The backflow of liquid time came without warning. A hundred-meter-high wall of liquid suddenly rose from the entire purple ocean, its surface reflecting countless distorted fragments of spacetime—the gears of a steampunk city turned to ash, the code pythons of Cybertron torn into data streams. From the center of the vortex came the roar of mechanical gears crushing stars. Lu Li's golden armor blared a shrill alarm, and data lines twisted into spirals in the backflow.
"Catch me!" The calico cat swung its chain around Lu Li's wrist, but the sudden acceleration of the vortex nearly dislocated it. Lu Li's six afterimages forcibly merged amidst the tug-of-war, the golden code transforming into a strong rope, binding the two tightly. Like two dead leaves, they were drawn deeper into the vortex, shattering the suspended liquid time crystals along the way. The shards that flew through the air pieced together fragmented memories: Lin Yue smiling as she wove the threads of time, a silver-armored warrior falling on the battlefield, and... the image of a mirrored colossus slumbering within an ancient seal.
The speed of his descent accelerated, and Lu Li felt his physical form dissolving in liquid time. Just as his consciousness was about to fade, a scene at the core caught his eye—a cage of silver chains the diameter of a galaxy, with a mirrored colossus suspended at its center, awakening. Its liquid metal body shone with the luster of a galaxy, each wrinkle etched with patterns reminiscent of the seventeen-colored gemstones. As the giant eyes, radiating purple light, slowly opened, Lu Li's breath nearly stopped. The rhythm of the light echoed the final burst of light from the gemstone before Lin Yue vanished. Even at the edge of the purple halo, he could still catch the familiar afterimage of golden threads.
"Impossible..." Lu Li muttered a broken whisper. The calico cat's gear collar suddenly spun wildly, emitting a sharp buzzing sound. It was horrified to discover that the fragments of the entropy core in the mirror image's chest were quantum entangled with the seventeen-colored gems in Lu Li's arms. The space between them was filled with spiderweb-like energy patterns. Outside the cage, the remnants of the black-robed men broke free from the golden cage. Their bodies expanded in the entropy energy, transforming into twelve pillars of purple light that connected heaven and earth and pierced the mirror image's sealed core.
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