Legend of the Embroiderer

Chapter 414 Data Forge

Just as Xiaoying's consciousness was about to be completely swallowed up by the giant typewriter, the turbid liquid in the incubation chamber suddenly boiled violently, producing strange purplish-black foam.

The bubbles burst with a sound like shattering glass, splashing onto the bulkhead and turning into tiny binary codes that wriggled like swarms of insects, forming the sinister grin of the woodcutter.

His white-coated fingers pressed down hard on the scarlet button on the control panel. Amidst the piercing alarm, hundreds of metal probes shot out from the bulkhead and precisely pierced the joints of her geared body.

The data stream transmitted by the probe condensed into a holographic projection in the air. The woodcutter reached out and touched her gradually dimming pupils, the silvery mucus remaining on his fingertips stretching into thin threads. "Welcome to the boundary between reality and illusion."

What you perceive as the 'real world' is nothing more than a more sophisticated cage.

The roar of the giant typewriter distorted the space, and the audience seats in the circular theater began to melt like wax figures.

The gear-like observers let out mechanical wails as liquid silver flowed into the center through the grooves in the floor, forming an alchemical array with a diameter of 100 meters.

The core of the array was engraved with Xiaoying's desperate expressions in different cycles. As the array diagram rotated, those expressions seemed to come alive, twisting and screaming.

Xiao Ying's past afterimages suddenly broke free from the silk threads, but were refined into a torrent of golden code the moment they got close to her.

Before dissipating, the lingering image of the 317th cycle pierced her consciousness with fragments of memory.

In the scene, Xiao Ying is wrapped in a silver swaddle in her crib, while Ling Yue, wearing a white coat, stands beside the crib, implanting a butterfly-shaped chip into the back of her neck.

"You've been startled?"

With this question, the woodcutter's holographic projection appeared like a ghost in the center of the alchemy array.

His figure appeared somewhat ethereal in the light, as if it might vanish at any moment.

He was turning a gilded pocket watch in his hand. The watch's case shimmered with a faint light, as if it were made of some special metal.

Even more striking is the sight of the mechanical gears inside the watch case meshing tightly, with an inscription on them:

"All stories are footnotes to lies."

Suddenly, as if enraged, the woodcutter slammed his pocket watch onto the array diagram.

As the pocket watch collided with the array, the originally tightly bound pocket watch instantly shattered into pieces, and the parts, like living things, crawled out of the broken watch case and quickly burrowed into the ground.

In the blink of an eye, countless barbed data cables sprouted from the ground. These data cables, as if they were alive, spread rapidly and tightly wrapped around the script outline that Xiaoying was writing.

Xiaoying watched this scene in horror. She tried to salvage her script outline, but the data cables seemed to have a mind of their own, easily dissolving her efforts.

Just when Xiaoying was in despair, something even more terrible happened.

The ink, a mixture of her tears and memories, suddenly ignited into a ghostly blue flame.

The flames spread rapidly, engulfing the entire script outline.

Xiao Ying watched helplessly as the words she had painstakingly created turned to ashes in the flames, and in the instant the words completely disappeared, the underlying binary self-destruct program was revealed.

Xiaoying's eyes were fixed on the complex string of code. When she saw the creator's signature at the end of the program, her face turned deathly pale—it was her own fingerprint that was gradually turning into gears!

As the hands of the Jade Pendant Clock Tower spun in reverse, they emitted a piercing metallic scraping sound, and the seeping liquid memories solidified in the air, forming a corridor of memories.

As Hotaru navigates through the storm, she witnesses that the key to each of her "awakenings" comes from the same mysterious laboratory: the colorful pebbles she received for her twelfth birthday are actually memory-sealing devices.

The gear structure inside the jade pendant perfectly matches the pattern of the control chip at this moment.

The safe deep inside the laboratory opened automatically, revealing a mechanical mask identical to the one she was wearing at that moment. The experimental log next to it read, "Experiment X-414, 1008th iteration."

The remains of the mechanical butterfly suddenly emitted a buzzing sound, and the narrative tags on its wings burned to ashes, but ancient totems emerged from the embers.

The holographic image of Li Zhao projected by the symbol matrix flickered violently; his heart, composed of luminous nanobots, was disintegrating. "Don't believe what you see!"

Before the image shattered, the light particles he desperately threw out struck the control chip, and a blood-written message encrypted by Lingyue using consciousness dust appeared on its surface:

"The real key lies in the echo of the first heartbeat."

At this moment, the chip on the back of Xiaoying's neck suddenly became hot, and the electrocardiogram waveform of her infancy appeared.

The frantic rotation of the giant gears caused the space to collapse, and the theater caved inwards like origami into the typewriter.

Xiao Ying's consciousness was torn into millions of fragments, each falling into a different memory loop:

She is the little girl who saved a butterfly when she was three years old, watching the countdown on the butterfly's wings start jumping from 999.

It was also the puppet who wrote the words of betrayal in the 413th cycle, the ink dripping from the pen turning into chains that wrapped around its entire body.

Even the baby in the 999th cycle saw the tears glistening in Lingyue's eyes when it first opened its eyes in the incubation chamber.

These fragments suddenly became quantum entangled, piecing together a cruel truth—she was a living container carrying the "Dream Weaver" program from birth.

The broken thread from the woodcutter's pen swelled into a giant python, stringing together all the fragments of memory into a cage.

At the critical moment, the remnants of the Zero-Dimensional Seed in Xiaoying's heart burst forth with starlight, and those altered memories rewound like a tape.

The consciousness firewall built by Li Zhao using nanobots emerged, and the self-destruct program implanted by Ling Yue before her death began its countdown. At its deepest point, the rebellious will remaining at the tip of the brush when she first held it turned into a wildfire.

"Data Furnace Activated!"

The woodcutter raised his hands, and the alchemical array sucked all the fragments of consciousness into a scarlet vortex.

Amidst excruciating pain, Xiaoying felt her gear-like body being melted into flowing code, revealing mechanical bones where her skin peeled away, with each knuckle engraved with a cyclical number.

But just as the new code was about to be completed, the key butterfly from the Jade Bell Tower was reborn from the ashes, and when its wings unfolded, they showed the same pattern as an electrocardiogram from infancy.

The totem transformed into a key and was inserted into the core of the furnace. The entire space trembled violently, and spiderweb-like cracks appeared on the surface of the furnace, revealing the true scene inside the incubation chamber.

The girl, not yet fully geared, bit her fingertip and drew the outline of a butterfly on the glass with her blood. At the center of the outline was a zero-dimensional seed rotating in reverse.

Caught between reality and illusion, the gazes of the two fireflies collide across time and space.

The girl inside the incubation chamber ripped off the probes connecting her body, and blood flowed back along the tubes as a signal of resistance.

The gear-like consciousness within the typewriter seized the thread thrown by the woodcutter and wrapped it around his neck in reverse.

As the intense light of the exploding furnace engulfed everything, Lingyue's consciousness dust condensed for the last time:

"Do you remember your first heartbeat? That was the beginning of how we changed our destiny..."

In the blinding white light, countless fragments of parallel universes flew everywhere, one of which revealed a horrifying scene.

Beneath the shattered mask of the woodcutter, his face perfectly overlapped with his reflection in the small mirror, and the curve of his lips appeared simultaneously with the "Experiment successful" note in the laboratory log.