly dangerous—you must never approach unless you see the time here stops..."

The time stops...

Lynch didn’t know what lay beyond the door. He didn’t know if it would save him. But in this moment, he had no choice but to gamble everything he had left and crawl toward it.

Crawling wasn’t even the right word; he was dragging himself, inch by inch.

The fall had left his body half-paralyzed, utterly numb. Only his right arm remained faintly responsive, pulling him forward incrementally.

Ten meters...

Nine meters...

Eight meters...

Each of the ten meters felt like the longest, most insurmountable distance in the world, dragging every ounce of his remaining strength toward oblivion.

Thoughts began to scatter. His body seemed to petrify, organs shut down in quick succession, and even his heart ceased beating. Suffocating pressure gripped his entire being.

Darkness pulled his mind deeper into the Abyss.

"Click!"

Finally, just before his consciousness evaporated completely, Lynch reached the door and flung it open with one last effort, rolling his entire body inside...

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