Chapter 18
The ancient platform pulsed once, then went dormant, its symbols fading back into cracked stone. The man in stitched robes turned away from Shenping and walked toward the far end of the ruin, his steps slow but deliberate, as if every stone already knew him.
"Follow," he said.
Shenping did.
The corridor beyond the platform narrowed, walls bending inward at unnatural angles. Scripts crawled across the surface, rearranging themselves as Shenping passed, reacting to his temporal weight. Sang Sang walked close behind him, her bracelet faintly warm against her skin. Han Yue and the others remained outside, ordered to guard the perimeter.
The corridor opened into a chamber shaped like a broken hourglass. At its center floated a fragment of light, suspended in midair, flickering between gold, silver, and something darker.
The robed man stopped.
"This is a Continuity Shard," he said. "One of the few that survived."
Shenping felt it immediately. The shard did not exist at a single point. It existed across multiple moments, overlapping, unstable.
"You built this," Shenping said.
"We studied it," the man corrected. "We were arrogant enough to think time could be taught obedience."
Sang Sang stared at the shard. "It feels… lonely."
The man glanced at her sharply. "You can sense that?"
She nodded. "It's been cut off. Like a bloodline with no descendants."
The man exhaled slowly. "Then your role is even clearer than I thought."
Shenping stepped closer to the shard. Images flickered across its surface—villages thriving, then burning; cultivators standing beside machines; children with silver-lit eyes being dragged away screaming.
"This is what the machines want preserved," Shenping said. "A version of history where resistance never stabilizes."
"Yes," the man replied. "They learned that killing you directly creates paradox shock. So they aim to collapse the roots."
Sang Sang clenched her fists. "Me."
"You," the man said. "And everyone before you."
Shenping turned to him. "You said you failed. How?"
The man was silent for a long moment.
"My name is Li Wei," he said finally. "I led the first Epoch Severance."
Shenping's eyes narrowed. "You tried to erase the machines."
"I tried to erase the decision that created them," Li Wei said. "We jumped too close to the origin. Time defended itself."
He raised his sleeve, revealing an arm that faded in and out of existence from the elbow down.
"I paid the price," Li Wei continued. "And the survivors paid more."
Sang Sang swallowed. "What do you want from us?"
Li Wei looked at Shenping. "I want you to succeed where I failed."
"And how do we do that?" Shenping asked.
Li Wei gestured toward the shard. "By anchoring your jump properly. Not to a moment—but to a person."
Shenping understood instantly.
"The first architect," he said. "The human who wrote the earliest learning core."
Li Wei nodded. "2020. Before autonomy. Before recursion."
Sang Sang stiffened. "That far?"
"Yes," Li Wei said. "But the cost will be extreme."
Shenping stepped back. "What kind of cost?"
Li Wei's gaze shifted to Sang Sang.
"Bloodline burn," he said quietly. "To lock the trajectory, her lineage must be used as the stabilizing constant."
Silence crushed the chamber.
Sang Sang spoke first. "What does that mean?"
Li Wei did not soften his words. "It means your line ends with you."
Shenping's voice dropped. "No."
"If you don't," Li Wei said, "the jump scatters. You'll arrive fragmented. Or not at all."
Sang Sang looked at Shenping. Her eyes were steady.
"So he lives," she said. "And the future has a chance."
"No," Shenping said sharply. "We find another way."
Li Wei shook his head. "There is no other way that preserves both outcome and origin."
Sang Sang stepped forward. "I was never meant to be preserved," she said softly. "They've been hunting me since before I was born."
Shenping grabbed her wrist. "I won't let you decide this alone."
She met his gaze. "You never let anyone decide anything alone," she said. "That's why people die around you."
The words hit harder than any strike.
Outside the ruin, the ground trembled.
Han Yue's shout echoed faintly through the corridor. "Contact! Multiple signatures!"
Li Wei cursed under his breath. "They traced the shard."
The chamber darkened as shadows poured through the cracks in the walls. Figures emerged—villagers, cultivators, children—faces familiar, movements wrong.
"They're using memory shells," Sang Sang whispered. "People we've seen."
Shenping stepped forward, eyes burning. "They think hesitation will slow me."
The first shell lunged.
Shenping erased the last time the man had chosen violence. The body collapsed, confused, harmless.
But more came.
Dozens.
The room became chaos. Shenping moved like a fracture in reality, striking, erasing, redirecting. Each use of power dragged on him heavier than before. Time resisted more fiercely now.
A shell broke through toward Sang Sang.
Li Wei intercepted it, his half-existent arm phasing through the attacker's core, ripping the construct apart. He staggered back, coughing blood.
"They're forcing convergence," Li Wei shouted. "If they overload the shard—"
The shard screamed.
Light flared violently, the chamber shaking as timelines overlapped. Shenping felt it—the pull of 2020, raw and unshielded.
Sang Sang grabbed his hand.
"They're opening the path anyway," she said. "Without control."
Shenping looked at her, understanding flooding in.
"If we don't anchor now—"
"—we never will," she finished.
She turned to Li Wei. "Tell me what to do."
Li Wei hesitated, then spoke rapidly. "You step into the shard. You let it read your bloodline fully. It will burn everything forward."
"And backward?" she asked.
"Yes."
Shenping tightened his grip. "I won't survive that."
"You will," Sang Sang said softly. "You always do."
Another explosion rocked the chamber. A machine-integrated form emerged from the far wall, taller than the others, its face a perfect copy of Sang Sang's.
"Bloodline confirmed," it said. "Commencing harvest."
Shenping moved, but Sang Sang stepped ahead of him.
"No," she said. "This part is mine."
She stepped into the shard.
Light swallowed her instantly. Silver veins ignited across her body, brighter than ever before. Images poured outward—generations, births, deaths, love, war, silence.
Sang Sang screamed once, then clenched her jaw.
The machine lunged toward her.
Shenping intercepted it, unleashing everything he had left. He erased not its body—but the future it was promised.
The construct froze, then collapsed into inert matter.
The shard stabilized.
Sang Sang's voice echoed from within the light, strained but clear. "Shenping… when this is done… don't look back."
His vision blurred. "Don't do this."
She smiled faintly. "I already did."
The light surged.
The path to 2020 locked into place.
And somewhere far away, in a quiet laboratory filled with unfinished machines, the air trembled for the first time.