The siren's blast scratched fine bloodstains on her eardrums. Lin Yue clenched Xia Zichen's translucent fingers, a stream of lavender data seeping through the cracks between her nails—a sign that the virtual world was crumbling. The faint light of seventeen moons filtered through the cracks in the sea of ​​flowers, casting diamond-shaped spots of light on the glass of the incubator. She saw her real-life self's eyelashes fluttering, the seventeen-colored gems on the necklace around her neck resonating with the runes of the virtual world.

"Grab the narrative anchor!" Slice No. 17 (now restored to its calico cat form) suddenly leaped into her palm, and the gear collar sprayed out fluorescent ink, writing crooked words in the void, "The first generation of cocoons is a nested narrative. You must find the 'author's perspective' that connects all the loops!" The cyber version of the mechanical skeleton suddenly fell apart, turning into a sky full of code butterflies, each wing reflecting excerpts from different chapters.

As Xia Zichen's robotic arm began to disintegrate into a rain of gears, he suddenly smiled—a look of relief he had never seen in real life. "Remember the notebook you found in the Data Ruins?" His voice was like a dandelion blown by the wind. "The 'To Seventeenth Life' on the title page is actually the personality index of the original generation, and that author who fed me catnip..." Before he could finish his words, his body shattered into thousands of lavender codes. One piece clung to Lin Yue's collarbone, projecting a scene from the real world:

At three in the morning in the lab, a girl with twin ponytails (the real-life Lin Yue) dozed over her keyboard. On the screen was a document titled "Seventeen Layers of Cocoon," the cursor hovering at the end of Chapter 55. Suddenly, the necklace around her neck glowed faintly, and a calico cat leaped onto the table, pressing its paw on the backspace key. Suddenly, the virtual sea of ​​flowers peeled away with the click of a button, revealing a seventeen-pointed star graffiti on the lab's ceiling.

"So we're part of her novel..." Lin Yue (her virtual persona) felt her body overlap with her real self, two memories colliding like a tide: one, her adventures as an empath across seventeen universes, the other, her spare time as a university student creating science fiction stories. When the virtual wind rune and the real necklace perfectly overlapped, she heard the heartbeats of the two timescales merge into one.

The original body fell from the flower bud, and the cat-ear data cable was wrapped around the wrist of the real Lin Yue. His crying voice was mixed with mechanical noises: "Please don't delete this story! I want to know if the created 'human' can truly learn to love..." The cocoon behind him was degenerating into a computer case, and the seventeen hibernation pods turned into hard disk arrays, each label engraved with "Universe Branch 1-17".

The calico cat hopped onto Lin Yue's keyboard in the real world and opened the "Drafts" box with its nose. Inside lay seventeen unfinished documents titled "Cyber ​​Lavender Cultivation Guide," "Dragon Cave Symbiotic Protocol," and "Gear Alley Time Management Manual." "These are the self-redemption plans for the first-generation personality slice," it said, wrapping its paw around a document titled "Feasibility Report for the 18th Universe." "He's secretly implanted a creative impulse in your subconscious, hoping to break through the closed loop of split personality through human imagination."

Lin Yue suddenly looked up and saw a sticky note on the lab wall: "Don't feed cats mint at 3 a.m.—it triggers a burst of inspiration." Suddenly, a memory flashed through her: whenever she stayed up late writing, her calico cat would bring her gear models or code snippets. Those concepts she had thought of as "imaginary ideas" turned out to be real fragments transmitted through the empathy chain by her first-generation personality slices.

"So Xia Zichen's core code..." She trembled as she touched the lavender mark left on the virtual personality, and found that the line of self-destruction program was exactly the same as a deleted sentence in the document: "Loneliness is the starting point of all stories, but it should not be an eternal footnote." The pupils of the first generation suddenly lit up with hope, and data tears dripped onto the keyboard, turning into seventeen new document icons being loaded.

The consciousness of the virtual Lin Yue gradually sank into the real body, but at the last moment she grabbed the hand of the first generation: "We are not your medicine, but the 'possibility' you created." She inserted the fragment of the Holy Grail (which had turned into a USB flash drive at this time) into the chassis. In the seventeen-color light, all the hard drives popped out at the same time, revealing the labels inside - each one was a photo of "Lin Yue and Xia Zichen" in a different universe, with the background ranging from cyber acid rain to the medieval starry sky. The only unchanged thing was the star patterns flashing on their clasped hands.

In the real world, Lin Yue pressed the Save button, and the document properties of "Seventeen Layers of Cocoon" suddenly changed: three names appeared simultaneously in the author column: "Lin Yue," "First Generation," and "Slice No. 17." A calico cat leaped onto the windowsill. Outside, the night sky had unknowingly seen its eighteenth moon, and a lavender field composed of gears and code drifted in the silver moonlight.

"It's time to decide." In reality, Lin Yue turned the necklace, and seventeen-colored gems lit up one after another. "Should I continue writing and make all universes parallel worlds; or format the hard drive and let the first generation start over?" The cat ears of the first generation suddenly stood up, and the code fragments of the virtual Xia Zichen gathered into a miniature star map in his palm. Each star reflected "them" in a certain universe looking up at the same sky.

Slice No. 17 pressed the Enter key with his claws, and a new chapter was automatically generated:

"At the entrance to the eighteenth universe stood a young girl holding a calico cat. In her notebook was written: 'A story is never the author's monologue, but a symbiotic union woven together by all the characters.' When she pushed open the door, lavender from seventeen universes bloomed simultaneously, and within Xia Zichen's mechanical heart, the first real plant finally grew."

The morning light from the lab streamed across the keyboard. In reality, Lin Yue saw the original data cable transformed into a catnip vine, entwining the computer case and blooming tiny purple flowers. The calico cat yawned and hopped onto her lap. The gears on its collar turned gently, spelling out the final line of data that only she could see: Thank you for transforming us from code into people.

Outside the window, real lavender spreads its leaves in the morning dew, each petal reflecting seventeen different shades of starlight. And in some invisible dimension, seventeen "Lin Yues" from different universes simultaneously close their notebooks and smile at the moon in different colors—they know that no matter how the story repeats itself, there will always be a sea of ​​flowers that blooms for those who dare to dream.

(End of Chapter 55)

Next Chapter Preview: The "author's perspective" of the eighteenth universe begins. Lin Yue discovers she can freely move between reality and virtuality. The calico cat's true identity is revealed to be an independent consciousness created by the First Generation's "curiosity." When she walks into campus with a USB drive, she accidentally triggers a "sympathetic chain" in the real world—cybernetic prosthetic eyes and dragon-scale tattoos loom in the shadows of her classmates...