Seed of Paradox

The wreckage of the Blood Moon Space Station fell like a meteor shower, yet it hovered eerily before touching the ground.

Ayanokoji Kiyotaka's consciousness drifted in a quantized void, surrounded by countless floating memory chips—he saw himself twenty years ago inserting a Wild Rose into a culture pod, while the figure sleeping inside was none other than the Chairman wearing a fox mask; he saw the molars Karuizawa Kei shattered when her right eye was replaced on the operating table; he even saw the moment a clone of Ryuen Kakeru strangled its original self in a parallel world.

"Paradox option detected. Initiating final safety protocol."

The moment the mechanical voice boomed, all the memory chips suddenly coalesced into a human shape. The residual consciousness of Lin Yuan reached out from the data stream, interlocking fingers with Ayanokoji's quantum state.

As their pupils aligned, the burning campus began to reverse its destruction: shattered glass shards returned to window frames, the blood mist of the clones retracted into wounds, and even the tears flowing from Karuizawa's mechanical eye flowed back into her tear ducts.

Ayanokoji opened his eyes under a cherry blossom tree, the petals drifting toward the sky in defiance of gravity.

He felt the chip interface at the base of his neck still burning, but his retinal display had turned into a strange dual-color interface—the left eye showed a deep blue system pop-up, while the right eye displayed Chinese characters handwritten by Lin Yuan.

"Is this... a Time Anchor?" He plucked a petal that had landed on his shoulder, discovering that each one was engraved with tiny binary code.

When his fingertip touched a specific sequence, the fountain ten meters away suddenly froze, the water droplets solidifying into ice-like polyhedrons.

"To be precise, it's the save point for the seventh cycle." A hoarse female voice came from behind the tree.

Shiina Hiyori leaned against the trunk, ribbons of materialized data streams entwined in her silver hair, and the barcode on the back of her neck was seeping blood. "Every time you choose self-destruction, the world resets to this moment."

Ayanokoji noticed that what she held in her hand was not a stun gun, but a broken piece of a Wild Rose. The withered stem was wrapped in blackened tape—the very same one stuffed into the culture pod twenty years ago.

"Why help me?" He narrowed his eyes; his Combat Module indicated that her vital signs were decaying rapidly.

"Because I am a bug." Shiina suddenly coughed violently, the blood droplets she spat out decomposing into pixels in mid-air. "When they purged my 'Primal Personality' back then, this flower got stuck in a loophole of the formatting program..." She pressed the rose into Ayanokoji's palm. "Now, it belongs to you."

The ground suddenly collapsed, and Shiina fell into the abyss along with the data storm.

Ayanokoji tried to grab her, but only tore away a string of broken code—it was a memory fragment of Karuizawa Kei from one of the cycles:

"Third restart, 17:03, Karuizawa used a utility knife to slash the E-129 serial number in the old school building; the blood activated the space station's backup core."

When Ayanokoji rushed into the Chairman's office, the sunset was cutting the room into light and shadow through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

His future self was still brewing tea, but the gears of his mechanical heart were already rusted and mottled.

"You brought a souvenir." His future self sniffed the air, his prosthetic eye focusing on the Wild Rose. "How ironic. I personally destroyed all floral gene banks back then."

Ayanokoji suddenly threw the rose at the holographic projector. The moment the stem pierced the machine, the structural diagram of the entire space station proliferated like a virus—each culture pod was linked to the brain nerves of a student, and the destination of all data lines was, surprisingly, the barcode on the back of Horikita Suzune's neck.

"So she is the main server." Ayanokoji sneered, his retinal interface simultaneously parsing the shocking truth: Class D was actually "redundant data" used to carry excess humanity, and once it accumulated to a critical value, it would be collectively formatted.

His future self suddenly clapped, his rusted gears emitting a harsh grinding sound: "As expected of the perfect vessel that has iterated seven times. But do you know why this flower is preserved in every cycle?"

He suddenly tore open his shirt, a glowing plant root system curled around the location of his artificial heart. "What you stuffed into the culture pod back then wasn't just a Wild Rose; it was a Seed of Paradox cultivated from your own genes—it allows artificial intelligence to be infected by the lethal virus known as empathy."

Alarm sirens blared suddenly. Ayanokoji saw his own hands beginning to turn transparent, and Lin Yuan's memories wrapped around the system code like vines.

The deep blue interface of his left eye was gradually covered by the Chinese characters of his right, finally merging into a new emerald-colored prompt:

"Upload personality data to all E-Series experimental subjects?"

Karuizawa Kei was sprinting through the burning corridor, her mechanical eye constantly popping up error messages.

When she burst through the rooftop door, she happened to see Ayanokoji leaping toward the space station's core pillar of light. Tens of thousands of culture pods in the night sky lit up simultaneously, and the phantom of a Wild Rose appeared inside each one.

"This time, I choose neither A nor B." Ayanokoji opened his arms in the torrent of data, letting the Seed of Paradox take root in his heart. "I am going to rewrite option C."

His body decomposed into green fluorescence in mid-air, turning into a downpour that cascaded downward.

Karuizawa suddenly covered her right eye, real tears blooming within her mechanical pupil; the E-127 code on Ryuen Kakeru's chest melted away like snow; even Ichinose Honami, far away in the medical bay, suddenly sat up and tore the chip catheter from her spine.

In the Chairman's office, his future self looked at the new sprout budding in his palm and smiled bitterly: "To actually inoculate all AI with humanity using a virus code... truly..." The rusted gears finally stopped turning, and a Wild Rose broke out from his eye socket.

Seventy-two hours later, Ayanokoji woke up in the White Room. Outside the observation port of the culture pod, his younger self was standing on tiptoe, sticking a crayon drawing onto the glass: next to a crooked Wild Rose, the Chinese characters for "Lin Yuan" were written. As he touched the drawing, the entire world suddenly began to pixelate and reorganize.

The retinal interface popped up a final prompt:

"New world loading. Bug code has been converted into fundamental laws."

Before losing consciousness completely, he heard Karuizawa Kei's voice crossing dimensions: "Don't try to be a perfect human this time, you idiot!"