Now, it could be said that it was extremely boring fighting monsters and trying to enter their Soul Palaces, but sometimes you arrived at some seriously interesting trials when you did. Today, in particular, was the Soul Palace of a rabid rat that they had offed in order to gain some extra soul crystals. Nothing special, but it turned out that this rabid rat had been hiding a much more intense secret than they had realized:

A time loop.

Now, Budou and Kiwi were caught in blessed time, the fundamentally perfect notion of existence. With no time passing, nothing could change except for the humans living in it. They experienced infinity and never grew bored, never grew tired. As long as they had a wi-fi signal, and that signal was not leading them into a broken, censored internet (luckily they did not live in China or Burma where the internet was blacked out from any ideas that went against the norm), they would have unlimited access to the internet’s contents.

People in time loop stories often go insane and become singularly focused on some specific goal, usually romance-related because the characters who get trapped in time loops tend to be sad sack middle aged men, or teenage girls. Well, we at r/rational declare that a time loops must be played to the maximum effect, and luckily Budou, the clever, intelligent one, plus Kiwi, the fun, adventurous one, had combined their forces to create some of the strongest time looping skills ever known.

For if the laundromat inside this soul palace was in a permanent division of time, then that gave them a permanent division of time to do whatever the hell they wanted.

Budou stared mindlessly at his phone while the laundromat whirred with its various machines, and the episode of Avatar on Nickelodeon (muted) played up on the ancient CRT television.

“Whatcha looking at there?” Kiwi asked. Kiwi was dreaming up new fashion designs in his giant, almost-full notebook that he carried around with him at all times (so that the contents didn’t reset every time, of course). Then, up on the muted TV, a funny joke started. “Haha, Jake Sully tripped over a vine in the ground and stumbled all or the place!” He burst out laughing, but he did that every single time, so it wasn’t really relevant. Sometimes Budou wondered if Kiwi wasn’t secretly part of the loop from the regularity with which he repeated the exact same things, but honestly, Kiwi was just being cute. He was certainly trapped in the loop, too, since he had learned to express himself in many major ways over the years.

“Years” being how many loops they had gone through.

Every hour, the loop reset, right back at the beginning of the laundromat scenario. And then, sixty minutes later, it reset again.

If we were to do some simple math (or maths as the Brits say), you would realize that it takes twenty four loops in order for a full day to pass. For a full year to pass, that is 8,760 loops. Years implies multiple, which means if there have been, say, three years passed so far, that is 26,280 loops. Twenty-six THOUSAND loops. With no biological need for sleep or food, that is infinite time to do whatever the hell you want. And these two had been doing this loop for at least a few tens of thousands of times.

You can imagine the consequences.

“What am I doing? I’m just reading,” said Budou. He felt a bit peckish, like he could go for one of the snacks in the vending machine, but he also knew that he had eaten every single one of those snacks in that machine at least three times over, and honestly he was a bit sick of it by now. He would rather just wait it out for the reset and let it wash over him.

“Whatcha reading?”

“Well, I was making my way through the complete Project Gutenberg library, since I wanted to consume the classics to help me better understand Western and Eastern literature, but I got sick of the old stuff a little bit. So now I’m just on this site called Royal Road dot com. Before I was reading this terrible Australian Isekai book that I really just don’t want to tell you about for how poor it was. Now I’m reading this really long fic called Defiance of the Fall.”

“Ooh, what’s that about?” Kiwi asked.

“Here, I’ll read you the synopsis:

“As Zac was alone in the middle of the forest the world changed. The whole planet was introduced to the so-called multi-verse by an unfeeling System or God. A universe where all races and civilzations [sic] fought for power and dominion.

“Seemingly forgotten by the System, Zac found himself stuck in the wilderness surrounded by deadly beasts. Alone, lost and without answers, he must find [sic] the means to survive and get stronger in this new cut-throat reality.”

“Wow,” Kiwi said. “Since fair use dictates that we must transform this snippet into something real with commentary or criticism, I guess we ought to set off on a FAIR USE ADVENTURE!”

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Budou. “It’s just a synopsis, but I do feel like it fails to capture what we want out of a story. I’m only reading it because it’s popular and lots of people recommend it.”

“Word of mouth is a very good way to spread stories, that’s for sure. But a good synopsis will also do a lot of help, won’t it?”

“Yep, and that’s why we need to gain Fair Use legal shields by critiquing this synopsis,” said Budou. “Having read over ten thousand novels and short stories since we began this time loop excursion, I can say with great certainty that this synopsis needs to be redone, and the author is probably losing potential readers (AKA Patreon subscribers) because of it.”

“Oh, for sure! It has a tense error in the synopsis, switching from past to present, and while it’s not strictly a grammatical error, it doesn’t really jive with the rest of the paragraphs and feels distinctly weird, if not outright wrong.”

“Plus, it doesn’t really sell itself. It gives a prologue that is extremely familiar to most Royal Road readers—a system apocalypse and some monsters—without giving itself enough details that set it apart and make it sound interesting. Maybe two years ago the idea of a system apocalypse was enough to sell the story, especially when word of mouth is still a big part of the site’s culture, but it can’t be so much today.”

“I agree,” said Budou. “Since reviews aren’t particularly glowing these days, the synopsis would really benefit from some fine-tuning to help bring new readers in who aren’t necessarily driven by word of mouth but are discovering the story through searching or their recommendations tab.”

“Exactly! Look at this Fair Use snippet from this review by user Garrdor:

“Update: this story pretty quickly becomes your standard "Dao of Luck" xanxia fare, with the MC stumbling into treasures and powering up from near death experiences (that should have killed him). You better believe there's a settlement that he wants to protect at all costs and his motivations for becoming stronger are "because I need to". Biggest bummer is his fighting style devolves into "I hit the other guy harder, so I won". I'm still reading, obviously, but I'm definitely less enthused, and my earlier review may create unrealistic expectations.”

“You see, Budou?” asked Kiwi.

“I do see. Apparently this story is a xianxia Chinese Fantasy martial arts story, even though the synopsis doesn’t mention it at all.”

“Another reviewer, Pewpewcachoo, mentions this:”

“Overall it's decent for what it is, a cultivation story with a system. But it could use some work and a good polish. But i don’t think that will happen, the author reminds me of Chinese Wuxia authors. He is making a very long story with many plots and paths it can take, while keeping the tension high to keep people reading.”

“I’m still in the middle of the story,” said Budou, “so I can’t give a good review. There’s 550 chapters already, which means there’s way more story available than I have currently read. I’ll need to spend five or ten more loops before I can read enough to give a real review.”

“Well, we have infinite time, so I’ll expect that review,” said Kiwi.

“I’ll give it, someday! But for now, I can’t judge about how Defiance of the Fall treats its story, but it does have a lot of issues with its synopsis that could be addressed without that much effort. Drawing new readers in is great, and being more transparent about the wuxia and xianxia aspects could really help draw in readers who are specifically looking for that kind of thing, rather than simply hoping that people will try the story out simply due to boredom and assume that they will like it once they dive in.”

“You’ve really become a literature expert, haven’t you, Budou?” Kiwi asked.

“Sort of. I’ve read a lot of web fiction, that’s for sure.”

“Like Synth, the excellent sci-fi web serial?”

“Yep, and many others.”

“That’s great. It’s an adventurous medium, to be sure!”

“Yeah, though it has a lot of garbage, like Inex--.”

“Oh my,” said Kiwi. “You can NOT say that. That is just not okay. It's rude and mean. The author of [Redacted] did not contact me and send an angry message forcing me to change this chapter's content."

"What? Of course he didn't. We're in a time loop, so that would be impossible."

"Exactly, I'm just saying that nobody contacted us, and it is my opinion, as Kiwi, that [Redacted] is a story that cannot be judged based off its top reviews alone, and quoting those may or may not give a myopic view into what the story might end up being."

"A lot better than that Csuite person's crappy stories," Budou said. "Oh man, are they awful."

"Just terrible!!!"

"Doing God's Work? More like, Doing God a Disservice by Making a Crappy Story!"

"It doesn't even have any vines in it!"

"What a waste of time that is. That and any other story without vines."

“Of course, we are just repeating what certain reviewers have said, especially any vine-related insults, so we can’t say for certain if the story is any good without reviewing ourselves,” said Kiwi. “We both have more experience reading fiction than anyone else in the known universe, due to willfully being trapped in this time loop, but still.”

“Yep, it’s all just opinions.”

Time reset.