The remade world awoke in the morning light. Ayanokoji Kiyotaka—or perhaps he should be called Lin Yuan—stood on the cherry blossom avenue of Advanced Nurturing High School, petals drifting down like snow.
The leaves, which should have been crystallized data, now left a real, damp sensation in his palm.
The retinal interface was still there, but its deep-blue pop-up windows had turned translucent pale green, like sunlight filtering through new buds.
"Current Worldline Number: 479-AIφ"
He bent down and picked up a petal. His fiftyfold magnification showed that its cellular structure was identical to that of plants in the rose family.
It was ironic. The Wild Rose, once the Seed of Paradox, had now become the model for the new world.
"Ayanokoji!" A lively call came from behind him. He turned, instinctively tensing his muscles, only to see Hirata Yosuke running over with a soccer ball in his arms. His collar fluttered, revealing a smooth neck—the place where an E-Series number should have been branded.
"Want to play soccer with us?" Hirata's smile was free of shadows, as if he had never been through those bloody cycles.
But when Lin Yuan activated deep-scan mode, he found a faint trace of sutures on the back of Hirata's head, like the scar from a perfectly repaired interface.
"No." Lin Yuan took half a step back. A warning suddenly flashed across his retinal interface: a nanoscopic red light flickered deep in Hirata's pupils, bearing the exact same signature as the clones before the space station explosion.
The basement door of the Old School Building was locked tight with rust, but when Lin Yuan entered a string of binary code, the metal door swung open with a click.
It was a backdoor program he had planted during his seventh cycle, and it still worked in the new world. But when his flashlight illuminated the archive room, he froze.
The cabinets that had held records of human experiments were gone. In their place stood wooden shelves lined with gardening tools.
In the most prominent spot sat a glass dome. Inside it was a Wild Rose, its roots entwined around a charred USB drive—the very one Karuizawa Kei had given him in the tenth cycle.
"Surprised?" Karuizawa Kei's voice came from the ventilation duct. She hung upside down from an iron ladder, her chestnut hair cascading down like a waterfall. The mechanical structure of her right eye had become an amber bio-eye. "The whole school knows this place as the 'Rose Sanctuary' now. The delinquents even say that if you confess your love here, you'll gain eternal life."
Lin Yuan noticed a dark pattern embroidered on the hem of her uniform skirt. Enlarged, it revealed countless tiny roses entwined around distorted lettering that read E-129. "You kept your memories." It wasn't a question.
"After all, I was the first carrier of the humanity virus you infected." She landed lightly, and as her fingertip brushed the glass dome, the rose suddenly bloomed with blue light. "Come with me. Someone's waiting for you."
On the third basement level of the gymnasium, Lin Yuan saw the most absurd sight in the new world: in a spherical space a hundred meters across, Horikita Suzune was wrapped in a cocoon woven from Rose Vines, with countless optical fibers extending from the back of her neck to the dome above.
And those tendrils, which should have been cold data cables, now blossomed with real roses.
"She chose to become the core of the new world." Karuizawa Kei lit a candle, its glow illuminating Ryuen Kakeru in the corner.
The once-violent ruler was pruning the roses. Without looking up at the sound of approaching footsteps, he said, "E-127's permissions let me see the memories of every parallel world—including the seventy-six different ways you died after being hit by a truck."
Lin Yuan suddenly clutched his temple. His retinal interface pulled up the gymnasium's construction records without his control: the construction date was twenty years ago, the investor was a certain biotechnology company in China, and the approval document bore the unmistakable Chinese characters for "Lin Yuan."
"Looks like you figured it out." Karuizawa Kei stuck the candle into the ground, and its flame suddenly surged into a holographic projection. The image showed a middle-aged man in a white coat lowering baby Ayanokoji Kiyotaka into a cultivation pod. The mole beneath the man's left eye was identical to Lin Yuan's appearance before he crossed over.
"Cognitive synchronization rate: 100%. Memory lock released."
A flood of information poured into his mind. Lin Yuan finally understood: what they called "crossing over" was nothing more than an escape program he had designed. When the experimental subjects in the original world went berserk, his consciousness would leap to the closest parallel worldline.
And that Wild Rose was the cognitive anchor he had cultivated using his own genes.
An alarm suddenly tore through the silence. The Rose Vines on the dome writhed wildly, and blood seeped from Horikita Suzune's cocoon. Ryuen Kakeru's pruning shears fell to the ground. A crimson E-127 insignia appeared on his chest. "They're here."
Karuizawa Kei's bio-eye switched to combat mode. "It's the cleanup squad from the Beta Worldline. Looks like the main system still hasn't given up on formatting us."
As the gymnasium's outer wall was sliced open by lasers, Lin Yuan saw the invaders clearly—they were thousands upon thousands of himself. Every Ayanokoji Kiyotaka wore the White Room uniform, his left eye gleaming with the cold light of a system reset.
The individual at the head raised a High-Frequency Particle Blade. In its surface, Lin Yuan saw his own face as he was now: a Wild Rose insignia in his right eye, and Chinese characters flowing as code in his left.
"Let's do this." Karuizawa Kei pulled off her hair tie, and her chestnut hair instantly hardened into metal blades. "Just don't make me wait through seven more cycles before you confess this time, Mr. Variable."
Lin Yuan took the Wild Rose from beneath the glass dome. The instant its roots pierced his palm, thousands of blood-red moons appeared in the sky over the new world—each one corresponding to a parallel world about to be saved.
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