The gilded mirror pattern shone a faint blue glow in the shadows. As Lin Yue's fingertips touched the mirror, all the cracks suddenly became covered with spidery synapses. The star pattern on Xia Zichen's neck suddenly lit up, and the mirror reflected an afterimage of his cyberverse—a man inserting a blood-stained chip into the core module of the first generation. A mechanical voice mingled with a real heartbeat: "Seventeen 'first encounters' in the universe... These are all emotional anchors pre-set by the first generation."
Lin Yue's wind rune burned at her collarbone. Her steampunk self in the mirror tore off the connecting wires of her mechanical prosthetic eye, and gear oil dripped down her chin: "Do you think the black cat is a container? It's actually an emotional cache split from the first generation." Before she finished speaking, the mirror suddenly cracked, and the fragments of the Holy Grail beat like a heart, casting the shadow of a medieval rack on the wall with each beat.
"Warning! The cross-dimensional memory pollution index has exceeded the critical value!" Lao Zhang's holographic projection was distorted in the mirror. "That mirror will materialize the secret into instinctive fear - Major Xia, the gear oil in your left mechanical arm is actually from the first generation..." The communicator was interrupted by a burst of sound. Xia Zichen's mechanical fingers were uncontrollably digging into the star pattern on his palm. As blood oozed out, he was reflected in seventeen universes in the mirror, simultaneously engraving the same inscription: Prisoned by love, trapped in reincarnation.
Lin Yue's movements were swift and decisive. She reached out like lightning and tightly grasped his bleeding wrist. The moment she touched him, a powerful force surged between them like a torrent.
As if summoned, the wind rune quickly wrapped around their overlapping rainbow patterns, forming a tight protective layer. The rune flickered with a faint light, as if injecting new energy into their connection.
Lin Yue's voice echoed in the wind, with a firm and resolute tone: "Use the empathy chain to reconstruct the memory! Just like we pieced together the inversion matrix before—"
Her words were like a spell, shaking his heart. He watched her close her eyes tightly, as if concentrating, preparing to enter an unknown realm.
When Lin Yue closed her eyes, it was as if a door to another world had been opened in her sea of consciousness. The strong sulfurous smell of a medieval dragon's lair filled her nose, an ancient and mysterious scent that reminded her of legendary dragons and their lairs.
However, the smell of sulfur was not what she was looking for. She continued to explore the depths of her memories, passing through layers of fog, and finally touched a cold code that did not belong to any universe.
This code, like the dark matter of the universe, was hidden deep within her memory, unknown to others. It contained no emotion, only mechanical instructions and repetitive cycles.
And within this code loop, one sentence was constantly played, like a nightmare that would never stop: "Test Subject 7-17, emotional resonance threshold increased to 92%."
Xia Zichen's robotic arm suddenly felt a sharp pain, as if a gear had misaligned. The pain was almost unbearable. However, just as he was in agony, his empathy chain suddenly opened, and he saw a scene from when Lin Yue was seven years old.
In that scene, Lin Yue was standing in a data ruin, with broken code and flickering lights beneath her feet. In the ruins, she picked up a black cat doll, and the doll's eyes were embedded with fragments of the original core.
Xia Zichen looked at this scene, his heart filled with confusion and shock. He didn't understand the relationship between this black cat doll and the fragments of the first generation core, nor did he know why he saw this scene at this time.
As he pondered, the mirrored blood in reality suddenly began to coagulate, forming a lavender-like shape. Each petal clearly reflected their death scenes in different universes: being devoured by a giant dragon, decomposed by code, crushed by gears... These scenes filled Xia Zichen with immense fear, but what surprised him even more was that at each of their final moments, a black cat would appear with fragments of the Reversed Matrix in its mouth, saving them from danger.
"We are the created experimental subjects?" Lin Yue's voice echoed through seventeen universes. All of the "selves" in the mirror simultaneously raised wind blades, slashing at the original logo that appeared on the mirror surface. Xia Zichen's robotic arm automatically deployed a defensive stance, but in the scope, he saw that behind each slashed logo was a holographic projection of them hugging and smiling.
The fragments of the Holy Grail suddenly erupted in a silvery light. From the cracks in the mirror, an arm etched with star patterns emerged, its palm holding seventeen memory crystals. Lin Yue trembled as she touched the crystals. A lavender garden from the cyberverse blossomed in her palm, yet within its pistil lay the First Generation's warning: when the experimental subjects realized the true nature of reincarnation, all universes would collapse simultaneously.
"It turns out that the first generation is not the enemy..." Xia Zichen clenched the crystal, and a black cat's paw print suddenly appeared on the hilt of the medieval star-patterned sword. "It used seventeen cocoons to protect us, but it was trapped in the corridor of consciousness and bore the backlash of all the fragments." The mirror began to vibrate violently. In the dust falling from the castle dome, hundreds of black cats came, crushing the moonlight, and each pair of eyes reflected the reflection of the truth in the mirror.
The calico cat in the foreground leaped onto the mirror table. The gears on its collar suddenly resonated with the fragments of the Holy Grail, creating a star map of the original core module on the ground. Lin Yue saw the timelines of seventeen universes intertwining in the mirror, and the starting point of all these lines was her first encounter with Xia Zichen in the data ruins—back then, the black cat was using the original code to weave their initial cocoon.
"To break the cocoon, you have to tell the ultimate truth." When the calico cat spoke, his voice was a mixture of the black cat's purring and the buzzing of data streams, "But the price of the truth is--" The mirror suddenly reflected a picture of seventeen universes collapsing at the same time. Xia Zichen turned into a point of light in every time and space. Only Lin Yue held the reversal matrix, standing at the end of the desolate time.
Xia Zichen's mechanical arm wrapped around her trembling shoulders, and the star pattern and wind rune glowed faintly at the contact point: "Rather than false eternity, I want seventeen real hugs." When he bent down to kiss her, all "them" in the mirror made the same movement at the same time. Seventeen rainbow patterns spread from the wrist to the mirror surface, decomposing the original logo into lavender petals.
The fragments of the Holy Grail slammed into Lin Yue's palm, and their clasped hands were reflected in the fragments. The Gothic handwriting on the mirror had been diluted by tears, leaving only the last half sentence: - Or become a new cocoon, guarding each other's light.
(End of Chapter 52)
Next chapter preview:
The empathy chain evolves due to the awakening of the truth. Lin Yue can hear the voice of "himself" in all universes, but falls into memory overload.
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