As the spaceship emerged from the cracks of the quantum entangled universe, the spacetime outside the porthole suddenly resembled crumpled parchment, with all light refracting in twisted, circular paths. In the "Causal Closed Loop Universe" numbered 233, time took on an eerie Möbius strip—light rays from the past, present, and future intertwined here, forming countless interconnected causal loops. The calico cat's mechanical claws projected frequency ripples onto the control console. As the ripples spread, they bounced off the causal loops, superimposing themselves on its own trajectory. "The rule here is 'cause is effect, effect is cause.' Any energy output becomes its own input, trapped in an eternal closed loop!"
Lin Yue felt a strong tugging sensation at the spiral mark on the back of her neck, as if countless causal threads were trying to pull her consciousness into a closed loop. She looked at Lu Li and discovered that his code body was undergoing "causal collapse"—the Lu Li standing at the control console at that moment was also herself, operating the engine five seconds ago and being buffeted by the causal wave ten seconds later. Three Lu Lis in different time states overlapped into a quantum ghost. A voice rang out from different time planes: "The core of the causal closed loop is the 'Möbius strip of time.' The first cause of the universe's birth and the final result of its destruction are entangled here. All events are cycles of causal autophagy..."
Before he could finish his words, the spaceship was engulfed by a tidal wave of cause and effect. Countless transparent "causal cocoons" emerged from the portholes, each containing a closed-loop event: the simultaneous birth and destruction of stars, the mutual causal origins and extinctions of planetary civilizations, the intertwined awakening and dissipation of observers' consciousness. The remains of the calico cat's gear collar touched a causal cocoon, and the star's destruction within instantly became the cause of the spaceship's engine overload. The engine's uncontrolled gushing of energy, in turn, became the result of the birth of a star. The two causes and effects exploded in space, creating golden sparks of time.
"We must find the 'First Cause Anchor'!" Lin Yue's thread of time penetrated the causal cocoon and saw that every closed-loop event traced back to the "causal singularity" at the center of the universe. It was a black crystal suspended in the void, its surface engraved with ancient divine characters, each character representing the starting point and end point of a closed causal loop. Twelve bands of time light surrounded the crystal, sealing within them the entire chain of cause and effect since the creation of the universe, from the vibration of the first quark to the dissipation of the last consciousness, circulating eternally within these bands.
Lu Li's code parsed the ancient divine text, revealing it to be the "Curse of Causal Autophagy." To counteract the dark purple fluid, the universe's original observers used their consciousness to anchor the First Cause. However, the fluid eroded their consciousness, causing it to merge with the causal singularity, trapping the entire universe in a closed causal loop, a "time prison" of the fluid. The calico cat's mechanical claws transformed into a frequency drill, attempting to create a breach in the temporal ribbon. However, the drill was instantly consumed by causality, becoming the ribbon's reinforcement. The ribbon's rotation accelerated, and the causal cocoons within the universe began to multiply rapidly.
Lin Yue raised the Star Track baton. The light-crushed gears at its tip unexpectedly exhibited a superposition of "cause gears" and "result gears," simultaneously driving the frequencies of the past and future as they rotated. When she touched the causal singularity with her baton, the ancient divine characters on the crystal surface suddenly came alive, transforming into countless causal snakes that bit into the ship's energy core. Each bite left a "causal wound" on the ship, followed by a "result repair" simultaneously. This causal cycle of wounding and repair plunged the ship into a paradox of eternal self-healing, causing the engine power to fluctuate exponentially.
"Use the chaotic frequencies of the Chaos Source to break the symmetry of causality!" Lu Li's code condensed into a disordered virus and injected it into the temporal light band. The virus caused chaos within the light band, but was immediately transformed into a "patch of order" by the laws of causality, accelerating the closing of the causal cocoon. Lin Yue felt the spiral mark on the back of her neck resonate with the causal singularity, and the memories of the original observer emerged before her: this observer, known as the "Anchor of Time," discovered that the dark purple fluid could corrode the arrow of time, and thus merged his consciousness into the causal singularity, attempting to trap the fluid in a "causal loop." However, due to the fluid's entropy, the loop became an eternal prison of time.
In the memory, the fragment of the "Anchor of Time"'s consciousness struggles within the causal singularity, its body half the observer's physical form, half the fluid's virtual image. Every attempt to break free from the closed loop only reinforces the causal chain. Lin Yue's threads of time resonate with the fragment of the "Anchor of Time"'s consciousness, and she sees the "causal web" woven by the fluid within the causal singularity—each causal cocoon a node in the web, with dark purple fluid flowing through the threads between the nodes, completely locking the universe's time and space into a closed loop.
The calico cat suddenly exploded into a rain of gears, each carrying an "acausal frequency"—a frequency that is neither cause nor effect, a chaotic variable that transcends the closed loop of causality. The gear rain crashed into the causal singularity, and the causal snake on its surface was instantly infected by the acausal frequency, trapped in the paradox of "biting its own tail," and a brief crack appeared in the causal web. Lin Yue seized the opportunity and inserted his baton into the crack. The light-chip gear at the baton's tip split into thirteen pieces, twelve corresponding to the time band and one as the acausal variable.
When the acausal gears resonated with the temporal bands, the causal singularity erupted with a deafening roar. Twelve temporal bands began to rotate in reverse, reversing the sequence of events within the causal cocoon: star destruction became the cause of birth, civilization extinction became the effect of origin, and the observer's disappearance became the cause of awakening... This reverse causality formed a vast temporal vortex in space. At its center, the fluid-encased cocoon of consciousness, the "time anchor," was revealed. The fluid on the cocoon was being stripped away by the reverse causality, revealing the observer's physical form.
But the fluid wouldn't give up easily. The stripped-off fragments quickly gathered into twelve giant dark purple eyes of time. They simultaneously plucked the threads of the causal web, weaving the reverse causal relationship into a tighter closed loop. Lin Yue's thread of time was caught by the giant eyes, and the fluid's whisper emerged in her mind: "Causal loops are the essence of the universe. What you call reverse is merely a cycle in the other direction. You can never break free..."
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