Legend of the Embroiderer

Chapter 410 Fatal Gamble

Countless silver chess pieces, like a flood bursting its banks, gushed forth from the fetus's ruptured heart.

These chess pieces, accompanied by a piercing metallic screech and the clicking of gears meshing, instantly engulfed the surrounding space like a raging torrent.

Xiaoying's consciousness was like a fragile, withered leaf in this torrent, mercilessly tossed and turned.

Suddenly, a sharply angled chess piece flew straight toward her with astonishing speed and embedded itself precisely in her shoulder blade.

A cold, liquid silver spread rapidly along her nerve pathways, as if it were alive, outlining an unfinished, cyclical numbered pattern beneath her skin.

This pattern is like a mysterious symbol, exuding a chilling aura.

Where the chess piece was embedded, a searing pain of memory struck, almost unbearable for Xiaoying.

Blurry images began to flash before her eyes; these images were the afterimages of the 73rd cycle projected onto the blank surface of the chess piece.

In these afterimages, Lingyue falls into the abyss of mirrors, her skirt billowing like a dancing butterfly, the graceful arc perfectly coinciding with the parabola of the chess piece at that moment.

The cracked tree rings around them suddenly transformed into countless pens floating in the air, as if by magic.

These pens have a very peculiar shape; the barrels are shaped like dodecagonal prisms, and they are densely engraved with the various moments of choices she had experienced.

Some of them are from when she was three years old, when her fingertips trembled as she tried to save a butterfly.

Some of it was the white breath she exhaled when she was picking up pebbles last year.

Another thing is the resolute look in her eyes when she stabbed herself in the heart during the 407th cycle.

The nib of each pen was pointed directly at her brow, as if it would pierce her forehead at any moment.

And inside the ink sacs of these pens, a strange liquid was swirling.

This liquid looks like both ink mixed with butterfly scales and a viscous fluid mixed with gear oil.

As the liquid seeps from the pen tip, it leaves streaks of blue-purple light in the air, like shooting stars twinkling in the night sky.

At that moment, the woodcutter's voice, carried by the silver thread, slowly crept into her ear canal.

His voice seemed to contain the drumbeats of a fetal heartbeat, which instilled fear in listeners.

He said, "This is the 410th ink stick, which requires the pupils of an observer and the marrow of a rebel to grind."

Just as Xiaoying's fingertips touched the chess piece floating in the air, suddenly, the memories of 397 Lingyue surged through her consciousness barrier like a high-voltage current.

These memories flooded her mind like a tide, instantly plunging her into chaos.

She simultaneously saw three silhouettes from parallel universes:

The woman, number 256, was cutting open the fetus's chest with scissors. Under the light reflected from the blade, the fetus's ribs were formed by the vocalizations of her every time she said "no".

Number 402 inserted the brush into the gap of the growth rings, but the roots that grew from the brush handle shredded all the cycle numbers into dust.

Meanwhile, Lingyue, number 001, was pressing a silver chess piece into her temple. What seeped from where the piece was embedded was not blood, but the title of Chapter 410 that she was writing.

The blank butterfly inside the jade pendant cocoon suddenly glowed brightly, and the liquid starlight that fell when its wings flapped condensed into a matrix of light blades, precisely severing the silver thread connecting Xiao Ying and the fetus.

The broken threads reassembled in mid-air into a star chart, and 365 silver chess pieces automatically fell into the trajectory of the twelve zodiac signs, each piece creating ripples of memory as it landed.

She saw herself as the dream weaver in a certain cycle, with a throne built from the heads of thousands of weeping "little fireflies".

In another cycle, she transforms into the giant eye of the observer, her pupils reflecting all the choices she has failed to make.

Millions of eyes appeared on the surface of the fetus's expanding body, each pupil playing a different version of her from different times and spaces.

It opened its gear-filled mouth, spewing out not sound waves but a torrent of binary code:

"When you see 'the road not taken' in the space of tree rings, those phantoms have already taken root in the narrative layer."

The star chart suddenly vibrated violently, and the chess pieces collided with each other, bursting out blue flames. Xiao Ying was horrified to discover that the patterns on the star chart perfectly matched the folds of her cerebral cortex.

When a chess piece collided with the "hippocampus," the memory of the butterfly she saved when she was three years old suddenly became distorted.

On the butterfly's wings, the original nerve patterns gradually transformed into the shape of a fetal spine.

Li Zhao's luminous nanorobots coalesced into a spear of light within the binary flood, but upon piercing the fetus, they differentiated into countless miniature pens, writing unrecognizable code in the void.

Lingyue's consciousness dust was broken down into pixel particles by the data stream, piecing together the final warning:

"The fetus's heart is the typewriter of a dream weaver; our resistance is merely the preset key tones!"

At that moment, the chess piece on Xiaoying's shoulder suddenly became hot, and symbols she had never seen before appeared on the blank surface.

The left half is the afterimage of a butterfly flapping its wings, the right half is the mechanical structure of scissors closing, and the middle is connected by 397 bloodstains.

As the code mist that split from the fetus was about to engulf the star chart, Xiaoying suddenly bit her tongue and used her blood to draw the outline of a butterfly from when she was three years old on her palm.

The moment the blood butterfly pattern lit up, the tips of all the levitating pens exploded simultaneously, and the ink formed a giant Möbius strip in the air, with her key lines from each cycle flowing on the strip.

The fetus emitted a shrill scream like a gear jamming, and blood welled up from its eyes. The blood and tears dripped onto the star chart and turned into new chess pieces. One of them fell into the "Crossroads of Fate" square, on which her expression at this moment was clearly engraved.

The pupil contracts into a binary 0, and the iris expands into the tip of a writing pen.

"True freedom is not about choosing, but about refusing to be defined."

Xiao Ying pierced the fusion tool into her third eye, and her consciousness transformed into millions of points of light that rushed toward the star chart.

The moment the light touches the chess piece, quantum entanglement occurs in spacetime:

She saw herself in the -1st cycle burying the jade pendant, and herself in the ∞th cycle harvesting the narrative tree, while the points of light in the current time and space formed a cocoon, enveloping the fetus and the star chart together.

From within the cocoon came the sound of bones reorganizing. The fetus's gear-like body gradually collapsed into the shape of a jade pendant, while the star chart transformed into the handle of a calligraphy brush, with 365 chess pieces embedded in the handle to become the brush tip.

When the cocoon broke open, Xiaoying stood in the pure white void, holding a calligraphy brush transformed from a star chart and a fetus.

The young woodcutter appeared behind her at some point, and half a stone tablet was visible from the pile of firewood, inscribed with the words "Charter of the 410th Cycle":

"All those who awaken will ultimately become punctuation marks in the narrative."

Before she could finish speaking, the ground suddenly cracked open, and countless hands emerged, each holding a silver chess piece. One of these pieces pressed against her back, its blank surface slowly writing with blood and flesh as ink:

"You think you've broken the cycle? Actually, you've just..."

Before the writing was finished, Xiaoying's reflection emerged from the crack, the blade of the scissors in her hand reflecting the smiling face of the woodcutter, while the tip of the scissors was aimed directly at her wrist holding the pen.