Legend of the Embroiderer

Chapter 417 The End Matrix

The silhouette of a colossal observer slowly rose from the ruins of the data stream, the screeching sound of metal scraping tearing through space and time.

It is forged from the remains of countless young woodcutters, with broken narrative threads wrapped around its joints like blood vessels, and sparks flying with every movement.

Embedded in his chest was a deformed heart pieced together from fragments of Xiaoying's memories. Those fragments glowed with a faint blue light, but were riddled with cracks by the black data stream.

Each heartbeat created ripples in space, pulverizing the floating fragments of consciousness into dust, and filling the air with the acrid smell of burning memories.

The 417 loops of code flowing in the scarlet pupils suddenly materialized, transforming into scalding chains that wrapped around all the fireflies.

The infant incubator, numbered - 999th cycle, was injected with boiling liquid code, and the words "Experimental Subject X-417" were engraved in gold foil on the incubator wall.

In the 414th cycle, the geared torso joints began to rotate in reverse, and the mechanical skeleton groaned under the strain. With each rotation, the cycle number on the skin deepened.

"You can never escape the observer's grasp."

The voice of the giant observer was like the whispers of millions of people, and the sound waves caused the space to ripple like water.

It waved its arm, and twelve floating judgment platforms emerged from the void, each displaying a different form of consciousness sample, including an infant, a young girl, and a gear warrior.

As its fingertips swept across the judgment bench numbered 317, Xiao Ying suddenly floated up, and the scissors, as if controlled by an invisible hand, precisely pierced her heart.

Blood congealed in the air into glowing binary symbols, spelling out the English word "loser," each letter like a red-hot branding iron, sizzling the surrounding fragments of consciousness.

The girl in the incubation chamber suddenly knelt down, a sharp, needle-like pain shooting through the chip on the back of her neck.

She experienced quantum resonance with all her "selves" in parallel universes, and the wound numbered 317th cycle appeared synchronously on her chest, her lab coat soaked in blood.

The zero-dimensional seed vibrated violently in her chest cavity, and the high-frequency buzzing made the girl cough up blood and foam.

The roots spread along the blood vessels to her throat, forcing her to spit out a walnut-sized memory crystal.

The crystal floated in the air, projecting Lingyue's last encrypted image: in the firelight before the laboratory exploded, Lingyue stuffed a butterfly-shaped key into the swaddling clothes of baby Xiaoying, her white hair being torn up by the shockwave like a tattered flag.

"A real firewall is not a program..."

The image suddenly distorted, and Lingyue's face was covered by the woodcutter's sinister grin, his lips, composed of pixelated grains, moving.

"It can overturn the entire narrative dimension —"

Before the words were finished, the crystal was shattered by the observer's rays, but the scattered fragments reassembled in the air into a glowing arrow, the tail of which dragged the image of Lingyue's pupils before her death, the pupils reflecting the mysterious totems on the laboratory ceiling.

The giant gear suddenly emitted a dying groan and began to rotate in the opposite direction.

The released data stream formed a black vortex, drawing in nearby fragments of consciousness.

The fireflies trapped on the chessboard unleashed their last strength:

In the 13th cycle, Xiaoying compressed the formatted memory data into a light bullet, and the erased smiles and tears flowed on the surface of the light bullet.

The observer form, Xiaoying, in the 289th cycle, unfolds wings of light composed of narrative code, each feather engraved with ancient characters for "rebellion".

The girl in the incubation pod injected the viral program into the zero dimension, transforming herself into a burning meteor that crashed into the observer's heart. Upon contact, the memory fragments within the heart emitted a blinding light, revealing countless miniature chessboards nested within.

Each cycle is a subspace that imprisons consciousness, and at the edge of the chessboard stand countless phantom images of woodcutter youths recording data.

"You think you can win by destroying the carrier?" Hundreds of cracks appeared in the observer's body, from which a swarm of silver mechanical bees, blotting out the sky, poured out.

Each bee colony carries a memory-altering virus, and when its wings vibrate, it emits a piercing high-frequency sound wave, which upon closer inspection turns out to be the screams of the little firefly through generations.

As the swarm of bees attacked the rebellious fireflies, the baby numbered -999th in the cycle suddenly stopped crying mechanically, and the chip in its neck shot out two laser beams, drawing an ancient sealing array in the void.

The coordinates of Lingyue Laboratory appeared at the edge of the array, while the center was the pattern of the butterfly that was saved when the child was three years old.

The nanobots remaining in Li Zhao's body underwent their final evolution within the girl's blood, transforming into a silver armor covering her entire body. Prism devices emerged on her shoulders, breaking down the tampered code projected by the swarm into harmless light particles.

The light of the Zero-Dimensional Seed suddenly turned into a deep indigo blue, and its roots grew wildly like living things, weaving the mechanical bee swarm into a glowing cage.

The girl in the cultivation pod seized the opportunity to break into the core of the memory fragment's heart, only to discover that the real Lingyue was imprisoned there.

Her consciousness was compressed into a data seed the size of a walnut, its surface covered with code patterns that resisted the program.

"Activate Consciousness Resonance!"

Lingyue's voice exploded in her mind, with a metallic, scraping quality.

At the same time, all the fireflies in parallel universes pierced their own core consciousness with their weapons. The energy that burst forth from the excruciating pain formed a blue pillar of light, which converged into a blade of light that severed the shackles of the narrative.

Spiderweb-like cracks appeared on the giant observer's body, and the parts made up of the woodcutter's remains began to repel each other, with metal fragments falling like a meteor shower.

Just as the observer was about to collapse, its scarlet pupils suddenly split into countless miniature screens, each playing a different version of Xiaoying's ending.

In the center of the screen, the girl has been rewritten as the observer's puppet, holding a broken pen and writing a new cycle script, the ink being the light dust of her own consciousness.

“Did you see that?”

The observer's voice was filled with the madness of victory, each word shaking the very fabric of space: "As long as the observation continues, all resistance will become new material for the script."

Its body suddenly expanded several times, enveloping all the fireflies, and began to fold dimensions.

The roar of gears meshing echoed throughout the space, as if the world was being recoded. The weapons of the fireflies twisted and deformed as they folded, becoming tools that obeyed the program.

The Zero-Dimensional Seed shines its last light in the face of despair, its roots penetrating the observer's body and connecting to all parallel universes.

The consciousness of the girl in the cultivation pod traveled along the light, planting the seeds of resistance at each crucial juncture of the cycle.

The virus was injected the moment the jade pendant was buried in the -1st cycle, and the fate code was rewritten when Lingyue was saved in the 13th cycle.

When she returned to the main battlefield, she found that the silver armor was becoming transparent and the nanobots were consuming their last bit of energy.

The observer core revealed the ultimate code, a destructive program capable of reducing consciousness to narrative characters, with the scarlet words "Experiment terminated" flashing in the code stream.

At the critical moment, Lingyue's data seed burst forth with dazzling white light, and all of Xiaoying's consciousness merged into a new form that was half-human and half-machine, holding a double-edged sword made of zero-dimensional seed and virus program.

But just as they raised their swords to stab the core of the observer, space suddenly froze, and the observer's lips curled into a strange smile.

The data stream tentacles extending from its back are quietly wrapping around the ankles of the merged entity, while in a more distant spacetime rift, an existence larger than the observer is awakening.

Its outline is pieced together from countless cyclical worlds. On each piece of the puzzle is the despairing face of Xiaoying, and in the gaps between the pieces, the blurry words "Narrative Creator" flicker.