The moment the High-Frequency Particle Blade cleaved through the clone, a blood-red warning exploded across Ayanokoji Kiyotaka's retinal display.
The severed limbs didn't bleed. Instead, streams of fluorescent blue data gushed from them, coalescing in midair into a system prompt he knew all too well:
"Memory formatting forcibly initiated—countdown: 3 minutes, 29 seconds."
His future self continued stirring his black tea without a hint of haste. His mechanical eye reflected the station's cold light.
"Painful, isn't it?" He scooped up a cube of crystallized sugar. When it dropped into the tea, it rang like metal striking metal. "The first time I saw this option, it took me a full ten minutes to make up my mind."
Ayanokoji staggered, bracing himself against the desk as his fingertips dug deep into the wood grain.
Lin Yuan's memories were boiling over—the dampness of the rainy season in a small town in China, the smell of instant noodles while staying up late to binge anime, even the truck's high beams he'd seen just before crossing over. The fragments curled and charred in the depths of his consciousness like pages consumed by fire.
"Why... me?" he rasped. Static from misaligned data churned in his throat.
"Because you're the only variable that survived for more than three months."
His future self suddenly threw open his suit jacket. A transparent artificial heart was embedded in his chest, sparks flying between its meshing gears. "Of the other 479 test subjects, some were formatted into idiots. The rest..."
He glanced out the window at the burning campus. Karuizawa Kei was pinned against the fountain by three clones, an electronic patch crackling with electricity on her forehead. "They became Cleaners."
The countdown dropped to 2 minutes, 17 seconds. Ayanokoji suddenly snatched up the paper cutter on the desk and drove it into his wrist. The pain briefly cleared his head—this was a folk remedy from Lin Yuan's memories, using physical pain to fend off a mental breakdown.
Blood dripped onto the keyboard, activating a hidden program. A holographic projection abruptly unfolded:
"White Room 2.0 Project: Screen for the perfect vessel through 479 parallel-world experiments, then mass-produce absolutely rational humans aboard the Blood Moon Space Station."
Familiar scenes flashed across the screen: Horikita Suzune repeating combat drills inside a cultivation pod; Ichinose Honami being forced to watch war footage to test her empathy threshold; even Ryuen Kakeru enduring one hundred thousand cycles of betrayal in a virtual prison.
And every experiment had been monitored by the same figure wearing a fox mask.
"So you found out." At last, a ripple entered his future self's voice. "The so-called Advanced Nurturing High School is nothing but a disguise for a cultivation tank.
"Even your crossing over..." He suddenly reached out and tore open Ayanokoji's shirt. Beneath his collarbone was an E-Series number identical to Karuizawa's. "...was part of the fixed script for the 48th experiment."
An explosion suddenly rang out in the hallway. Ryuen Kakeru, covered in blood, crashed through the doorway. His High-Frequency Particle Blade was broken, but he still clutched the hilt with all his strength.
"Shut up!" He hurled a spherical device at the future version of himself. "If you want to get sentimental, go to hell!"
The instant the device cracked open, Ayanokoji's Combat Module automatically analyzed its contents. It was made up of hundreds of Nanoscale Mechanical Bees, which swarmed over the future version's mechanical heart and tore into it.
Seizing the opportunity, Ryuen grabbed him and ran. "Don't let that countdown fool you. That thing's a two-way trap!"
They sprinted down the burning hallway as clones poured in from every direction like zombies.
Ryuen suddenly ripped open his uniform. A black code was tattooed on his chest, from the same source as Karuizawa's: E-127. "You think only girls get branded?" he said with a savage grin. "Every Class D student is a failed-product dumping ground!"
At 00:59, data streams suddenly seeped from Ayanokoji's left eye.
Only the final fragment of Lin Yuan's memories remained: the latest volume of Classroom of the Elite that he'd read before crossing over, where the author had written in the afterword, "Ayanokoji Kiyotaka is not human." At the time, he'd thought it was just a metaphor. But now...
"Catch!" Karuizawa Kei vaulted over the second-floor railing and slapped a USB drive into his palm.
Her right eye had already been mechanized. Blood-red gears turned within her pupil. "This is what you buried under the cherry tree last week. Time to return it to its rightful owner."
The moment the USB drive plugged into the port at the back of his neck, a torrent of memories flooded in. Ayanokoji finally saw what had happened on that rainy night—it hadn't been an accidental car crash. He'd chosen to lie down in front of the truck.
Because three months before crossing over, a voice had begun whispering to him in his dreams: "Do you want to know the truth about the world?"
The space station began projecting beams of light onto the surface. The students and staff caught in them instantly crystallized, becoming floating data modules. Ayanokoji stood at the top of the clock tower, looking at the final options on his display:
"A. Format Lin Yuan's personality and become the perfect vessel" "B. Preserve memory fragments and initiate the self-destruct program"
A tear glinted in Karuizawa's mechanical eye. "If you pick B, every E-Series test subject will go down with you."
She lifted her skirt. The inside of her thigh was covered in densely packed numbers: E-129 to E-153, each followed by a different date of death.
At 00:07, Ayanokoji suddenly smiled. He remembered the taste of instant noodles on the night before he'd crossed over, and his mother in China always saying, "You have to leave a little humanity in yourself."
As his fingertip touched option B, he spoke softly into the void. "You know what? Humanity's most precious bug is that it'll never learn to be 'absolutely rational.'"
The core of the Blood Moon Space Station suddenly overloaded. In the blaze of the explosion, countless fragments of memory fell like shooting stars.
The last thing Ayanokoji saw in the flood of data was the White Room twenty years ago. His younger self was slipping a Wild Rose through the observation port of a cultivation pod, where the one sleeping inside was...
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