Part 3
Lin Xi stood before the shattered mirror, the star map still etched into her retinas, her ears ringing with static. Her hand had unknowingly clenched the front of Lu Yan's coat until the acrid scent of something burning reached her nose. She looked down—then froze.
A faint, glowing fluid was seeping from her palm, its color unnaturally iridescent. Where it touched Lu Yan's jacket, the fabric blistered and corroded, leaving behind clusters of pinprick holes that shimmered like scattered stardust.
"This... this is what you meant by 'resonance collapse'?" Lin Xi's voice was dry, her throat tight.
Her eyes swept over the floor, now littered with shards of mirror. Every fragment reflected a version of herself—but none were quite the same. Some were crying. Some expressionless. And one... was smiling at her.
"These angles of reflection—" she inhaled sharply, "—they violate the laws of physics."
Lu Yan grabbed her wrist, using his sleeve to hastily wipe away the luminous fluid. His expression darkened.
"The quantum tunneling effect in your body is accelerating. It's a form of high-dimensional interference."
His watch snapped open of its own accord, projecting a holographic interface. The Fibonacci sequence spiraled wildly across the screen. A blinking metric in the corner read:
Biological Clock Drift: 17.3%
"Your biological clock is detaching from real-world time," Lu Yan said softly. "Which means your 'anchor point' is destabilizing. If it's not contained, you'll become part of a multi-layered overlay. A fractured self across timelines."
Lin Xi stared at the fluctuating numbers, her mind roaring in chaos. Her nails dug into her palm, the pain grounding her. With a steadying breath, she spun around, grabbed the analysis scanner from the table, and stalked toward the console.
"Nice speech," she muttered. "But I trust data more than poetry."
The moment the chip connected to the port, the studio was plunged into darkness. A split-second later, lightning ripped through the sky, a thunderclap rattled the windows, and a signal tower in the distance erupted in a burst of sparks. The lights flickered. Lu Yan's voice was lost in the electrical distortion. She saw his lips moving—but couldn't hear a word.
Then the data loaded.
A familiar constellation lit up the screen—the Starfall Trajectory she had painted countless times before. But this time, it was reconstructing itself. Layer by layer, a 3D core emerged from the fragmented structures, forming what looked like the heart of a celestial map.
Holding her breath, Lin Xi tapped open the deepest encrypted directory. One folder. Just one. Its name:
ORIGIN
The moment she clicked it, the largest shard of the broken mirror began to levitate, its edges glowing with a distinct redshift—like light trying to flee gravity.
Reflected in the shard was an image of her—but this version of herself was already speaking. No sound came out—until the words echoed directly inside her mind:
[Memory host confirmed. Origin protocol initiated.]
She stumbled backward, slamming into the wall behind her. Eyes wide, she stared as the shard floated toward her of its own volition and hovered inches from her face.
"It's… identifying me," she whispered.
"Your memory anchor has been unlocked," Lu Yan said quietly. His voice was strained. "This chip isn't a key. It's a fuse."
"A fuse... for what?"
"You were the first successful subject of the Sensory Receptor Experiment," he said, his gaze dropping to her birthmark. "That mark—it's not a scar. It's an interface."
Lin Xi's eyes flew open wide. She opened her mouth to speak—but a wave of dizziness slammed into her. It was as if seawater had rushed into her ears, cutting off all sound.
And in that instant, she saw:
—A crying infant in a sealed laboratory.
—A corridor bathed in cold blue light, lined with walls of bio-containment tanks.
—The burning core of a massive meteorite, cradled in her own palm.
—Herself, curled in a zero-gravity capsule, gasping for breath as starlight spiraled in reverse…
Then—nothing.
The shard dropped with a crack, breaking into even finer fragments that sparkled like dust.
Lin Xi slowly fell to her knees. Her fingers grazed the floor and closed around something solid.
She lifted it.
A fingernail-sized sliver of the chip, still faintly glowing—its microcircuitry pulsing with residual light.
Her chest heaved. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again, her gaze was different. Clear. Resolved.
"I want to know—" she said through gritted teeth, "what exactly did your 'Aurora Project' do to me?"
Lu Yan didn't answer right away. He simply looked at her, as if this was the moment he'd been waiting for.
"You want the truth?" he asked. "Then be prepared to pay the cost it demands."
Water began dripping from the ceiling. The studio lights finally died.
In the darkness, only the chip fragment still glowed—faint and ghostly blue.
And for the first time, Lin Xi realized—
She wasn't chosen by the universe.
She was created by it.