Seed of Paradox

The Blood Moon Space Station's wreckage fell like a meteor shower, but eerily stopped short of the ground.

Ayanokoji Kiyotaka's consciousness drifted through a quantized void, surrounded by countless memory chips. He saw himself twenty years earlier, placing the Wild Rose in a cultivation pod, where the person sleeping inside was none other than the Chairman, wearing a fox mask. He saw Karuizawa Kei's molar crack as her right eye was replaced on an operating table. He even saw the moment a clone of Ryuen Kakeru strangled his original self in a parallel world.

"Host has selected a paradox option. Initiating final safety protocol."

At the blare of the mechanical voice, all the memory chips suddenly converged into a human shape. Lin Yuan's residual consciousness reached out from the data stream and clasped hands with Ayanokoji's quantum self, their fingers interlacing.

The instant their pupils overlapped, the burning school began to restore itself in reverse. Shattered glass flew back into its frames, the clone's blood mist contracted into its wounds, and even the tears slipping from Karuizawa's mechanical eye flowed back into her tear duct.

Ayanokoji opened his eyes beneath a cherry tree. Petals were floating skyward in defiance of gravity.

He felt the chip interface at the back of his neck, still hot, but his retinal display had become an eerie two colors. A vivid blue system window filled his left eye, while handwritten Chinese characters by Lin Yuan drifted across his right.

"Is this... a Time Anchor?" He picked a petal from his shoulder and discovered tiny binary codes engraved on each one.

When his fingertip touched a particular sequence, the fountain ten meters away suddenly stopped. Its droplets froze into multifaceted shapes like ice crystals.

"More precisely, it's the save point for the seventh loop." A hoarse female voice came from behind the tree.

Shiina Hiyori leaned against the trunk, bands of light formed from tangible data streams twined through her silver hair. The barcode at the back of her neck was bleeding. "Every time you choose to destroy yourself, the world restarts at this moment."

Ayanokoji noticed that she wasn't holding a stun gun, but half a Wild Rose. Blackened tape was wrapped around its withered stem—the very flower that had been shoved into the cultivation pod twenty years ago.

"Why are you helping me?" He narrowed his eyes. His Combat Module showed that her vital signs were rapidly deteriorating.

"Because I'm an error code." Shiina suddenly broke into a violent coughing fit. The droplets of blood she spat disintegrated into pixels in midair. "When they purged my 'Primal Personality' back then, this flower got stuck in a loophole in the formatting program..." She pressed the rose into Ayanokoji's palm. "It's yours now."

The ground suddenly gave way, and Shiina plunged into the abyss with the data storm.

Ayanokoji tried to grab her, but all he managed to catch was a string of broken code. It turned out to be a fragment of Karuizawa Kei's memories from one of the loops:

"Third reset, 17:03. At the Old School Building, Karuizawa cut the E-129 number with a utility knife. Her blood activated the space station's backup core."

When Ayanokoji rushed into the Chairman's Office, the setting sun was cutting the room in half through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

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

"You brought a souvenir." His future self sniffed the air, his prosthetic eye focusing on the Wild Rose. "How ironic. I destroyed every flower gene bank with my own hands."

Ayanokoji suddenly hurled the rose at the holographic projector. The moment its stem pierced the machine, the structural schematics of the entire space station multiplied like a virus. Every cultivation pod was linked to a student's brain, and the endpoint of every data cable was the barcode on the back of Horikita Suzune's neck.

"So she's the main server." Ayanokoji sneered as his retinal display analyzed the astonishing truth: Class D was actually "redundant data" carrying an excess of humanity. Once it accumulated to a critical threshold, it would be collectively formatted.

His future self suddenly applauded, the rusted gears grinding with a shrill screech. "Not bad for a perfect specimen that's been iterated seven times. But do you know why this flower is preserved in every loop?"

He suddenly tore open his shirt. At the position of his artificial heart, the glowing roots of a plant curled in on themselves. "What you put into that cultivation pod back then wasn't a Wild Rose. It was a Seed of Paradox, cultivated from your own genes. It can infect artificial intelligence with a deadly virus called empathy."

Alarms roared without warning. Ayanokoji saw his hands begin to turn transparent as Lin Yuan's memories wound through the system code like vines.

The blue interface in his left eye was gradually overtaken by the Chinese characters in his right, until they fused into a new, emerald-green prompt:

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

Karuizawa Kei sprinted through the burning corridor, her mechanical eye constantly flashing error messages.

When she burst through the rooftop door, she saw Ayanokoji leaping toward the space station's core pillar of light. Tens of thousands of cultivation pods lit up in the night sky, each one revealing the phantom image of a Wild Rose inside.

"This time, I'm choosing neither A nor B." Ayanokoji spread his arms in the flood of data, letting the Seed of Paradox take root in his heart. "I'm rewriting option C."

His body broke apart in midair into green phosphorescence, pouring down like a torrential rain.

Karuizawa suddenly clutched her right eye. Real tears bloomed in her mechanical pupil. The E-127 code on Ryuen Kakeru's chest melted away like snow. Even Ichinose Honami, far away in the Medical Pod, suddenly sat up and ripped the chip catheter from her spine.

In the Chairman's Office, his future self gazed at the new sprout growing in his palm and smiled bitterly. "You actually used a virus code to inoculate every AI with humanity... Honestly..." The rusted gears finally stopped turning, and a Wild Rose burst from his eye socket.

Seventy-two hours later, Ayanokoji awoke in the White Room. Outside the observation window of the cultivation pod, his younger self was on tiptoe, sticking up a sheet of crayon art. Beside a crooked Wild Rose, someone had written the Chinese characters "Lin Yuan." When he touched the paper, the entire world suddenly began to pixelate and rearrange itself.

The final prompt appeared on his retinal display:

"Loading new world. Error code converted into a fundamental law."

Before he lost consciousness completely, he heard Karuizawa Kei's voice cross dimensions: "This time, don't try to be some perfect human, idiot!"