Legend of the Embroiderer

Chapter 411 The Prisoner of the Ink Pen

Suddenly, ripples like asphalt appeared in the pure white void. The viscous texture was like an invisible shackle, making Xiaoying's every breath extremely heavy.

A chill ran through her wrist as she gripped the pen, as if it had been immersed in millennia-old ice. The reflection showed the blade of the scissors in her hand had touched her skin; the moment the sharp metal made contact, a bead of blood slowly seeped out.

The young woodcutter's smile twisted into gear patterns on the blade, each groove resembling an entrance to an unknown abyss.

The chess piece pressed against his back suddenly became scalding hot, like a red-hot branding iron, and the fleshy characters seeping from the blank space were growing rapidly:

"Actually, you're just a puppet in a new script."

The hands that emerged from the cracks in the ground were covered in calluses, with silvery fragments embedded in their fingernails.

Suddenly, she clenched her fist, and the silver chess pieces transformed into chains, binding her limbs and neck. The cold metal pressed against her skin, leaving bloody marks.

The jade pendant-shaped fetal remains suddenly emitted a reverberation of infant cries and gear turning, the sound sharp and piercing, like countless steel needles stabbing straight into the eardrums.

Fine cracks appeared on the surface of the curled-up body, and the seeping liquid silver condensed in the air to form a projection screen.

The screen played a loop of parallel universes where she became a dream weaver:

The throne, built from thousands of heads, began to bleed. The pupils of each head reflected the eyes of the observers, casting countless cold gazes with each blink.

The giant eye she had transformed into, the observer, was being pierced by the woodcutter's broken pen. Black sap dripped from the pen tip, drawing countdown symbols in the void. Each stroke seemed to mark the end of her fate.

"The awakened are forever trapped in punctuation."

The voices of the woodcutter came from all directions, echoing with a chilling force.

His figure appeared and disappeared among the silver chains, like an elusive ghost.

The stone tablet in the pile of firewood rose completely, its back engraved with crossed-out cyclical numbers. Each number was like a piece of history that had been erased, carrying an unspeakable sense of vicissitude.

Xiaoying tried to wield the brush transformed from the star chart, but found that the brush tip was absorbing her consciousness. With each stroke, she could feel her power draining away.

Each chess piece embedded in the pen barrel glowed red, corresponding to a moment of despair she had experienced.

The shattered light dust of Lingyue in the 13th cycle and the dissipated source of light of Li Zhao in the 289th cycle have now transformed into flames leaping on the chess pieces, scorching her heart.

The moment the pen tip touched the chain, thorny vines sprouted, wrapping around her arm in reverse. The thorns pierced her skin, and blood dripped down the vines.

The blank butterfly inside the jade pendant cocoon suddenly let out a sharp cry, its voice mournful, as if issuing a final warning.

The afterimage of a blood-red butterfly pattern appeared on the wings, the pattern shimmering with an eerie light.

It flapped its wings and flew toward Xiaoying's reflection, but was broken down into binary code the moment it made contact. The code was then reassembled into the image of a woodcutter, who raised his scissors and stabbed into her heart.

At the critical moment, Li Zhao's remaining light nanobots formed a light shield, illuminating the surrounding darkness.

But the scissors in the reflection's hand were like a death scythe, cutting the light shield into glowing shreds of paper, each shred imprinted with her last words from different cycles.

Those words echoed in the void, like a mockery of her fate.

"Pay attention to those lines that are disappearing!"

Lingyue's shattered consciousness suddenly coalesced in the void, her form composed of countless question marks, each filled with confusion and bewilderment.

Xiao Ying then realized with a start that the key lines flowing on the Möbius strip were peeling away.

"True freedom is not about choices"—it turns to ashes and drifts away with the wind.

The phrase "refusing to be defined" is twisted into "definition is a cage," as if telling her that all resistance is futile.

And those chess pieces, transformed from the blood and tears of fetuses, are now weaving through the chains, each touch altering memories into a new narrative script, subtly rewriting her past, present, and future.

When Xiaoying's reflection pierced the scissors into the chess piece wound on her shoulder, excruciating pain surged like a tidal wave, as if the whole world were collapsing at that moment.

In the midst of this excruciating pain, her third eye suddenly pierced through time and space.

She saw herself burying the jade pendant in the first cycle, now being tricked by the woodcutter into digging out her heart, her face filled with confusion and trust.

In the infinite cycle of harvesting the narrative tree, the trunk contained the skeleton of young Lingyue, whose empty eye sockets seemed to tell of endless injustices.

Even more terrifying is that the tools in the hands of "her" in all parallel universes are being transformed.

The scissors became a pen, the pen became a chain, and the chain became the observer's eye, as if an endless cycle had trapped her within it.

"The script needs to be rebound."

The woodcutter held up the scroll woven from Xiaoying's memory fragments, a smug smile on his face.

The moment the scroll unfurled, all the silver chains began to retract, the metallic scraping sound making one's teeth ache.

Xiaoying's consciousness split into two parts under the pressure: one part was trapped in reality, watching the reflection point the scissors at her hand holding the brush, her eyes filled with fear and despair.

The other part delves into the depths of memory, discovering that hidden within the wings of the butterfly he saved at the age of three is a portrait of the woodcutter in his youth, whose eyes are exactly the same as they are now, full of calculation and conspiracy.

The colorful pebbles found last year turned out to contain the activation key to the Dreamweaver's core program, revealing that everything was a meticulously planned scam from the very beginning.

The blank butterfly suddenly reformed itself, this time transforming into a key shape and inserting itself into the forehead of the fetus in the jade pendant.

The cocoon began to collapse, emitting a suffocating sense of oppression.

The calligraphy brush in Xiaoying's hand burst forth with a bright light, and the chess pieces on the brush tip fell off one by one, forming a new star map in the air.

But the star map was absorbed by the woodcutter's scroll as soon as it took shape, and he smiled as he dipped the tip of his pen in the blood dripping from Xiaoying.

His voice was full of mockery and sarcasm, as if announcing her defeat.

Suddenly, black, viscous liquid gushed from the cracks in the ground, carrying a pungent, putrid odor, enveloping Xiaoying and her reflection.

In the instant she was suffocating from the slime, she glimpsed countless versions of herself standing in the shadows behind the woodcutter, each holding a different tool. The shadows of all the tools overlapped, eventually forming a giant printing press.

The printing press was running non-stop, printing page after page of the script that had already been written.

As the mucus entered her nasal cavity, the brush in her hand suddenly began to write automatically. Instead of writing characters, it drew her own face, which was gradually being turned into gears. The face was expressionless, as if it had lost its soul.

In the pupils of his face, the young woodcutter was reflected, binding a new script. His smile grew wider and wider, as if victory was already in his grasp.