I just completed my second chronophagy ritual in my current colony and it “healed” the guy’s scarred eye. Everyone was pleased, of course, because he’d been blind up to that point. But he’d gained that scar in a tussle with a megasloth. How does this healing work, I wondered. Then I realized that the the bioferrite he’d been holding hadn’t been an offering but a beacon. What does super-intelligent, artificial planet want with a small lump of metal? In fact, I concluded, my colonist was likely taken and replaced with a younger copy. Is it a construct, a body abducted from another dimension with a copy of my colonist’s mind overlayed, or something else? I don’t know, but so many possibilities fit the Anomaly theme more than “age -8 years and scar removed.” And what happened to my original guy? What horrors awaited him in the archonexus’s maw? I wonder.
Edit: typo
There’s an elephant in the room here I mean to address: The ritual requires a prisoner as target, who is aged and suffers brain damage as part of the ritual. Sort of sounds like they are the offering.
The problem I have with your theory is that, if Horax wanted one of your colonists, they could just take them. All of the rituals work by calling upon Horax, with them doing the actual work. The existence of the skip abduction ritual implies that Horax can grab anybody from anywhere on the planet. Given that Horax is perfectly willing to send anomalies to attack your colony, it stands to reason that if they had interest in random colonists, they’d just grab them with skip abduction.
Based on the title, I thought you meant that the player is the chronophagy sacrifice. As in, the game is taking YOUR time and giving you a healed colonist.