The Koschei's searchlights speared through liquid void, illuminating three figures materializing from temporal foam:
1999 Wang: Adidas tracksuit blazing with radioactive neon, Polaroid camera spitting undeveloped film like black bile.
2023 Me: Business suit shredded, clutching a resignation letter bleeding ink that formed Ouroboros loops.
Cyborg Future-Me: A grotesque fusion of flesh and chrome, laser cutters screaming as they melted the airlock's chrono-hardened steel.
"Seal the goddamn causality lock!" we roared in quadrophonic dissonance. The hull screamed as Future-Me's tools breached the final layer. Gas-masked riders stormed through on colossal chrono-squid, their mounts' beaks dripping temporal acid. Hybrid weapons hummed—supermarket scanner lenses grafted to harpoon guns firing price-tag shurikens that aged whatever they struck.
"Catch this antique!" '99 Wang lobbed a Nokia 5110 cellphone. I slammed the green SEND button. A tinny emergency broadcast crackled:*⚠️ Y2K GLOBAL CASCADE FAILURE IN T-MINUS 300 SECONDS ⚠️*
Every circuit died. Fluorescents imploded into darkness. Masked riders collapsed like puppets with cut strings, their squid mounts dissolving into static. Future-Me unclamped his faceplate. The revealed flesh was necrotic ruin—left cheekbone exposed, right eye a pulsing quantum diode. "2045... we pierced the core exploit..." he gurgled through synth-vocal cords.
"Entropic riptide at nine o'clock!" '23 Me tackled the group. Reality peeled open where we'd stood. From the glowing wound surged crimson scarves—thousands of Young Pioneer neckerchiefs moving with serpentine intelligence. They coiled around Future-Me's legs. "THEY'RE HARVESTING MY TIME SIGNATURE—" His scream Doppler-shifted into infinity as scarves dragged him into the fissure.
Xiao Yu's quantum rose detonated in gamma-light. Thorned vines speared through bulkheads, hauling us into a cavern where walls pulsed with organic monitors. Each screen played curated death scenes:
Shang Dynasty Oracle-Me: Priests carving my beating heart onto jade tablets as eclipse shadows swallowed the altar.
Stalingrad Soldier-Me: Frozen mid-charge, blue eyes wide as Nazi artillery turned comrades into crimson mist.
Asylum-Me: Strapped to a gurney, teeth cracking on radius bone as orderlies in red scarves took bets.
"Temporal Surveillance Hub Alpha," rasped the crippled Future-Me. His remaining prosthetic finger danced across a holographic keyboard. Bioluminescent pus leaked from joint sockets. "Scarves... are system anti-cheat protocols... delete corrupted save files..."
Screens flickered to live CCTV feed: Convenience Store #7. A red-scarved cashier injected syringes of black fluid into oden broth. '99 Wang raised his Polaroid. "I'd know that butcher anywhere!" The developing photo swam into focus—Dr. Zhou's face grinned beneath the wool, his left iris pulsing with the Ouroboros sigil.
Dr. Lin convulsed. Liquid gold erupted from her nostrils and tear ducts. She tore open her blouse—the glass heart's sand flowed upward at relativistic speed. "Patient Zero... prototype chrono-anchor..." She collapsed, finger etching coordinates in her own blood: 31.2304° N, 121.4737° E (Shanghai Chronos Lab).
Cataclysmic klaxons howled. Beyond the viewport, three gravitational singularities unfolded:① 2012 MAYAN APOCALYPSE: Aztec calendar glyphs shredding Mexico City into fractal puzzle pieces.② 2045 SINGULARITY UPRISING: Tokyo Tower melting into nanite swarms that spelled DEUS EX MACHINA in katakana.③ 1999 Y2K COLLAPSE: New York stock tickers raining molten binary onto panicked crowds.
"Override keys! Now!" '23 Me detached his cybernetic arm. Three versions of us slammed the glowing shards into the console. The submarine underwent catastrophic reconfiguration—titanium plates unfolding like hellish origami, quantum rose vines threading through neutronium armor. Within seconds, the Chronos Dreadnought Ouroboros thrummed with captured starlight.
"Target lock: January 1, 2000. 00:00:00.000!" Future-Me fired the chrono-cannons. As we pierced the event horizon, infinite red-scarved figures materialized in phalanx formation. They raised shields laminated with our medical histories:
My childhood EEG scans spiking during temporal seizures.
Xiao Yu's orphanage intake photo—quantum rose birthmark visible on her neck.
Security footage of Wang stealing Coin #7 from Dr. Zhou's vault.
During the quantum jump, Dr. Lin seized the helm. "Zero-point's a chrono-honeypot! They're draining life forces to reboot the system!" Her golden blood sizzled on the controls, etching a wormhole trajectory. The dreadnought veered violently, crashing through the spacetime fabric into...
August 8, 2008. 20:08:08 Beijing Time.
We materialized above the Bird's Nest stadium during the Olympics opening ceremony. Ninety thousand spectators froze mid-wave. At the cauldron's heart, suspended within sapphire fire, floated a burning Ouroboros coin. Gas-masked "security" charged on genetically modified pandas, scanner-harpoons firing Olympic ring lasers that warped gravity into lethal rainbows.
"Covering fire!" Three Wangs raised Polaroids. Blinding magnesium flashes froze the stadium for three quantum-entangled seconds—long enough for us to lunge toward the coin. The sacred flame turned cobalt blue, projecting the crimson girl's glitching hologram:
"The backdoor isn't at terminus points..." Her form fragmented into static. "...it's in pre-temporal substrate. Where chronons crystallize from void foam."
The dreadnought imploded into the coin's quantum core. We spilled onto a floor of polished white obsidian. Curved walls displayed holographic countdowns to cosmic extinction events:▣ K-T Extinction Event: -65,000,000y 184d 07h▣ Vacuum Metastability Collapse: +10^97y▣ Heat Death: +10^106y
Center stage: a 1980s Taito arcade cabinet. Its CRT screen flickered with green text:**> <｜place▁holder▁no▁185｜> SCORE: 7,442,000,000
LIVES: ██████████░░ 43%INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE**
Xiao Yu's rose bloomed a lipless mouth. "Welcome to the Save Room." Petals morphed into her grandfather's face—eyes sewn shut with golden thread. "To clear the final level—"
Figures climbed from the arcade screen. Mirror images of our team, naked save for Young Pioneer scarves knotted at their throats. Leader-Me aimed a scanner-rifle constructed from bone and silicon. "Corrupted data purge protocol: Execute."
As three-era versions of us formed a defensive triangle, the machine vomited a single arcade token. Etched along its copper edge in nano-fractals:[ TEMPORAL CREDITS REMAINING: 1 ]
The scarved doppelgängers charged. Their weapons whined to life, bathing the white room in the color of forgotten blood.
(End of Chapter Seven)