"Mother!"
He Xiao caught the suddenly collapsing Shen Linyue, his hand feeling a burning heat. A blood-red star map appeared on her chest, perfectly matching the birthmark on the infant in his memory. The boy's trembling fingertips were about to touch her when they were forced back by a sword aura.
"Don't touch her!"
Amidst the fluttering apricot blossoms, a woman wielding a sword arrived under the moonlight. He Xiao's Shattered Star Sword hummed in her hand, and even more terrifyingly—this person looked exactly like Shen Lin Yue, except for a beauty mark at the corner of her eye.
"Finally found you." The woman pointed her sword at the unconscious Shen Linyue in his arms. "A time traveler from 2035."
The torrential rain washed away the blood-stained divination blocks on the ground, and the sleeves of the two Shen Linyue figures tangled in the wind. As the yin-yang jade pendants in their palms lit up simultaneously, the puppet threads on He Xiao's wrist suddenly dug into his flesh, carving patterns on his skin that matched the star map.
The sound of a watchman's drum came from afar.
It's midnight.
The bronze markings on the star dial were bleeding. When the two jade pendants, each bearing the image of a moon, were simultaneously embedded in the dial's center, the torrential rain suddenly stopped, and countless fragments of time and space emerged from the suspended water droplets. He Xiao saw his fifteen-year-old self gouging out his heart, and his mother in each timeline wore a beauty mark.
"Don't you understand?" The woman with the beauty mark cut through Shen Linyue's neck with her sword. "We are nothing but puppets on a destiny chart."
The golden threads on He Xiao's wrist suddenly flared up, but not to attack an enemy—the puppet threads were frantically burrowing into his heart, outlining the star map birthmark into a complete armillary sphere. Amidst the excruciating pain, he heard the clicking sound of machinery, as if countless gears were meshing within his veins.
"Xiao'er, don't move!" The real Shen Linyue suddenly crushed the sundial needle, the bronze fragments transforming into three thousand talismans. "She's using the sundial to initiate a blood sacrifice!"
The woman with the beauty mark under her eye chuckled, and the mark began to wander. It crawled across her temple and finally settled between her brows, turning into cinnabar—the mark of the Cangming Pavilion assassin. He Xiao's Shattered Star Sword suddenly slipped from his hand, and the words "Xiaoyao" appeared on the hilt.
"You think you've awakened the Mirror Abyss?" The woman pointed her finger at He Xiao's brow. "This is the God-Slaying Platform you built yourself thirty years later."
The sundial spun violently, and the suspended raindrops transformed into blood-red icicles. When Chen Linyue lunged at the sundial, he discovered that his blood was burning on the bronze patterns—this was the "blood sacrifice" recorded in the *Lianshan Yi*.
"Don't look at the divination!" She tried to blindfold He Xiao, but was blasted away by the golden light emanating from his body. The boy's pupils had turned into gear shapes, reflecting the divination text slowly appearing on the sundial:
[With the mysterious Yin as the guide and blood relatives as the sacrifice, the shattered stars are reforged, and the god-slayer returns.]
The woman with the beauty mark under her eye suddenly coughed up blood, which fell to the ground and sprouted into ice-blue datura flowers. She stroked the flowers and chuckled, "When you planted those thirty-seven apricot trees, didn't you notice that a fragment of a stardial was buried beneath each one?"
He Xiao trembled violently. Memories cleaved through his mind like a sharp blade—the year he was five, when his mother held his hand as they planted a tree, the reflection of bronze fragments in the soil, and the strand of white hair that appeared at his mother's temples every time an apricot tree blossomed.
"The time has come." The woman suddenly crushed the cinnabar dot, and the blood transformed into chains that bound Shen Linyue. "Let you, in 2035, personally activate the destiny chart."
The sundial emitted a screeching sound as gears jammed, and He Xiao witnessed a horrifying scene: in the stillness of the torrential rain, countless Chen Lin Yue were falling from different times and spaces, each with a Shattered Star Sword piercing their heart. Their blood intertwined in the void, gradually solidifying into star patterns on their bodies.
"So... I am the birth chart itself?"
Shen Linyue suddenly bit her tongue, using her blood as ink to draw quantum mechanics symbols in the air. This was her research topic before her transmigration, and now it resonated with the stardial. The moment the Ψ symbol enveloped He Xiao, the gear-like sounds within his body abruptly ceased.
"Remember, the observer can change the probability cloud!" She pressed the last half of the jade pendant into He Xiao's heart. "Now, look into your mother's eyes—"
As the woman with the beauty mark pierced Shen Linyue's chest with her sword, He Xiao's shrill cry shattered the sundial. The suspended raindrops exploded, each drop reflecting his image of embracing his mother from a different time and space. When all the images overlapped, the star map on his forehead finally became complete.
The Shattered Star Sword suddenly returned from the void, its blade swirling with binary code that didn't belong to this era. As He Xiao swung the sword to sever the chains of time and space, the woman with the beauty mark suddenly revealed a relieved smile: "Finally... I've waited for you..."
The moment the sundial completely collapsed, Chen Linyue vanished into specks of light. He Xiao reached out to grab it, but only grasped a strand of white hair. That white hair was wrapped around his wrist, tracing the pattern of a Möbius strip together with the puppet silk.
As the first light of dawn appeared in the east, the apricot grove swayed without wind. Suddenly, thirty-seven withered trees burst into bloom with blood-red flowers, each petal etched with a divination inscription. He Xiao knelt beneath the trees, hearing a mechanical heartbeat emanating from deep within their roots.
Three feet underground, the woman in the ice coffin slowly opened her eyes. The Shattered Star Sword was stuck in her chest, and a Möbius strip identical to He Xiao's was tied around her wrist.
As the blood-red apricot blossoms fell in a flurry, He Xiao saw the prophecy on the petals. It wasn't a divination, but rather the rings of time formed by countless overlapping strokes of the character "Chen Lin Yue"—from 1999 to 2035, each number stained with tears.
The moment the ice coffin opened, thirty-seven apricot trees suddenly sprang from the ground. Their roots intertwined to form a bronze sundial, and their trunks transformed into massive, interlocking gears. As He Xiao stepped into the tree hollow, he heard a mechanical female voice announce the time in English: "April 1, 2035 AD, the 37th failure of the quantum entanglement experiment."
"Xiao'er."
He whirled around, and the woman in the ice coffin was now suspended in the circular orbit of the particle collider. The Shattered Star Sword on her chest glowed blue, and the binary code appearing on its blade resonated with the Möbius strip on He Xiao's wrist.
"This is...my mother's..."
"Fragments of memory." The woman's ethereal figure brushed across the star map between his brows. "What you have awakened is not Mirror Abyss, but our consciousness trapped in the closed loop of time."
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