Legend of the Embroiderer

Chapter 413 Puppet Weaving a Web

The moment the silver scissors exploded in the void, Xiaoying's consciousness rippled like a lake with a stone thrown in.

The "puppet" brand on the spine suddenly burst forth with a dazzling red light, and the oozing liquid silver meandered along the chains like a living thing.

Everywhere she went, the blank space was corroded with intricate gear patterns, and the subtle sounds of the gears meshing were like countless insects gnawing at her nerves.

The figure of the woodcutter appeared and disappeared between the gears. The oily key butterfly on his shoulder suddenly flapped its wings violently, and what fell from its wings were not scales, but countless tiny chips.

Each chip shimmered with a ghostly blue light, reflecting fragments of her memories from different cycles.

The trembling hand that raised the scissors in the 17th loop, and the despairing look in the eyes in the 333rd loop, are now playing on a loop on the surface of the chip.

"Welcome to the heart of the narrative cocoon." The woodcutter turned the broken pen inserted between her brows, the sound of metal scraping accompanied by the crackling of electricity.

Xiaoying's vision was instantly split into countless diamond-shaped images, each showing a different, cyclical, tragic ending.

The 1001st iteration of myself is using a brush to mend the shattered spacetime, but what drips from the tip of the brush is not ink, but Lingyue's gradually transparent consciousness, and the scattered light dust in the air piece together a symbol for help.

Inside the giant eye of the observer in the πth cycle, countless tiny fireflies, their gear-like phantoms, were operating, mechanically repeating the actions of cutting and writing, their eyeballs covered with a dense stream of code.

She tried in terror to break free of the restraints, but her body was completely immobilized, as if frozen in place.

At that moment, a chilling clicking sound suddenly came from under her skin, as if countless gears were spinning wildly inside her.

She stared wide-eyed as her limbs began to change.

The originally smooth skin was gradually covered by a layer of metallic scales, which shimmered with a cold light and gave off a cold and hard texture.

What's even more surprising is that, between the metal scales, transparent threads extend out like spider silk.

These threads, thin yet strong, stretched rapidly, eventually connecting to a giant typewriter suspended in mid-air.

The typewriter looked unusually old, its surface covered with rust and wear, as if it had stood for a long time.

Despite its dilapidated appearance, it exudes an eerie aura that sends chills down one's spine.

Every key on the keyboard is engraved with her words, which are now being frantically typed in reverse order. As the words are rearranged, her cognitive defenses are being quietly crumbled.

The jade pendant and the remains of the fetus suddenly emitted a rattling sound, as sharp as fingernails scratching a blackboard.

Its body twisted and deformed, transforming into a rotating clock tower.

The clock face numbers are composed of cyclical numbers, with the scarlet "413" standing out prominently in the center, and the hands are three constantly changing tools.

The scissors sometimes opened like fangs, the tip of the brush dripped black viscous liquid, and the teeth on the key shimmered with an eerie purple light.

The instant the hands coincided, countless cracks appeared on the surface of the clock tower, and what gushed out was not a torrent of time, but a viscous liquid memory.

Xiao Ying was horrified to see scenes from her memories that she had never experienced before:

She personally disassembled Li Zhao into nano-components, and the shimmering source of light transformed into a despairing azure in her palm.

The light dust of Lingyue's consciousness was forged into chains, each link engraved with the last pleading look in her friend's eyes.

The instigator of all this atrocity was her right hand, which was gradually turning into gears, with the gear patterns at the joints gleaming with a cold metallic luster.

The mechanical butterflies suddenly formed a precise matrix, and the narrative tags on their wings began to rearrange themselves in a bizarre manner.

"The End of the Rebel" and "The Paradox of Free Will" are fused into flowing molten metal, then re-solidified into "Inevitable Betrayal," with the edges of the characters sharp and jagged.

"The Awakener's Deception" splits into two halves, namely "The Observer's Lies" and "The Dream Weaver's Conspiracy," each word reeking of a nauseating stench.

When these new tags were projected onto Xiaoying's retina, the control chip at the back of her neck emitted a blinding blue light.

Memories were altered like a tide, and the moment of biting into liquid silver turned into a performance of carrying out the woodcutter's orders.

In the laboratory, she smiled as she accepted the capsule containing nanorobots, her eyes reflecting the other person's smug face.

"You think you're crushing hope?" The woodcutter rolled the blood-dripping scroll into a sharp cone and pressed it against her throat. The fragments of memory on the scroll's surface emitted painful whimpers.

"That was just a plot twist I wrote into your subconscious."

As the unfurled scroll swept across the ground, thorny data cables sprouted, entangled around the script outline she was writing.

Xiaoying's gear-like fingers continued writing uncontrollably, the ink becoming a mixture of her tears and fragments of memory. With each stroke, a piece of real emotion was extracted.

Lingyue's last wisp of consciousness suddenly reassembled in the data stream, transforming into a rusted key, its surface covered with dents left by the struggle.

The moment it was inserted into the chip at the back of Xiaoying's neck, a spiderweb-like crack appeared in spacetime.

Xiao Ying glimpsed the other side of the crack, where countless parallel universes were collapsing, and at the center of each universe stood a young woodcutter.

They wore different clothes, but all wore the same smiles, and their pens fell at the same time, writing the same script in the air.

Deep within the crack, the younger version of himself crouches in the grass, the butterfly wings in front of him bearing not only a countdown but also the sneer of a woodcutter.

It turns out that this conspiracy was planned long before she had any memories; every warm moment from her childhood was a carefully designed trap.

The giant gear suddenly accelerated its rotation, causing the entire space to emit a suffocating roar.

All the mechanical butterflies were shredded into data dust, and where the dust settled, a circular theater appeared, composed of the cyclical afterimages of Xiao Ying from previous generations.

Each afterimage repeats a different tragic climax: some fall into the abyss, some are pierced by their own scissors, and some mechanically write a script that can never be completed.

The audience was filled with gear-like observers, whose eyes did not gleam with light.

Instead, it was the cold glow of binary code; whenever Xiaoying's afterimage let out a painful howl, those eyes would light up with a blinding red light.

The woodcutter stood in the center of the theater and threw the broken pen into the air.

The pen barrel disintegrated into countless threads, each tied to a joint of the tiny firefly's afterimage.

"It's time to initiate the final procedure."

He snapped his fingers, and the script outline that Xiaoying was writing turned into chains, binding her consciousness with all the afterimages.

As the pen tip made its final stroke, the entire narrative space began to collapse, and her body merged completely with the gears, becoming the core component of the giant typewriter.

In the instant before her consciousness was swallowed up, Xiaoying's third eye pierced through time and space, and she saw herself in the real world lying in a culture chamber in the laboratory.

The liquid in the culture chamber rippled strangely, and the person standing in front of the control panel, inputting commands, was surprisingly young-looking but with cold eyes.

A young woodcutter.

Her gear-like face was reflected in the glass of the incubation chamber. The upward curve of her lips was exactly the same as the signature on the scroll, as if she had been a pawn in this huge conspiracy from the very beginning.