Xiao Yi grabbed the satellite phone and heard Morse code in the background. When he split the phone's casing with a fire axe, a miniature uranium glass tube tumbled out, the inner wall of which was engraved with the laser logo of NW-2077.
"Be careful!" The pregnant woman suddenly pushed Xiao Yi aside, her back instantly pierced by a bullet. The smell of burnt integrated circuit boards wafted from the bullet hole. On the rooftop of the office building opposite, a figure wearing tactical goggles was sheathing his gun and retreating. The hem of his windbreaker revealed a dark blue uniform—the same emblem as the one on the handle of Lao Zhou's scalpel.
The water level now overflowed the threshold of the 28th floor, and the floating office furniture collided with each other, making a roar like bells. Xiao Yi held the gradually cooling baby in his arms and suddenly realized that the storm clouds reflected in his pupils were exactly the same as the heat map he had seen on the meteorological bureau's computer.
"Hold on tight!" Old Zhou swung out a rope woven from data cables and looped it around the exposed steel beams on the ceiling. As he leaped toward safety, Xiao Yi saw the computer case bobbing in the floodwaters below. The hard drive indicator light was still stubbornly flashing, like the eyes of a drowning victim refusing to close.
The glass dome of the Sky Garden groaned in the torrential rain, and icy mist gushed from the seams of the steel structure, freezing Zhang Zhihao's custom-made suit into armor. Xiao Yi squatted beside the base of the viewing telescope, tracing the cloud map on the French window with the light spots cast by his baby pupils. The distorted isobars resonated with Lao Zhou's hand-drawn escape map, like quantum entanglement.
"98% match." Xiao Yi's Adam's apple rolled as he swallowed his metallic-smelling saliva. When he aimed his phone's camera at the spot of light, the EXIF data suddenly jumped wildly, revealing the shooting time as June 2035—a time and space coordinate from five years in the future.
Lao Zhou was dissecting the control box for the automatic irrigation system. The chip he extracted with his military dagger glowed with a cold blue light. "This isn't an ordinary Arduino board. Look at the number of wafer layers." He immersed the chip in the standing water. The twelve layers of nanocircuit peeled off and spread like a living thing, forming a miniature model of the typhoon's eye on the liquid surface.
"Weather weapon closed-loop control system," Xiao Yi's temples throbbed. "Use Josephson junction quantum interference to manipulate atmospheric thermodynamic phase transitions." He suddenly remembered that the night before his university mentor disappeared, the Maxwell demon formula on the laboratory blackboard had been changed to the typhoon energy equation.
The baby suddenly let out a high-pitched cry, the sound waves shattering the wine display case ten meters away. Zhang Zhihao frantically lunged towards the bottle of Lafite spilling onto the floor, but suddenly froze in place—his reflection in the wine took on two forms: one that of a suited investment banker, the other that of a middle-aged man in a municipal engineering uniform.
"Multiple Mandel effects." Lao Zhou wiped the tissue fluid off the dagger. "When the collapse speed of parallel space-time exceeds the Planck time..."
The entire building suddenly tilted seven degrees, uprooting the palm trees in the sky garden and creating spiderweb-like cracks in the tempered glass. Xiao Yi grabbed Lao Zhou's mechanical prosthesis and found that the barcode on the inside of his forearm produced a fluorescent reaction with the metal colloid on the baby's umbilical cord.
"The biological samples you collected from the dam breach during the 1998 Yangtze River flood..." Old Zhou suddenly coughed violently, spewing out a bloody mist with tiny hexagonal metal pieces suspended in it. "It wasn't a natural disaster, it was sampling."
A pattern of blood-misty metal flakes remained on Xiao Yi's retina. It was clearly a satellite image of Typhoon Phoenix. As he rushed to the remaining servers in the data center, the neon lights of the entire city suddenly lit up simultaneously, projecting a huge holographic projection in the torrential rain - a weather report for the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.
"Stop him!" The pregnant woman's body suddenly twitched and stood up, revealing a miniature reactor within her pierced chest. Her remaining facial muscles pulled into a strange smile, and her blood-stained fingertips carved the Schrödinger equation on the ground.
Zhang Zhihao howled like a beast and slashed his artery with a broken bottle. The moment his blood hit the air, it vaporized into pink smoke, condensing in the air into a 3D model of the municipal drainage network. The location of the cracks in each pipe exactly matched the acceptance report Xiao Yi had seen in the archives.
"Cognitive pollution..." Lao Zhou scanned the smog model with his prosthetic eye. "They've added LSD derivatives to the city's water supply." He suddenly ripped open his shirt. The surgical scar on his chest was oozing fluorescent blue liquid, forming a Klein bottle topology on the surface of the accumulated water.
Xiao Yi's smartphone suddenly unlocked, and a ghostly email he'd deleted three months earlier reappeared. Attached was a plan he'd drawn up to improve the heat island effect, but the location of the plan was clearly marked as Chongqing in 1942—the period of the Chongqing bombing that killed tens of thousands of people.
The baby's cries shifted to infrasonic frequencies, and the glass curtain walls below the 40th floor shattered simultaneously. Amidst the roar of the flood, Xiao Yi heard the whirring of some massive machinery. Old Zhou plunged his dagger into the data center's main cable, and within the arcing current emerged a nuclear reactor blueprint, annotated in Russian.
"In 1945, Truman received two weather reports." Lao Zhou's voice was mixed with electromagnetic noise, "You all know the one about Hiroshima, and the other one was about the blizzard in Siberia..."
The ground of the Sky Garden suddenly collapsed, revealing a fifteen-story spiral metal structure below. Xiao Yi, clutching Lao Zhou's mechanical arm and suspended in mid-air, watched as Zhang Zhihao's flesh and blood body melted, revealing the silvery-gray, fluid metal skeleton within. The chest cavity of that skeleton was branded with the Municipal Engineering Bureau's phoenix emblem.
The baby suddenly broke free from his swaddling clothes, and in free fall, his metallic membrane unfolded like a cicada's wing. Laser beams shot from his pupils, cutting clear Russian characters through the rain: "Циклон-3 has been activated."
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