In the tremors akin to the throes of the universe, the cluster of civilization tombstones was reenacting a reversed creation myth. The Mayan crystal skulls recombined into living priests, the Trisolaran fleet tore free from the two-dimensional plane and restored to form, and even the meteorite that caused the dinosaur extinction reversed its trajectory back into space. Meanwhile, our submarine was being torn apart by the creation storm — the metal hull peeled like an eggshell, revealing the writhing biological tissues within.
"Hold on tight!" I yelled, grabbing the exposed cables. The teenager Lu Zhao hovered in the center of the control cabin, his body in a semi-transparent state. The ouroboros brand on his chest was sucking in nebulae, and each breath exhaled ancient hieroglyphs.
Suddenly, a crack split open on Xiaoyu's bald head, and crystal tentacles stretched out, plunging into the submarine's neural plexus. "The ship is evolving... It wants to eat us!" As if confirming her words, the deck suddenly rolled up, swallowing Lao Wang's sports shoe into the fluorescent, fleshy wall.
My mechanical arm from 2045 suddenly transformed into a welding torch. "This is the Egg of Entropy Reversal! We're trapped in the womb of a new universe!" The moment he cut through the fleshy wall, what spurted out wasn't blood — it was viscous time serum, in which unborn civilizations floated: a steampunk Tang Dynasty Chang'an, a photosynthetic Terracotta Army Mausoleum, and future children keeping black holes as pets...
Seven compound eyes suddenly opened at the wound in the fleshy wall. Each pupil reflected the afterimage of a girl in a red dress, but they wore costumes from different civilizations: Egyptian priestly robes, Victorian crinolines, cyborg armor... They sneered in unison: "The god-slayer shall become the embryo of the new god."
Lu Zhao suddenly opened his eyes, and clockwork pupils shot out lances of light to shatter the compound eyes. In the flying crystal fragments, we saw a horrifying truth: those compound eyes were actually parts from the monitoring device at Mother's deathbed! And the pulsing core deep within the fleshy wall was the umbilical cord remnant after the Main System's fetus dissipated.
"It's using our memories as nourishment!" Xiaoyu's tentacles were suddenly swallowed by the fleshy wall, and the severe pain made the star map patterns on her body glow brightly. She accessed the Egg of Entropy Reversal's "menu": my memories of subway commutes, Doctor Lin's trauma from a failed surgery, and even Lao Wang's first love letter lost in 1999 — these pains were incubating something.
The hull suddenly contracted violently, squeezing us into the neural center. Here floated billions of memory dewdrops, each containing a "Lu Zhao"'s moment of death. In the largest dewdrop, the five-year-old me was sinking into a sea of code with a teddy bear, while the girl in red tore her mechanical spine frantically on the shore...
"Rewriting memories can rewrite reality!" I slammed into that dewdrop. The moment my fingertips touched it, all of Lu Zhao's death scenes suddenly pieced together into the delivery room where Mother gave birth. The beeps of the ECG monitor transformed into a code: [Those who endure great pain shall see the truth].
The fleshy wall suddenly stabbed out neural bundles, piercing through us. A vascular-like catheter drilled into my temple, and twenty-eight years of life were squeezed like by a hydraulic press: the humiliation of being bullied by colleagues, the confusion of picking up coins on the subway, the despair of watching Doctor Lin dissipate... When the pain exceeded the threshold, the catheter suddenly erupted with rainbow syrup — the scent of the painkillers Doctor Lin often took!
In agony, the teenager Lu Zhao completely quantumized. His body decomposed into light particles, reorganizing into an ouroboros nebula in the cabin. At the center of the nebula spun the primitive code Mother had engraved on my ribs!
"Mom is in a higher dimension..." The voice of Quantum Lu Zhao directly vibrated our brainstems, "She's being sacrificed as a new god!"
The fleshy wall burst open, revealing the terrifying scene beyond the flesh-and-blood universe: countless cloned bodies of the girl in red were dragging Mother's consciousness with chains, nailing her to an altar cast from civilization tombstones. Beneath the altar, Xiaoyu's grandfather and a Shang Dynasty priest were writing the sacrifice program in oracle bone inscriptions.
"Not a chance!" Lao Wang's polaroid burst with strong light. He tore open his tracksuit, revealing time scars all over his body — each scar was left by his repeated experiences of the 1999 apocalypse. These scars peeled off automatically, transforming into golden darts shooting toward the altar.
Quantum Lu Zhao swept the entire submarine into the altar. At the moment of impact, I saw Mother turn and smile. Her lips moved soundlessly, transmitting a message beyond dimensions:
"Eat the god's rules."
When light engulfed everything, I tasted iron. Looking down, I found my hand gnawing on the altar's rule inscriptions, with the broken light of galaxies flowing between my teeth.
(End of Chapter 13)