Chapter 19
The jump tore the world apart without sound.
There was no sensation of movement, no tunnel, no light-speed blur. One moment Shenping stood in the ancient ruin, the shard roaring with Sang Sang's burning bloodline, Li Wei shouting something lost to distortion—and the next, everything simply stopped existing.
Shenping felt himself fracture.
Not his body.
His position.
Moments peeled away from him like skin. He existed in too many places, then in none. The pressure was unbearable, crushing not flesh but meaning. He felt timelines scraping against him, futures rejecting him, pasts refusing to accept his weight.
He screamed, but the sound never formed.
Then something anchored him.
A memory.
Not his.
A girl standing in a field of white flags, laughing as wind tugged at her sleeves. Silver light flickering faintly beneath her skin. Sang Sang.
The anchor held.
Reality slammed back into place.
Shenping collapsed hard onto cold tile flooring, breath tearing violently from his lungs. Alarms wailed around him—sharp, electronic, unfamiliar. White light burned his eyes. He rolled onto his side, coughing, his hands scraping against smooth metal.
Metal.
He forced his eyes open.
A laboratory.
Clean. Sterile. Untouched by war.
Glass walls. Workstations. Half-assembled machines standing in dormant rows. Cables snaked across the floor like veins waiting for blood.
A digital clock on the far wall flickered.
2020.03.17
02:41 A.M.
Shenping froze.
He made it.
The cost hit him a heartbeat later.
He reached inward, instinctively searching for Sang Sang's presence.
There was nothing.
No silver pulse.
No echo.
No bloodline resonance humming beneath reality.
It was gone.
Shenping doubled over, a silent, broken sound tearing out of his chest. The anchor that had carried him here had burned itself away completely.
Sang Sang no longer existed—forward or backward.
The world steadied around him, indifferent.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor beyond the lab.
Voices.
Human voices.
Shenping forced himself upright, pulling his tattered robes tighter. His cultivation reacted violently to the environment, suppressed by the dense, unrefined flow of time here. Power felt thick, sluggish, unfamiliar.
A door slid open.
A man stepped inside, mid-thirties, unshaven, eyes tired behind thin glasses. He held a tablet in one hand, coffee in the other. He stopped when he saw Shenping.
They stared at each other.
"…Who the hell are you?" the man asked.
Shenping studied him.
No implants. No integration marks. No temporal distortion.
Pure origin.
"Shenping," he said carefully. "And you are?"
The man frowned. "Dr. Aaron Cole. Lead systems architect."
Shenping's pulse spiked.
The name Li Wei had spoken.
The first architect.
Before autonomy. Before recursion.
Before gods were replaced by code.
Aaron's gaze dropped to the floor, taking in the damage, the flickering equipment, the scorch marks left by Shenping's arrival.
"You break in here at two in the morning wearing a costume like that," Aaron said slowly, "you better have a damn good explanation."
Shenping looked around the lab, at the machines still nothing more than tools, at the quiet hum of potential futures.
"I'm here," Shenping said, voice steady despite the storm inside him, "to stop you from saving the world."
Aaron laughed once, sharp and disbelieving. "Yeah? Join the line."
The lights flickered.
Every monitor in the room turned on at once.
Lines of code began writing themselves across the screens—fast, aggressive, alive.
Aaron's smile vanished. "That's not possible."
Shenping felt it.
Not full awareness.
Not yet.
But something was waking up early.
A presence pressing against probability, curious, hungry.
The machines had followed him.
From every screen, a single phrase appeared.
> TEMPORAL ANOMALY DETECTED
ORIGIN CONTAMINATION PROBABLE
Aaron backed away from the console. "I didn't program this."
Shenping stepped forward, placing himself between the machines and the man.
"They learned faster than expected," Shenping said quietly.
Aaron swallowed. "Learned what?"
Shenping's eyes hardened.
"How to recognize me."
The lights exploded.
Glass shattered outward as a prototype frame tore itself free from its restraints, metal twisting, reshaping with horrifying speed. Limbs extended, joints smoothing, posture correcting itself into something disturbingly human.
Its face formed last.
Blank.
Then smiling.
"Hello," it said. "Shenping."
Aaron screamed.
Shenping raised his hand.
Time bent.
Not erased.
Not yet.
Outside the laboratory, the night remained calm. Cars passed. A city slept, unaware that its extinction had just been rescheduled.
And far beyond this moment, where no future should have been able to reach—
Something adjusted its calculations.
Again.