I’m going to try and explain this as simple as possible and as how I interpret the story (this is long as it is covered over the entire course of the manga but i tried to skip unnecessary info):
QUICK DISCLAIMER: This is solely based off of my most recent memory and ive been reading this series weekly/as each chapter comes out so some information may have been lost to my memory so please take this explanation at face value and feel free to correct any misinterpretations!!
Explanation begin: In one of the past universes (past as in past/previous chapters) shura was an enemy of shiki and the gang. In this same universe Dr. Muller (the one that did experiments on the rutherford siblings) was somehow involved with shura/the situation going on at the time that led everyone to this one particular planet, which is where the 20,000 years in the future event began. Essentially because of shura shiki and gang were on this planet and muller also happened to be on the same planet planning his evil scheme. On this planet were thousands of bombs (this was muller’s scheme) that each contained some kind of time power, i forgot the specifics but I believe it was similar to rebecca’s cat leaper as she was needed to activate it or something, either way all you need to know is that these bombs affected time.
In one version of this universe shiki and gang were not able to stop the bombs from exploding/were not able to survive. In this version shiki and rebecca were closest to these bombs (the two were down by the bombs for reasons that are not necessary rn). As I interpret it/remember it, these thousands of TIME bombs went off and sent rebecca and shiki 20,000 years into the future. For reasons with an even longer explanation, this future is where shiki became ziggy and where rebecca became the chronophage (she lost 20,000 years of her time which i will explain later with more context). This was only one outcome of the universe with the time bombs.
Going back to the original bomb universe (before the 20,000 year time skip) there was another version of this universe in which rebecca and shiki were able to escape the thousands of bombs, this is also the same universe in which Witch died as she sacrificed her life to protect everyone from the blast of the thousands of bombs. This means in this version of the bomb universe shiki and rebecca did NOT get sent to the future.
So at this point we have two separate universes created from two different choices made within the same original universe. One: a version where the bombs go off, kill everyone and send shiki and rebecca into the future. And Two: a version where shiki and rebecca and everyone else survive the bombs due to Witch’s sacrifice and do NOT get sent into the future. (This is a very very summed up version of the events so a lot of specific info is being left out)
Now onto the current/present story: In a world where Rebecca and co. survive the bombs and don’t get sent into the future, rebecca uses her cat leaper to transport everyone into universe zero. Long story short this means everyone is basically in the very “first” universe and can no longer leap to any other universes anymore as they are all gone. In this world we then find out, through an even longer explanation, that mother has been earth the whole time, she was just the earth in overdrive. Mother basically powers the universe with ether, this is simply a fact of the manga.
In the present time, Mother is/was losing her abundance of ether, causing this universe zero to fall apart, which is what the current situation is. But before I go further i need to go back to the 20,000 years in the future universe and explain how shiki and rebecca (ziggy and the chronophage) came about before rebecca leaped to universe zero: Long story short this 20,000 years in the future is a world where humans do not exist, only robots. Robots then find the body of rebecca after she was transported to the future bc of the bombs. She is alive and not alive at the same time, its a weird situation that’s most closely described as a coma, but either way the robots end up taking care of rebecca/basically doing experiments on rebecca’s body. Whatever was happening to her body at this time is what created the spark of rebecca’s chronophage powers (a why and how to this situation has not yet been explained to my knowledge). Fast forwarding, Ziggy found out about the existence of rebecca and knew that she was important to him but could not remember how or why, either way he was determined to save her from her current state between life and death.
Ziggy then found a way to travel back in time through the edens zero, he wanted to use this time travel to save rebecca. Rebecca, in her coma like state, was conscious but could not move and didn’t want ziggy to leave her when he told her body of his plans to time travel. She knew he was shiki and was afraid to be alone but could not voice her problems to him. Through whatever reasons, rebecca’s will and new unexplained power led her to, in simplified terms, break out of her physical body and join ziggy just as he was time traveling, causing the two to be transported to the past. This is how ziggy and the chronophrage were introduced to the very world(s) that that manga started out in (ziggy becoming shiki’s father figure and teaching him gravity ether as we see in the beginning of the manga). So long story short ziggy and the chronophage are shiki and rebecca of the future and became the characters that we see regularly in the manga, which means they were already present when rebecca leapt everyone to universe zero. Thus, putting shiki, rebecca, ziggy, and the chronophage all in one final universe even though they were orginally from separate universes/futures.
Quick chronophage explanation: When rebecca as the chronophage first enters the world after time traveling with ziggy she eats time because she has forgotten herself as rebecca, as seen when she left her physical body, this new version of her as the chronophage simply hungers for time because she lost hers, that’s literally it, I don’t know how this works all i know is that it is what it is. This also explains why anytime rebecca used cat leaper/time powers the chronophage would be summoned cause it was rebecca unconsciously being drawn to herself and her own time.
Okay back to present situation in universe zero with mother: In order to stop mother from dying (once again another long explanation of why she is dying) shiki and gang needed to turn mother back into when she was the earth as this is when she still held ether within her that somehow created/stablized the entire universe. In order to do this they needed the chronophage to eat mother’s time, basically this means if the chronophage consumed mother the future in which the earth became mother would be erased and send the planet back in time to before it went into overdrive, making it so that mother never existed (remember, mother is the planet earth just in overdrive).
Long explanation short, shiki went directly to the chronophage to bring it to mother so it could eat mother’s time. Another long explanation short, shiki is successful and the battle/situation ends with the chronophage eating mother’s time and also destroying the fleet of the edens one. In all of this chaos and flashbacks being shown, shiki realizes that the chronophage has been rebecca all along (as i previously explained with the bombs and 20,000 years in the future). The chronophage also comes to this realization that the rebecca of the present is herself from 20,000 years in the past. The chronophage’s whole purpose is to found out who she is and get her time back, so what better way than to become herself from 20,000 years in the past, gaining back her lost time? Aka, what better way than to reach her goals by taking over the body of the current rebecca and becoming her, as seen in the most recent chapters. This part gets confusing to me as I don’t know if rebecca of the present and the chronophage became one or if rebecca simply beat the chronophage off, but either way it is a fact that as of right now the threat of the chronophage is gone and rebecca is back to her normal self, no matter how far fetched it is sometimes you just can’t explain time travel and have to accept it’s laws as fact in this story. End explanation.
There’s A LOT of story that i left out (like why and how the edens one is actually shiki and rebeccas son) but this is everything i personally use to understand the current situations of the chapters! I know this is a lot so please feel free to ask me questions! It’s really hard to explain the situation when so much time travel is involved tbh lol…
I’m going to try and explain this as simple as possible and as how I interpret the story (this is long as it is covered over the entire course of the manga but i tried to skip unnecessary info):
QUICK DISCLAIMER: This is solely based off of my most recent memory and ive been reading this series weekly/as each chapter comes out so some information may have been lost to my memory so please take this explanation at face value and feel free to correct any misinterpretations!!
Explanation begin:
In one of the past universes (past as in past/previous chapters) shura was an enemy of shiki and the gang. In this same universe Dr. Muller (the one that did experiments on the rutherford siblings) was somehow involved with shura/the situation going on at the time that led everyone to this one particular planet, which is where the 20,000 years in the future event began. Essentially because of shura shiki and gang were on this planet and muller also happened to be on the same planet planning his evil scheme.
On this planet were thousands of bombs (this was muller’s scheme) that each contained some kind of time power, i forgot the specifics but I believe it was similar to rebecca’s cat leaper as she was needed to activate it or something, either way all you need to know is that these bombs affected time.
In one version of this universe shiki and gang were not able to stop the bombs from exploding/were not able to survive. In this version shiki and rebecca were closest to these bombs (the two were down by the bombs for reasons that are not necessary rn). As I interpret it/remember it, these thousands of TIME bombs went off and sent rebecca and shiki 20,000 years into the future. For reasons with an even longer explanation, this future is where shiki became ziggy and where rebecca became the chronophage (she lost 20,000 years of her time which i will explain later with more context). This was only one outcome of the universe with the time bombs.
Going back to the original bomb universe (before the 20,000 year time skip) there was another version of this universe in which rebecca and shiki were able to escape the thousands of bombs, this is also the same universe in which Witch died as she sacrificed her life to protect everyone from the blast of the thousands of bombs. This means in this version of the bomb universe shiki and rebecca did NOT get sent to the future.
So at this point we have two separate universes created from two different choices made within the same original universe. One: a version where the bombs go off, kill everyone and send shiki and rebecca into the future. And Two: a version where shiki and rebecca and everyone else survive the bombs due to Witch’s sacrifice and do NOT get sent into the future. (This is a very very summed up version of the events so a lot of specific info is being left out)
Now onto the current/present story: In a world where Rebecca and co. survive the bombs and don’t get sent into the future, rebecca uses her cat leaper to transport everyone into universe zero. Long story short this means everyone is basically in the very “first” universe and can no longer leap to any other universes anymore as they are all gone. In this world we then find out, through an even longer explanation, that mother has been earth the whole time, she was just the earth in overdrive. Mother basically powers the universe with ether, this is simply a fact of the manga.
In the present time, Mother is/was losing her abundance of ether, causing this universe zero to fall apart, which is what the current situation is. But before I go further i need to go back to the 20,000 years in the future universe and explain how shiki and rebecca (ziggy and the chronophage) came about before rebecca leaped to universe zero:
Long story short this 20,000 years in the future is a world where humans do not exist, only robots. Robots then find the body of rebecca after she was transported to the future bc of the bombs. She is alive and not alive at the same time, its a weird situation that’s most closely described as a coma, but either way the robots end up taking care of rebecca/basically doing experiments on rebecca’s body. Whatever was happening to her body at this time is what created the spark of rebecca’s chronophage powers (a why and how to this situation has not yet been explained to my knowledge).
Fast forwarding, Ziggy found out about the existence of rebecca and knew that she was important to him but could not remember how or why, either way he was determined to save her from her current state between life and death.
Ziggy then found a way to travel back in time through the edens zero, he wanted to use this time travel to save rebecca. Rebecca, in her coma like state, was conscious but could not move and didn’t want ziggy to leave her when he told her body of his plans to time travel. She knew he was shiki and was afraid to be alone but could not voice her problems to him.
Through whatever reasons, rebecca’s will and new unexplained power led her to, in simplified terms, break out of her physical body and join ziggy just as he was time traveling, causing the two to be transported to the past. This is how ziggy and the chronophrage were introduced to the very world(s) that that manga started out in (ziggy becoming shiki’s father figure and teaching him gravity ether as we see in the beginning of the manga).
So long story short ziggy and the chronophage are shiki and rebecca of the future and became the characters that we see regularly in the manga, which means they were already present when rebecca leapt everyone to universe zero. Thus, putting shiki, rebecca, ziggy, and the chronophage all in one final universe even though they were orginally from separate universes/futures.
Quick chronophage explanation: When rebecca as the chronophage first enters the world after time traveling with ziggy she eats time because she has forgotten herself as rebecca, as seen when she left her physical body, this new version of her as the chronophage simply hungers for time because she lost hers, that’s literally it, I don’t know how this works all i know is that it is what it is. This also explains why anytime rebecca used cat leaper/time powers the chronophage would be summoned cause it was rebecca unconsciously being drawn to herself and her own time.
Okay back to present situation in universe zero with mother: In order to stop mother from dying (once again another long explanation of why she is dying) shiki and gang needed to turn mother back into when she was the earth as this is when she still held ether within her that somehow created/stablized the entire universe. In order to do this they needed the chronophage to eat mother’s time, basically this means if the chronophage consumed mother the future in which the earth became mother would be erased and send the planet back in time to before it went into overdrive, making it so that mother never existed (remember, mother is the planet earth just in overdrive).
Long explanation short, shiki went directly to the chronophage to bring it to mother so it could eat mother’s time. Another long explanation short, shiki is successful and the battle/situation ends with the chronophage eating mother’s time and also destroying the fleet of the edens one. In all of this chaos and flashbacks being shown, shiki realizes that the chronophage has been rebecca all along (as i previously explained with the bombs and 20,000 years in the future). The chronophage also comes to this realization that the rebecca of the present is herself from 20,000 years in the past. The chronophage’s whole purpose is to found out who she is and get her time back, so what better way than to become herself from 20,000 years in the past, gaining back her lost time? Aka, what better way than to reach her goals by taking over the body of the current rebecca and becoming her, as seen in the most recent chapters.
This part gets confusing to me as I don’t know if rebecca of the present and the chronophage became one or if rebecca simply beat the chronophage off, but either way it is a fact that as of right now the threat of the chronophage is gone and rebecca is back to her normal self, no matter how far fetched it is sometimes you just can’t explain time travel and have to accept it’s laws as fact in this story.
End explanation.
There’s A LOT of story that i left out (like why and how the edens one is actually shiki and rebeccas son) but this is everything i personally use to understand the current situations of the chapters! I know this is a lot so please feel free to ask me questions! It’s really hard to explain the situation when so much time travel is involved tbh lol…