Part I: Echoes in the Quantum Abyss
The quantum whale's mournful cries reverberated inside my crystal core. As the crystalline substance crawled over my eyelids, I caught a final glimpse of the lunar crater cracking like an eggshell, revealing a colossal rusted structure beneath. It was a grotesque amalgamation of Shang-Zhou bronzeware, space alloys, and dinosaur fossils—a literal graveyard of civilizations.
"Biological matrix signal lost," blared the mechanical alarm. My consciousness plunged into the calf whale's memories, a disorienting mix of Cambrian warmth brushing my skin and the icy chill of the convenience store freezer. The teddy bear's cries suddenly morphed into a robotic voice: "Coordinate overlap error... Initiating correction..."
The lunar surface caved in, swallowing me into a tunnel that resembled an ancient stele forest. Eerie artifacts lined the niches: a half-broken Nestorian Stele fused with a Mayan calendar disc, Paleolithic bone needles strung with nano-chips. At the tunnel's end loomed the most unsettling sight of all—the broken-down subway security scanner from the very beginning.
"Welcome home, my child." My mother's smiling face flickered on the scanner screen as the conveyor belt spat out a blood-stained ouroboros coin. Before I could react, I collided with something warm and fleshy. Turning around, I found myself face-to-face with a horde of Dr. Lin clones emerging from their pods, their glass hearts frozen in time, the sand within suspended just before its final fall.
Part II: The Unraveling of Deception
The calf whale's consciousness suddenly went haywire. My crystal body slammed into the altar uncontrollably, the cuneiforms on the Nestorian Stele searing my crystalline skin. Painful words seeped into my mind:
The gods never abandoned humanity; humanity imprisoned itself in the cage of perfection.
The clones burst into a twisted lullaby, their voices overlapping in dissonance. My quantumized right hand pierced through the security scanner, touching something cold and organic within. Coiled inside was a mountainous mass of flesh, its surface covered with my mother's youthful face, and beneath it, thousands of infant hearts pulsated in a grotesque rhythm.
"Is this... the so-called 'Matrix'?" My crystal heart shattered from the shock, Dr. Lin's golden blood splattering across the abomination. The face suddenly opened its eyes, and I saw a horrifying vision: the red-clad maiden nailed to a colossal bronze tree, its branches adorned with plaques of extinct civilizations. The lowest plaque remained blank, flickering in sync with my ragged breaths.
The calf whale thrashed inside my core, and the convenience store scene spilled out from the cracks in my body. Shelves towered like tombstones, and inside the freezer, my five-year-old self wrote on the frost with frozen fingers:
RUN. MOM IS A FAKE.
The clones' singing reached a fever pitch. The flesh-face melted away, revealing a nightmarish fusion of machinery and organic matter. Umbilical cords shot out from the mass, piercing my crystal joints. As my strength drained, the security scanner ejected a blood-stained ticket. The destination? The subway station from Chapter One. The departure time? The exact moment the Doomsday Clock strikes zero.
Part III: The Truth and the Sacrifice
The teddy bear leaped out of my quantum pocket, shattering the clones' sonic attack. From its torn seams spilled fragments of the maiden's spine, which embedded themselves into the blank plaque on the bronze tree. The moment the Chinese characters 陆昭 (Lu Zhao) materialized on the plaque, the entire tree disintegrated into stardust.
Three hundred and sixty prisms appeared in the light, each reflecting a different version of myself: the one who smashed the chip in the delivery room, the one who took the teddy bear from the convenience store, the one who refused to insert the whale key. All the reflections raised their hands simultaneously, pointing to a tiny blue light at the heart of the flesh mass.
The calf whale's memories merged with my consciousness in a final surge. Cambrian warmth mingled with freezer cold, coursing through my crystalline veins. When my finger touched the blue light, the mass let out a scream that echoed across the cosmos.
It wasn't a "Matrix" at all. It was a "Despair Collector" created by a higher civilization. Those infant hearts were the orphans of extinct civilizations, transformed into generators of suffering. My mother's face was nothing but a mimicry designed to trap me.
My crystal body began to disintegrate. Before disappearing completely, I launched shards of my crystal core into three different timelines:
Cambrian warmth seeped into the moon's coreThe convenience store freezer locked shutOracle Bone Script chains from the Whale Fall Coordinates bound the remains of the bronze tree
The lunar base ascended into the sky, transforming into a new celestial body. Where the crust cracked, the maiden's spine fused with the Nestorian Stele to form a sword hilt, while Dr. Lin's crystal bones extended into a blade. In the final telepathic wave, the calf whale's cries resolved into clear words:
"Mom... is in a light-year prison..."
(End of Chapter 18)