The moment Chen Hao crashed into the void rift, he felt as if he had been stuffed into a washing machine and spun around ten times. He didn't see what those eyes looked like, only remembering that the final recoil was incredibly strong, and he was bounced back like a cannonball.
When he landed, his knees slammed into the ground, making him wince in pain. His wings didn't fold properly, and the edges still shimmered with gold, flickering like a faulty fluorescent light.
“That thing…it’s not an enemy, it’s a mirror.” He gasped for breath, spitting out a few specks of light, like sparks from a hiccup.
Nana stood by the buffer platform, the mechanical finger just removed from the alarm panel. She didn't speak, but the scanning beam had already swept over his entire body, running back and forth three times from head to toe.
“The crack is closing,” she said. “What did you just touch?”
"I can't explain it." Chen Hao tried to stand up, but his hand slipped and he sat back down. "It's like... scrolling through someone else's social media and suddenly finding that it's all old photos of yourself."
Nana frowned—if you could call it a frowning robot. She turned and retrieved the ice core from the storage compartment, placing it on the energy buffer platform. This thing, which had originally been just the remains of a frozen fruit, now began to ripple on its surface, as if water was sloshing inside.
Chen Hao reached out to touch it.
"Wait," Nana stopped her. "The equipment is all alarming; it's emitting a frequency we've never seen before."
“That’s perfect.” He placed his hand on it. “My mind isn’t quite right to begin with, so maybe I can get on the same wavelength.”
The ice core suddenly lit up.
The image exploded.
It wasn't a continuous stream of images, but rather a series of flashing frames: in a collapsing city, he held a rusty iron pipe to her, her eyes reddening, and a mechanical arm unfolding into a weapon array; in a metal forest, she pressed him against a wall, their foreheads touching, unsure whether they were arguing or almost kissing; and once, they brushed past each other at the edge of the desert, the wind and sand whipping up tattered rags, neither of them turning back.
"These are all...?" Chen Hao's voice trembled slightly.
“Our encounters,” Nana stared at the data stream, “were more than once.”
"I mean, I've never been to any of these places, but how come I seem to remember the taste?"
Nana brought up the analysis interface and found that the knowledge base could not recognize the information structure at all. As soon as the regular decoding program was connected, the ice core began to vibrate, causing the lights in the entire control room to flicker.
"Stop." She decisively cut off the direct connection. "If you keep trying, you'll get dragged in."
"Wait a minute." Chen Hao suddenly looked up. "Do you remember that scene just now—I was wearing my school uniform in the ruins? That day you said 'you're late,' and then threw me a hot drink."
Nana was stunned.
That conversation is not in any records.
But she did...remember it.
“I shouldn’t remember this,” she whispered. “The system hadn’t activated the emotion module back then.”
"So this isn't a memory." Chen Hao touched the surface of the ice core. "Is it a rehearsal? A dress rehearsal? Or... a save point where we start over after a failed rehearsal?"
Nana didn't answer. She was quickly retrieving past experimental data: in Chapter 103, during the fruit acid reaction, the ice core triggered a brief hallucination; in Chapter 118, during the hallucination crisis, they simultaneously saw childhood scenes; in Chapter 130, before the creation light curtain opened, the ice core temperature suddenly dropped by seven degrees, which corresponded exactly to the moment when the two shook hands.
“It doesn’t store history,” she said suddenly. “It’s a trigger. As long as we get close, it awakens some kind of… latent possibility.”
"So," Chen Hao grinned, "I'm not unlucky, I just have too many options?"
“In theory, each cycle is an independent branch of the timeline.” Nana looked at the fluctuating curve, “but our interaction pattern is highly repetitive—you are always running away, and I am always chasing.”
"And what about this time?" He tilted his head to look at her. "Have we gone off track now?"
The ice core flickered again as soon as the words were spoken.
New images emerge: in the snow, he was shivering and curled up, and she knelt down to wrap him in clothes; after the laboratory explosion, he carried her burned body all night; and another time, he jumped from the top of a tower, and she caught him in mid-air, as a rain of fire exploded behind them.
“These things really happened,” he said.
“It’s also possible that it didn’t happen,” she added. “In other timelines, you let go, or I missed it.”
Chen Hao was silent for a few seconds, then suddenly laughed: "No wonder I always felt pretty useless, it turns out it's because I was even more useless in other worlds."
Nana glanced at him: "Are you still going to laugh?"
"Otherwise what?" He shrugged. "I can't exactly cry, can I? I'm not the main character in a TV series, and I don't need to be accompanied by background music and flashbacks."
The fluctuations in the ice core gradually stabilized, but the scene continued to shift. With each transition, the air in reality seemed to freeze slightly for a moment, as if time had hiccuped.
"Warning." Nana received a system notification: "Contact between two people may lead to consciousness fusion, with a 76% risk of blurred personality boundaries."
"Who hasn't trusted whom before?" Chen Hao grabbed her mechanical hand directly. "If you're afraid I'll devour you, I'll just let you become the dominant personality."
“I don’t have a dominant personality,” she sighed, “but I’m afraid you’ll lose yourself.”
“I won’t lose you.” He squeezed her hand. “Look, I’m always fat in every reincarnation, and you don’t mind.”
Without further hesitation, Nana placed her palms on the ice core with him.
In an instant, a myriad of images rushed in.
This time, they were no longer bystanders.
They could hear the wind, smell the burning, and feel the warmth from each other's fingertips. They ran side by side through the flames of war, laughed in the torrential rain, and counted stars on a desolate planet. There were also arguments, misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and even hurting each other.
But every time they meet again, the rhythm changes.
In the early episodes, she always spoke first, and he hesitated for a long time before responding; in the middle episodes, he would occasionally call her name; in the last few episodes, he would usually be the one to speak first, and then the situation would be completely different.
"Wait!" Chen Hao suddenly opened his eyes. "I've discovered a pattern—every time I speak first, the outcome is different!"
Nana noticed it too.
The worlds she left alone were all places where he remained silent until the very end; and the point at which they finally came together almost always began with one of his seemingly pointless opening remarks—such as "Are you hungry?" or "This weather is perfect for stealing chili sauce."
“Destiny is not predetermined,” he murmured, “it’s inertia. We think we can’t escape it, but actually we’re just too lazy to change our approach.”
Nana looked at him: "So you're saying that choices themselves can rewrite the course of events?"
“Exactly.” He laughed. “It’s like copying answers in an exam. If you copy too much, you won’t even notice if the question has changed. But if you dare to write it yourself even once, even if you make a mistake, you can find a new path.”
The light from the ice core gradually faded.
Sunlight streamed through the observation window, illuminating a pair of old snow boots in the corner. The uppers were torn, one lace was broken, and they were covered in dried mud and frost.
Chen Hao withdrew his hand, his wings already tucked into his back, leaving only a faint light swimming beneath his skin. He flexed his wrists, feeling his body steady.
"To be honest, I was a little dizzy just now," he said. "It felt like I was watching short videos for eight hours straight, only to find that all the recommendations were from the same streamer."
“You’ve absorbed too much information about possibilities,” Nana said, shutting down the alarm system. “You need to rest.”
“No need.” He shook his head. “I’m perfectly clear-headed right now. I used to think I was the one holding you back, and that you were the one saving me. But now I know—without my foolish choice, you wouldn’t be where you are today.”
Nana paused for a few seconds.
“Next time,” she said softly, “I want to hear you tell a new story.”
“Sure.” He stood up, walked to the observatory, and picked up the ice core that was no longer glowing. “But it’ll cost extra, after all, I’m a man who has traversed multiple universes.”
He stuffed the ice core back into the storage compartment and patted her on the shoulder: "Come on, let's go check outside. That impact might have shaken something out."
Nana followed behind him, not at a fast pace. She glanced back at the spherical monitoring screen and discovered that although the ice core was still, there were still extremely subtle pulsations inside, the frequency of which was completely synchronized with Chen Hao's heartbeat.
They walked out of the control room, and the corridor lights automatically turned on. There were some small cracks in the floor, as if it had been briefly distorted by some force.
Chen Hao stopped in his tracks.
"You think... that crack just now was really a mirror?"
He looked down at his own shadow.
The shadow was a beat slow.
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