bullyxtreme Chapter 406 The Labyrinth of Dual Narratives
Chapter 406 The Labyrinth of Dual Narratives
Xiao Ying kept her eyes tightly closed, large beads of sweat sliding down her cheeks. Her third eye felt as if it were about to burst open in the intense pain, with starlight constantly seeping out from its slit.
The starlight was like the most dazzling star in the night sky, yet it carried an eerie aura.
On her retina, the neuroverse was collapsing and expanding at a heart-pounding pace.
It was a universe woven from countless nerve fibers, with neurons twinkling like stars. At this moment, these stars were colliding and merging with each other in an inexplicable way, and then splitting apart in an instant.
Suddenly, countless silver scissors rained down from all directions, their sharp blades gleaming coldly, carrying an indescribable malice.
These scissors seem to be made up of fragments of memory, each containing a forgotten piece of the past.
However, when these scissors touched the paradoxical barrier surrounding Hotaru, something unexpected happened.
Instead of penetrating the barrier as expected, they were instantly refracted into butterfly-shaped blades of light.
These light blades danced in the air like a group of beautiful butterflies, yet they exuded a deadly aura.
The butterfly-shaped mark on Xiaoying's wrist suddenly became scalding hot, as if a powerful energy was surging within it.
As the temperature rose, the mark began to ooze a strange liquid, not ordinary mucus, but a liquid starlight with gear-like patterns.
These liquid starlight meandered across the ground, forming a path leading to the ancient wooden door.
The wooden door looked dilapidated, yet it exuded a mysterious aura, as if a hidden world lay behind it.
Don't follow the path!
Lingyue's shattered consciousness dust suddenly condensed into a warning sign, but it disintegrated again the moment it came into contact with the scissor blade.
Xiao Ying looked down and saw her shadow detaching from the ground, transforming into a black maze composed of countless Xiao Ying faces, each face's pupils playing different looping clips:
When Lingyue, number 127, confronted the man in black robes in the Mirror Palace, the reflection in the mirror behind her was herself holding scissors.
In the 398th cycle, the baby's cry at the observer core perfectly matched the sound of scissors opening and closing.
The zero-dimensional tree reflected in the stream began to distort, and the fruit it bore no longer contained narrative possibilities, but instead seeped out corrosive fragments of the mirror.
When Xiaoying tried to touch the fruit, the fragments suddenly reformed into a mirror cage, trapping her in the center.
Countless reflections of myself appeared in the mirror; some were severing nerve synapses with scissors, some were mending cracks with a brush, and others... The faces in the mirror began to melt, revealing the gear patterns of the dream weaver beneath.
Li Zhao's luminous nanorobots battled the reflection of scissors in the spinal cord, only to discover that liquid silver was reconstructing the neural pathways in a bizarre way.
Xiaoying's left hand uncontrollably raised the scissors, while her right hand tightly gripped the brush. The trajectories drawn by the two tools in the air intertwined, forming a Möbius strip-like symbol.
The figure of the woodcutter carrying firewood suddenly appeared in the mirror. The silver chess piece he threw down split into two pieces, one engraved with a broken pen and the other carved with open scissors.
"The real variable is not the choice, but the simultaneous existence of contradictions."
The young man's voice came from the chess pieces. In the mirror, he reached through the mirror and pressed two chess pieces into Xiaoying's temples.
In the midst of excruciating pain, her consciousness split into two dimensions: one chasing after the traces of butterfly scales in a labyrinth of memories, and the other trapped in a narrative network woven from scissors and a brush.
The butterfly inside the jade pendant cocoon flapped its wings and struck the mirror surface. The synaptic patterns on its wings began to grow in reverse, gradually transforming into a hybrid shape of gears and pen tips.
The moment Xiaoying cuts the reflection in the mirror with scissors, the entire neuroverse undergoes a spacetime fold.
She experiences two narratives simultaneously: in the dimension of light, she uses a brush to mend the cracks in the zero-dimensional tree, each stroke blossoming into a butterfly-shaped new synapse.
In the dark dimension, wherever the scissors pass, all fragments of memory are cut into binary code and reassembled into the core program of the Dream Weaver.
The young woodcutter's figure traverses between two dimensions; his firewood ignites the flames of hope in the light, but transforms into chains that imprison consciousness in the darkness.
"The ending you see is merely the starting point of a new narrative."
Lingyue's consciousness suddenly coalesced in the dark dimension, her body composed of countless shattered mirrors, each reflecting a different future of Xiaoying.
Xiao Ying was shocked to realize that the nerve cell patterns on the wings of the butterfly she saved when she was three years old were actually the coordinates that the Dream Weaver used to locate her.
The colorful pebbles found last year contained not only images of Lingyue, but also fragments of the observer's consciousness.
The wooden door at the center of the Zero-Dimensional Tree began to tremble under the impact of the dual narratives. The butterfly scales seeping from the cracks reacted violently with the black slime, forming a vortex that devoured everything.
Xiaoying's quantum superposition state body began to disintegrate, and her warrior form holding scissors transformed into countless scissor blades, flying to every corner of the neuroverse.
The village girl, holding a calligraphy brush, splashes the mixed liquid into the vortex, attempting to fill the cracks.
When the first paradoxical fruit fell, symbols of "freedom" and "cage" appeared simultaneously on its surface, and inside the fruit's flesh was a silver chess piece belonging to a woodcutter.
“Eat it.”
The young man's voice came from inside the fruit. When Xiaoying bit into the fruit, she tasted the bitterness of memories and the sweetness of hope.
The pulp transforms into liquid silver in the mouth, flowing along the blood vessels to the zero-dimensional seedling at the heart.
The seedling's roots began to grow wildly, twining together to form a protective barrier and twisting into the shape of scissors, while the crown blossomed with flowers made of brush tips.
When Xiaoying's consciousness attempts to merge the two dimensions, she finds herself trapped in an even deeper paradox.
The narrative fruits of the light dimension are healing the neuroverse, while the scissor network of the dark dimension is constructing a new cage.
Her third eye saw that in a parallel universe, another version of herself had completely transformed into the Dream Weaver, using scissors to trim all the freely growing narrative lines.
In a corner, hidden in the woodpile of the young woodcutter, lies a brand-new chess piece engraved with "406th Cycle".
The butterfly in the jade pendant cocoon suddenly burst out, and the moment its wings unfolded, the entire neuroverse was split in two.
Half of it is free verse written with a brush, and the other half is cold rules sculpted with scissors.
When the butterfly landed on Xiaoying's shoulder, she was horrified to discover that the butterfly's shadow projected on the ground was not wings, but countless scissors closing, and on the blades of the scissors, her face, gradually being eroded by the gear patterns, was reflected.
Xiaoying's fingertips touched the brush and scissors again, only to find that the two tools began to merge into an unknown form.
At that moment, the wooden door at the core of the neuroverse suddenly swung open. Behind the door was not the imagined truth, but countless identical wooden doors, each engraved with different chaotic symbols.
As she tried to step into one of the doors, she saw that the person walking out was none other than herself, holding a pair of scissors. And on the blade of those scissors, the face of the woodcutter slowly emerged, a meaningful smile playing on his lips.
"Welcome to the true abyss of narrative."
At her heart, the zero-dimensional seedling suddenly trembled violently, and the scissor-shaped root system began to grow in reverse, extending towards her cerebral cortex...