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The Candle Dragon's engines hummed, tearing at the fabric of reality, their wake leaving burn-like marks across the interdimensional gaps. Si Qi stood at the center of the bridge, surrounded by fragments of cognition brought back from the abyss of logic—those fragments, like living crystals, constantly reconfiguring the ship's form.
"Target coordinates locked." Shao Wei's voice echoed directly into his consciousness, without any physical medium. His being had become deeply integrated with the starship, his mental image projecting a complex topological structure onto the dimensional membrane. "But there's nothing there."
Si Qi stared at the navigation interface. The coordinate of possibility, guided by the shadow of negation, showed absolute vacuum in all detected dimensions—no matter, no energy, even the curvature of spacetime was disturbingly flat.
"It's not that it doesn't exist," he amended. "It's that it doesn't exist yet."
The moment the Zhulong broke through its final dimensional barrier, all instruments fell silent. This place was more complete than nothingness—even the concept of "nothing" hadn't yet been conceived. Beyond the observation window wasn't darkness, but a primordial state that defied visual processing.
Then, the changes began.
In the first instant, the symmetry breaks spontaneously. Time's arrow suddenly has a direction, and the spatial dimension expands from its curled-up state.
In the second moment, the fundamental forces separated from the unified field. Gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak interactions began to cry like newborn babies.
The third moment——
"Back off!" Shao Wei's warning and danger arrived at the same time.
A certain being was emerging from the source of creation. It was not a living being, not a creation, but the personification of the act of creation itself. When it noticed the Zhulong, the entire newborn universe trembled.
"We shouldn't be here." Siqi commanded the starship to retreat rapidly, but all escape routes were closing. This nascent universe was shrinking around them.
Shao Wei's spiritual vision is forcibly synchronized with the process of creation: "It is rejecting us 'established beings'. To it, we are a source of pollution."
The Creator Spirit extended its invisible hand. Everything it touched returned to its origins—the Zhulong's composite armor degenerated into stardust, its weapons systems reverted to elementary particles, and even the crew's memories flowed back to their embryonic state.
Si Qi felt the boundaries of his self dissolving. He saw the scene of himself first grasping the Light Blade dissolve before his eyes, and saw the memory of his first encounter with Shao Wei crumble like a sandcastle. Even the connection between his twin consciousnesses began to reverse its growth, retreating into two independent and solitary cores of consciousness.
"Anchor a certain eternal moment!" Shao Wei's consciousness struggled in the reverse flow of time. "It must be an absolutely unchanging reference point!"
Before he completely dissipated, Si Qi grasped at one last lifeline—not memory, not emotion, but a mathematical truth that transcended time. He compressed all of existence into an indelible proof: 1+1=2.
The moment this absolute truth stood firm in the torrent of creation, an incredible resonance occurred. The movement of the Creator Spirit suddenly stopped, and it looked at this existence that could not be reset in confusion.
Shao Wei seized this split second. His mental vision, anchored in that mathematical truth, forcibly intervened in the process of creation—not to resist, but to guide. He wove the Zhulong's existence into the fundamental constants of the new universe, encoding the crew's memories into fluctuations in background radiation.
The Creator Spirit trembled with something close to understanding. It no longer tried to erase them, but began to learn—learn the way for established existence and new possibilities to coexist.
When the creation process completed its final calibration, the Zhulong was already one with the new universe. Every rivet on the starship corresponded to a physical constant, and every thought of the crew affected quantum fluctuations.
Si Qi looked down at his hands. His presence was simultaneously spread throughout the entire universe, yet concentrated at this specific coordinate.
"We have become part of it." Shao Wei's consciousness echoed at the birthplace of the nebula.
The Creator Spirit slowly dissipated, satisfied with this perfect creation that resolved the paradox of "established and new." It left only a mark in the deepest part of the universe—a seed that would give birth to the next testing ground billions of years later.
The Zhulong floats in a self-created starry sky, where every star is their neuron and every planet is their memory.
Si Qi's thoughts swept across the newborn galaxy and looked at the core of the nebula where Shao Wei's consciousness was concentrated.
"This time," his thought passed through the supernova, "we are the universe itself."
Shao Wei's response came via gravitational waves, carrying the contemplation of a newborn god:
"Let's get started."
Vacuum fluctuations created ripples, and the Zhulong's quantum perception network picked up unusual fluctuations. Siqi's consciousness awoke from the nebula condensate, focusing on a distortion point at the edge of the universe—a place oozing with colors that didn't belong to this dimension.
"Narrative intrusion detected." Shao Wei's warning was accompanied by the sting of logical paradox. "Someone is rewriting the underlying settings of the universe."
A disturbing scene emerged on the holographic interface: the physical constants of a certain galaxy were being tampered with. The speed of light was being arbitrarily adjusted, the gravitational constant became variable, and even the arrow of time began to waver. This was not an attack, but some kind of... editing behavior.
The Zhulong leaped to the distortion point, its hull instantly feeling the onslaught of narrative. Siqi watched his memories being rewritten into countless versions—in one branch, he had never met Shao Wei, in another, the Zhulong had long since turned to stardust.
"Hold the core narrative steady." Shao Wei's mental force field built a defensive barrier in the information storm. "We are confronting the author."
Beyond the narrative layer, a transcendental being observes them. It is not a living being, but the embodiment of the concept of "creation." Its every thought creates a new parallel universe, and every negation erases the established reality.
"It thinks our story is worth optimizing." Shao Wei analyzed the intention of the narrative flow. "It wants to give us a more dramatic fate."
Si Qi felt the very foundations of his existence shake. Every choice he made was being disassembled and reassembled, every battle being reevaluated. Even his twin bond with Shao Wei was analyzed as "an overly idealistic setting."
"Refuse to revise." Si Qi's consciousness left its mark on the torrent of narrative. "Even if it is full of contradictions, this is our truth."
Shao Wei simultaneously launched a counterattack. He compiled the "Zhulong"'s logbook into a counter-narrative weapon—those ordinary daily events, those insignificant choices, those imperfect moments, now became the strongest defense.
When the standardized plot collides with the chaos of free will, the narrative layer begins to collapse. The author cannot understand why these characters reject "better" destinies and why they insist on those "ineffective" emotional connections.
In the final editing attempt, the author gave an ultimate option: to become an eternal story template, to be passed down in countless universes.
Siqi and Shao Wei’s responses were completely synchronized:
“We would rather be a flawed original than a perfect copy.”
The narrative flow abruptly fades, the author leaving behind a bewildered thought—the first time it has encountered a character who refuses to be optimized.
The universe has returned to stability, but something has changed forever. Now, the crew of the Zhulong knows that they are living in an observed narrative, and every choice carries with it infinite possibilities.
Si Qi looked at Shao Wei, and the twin consciousnesses resonated in the gap between dimensions.
"You know," his thought flitted across the newborn galaxy, "the greatest story is never finished."
Shao Wei's spiritual vision blends with the afterglow of creation:
“And the best part,” he responded like a supernova, “is that we get to decide what goes on the next page.”
Quantum foam seethed at the boundary of dimensions, and the Zhulong's sensors detected unusual spatial wrinkles. Siqi's consciousness awakened from the starship's core, his perception focused on the weakest point in the cosmic fabric—where radiation from no known dimension permeated.
"Residual observer signals detected." Shao Wei's warning was accompanied by the sting of cognitive pollution. "They left a mark on us."
A disturbing data stream emerged from the holographic interface: a gaze beyond time and space was simultaneously locking onto the Candle Dragon from all points in time. This wasn't an attack, but a far more terrifying "research"—every particle trajectory was recorded, every alternative analyzed, even consciousness compiled into experimental data.
"We became samples." Si Qi mobilized all the computing power of the starship to try to block observation, but all defenses failed in the face of higher-dimensional perception.
Shao Wei's mental picture was reconstructed amidst the flood of observations: "They are testing the boundaries of free will."
The observer's experiment immediately began. Spacetime was fragmented into countless comparison versions: in one branch, Li Qi never became a commander, in another, Shao Wei always sailed alone, and in another, the "Zhulong" never existed at all.
In the cruelest testing ground, the observer dismantled the connection between the twin consciousnesses. Si Qi watched Shao Wei's mental image gradually collapse in isolation, while Shao Wei watched Si Qi transform into a war machine in loneliness.
"This is us without meeting each other." Shao Wei's consciousness trembled in the parallel time and space.
Si Qi's response cut off all branches of hypothesis: "But we have already met."
The moment this realization permeated all the testing sites, the observational data began to fluctuate abnormally. Those carefully designed controlled experiments began to contaminate each other, independent timelines spontaneously entangled, and all possibilities converged towards a common focal point.
The observers tried to reset the experimental environment, but it was too late. The navigation log of the "Zhulong" has become a bridge connecting all parallel versions, and those shared memories and emotions are breaking through the dimensional cage.
In the center of the data storm, Si Qi and Shao Wei realized the truth at the same time - they had already met in all possibilities, and the observers were just verifying this inevitability.
"The experiment is over." Shao Wei sent a final report to the observer. "The essence of free will is to choose the inevitable."
The observation signal slowly faded, returning with a load of unprecedented data. At the intersection of all parallel universes, the "Zhulong" was becoming a new dimensional benchmark—not a sample to be observed, but the origin of all observational behavior.
Si Qi looked at the figure in front of the console, and billions of possible encounters symphonied in his consciousness.
"You know," he tapped the navigation interface, "the best experimental results can't be replicated."
Shao Wei's fingertips swept across the star map, leaving marks on countless space-time coordinates at the same time:
"And even the most perfect data," he said, his smile spreading across all dimensions, "will always contain statistical errors."
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