As the starship traversed the turbulent data stream, Lin Yue's fingertips suddenly pierced Xia Zichen's palm. Beneath his transparent skin, his blood vessels glowed with the unique blue light of data flow—a sign that the space-time anchor was loosening.

The black cat curled up on the operating table, and the gears of the pocket watch with its tail curled up reflected the afterimage of the first-generation creator. Suddenly, a memory that did not belong to her flashed across Lin Yue's retina: a gear laboratory in a rainstorm, a man wearing gear glasses stuffed the last piece of debris into the black cat's mouth, and when he turned around, he revealed a star-shaped birthmark that was identical to Xia Zichen's.

"Touch my consciousness!" Xia Zichen pressed his hand between her eyebrows, but the astral light threads instantly turned inky black upon contact. Lin Yue's pupils split into a triple shadow. In her deepest vision, the First Creator knelt in the ruins of the BE Universe. The black cat (or "it") used its claws to split open its chest, hiding the fragments in its beating mechanical heart.

“This way… they’ll never guess the ultimate container for the fragments.” The man’s voice strangely overlapped with the black cat’s meow, causing blood-red ripples to appear in his sea of ​​consciousness.

"So the black cat is from the first generation..." Lin Yue grabbed the edge of the operating table and saw that his wind rune was absorbing Xia Zichen's star pattern light.

Lao Zhang's holographic projection suddenly twisted into a data stream, and the wrench transformed into a first-generation scalpel. The handle was engraved with the same gear rune as the one on Black Cat's collar. "When the empathy chain breaks through the dimension of time and space, the observer becomes the observed node. Be careful of those 'identical looks'; they could be a crack in the causal loop."

Xia Zichen's robotic arm was so transparent that he could see the data streams flowing through it. He forcibly ripped off the star-patterned wristband and pressed it against Lin Yue's wrist: "Use my energy to stabilize the anchor point!"

The moment the wristband touched their skin, they both fell into a vortex of time-space empathy. Lin Yue saw the black cats of seventeen universes turn their heads simultaneously, each pupil reflecting the scene of the First Generation injecting the fragment into the cat's genes. And from Xia Zichen's perspective, the same star pattern as the First Generation appeared on the back of their necks in all the universe's "selves"—a deliberately concealed "symbiotic mark."

"They are planting our souls in petri dishes." Lin Yue's wind blades condensed into chains in the sea of ​​consciousness, entangling the disappearing black cat.

"The fragment isn't the key, it's... the heart of the symbiote?" The black cat suddenly spoke, its voice a harmonious harmony of the First and the kittens: "When the last fragment falls into place, the First's consciousness will awaken in the 'vessel that most resembles him.' And you... are his chosen hosts."

The starship trembled violently, and the cybercity outside the porthole suddenly twisted into a DNA double helix. In Lin Yue's Wind Pocket, a gear candy oozed a black and red liquid, and the original's handwriting appeared on the wrapper: "To my perfect replica—When the cat's eyes reflect the star pattern, your empathy is the fetal movement of my rebirth." Xia Zichen felt the raised star pattern on the back of his neck and found that its shape exactly matched the number of the petri dishes in the original's laboratory.

The black cat jumped onto Lin Yue's shoulder, and the pupil of its left eye split into a gear shape, revealing the fragments hidden behind the iris: "To stop him, you must reversely implant the 'consciousness virus' when collecting the fragments. But first... you have to accept the fact that you are a 'container'." Lin Yue stared into the black cat's right eye, where the nursery of the steampunk universe was reflected, and the roots were decomposing the bones of the first generation into lavender nutrients.

"We are not pawns." Xia Zichen's Star-Embroidered Sword cleaved the data stream in his sea of ​​consciousness, unexpectedly revealing a layer of the First Generation's memories. Lin Yue saw a sealed image: The First Generation rushed into the lab, holding the dying Black Cat. In a photo hanging on the wall, he and Xia Zichen wore the same Star-Embroidered uniform, and the Black Cat wore the same gear collar.

"He's your...brother?" Lin Yue's wind enveloped the fading fragments of memory, reassembling them into the original experimental log: "73rd reincarnation, finally finding a space-time anchor in the cat's genes. If I fail, let 'the other me' live with the cat and the fragments." Xia Zichen's robotic arm suddenly materialized, grabbing the torn log page: "So, the 'me' in every universe is a genetic mirror image of him?"

Black Cat's pocket watch suddenly flipped back, dragging the three of them into a virtual wedding scene in the cyberverse. Beneath the dome of the holographic cathedral, the digitized "them" exchanged rings, the inner surfaces of which were engraved the very pattern of the missing fragment. Lin Yue's wind rune scanned the guest list, revealing that all the NPCs had the same gear-shaped pupils as Black Cat—each data entity here was a slice of the primary consciousness.

"Touching the ring will activate the trap." Xia Zichen's star-patterned wristband resonated with the virtual bride's headdress, revealing the fragment's location in the gene pool beneath the altar. "But if we use the empathy chain to forge the first generation's consciousness frequency..." Lin Yue nodded, and the wind blade transformed into a lavender virus in the data stream, quietly injecting the code for the wedding march. When the virtual Xia Zichen said "I do," the entire church's data stream suddenly boiled, revealing a cluster of incubation chambers hidden in the lower levels—each containing a clone identical to Xia Zichen, the star pattern on the back of their necks absorbing the fragment's faint light.

The fragment of the black cat's left eye suddenly flew out and embedded itself in the keyhole of the central incubator. The moment the hatch opened, Lin Yue's sense of time and space erupted, and she witnessed the entire process of the First Generation transforming the black cat into a space-time vessel in the BE universe. "I'm sorry, Ah Hei, this is the only way you can carry the fragments with you into your next reincarnation." The man wiped the blood from the cat's face, inserted the last fragment into its mechanical heart, and dissipated into a stream of data.

The real black cat suddenly whimpered like a kitten, its collar falling away to reveal a star-shaped scar on its neck—the "symbiotic mark" carved by the First Generation with a scalpel. Xia Zichen tightened his grip on Lin Yue's increasingly transparent hand, noticing the same data stream patterns emerging beneath their skin. "We are his backup, and the black cat... is the USB drive that holds that backup."

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