The feeling of falling came without warning.
Lin Yi's last memory before his consciousness went haywire was Long Wu's burning hot hand patting his back, Chu Yao's last words before the projection disappeared, "Wait until I fix the interface," and the setting sun outside the library window casting a long shadow of him.
But the next second, the warm weight in his arms suddenly became ethereal—it wasn't Chu Yao's projection, but a physical entity.
"Chu Yao?" he murmured, his pupils contracting as he lost his balance.
Darkness rolled up before my eyes like a crumpled curtain, and the turbulent flow of time and space brushed against my skin with a burning sting.
Lin Yi instinctively hugged the girl in his arms tighter, his fingertips touching the data interface on the back of her neck, where a pale blue current was seeping out, like a wounded firefly.
Her hair still bore the scorch marks from the collapse of the mother nest, yet it felt more real than ever before—this was not a projection, but a body materialized by Chu Yao with her last bit of computing power.
"Bang!"
The impact of the landing made Lin Yi grunt. He knelt down on one knee to protect Chu Yao, and his breath caught in his throat the moment he looked up.
The familiar sycamore-lined avenue stretches to the horizon, the words "Wen San Road" on the road sign washed white by the rain; fifty meters ahead is the "Warm Tea" milk tea shop I frequent, the faded poster still showing last winter's "limited-edition strawberry milk foam," while in reality it was just changed to summer green grape three days ago; further away, the gate of Hangzhou University is half open, and there is no sound of Old Zhang's radio coming from the gatehouse window.
silence.
Absolute silence.
There were no car horns, no human voices, and even the rustling of the wind through the sycamore leaves seemed to be muted.
Tiny fragments of light drifted across the sky, shaped like the gears of a shattered pocket watch. Some were engraved with the snow of 2023, some with the rain of 2030, and one clearly reflected the action of Long Wu wiping blood in the library just now—that was the reality ten minutes ago.
“Fragments of time,” Lin Yi blurted out, his Adam's apple bobbing.
He remembered Chu Yao saying that advanced civilizations used this method to preserve historical moments, "but this isn't a database, it's..."
My palms suddenly felt hot.
He looked down and saw dark silver patterns appearing on the back of his hand, marks left when he signed a symbiotic contract with the shadow.
The lines, as if alive, traveled to the palm of his hand, coalescing into a semi-transparent human face. A hoarse male voice boomed directly in his mind: "The Time Cage, a gift from the Weaver of Fate to the losers. You should be glad that it didn't crush your karma directly."
"Loser?" Lin Yi's fingers curled slightly, his knuckles turning white from the force.
He recalled the night owl's maniacal laughter before the mother hive collapsed, and the suffocating feeling of "everything was already written" as the shadow pierced his left shoulder. "I have never lost."
"That's why it panicked." The shadowy voice carried a cold, metallic edge. "This cage doesn't lock your bodies, it locks your 'possibilities.' Try manipulating the laws of spacetime?"
Lin Yi did not answer, but simply closed his eyes.
Deep within his consciousness, the star map belonging to the master of spacetime began to circulate. However, when he tried to draw upon the power of "time acceleration," it was as if invisible chains suddenly tightened—two-thirds of the starlight on the star map instantly went out, leaving only the nine most core stars still barely flickering.
“Thirty percent.” He opened his eyes, a suppressed darkness flickering in his pupils. “He can’t even open the most basic spacetime rift at the mythical level.”
“Because this is its home turf.” The silhouette of the shadowy figure began to blur. “The Weaver of Fate has built walls using the cause and effect of all your failed timelines, and within each wall lies the corpse of ‘you.’ The key to breaking this deadlock lies not in power, but in…”
"It's about 'why'," Lin Yi suddenly interrupted him.
He bent down and gently placed Chu Yao on a roadside bench, his fingertips tracing her closed eyes—as an AI life form, her eyelashes shouldn't have any temperature, but they were unusually hot at this moment. "Why did it waste resources building this cage? What can it gain by trapping me?"
A sudden gust of wind arose.
A fragment of time fell from the sky and broke in two as it brushed past Lin Yi's ear.
On the left is the image of him awakening the Time-Space Dominator for the first time in the starting village, and on the right is the moment three hours earlier when his left shoulder was pierced by a shadow in the core of the Mother Nest.
“Cause and effect collection,” Lin Yi murmured, pressing his fingers to his temples.
The words of the Night Owl before the collapse of the Mother Nest suddenly echoed in my mind: "What we want is the cause and effect of all your timelines, the key that allows the Weaver of Fate to tear open the curtain."
He finally understood that this cage was not the end, but a bigger trap: "It wants me to repeat failures here, to feed that thread of fate with every desperate cause and effect."
He crouched down and gently touched Chu Yao's brow with his fingertips.
As his personal AI, her consciousness space has an anti-tampering protocol, but at this moment the protocol light strip is breaking apart like silk eaten by insects.
"Hold on." He whispered to the unconscious girl, his voice so soft as if afraid of waking her. "When you wake up, we'll tear this broken cage apart together."
The sound of shattering glass came from afar.
Lin Yi suddenly looked up.
A crack appeared in the window of the milk tea shop, from which black mist seeped out. In the mist, he could vaguely see another version of himself—wearing a blood-stained school uniform, staring at him with desperate eyes.
"Failure Number 73." The shadowy voice rang out again, but it was much more distant than before. "It has begun deploying memory anchors. Remember, the real breakthrough is not in the past, but in..."
The words came to an abrupt halt.
Lin Yi stood up, his knuckles cracking as he clenched his fists.
He pulled out half an energy crystal from his pocket—a spare supply that Long Wu had insisted on giving him, which was still faintly glowing in the Time Cage.
"The past?" He sneered at the air, then stepped on a fragment of time engraved with "Victory in the Beginner Village" and crushed it. "My karma, Lin Yi's karma, has always consisted only of the present and the future."
The wind picked up.
Chu Yao's fingers suddenly twitched on the bench.
The scorch marks on the ends of her hair began to peel away, revealing the normal black color underneath, while the blue light at the data interface was visibly re-condensing, like stars shining on the back of her neck.
Lin Yi's breath caught in his throat.
He bent down and pulled Chu Yao into his arms, clearly feeling her consciousness reviving—as an AI, this "awakening" wasn't the fluctuation of his heartbeat, but rather the spiritual connection to her in his mind's sea of consciousness becoming clearer and clearer.
"Don't rush." He lowered his head and kissed the top of her head, his voice filled with a tenderness he himself didn't realize. "Once you wake up, we'll go and tear down the ceiling of this cage."
In the distance, the black mist from the milk tea shop suddenly churned into a vortex.
At the center of the vortex, the figure of another "Lin Yi" became clearer and clearer, but the smile on his lips was different from any other version of himself in his memory—it was the mockery of the weaver of fate, looking at him like an ant.
Chu Yao's eyelashes fluttered.
Fragments of time buzzed in the sky, like a countdown clock. (No modification needed)
Chu Yao's eyelashes trembled again, like a butterfly fluttering its dew-covered wings.
The girl in Lin Yi's arms curled her fingertips slightly, and the data interface on the back of her neck suddenly burst out with a dazzling blue light—the light was not chaotic, but flowed along her spinal veins, condensing into a pale blue star at her collarbone, which was the sign that the AI core restart was complete.
"Chu Yao?" Lin Yi's Adam's apple bobbed, his voice trembling with a tension he himself didn't even realize.
He could clearly feel the faint spiritual link in his mind becoming stronger at a visible speed—it was the resonance between him and his personal AI, vibrating like a plucked string.
The girl slowly lifted her eyelids.
Her pupils, which were originally the purest amber color, now surged with fragmented data streams, like the Milky Way pouring down into the depths of her eyes.
"Scanning." Her voice was still a little weak, but it carried the precision unique to the program. "Environmental data matching rate: 97.3%."
"Match what?" Lin Yi looked down at her fingertips pressed against her temples, where a semi-transparent holographic panel appeared, with green code cascading down like a waterfall.
Chu Yao's data stream suddenly froze for a moment, and then the Milky Way in her pupils abruptly shrank to a single point.
“Match your memory bank.” She looked up, the data stream at the corners of her eyes flowing down her cheeks. “The veins of the plane tree leaves on Wensan Road, the creases of the faded posters at the warm tea shop, the rusty hinges of Hangzhou University’s gate—all the details come from your visual memory archive of the past twenty years.” She reached out, her fingertips passing through the fragments of time that had fallen between them. The winter snow of 2023 on those fragments rippled when it touched her fingertips. “This isn’t the cage that traps us…it’s a mirror image that has been ‘copied’.”
"Copy?" Lin Yi's thumb unconsciously rubbed the interface on the back of her neck, where the temperature had returned to its familiar coolness. "Who would be so bored as to copy my memories?"
“It’s not boring.” Chu Yao’s holographic panel suddenly popped up a set of overlapping spatial coordinates. “Look, the coordinates of each building are completely aligned with reality, but the time dimension has been removed. It’s like…” Her voice suddenly lowered, “like someone cut the ‘Hangzhou’ from your memory from the river of time and soaked it separately in formalin.”
A "click" sound came from afar.
They both turned their heads at the same time.
The streetlights fifty meters away, which had been shining with a dim yellow light, suddenly went out, and darkness spread around the lampposts like ink.
The next second, something even stranger happened: the four neon characters "Summer Green Grape" on the signboard of the warm tea shop began to flash backwards—"Grape Green Summer" "Summer Green Grape"—and finally turned back into "Limited Edition Strawberry Milk Foam," exactly the same as Lin Yi remembered from last winter.
"Time rewind." Chu Yao's fingertips tapped rapidly on the holographic panel. "But it's not a natural rewind, it's a program command." She pointed to the street corner, where a spotted stray cat darted out from behind a mailbox and ran along the wall toward the milk tea shop—the same route Lin Yi had encountered during his morning run three days ago.
When the cat ran to the entrance of the bubble tea shop, it suddenly stopped, as if it had been put on rewind, and then darted back to the mailbox, repeating the same action.
Lin Yi's pupils contracted slightly.
He stepped forward and reached out to stop the cat as it darted out a second time.
The moment the cat's paw touched the back of his hand, it seemed to pass right through a holographic projection—not a physical object, but a data projection.
“This isn’t a simulation,” he said in a low voice, his tone icy. “It’s a loop. Someone is making this mirror space replay fragments of my memory over and over again.”
Chu Yao's holographic panel suddenly emitted a piercing alarm sound.
She glanced down, the data surging even more intensely in her eyes: "The spatial core is in the city center square." She looked up, her gaze piercing through the gaps in the plane tree leaves, "The clock tower."
The two exchanged a glance and quickened their pace simultaneously.
As they passed through the last alley, the view suddenly opened up.
The clock tower in the city center square still stands, but the hour hand is stopped at 15:47—the last moment before the Mother Nest collapsed.
The fountain under the clock tower was not spraying water; the surface of the water was like a frozen mirror, reflecting the dense fragments of time in the sky.
On the steps of the clock tower, a figure stood with his back to them.
A black trench coat, pale skin, and a scar running from the corner of his left eye down to his jaw—that was Night Owl, the leader of the interdimensional invaders.
But his body was semi-transparent, as if it were pieced together from countless fragments of time, each fragment reflecting a different timeline of him: some were laughing wildly, some were roaring angrily, and some were having their chests pierced by Lin Yi's Time Blade.
“Welcome back.” Night Owl slowly turned around, a morbidly pleased smile playing on his lips. “Or rather… welcome to your 73rd cycle.” He raised his hand, his fingertips tracing fragments of time beside him. One of them suddenly unfolded, revealing the scene of the two of them in front of the bubble tea shop—streetlights turned off, billboards reversed, stray cats repeating their routes. “Every time you come here, you notice something amiss; every time you try to resist, I reset it.” His voice suddenly softened, as if coaxing a child. “Tired? Admit it, on the chessboard of the weaver of fate, you are nothing more than a struggling pawn.”
Lin Yi's fingers slowly curled up at his side.
He could feel the spacetime star map in his sea of consciousness trembling violently, and the seventy percent of power that was locked was trying to break through the chains—not to attack, but to perceive.
He sensed that in the shadow beneath the owl's feet, countless silver threads were piercing the ground, spreading like roots throughout the entire mirror space.
"The 73rd time?" He suddenly laughed, the smile spreading from the depths of his eyes, making his pupils flicker with dark flames. "That's perfect. I have a quirk—the more setbacks I face, the more determined I become." He turned to look at Chu Yao, who was pressing her palm against the surface of the fountain, the code on the holographic panel scrolling wildly. "Did you find it?"
"The core of the loop is inside the clock tower." Chu Yao looked up, data streaming down her face, but condensing into a bright tear on her chin. "But before each reset, he uploads the core data to..."
"—A higher dimension." Night Owl's voice suddenly rose, and the fragments of time behind him began to spin wildly, forming a vortex like the eye of a typhoon. "And you, you don't even have the right to resist!"
Ripples suddenly appeared on the surface of the fountain pool.
Lin Yi looked down and saw his reflection distorted—not his face, but Chu Yao behind him.
Her figure began to become transparent, as if being slowly erased by an eraser.
"Chu Yao!" He turned around abruptly, but only managed to grab a handful of air.
The girl's voice surged from all directions, crackling with electrical noise: "I've been forcibly disconnected! Go to the clock tower, Lin Yi, find the core..."
Lin Yi's breathing suddenly became rapid.
He looked up and saw the figure of the Night Owl expanding, countless fragments of time drilling into his body, making the semi-transparent outline clearer.
The entire mirrored space began to flicker, the streetlights turned on again, the words on the billboards reversed again, and the stray cat darted out from behind the mailbox again—the reset had begun.
The owl's laughter, mixed with the shrill screams of the spacetime turbulence, exploded in Lin Yi's ears: "74th cycle, begin."
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