Legend of the Embroiderer

Chapter 412 Gear Brand

Black slime seeped into Xiaoying's nostrils like a swarm of living creatures, while a sweet, metallic smell and a strong, putrid stench churned in her throat, almost suffocating her.

The gear-shaped face she was drawing with a brush suddenly cracked open with fine fissures, spreading like a spider web.

Immediately afterwards, countless tiny silver threads emerged from it, one end of which was connected to the blood-dripping scroll in the woodcutter's hand, while the other end pierced her neck like a venomous snake.

The hands that emerged from the cracks in the ground suddenly exerted force, their rough skin rubbing against her skin, and the silver chains carved deep, bleeding grooves into her skin, as if trying to rip her flesh out.

The chess piece pressed against her back was burning hot, like a red-hot branding iron, branding the words "puppet on a string" into her spine, each stroke accompanied by excruciating pain.

The sounds of an infant's cry and the reverberation of gears turning, emanating from the remains of the fetus in the jade pendant, suddenly rose eight octaves, becoming as sharp as a fingernail scraping against glass.

The projection screen, formed from condensed liquid silver, twisted violently, and the images rapidly switched to countless parallel universes depicting collapse scenes.

In the Mirror Palace, numbered 77th cycle, the shattered light dust of the Spirit Moon is being mercilessly sucked into the gaps between the gears, and the dissipation of each speck of light dust is accompanied by a mournful cry.

In the 520th cycle, the giant eye of the observer that had once overlooked everything suddenly burst, and the splashed eye fluid turned into a dense rain of binary code, cutting through space like the scythe of death.

In each scene, the figure of the woodcutter can be seen flashing by. The trajectory of his swinging the broken pen perfectly overlaps with the bound posture of Xiaoying at this moment, as if all the tragedies were a carefully arranged rehearsal for this moment, with every detail fitting together perfectly.

"Can you feel it? This is the final chapter for the Awakened."

The young woodcutter's voice, laced with tiny bits of gear debris, filled the eardrums, carrying a chilling quality.

His physical form finally emerged fully from the shadows, with the key transformed from the blank butterfly perched on his shoulder. However, at this moment, black engine oil was constantly seeping from its wings, dripping onto the ground with a hissing, corrosive sound.

The stone tablet in the pile of firewood suddenly flipped over, its inscriptions dense and full of cold, mechanical feel.

At the signature section at the end of the agreement, Xiaoying's fingerprint, gradually turning into a gear, was clearly imprinted, as if she had unknowingly signed her own destiny.

The chess pieces that had fallen off the brush handle suddenly floated up, forming a gleaming cage around her head, each piece reflecting her despairing expression in different cycles.

And those expressions are turning metallic at a visible speed, losing all their emotion.

Just as the scissors in the reflection's hand were about to sever her wrist holding the pen, Xiaoying suddenly bit down on the liquid silver hidden in her mouth.

That was the last energy reserve of Li Zhao's nanobots. The silvery fluid seeped into her blood vessels along her gums, exploding in a blinding flash of light at her heart.

Amidst the intense pain, her fragmented consciousness finally merged into one, simultaneously revealing the dual truths of reality and memory:

On the butterfly wing he saved when he was three years old, next to the portrait of the woodcutter, there was a countdown timer engraved, with the numbers rapidly decreasing.

The key sealed in the colored pebble she picked up last year perfectly matched the pattern of the control chip implanted in the back of her neck. It turned out that she had already fallen into a trap from the moment she picked up the pebble.

Suddenly, the black viscous liquid seemed to be ignited, and began to boil violently. It churned and bubbled, producing countless bubbles, which then burst open in an instant, transforming into countless mechanical butterflies.

As if under a spell, these butterflies flew straight towards the firefly. Their wings were etched with various narrative labels, shimmering with a cold metallic luster that sent chills down one's spine.

"The End of the Rebels", "The Deception of the Awakened", "The Paradox of Free Will"... Each label is like a sharp sword, piercing Xiaoying's heart.

At the same time, a massive stream of data suddenly gushed out from the spot between the eyebrows of the fetus in the jade pendant, where the key had been inserted.

These data streams rapidly intertwine and converge in the air, eventually forming a giant screening room.

On the screen in the screening room, the original script was being played on a loop from the -1st to the 411th time.

Every script ends with "To be continued," as if the story has no end.

In the screenwriter credits section, Xiaoying was surprised to find that her name, which was being used as a gear, was prominently displayed.

This means that she has been unknowingly playing the role of the screenwriter of her own tragedy all along, weaving her own destiny.

"You think you can escape just because you discovered the conspiracy?" The woodcutter's voice carried a hint of mockery as he forcefully flung the blood-stained scroll into the air.

The moment the scroll unfurled, all the silver chains instantly transformed into typewriter keys, arranged before Xiaoying. She was forcibly pressed before the invisible keyboard by an invisible force, her pen-holding hand striking the keys uncontrollably, each strike accompanied by the excruciating pain of her memories being altered.

She watched helplessly as the scene of saving Lingyue in the 13th cycle was replaced by her personally pushing her into the Mirror Abyss.

In the 289th cycle, the scene of her fighting alongside Li Zhao changed to her stabbing the other person's heart with scissors. Every change in the scene was like a knife being plunged into her heart.

Lingyue's remaining consciousness suddenly coalesced into a sharp arrow, which shot forcefully toward the control chip on Xiaoying's nape.

The moment the arrow touched the chip, it strangely transformed into new instruction code, which accelerated her gear-like process.

The key-shaped butterfly that flew out of the jade pendant cocoon suddenly burst into flames, and a complete portrait of the woodcutter in his youth emerged from the ashes.

In the portrait, behind him are mountains of "Little Firefly's" skeletons, and in his hand he holds not a broken pen, but the threads that control the puppets. The truth is so cruel that it's suffocating.

As the first line of mechanical text flowed from the pen tip, Xiaoying's skin began to be covered with cold, metallic scales.

She was horrified to discover that she was not writing a declaration of rebellion, but rather "The 412th Cycle:

The script outline for "The Birth of the Perfect Puppet" felt like digging his own grave with every single word.

The woodcutter inserted the broken pen into her gear-like brow, a strange smile playing on his lips, and slowly turned the pen:

"Now, you are both the puppeteer and the scriptwriter. Guess what, when the author becomes a prisoner of the story, the variable in the next cycle..."

Before he finished speaking, Xiaoying's pupils completely transformed into a vortex of binary code, flashing with a cold light.

The first word she wrote exploded in the void into countless silver scissors, each scissor reflecting the increasingly blurry face of the woodcutter, and the giant gear behind him slowly rising, engraved with the words "infinite loop," as if foreshadowing her endless tragic fate.