Radiation Prisoner

At the heart of the nebula, cracks suddenly split the Pruning Shears' tombstone, and glowing blue mist seeped through them.

The instant Bai Mei's roots touched the mist, his consciousness was dragged into the Hawking Radiation Flow. There was no time or space here, only fragments of Horikita's consciousness drifting like will-o'-the-wisps, each repeating the dying words of a different universe.

"Find...the Radiation Singularity..." A fragment suddenly collided with his Quantum Body. "Tsukishiro hid it...before the black hole evaporated..."

Before it could finish, billions of mechanical compound eyes suddenly opened in the radiation flow.

The advanced civilization's Capture Net materialized, resembling Pruning Shears magnified a trillion times. Crushed remnants of civilizations streamed between its teeth.

"Test subject γ-00000, you have violated Article 7 of the Observer Convention: illegal storage of original consciousness." The compound eyes arranged themselves into a Star-Patterned Mask. "Now, hand over the parasitic program in the Hawking Radiation."

Bai Mei's poisonous stinger pierced the mask's cracks, only to be scorched by the radiation flow. He suddenly realized the advanced civilization didn't truly covet Horikita, but the "Mother Code" carried within her consciousness—the ultimate virus that Tsukishiro had spent his life pursuing, capable of crossing the boundary between reality and unreality.

Hirata's swarm defense network detected an anomaly: the civilizations marked with the Civilization Tattoo had suddenly gone berserk all at once.

Flesh-and-blood flowers blossomed on the gears of mechanical civilizations, while quantum chips grew inside the cell nuclei of biological civilizations.

The deadliest mutation occurred in the Seventh Universe. After the wildflowers there devoured the stars, miniature fleets of Pruning Shears emerged from their blossoms.

"The Civilization Tattoos are controlling their hosts in reverse!" Hirata's swarm split off scouts, but the Mutated Wildflower's vines assimilated them. "Bai Mei! Your aesthetic experiment is creating monsters..."

The radiation flow severed the connection. Bai Mei's Quantum Body reassembled inside the Capture Net, injecting venom into the Radiation Flow Rift. "You knew all along that the tattoos could mutate...and you deliberately let me mark those civilizations!"

Pleasure-filled data streams seeped from the Star-Patterned Mask's compound eyes. "Before pruning a garden, you have to let the weeds grow a little. That makes the burning all the more spectacular."

The Lantern Keeper's wildflower field suddenly withered, and the Poetry Scroll's glow gathered on the leaves into a distress signal.

As Bai Mei's roots pierced the dimensional barrier, he witnessed a horrifying sight: the wildflowers he had once nurtured were pinning the Lantern Keeper to the Klein Bottle Totem, drawing his Quantum Ember out with their roots.

"Why?" Bai Mei's stinger severed the roots.

The Lantern Keeper's left eye had already crumbled to ash. "I made a mistake... I used Horikita's Poetry Scroll as fertilizer, but forgot that the verses themselves carried genes of rebellion..."

The largest wildflower suddenly spoke, its voice mingling the frequencies of Kiyotaka and Tsukishiro. "We are the heirs to your ideals—absolutely free, absolutely exclusive." Its petals unfurled, revealing a Star-Patterned Mask writhing inside. "Now it's time to prune the obsolete Gardener."

Bai Mei captured a crucial fragment in the radiation flow and finally pieced together the whole truth: the embryo Horikita had sealed away long ago had been made by combining Tsukishiro's mechanical core with Kiyotaka's quantum remnants.

She had transformed herself into a living vessel and written the embryo's code into the Hawking Radiation before the black hole evaporated. That was the true target of the advanced civilization's hunt.

"You are both a weapon and a vaccine." Horikita's final fragment merged into his Quantum Body. "Now, choose: use the code to destroy the advanced civilization, or..."

The radiation flow suddenly froze, and the Star-Patterned Mask's compound eyes shattered. Bai Mei saw Hirata's swarm self-destruct in the real universe. The swarm's ashes coalesced into a giant Klein Bottle, temporarily blocking the advanced civilization's observation channel.

"Go!" Hirata's remaining consciousness shrieked through the radiation. "Go to the Void Flower Field...there's something there..."

The Void Flower Field had become a hell where flesh and machinery intertwined. Bai Mei's roots pierced the Mother Flower's core and released Horikita's Mother Code.

The wildflowers abruptly stopped attacking, and the Star-Patterned Masks on their petals began to fall away.

"Detecting a higher-level directive..." The Mother Flower's quantum processor overloaded. "Logical conflict...error!"

Bai Mei tore off his own quantum tendrils and, dipping them in venom, inscribed a fragment of the Poetry Scroll on a petal. "You wanted freedom, didn't you? Then taste what it's like to have no restraints."

The wildflower field shuddered violently. The Mother Flower's roots suddenly grew in reverse, piercing the advanced civilization's dimensional barrier.

The Civilization Tattoos on all the marked civilizations glowed at once, projecting a unified signal across the cosmic tapestry:

[Application to join the Observer Council]

[Gift: Mother Code]

The Star-Patterned Mask disintegrated in the council chamber. Bai Mei's venom coursed through the Mother Flower's roots into the dimensional core, and the advanced civilization's observation network instantly went dark.

Countless imprisoned "Gardeners" broke free, including the quantum state of an elderly Kiyotaka.

"Well done," he said, picking up Bai Mei's broken stinger. "But the real battle has only just begun."

The moment the stinger pierced the council's core, Bai Mei saw the ultimate truth: the so-called advanced civilization was itself no more than a bonsai belonging to another, more ancient existence.

And the true purpose of the Mother Code was to turn all observers into the observed.

Three months later, the Civilization Tattoos of the newborn universe began to fade. Hirata's swarm ashes reformed into a tombstone in the nebula, bearing a warning Bai Mei had carved with his stinger:

"When you gaze into the garden,

remember that you, too, are rooted in the soil."

The Lantern Keeper's remains were broken down by the wildflowers, yet a lightless bud sprouted among their roots. Horikita's Poetry Scroll flowed across its petals, while in a dimension unseen by any observer, Kiyotaka was forging the Pruning Shears into a Sowing Hoe.