Behind the door is the orphanage Chu Yun remembers, but the magnolia trees grow full of gears and the chains of the swings drip silver resin. Baby girl cries came from the basement, and each cry shook off the wall skin, revealing embedded mechanical veins. The shoots in Chu Yun's right eye suddenly contracted, and blood-colored navigational arrows emerged from his vision, pointing to the dark door behind the boiler room.
"You're twenty years late." The rusty teddy bear suddenly spoke, and a blood-colored hologram popped out of his abdomen - a five-year-old Chu Yun was burying a metal box under a tree, and inside the box was blood-stained baby clothes. When Chu Yun reaches out and touches the image, the entire wall suddenly activates and swallows him into a digestive system-like metal cavity.
At the end of the cavity was a circular laboratory, with a giant incubation chamber suspended in the center. The young girl inside the capsule slowly opens her eyes, the code at her neck flashing: Xiao Man - Final Variable. Her pupils reflected Chu Yun's mechanized right eye, "I've waited for you for seven hundred reboot cycles."
A sudden alarm blared in the lab, and mechanical arms extended from the walls. Xiao Man ripped off the infusion tube and photonic blood formed a shield, "Quickly connect to my neural interface!" A massive amount of data poured in as Chu Yun's shoots pierced the back of her neck-
The Xiaoman of all universes are protocol loopholes, and the point of their existence is to lure Chu Yun into awakening.
The countdown jumped on the surface of the incubation chamber: 00:04:30. Xiao Man suddenly vomited out black crystals, inside of which were sealed the memories of the first generation: Chu Yun was not a human being, but a vessel created by the "mother" of the first generation of the Seeder.
"Mother is waiting for you in the Core." Xiao Man's skin began to carbonize, "She's the one ..." Before the words left his mouth, the lab floor cracked open and the elevator held up the Magnolia Throne. The woman with the vines wrapped around her seat lifted her face - the "mother" who was 100% genetically matched to Chu Yun - and squeezed the blood-stained scissors in her hand.
"My child," the woman's smile made the mechanical veins boil, "it's time to inherit the throne."
The entire orphanage suddenly ascended in dimension as Chuun's blade of light stabbed his mother. They were suspended in an endless sea of data stars, each point of light a pruned remnant of the universe. The mother's body cracked open, revealing the core of the protocols beating inside - pieced together from the hearts of Chu Yun's successive clones.
With the last of her strength, Xiao Man initiated the self-destruct program, and photonic blood turned into chains to bind the core: "Do it!" The moment Chu Yun swung his blade down, twelve shadows descended from the end of the starry sea - the higher dimensional Council of Gardeners descended, their pupils forming a veto matrix.
The countdown refreshed in the starry sky:
Protocol core damage 89%... Activating final defense...
The remnants of Xiao Man's body in Chu Yun's arms suddenly trembled lightly, and his fingertips traced the coordinates in his palm-
Earth October 23rd, 2023 AD 03:47, Shanghai Quantum Laboratory Ventilation Ducts
The mother's mechanical heart suddenly burst open, and half of the chip that flew out was engraved with the handwriting of childhood Chu Yun:
"I'm sorry, mom."
The sea of stars began to collapse towards the core, and the voices of the council members overlapped and boomed, "Candidate Chu Yun, you have qualified for adjudication-"
"Choose to reboot, or end all."
Chu Yun gripped the chip tightly and saw his childhood self crawling through the ventilation ducts. At the end of the pipe, the five-year-old Dr. Lin held a syringe, the liquid dripping from the needle glowing a mechanical blue in the moonlight.