"Your mother's suicide note was written in viral RNA." Ye Shen's fingers sparked over holographic keys, genetic sequencers projecting Su Yao's mother amidst DNA spirals. "She was cultivating Chrono-Cocoons twenty years ago!"
Su Yao slammed him against bleeding walls, shattered glass crystallizing mid-air. "Shut up! You never knew her torment!"
"I heard her final seven minutes." Ye's QR-code tattoo pulsed cyan. "New Era used her brainwaves as firewall keys. Her screams... tenfold worse than Lin's metamorphosis."
Lin's prosthetic clamped their throats. Quantum parasites writhed beneath his bulging eyes: "Seventeen seconds... southeast breach..."
Li's lightning javelin seared the air behind them. A quantum Su Wan doppelgänger collapsed, bridal gown sprouting tentacles tipped with micro-Earths.
"Don't you see, darling?" Seven Su Wans chorused through pipe echoes. "Every Cocoon needs a bride's sacrifice, from Cambrian to Cyber Age..."
Lin's mutated arm tore open her chest, retrieving a motherboard core. "Hologram decoy!"
"Worse." Li exposed his ouroboros brand. "These are causality echoes - 300 timelines overlapping."
Walls liquefied into quantum tides, revealing caskets of era-dressed Su Wans. New Era corpses carved safehouse coordinates with bone daggers.
Ye hung crucified in neural cabling, irises streaming binary. The Chief Scientist's voice boomed from his throat: "Vessel 007 synced. Initiate hatching."
"Ye! Remember my pufferfish mask?" Su Yao tweezed thrashing cables, serum boiling in her vial. "You joked about nitrous oxide..."
Ye's quantum tears evaporated into code. "...said I'd hack like a clown..." He ripped glowing data from his chest. "Go! My cortex's their incubator!"
A glass pod descended, liquid cores drowning Ye. Li's lightning accelerated the crystallization. Lin wrenched open vents to find cockroaches mid-petrification.
"He's right." Li dragged Su Yao backward, barrier disintegrating. "Ye's consciousness merged with the Mainframe. Now he's..."
"I am the Gatekeeper." Pod-Ye's eyes swirled with galaxies. "...and the sacrifice."
Screens flared alive, showing twelve cracking eggs. The first oozed stained-glass fractures, birthing cacophony of infant wails and armageddon.
In the cathedral
The crucifix bore Su Wan's face. Bloodlight from kaleidoscope windows warped worshippers into flesh pipe organs. Quantum storms conducted *Bridal Chorus* through screaming pipes.
"Our wedding ring." Pulpit-Su Wan raised a light-devouring core. "Each Cocoon requires seven betrayals. Isn't that right, Sergeant Lin?"
Lin's quantum-vined arm bore his dog tag. "How... the desert mission..."
"Your black-market surgeon..." She plucked an eyeball-key. "...was my 320th mutation."
Li's javelin through her forehead emerged from Lin's back, spewing memory-sand. Su Yao pressed scalpel to Su Wan's throat: "Return my mother's memories!"
"Foolish child." Neural tendrils caressed her wrist. "Your mother was the First Bride. She volunteered..."
The ground collapsed. They plunged into a vascular chamber where twelve hearts orbited a quantum globe, each tethered to orbital eggs.
"Choose, Beichen." Quantum Su Wans chorused, lightning-rod hairpins extending. "Kill all mes, or nurture the new epoch."
Lin tore parasitic cores from his ribs: "They feed on trauma!"
Ye's voice echoed through the globe: "Eggs are reverse-time cocoons! Each holds an extinction event! Your countdown isn't a warning... It's a fetal monitor!"
Su Yao's scalpel gleamed with genome maps: "Mother's serum disassembles quantum structures! But needs... living bio-resonance!" She injected her heart, jade light flooding the chamber.
Li's power collapsed into singularity. In the blinding glare, he witnessed the primal truth - his younger self fastening a core necklace on Su Wan as twelve meteors fell.
The Pacific eye-blink storm dilated. As the first egg shattered, all Luo City devices broadcast infant cries. New Era Tower quantum-collapsed into bridal shrapnel.
Ye's fading data screamed: "They seek recursion! Seventh civilization reboot!"
Su Yao's crystalizing body smiled: "Cocoons are tombstones... and cradles..." Her serum flooded the quantum Earth.
Lin crushed the last core: "To hell with new mankind!" Memory-sand from his eyes repelled quantum tides.
Li embraced dissolving Su Wan, driving lightning-rod pins through their hearts: "This time... we rewrite..."
Geological bells boomed. The seventh chime detonated clouds, compressing all eggs into global azure rain.
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