As Lin Xiu made his way toward the surface along the subway tunnel, the glowing hand of his tactical watch danced across his wrist, giving off a cold, ghostly blue light.
9:17. There were still forty-three minutes until the agreed time of ten.
His boots scraped across the damp tracks, and the pooled water splashed fine glimmers around his feet—when a silver-white shadow suddenly flashed through that light, like a snowflake scattered by the wind, leaving behind a faint sense of static in the air.
He whipped around. The armor's thermal imaging system activated instantly, bathing his vision in crimson, but the bend in the tunnel was empty. Only rusted ventilation pipes hung with spiderwebs, swaying gently in the wind with a faint scraping sound.
On the Oracle System's energy-monitoring interface, a pale blue ripple traced a path through the air, like some sort of guiding line.
"Nonphysical dimensional interference signal?" he repeated the system prompt in a low voice. His Adam's apple bobbed, his voice deep and dry.
Three days ago, "M.C." had been engraved on Mia's pen cap at the café. Yesterday, in the laboratory, he had found traces of Nanite Swarm corrosion around the vent—now, this ripple had a 0.3% match with the quantum resonance frequency on Mia's tracker.
The shadow flashed again.
This time, he saw it clearly: a figure in a dark green robe, facing away from him, with specks of starlight falling from its fingertips as though it were scattering glowing trail powder. A faint metallic scent mixed with a cold fragrance filled the air.
Lin Xiu's Nano Armor warmed slightly beneath his skin, an instinctive response to entering a state of alert.
He touched the note hidden in his inner pocket. The scent of lavender still lingered in the gaps of the Nanite Swarm—Mia's perfume, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s eagle insignia, and this inexplicable phantom.
"Either a trap or a key," he said to the air. His voice was filtered through the mask into a mechanical tone with a metallic echo.
When he stepped forward to follow the shadow, the second hand on his tactical watch suddenly reversed half a turn—the Oracle System was warning him of an abnormal flow of time.
The iron ladder at the tunnel exit was rusted. When he was halfway up, the shadow turned into an old bookstore in the alley.
The faded sign swayed in the wind. The words "Brooklyn Library" had lost their paint, like a gnawed crust of bread, its edges curled and peeling, giving off the mingled smell of aged paper and mildew.
The door was unlocked. It let out a piercing creak when he pushed it open, and the stench of mold mixed with rust rushed over him.
Lin Xiu's pupils contracted behind his mask—pale golden symbols drifted between the shelves like ash blown by the wind. Up close, they became spinning hexagrams, and touching them brought a faint electric sting.
"Nonphysical dimensional interference signal detected." The Oracle System's alert was sharper than usual. "Immediate evacuation is recommended."
He did not move.
Nanite Swarm seeped from his fingertips, drawing silver threads through the air as it attempted to capture the symbols' trajectories.
One symbol suddenly collided with a thread. Like a punctured soap bubble, it burst into a small cloud of blue light.
A chill rose along the back of Lin Xiu's neck—in that blue light, he clearly saw the edge of the wormhole torn open by the Chitauri Mothership during the Battle of New York. The energy fluctuations were identical.
"You are not the first anomaly to set foot in this place."
The voice came from above.
Lin Xiu jerked his head up and saw a man floating between the ceiling and the floor. His black cloak billowed like a living thing. There were no eyeballs in his sockets, only a spinning starry sky, as though the entire universe flowed within them.
His armor automatically deployed its shoulder guards, and the Nanite Swarm formed a defensive matrix around him. Yet the man's voice remained clear, carrying a crushing calm. "Whether you can leave depends on whether you are worthy of being known."
Dizziness struck without warning.
Lin Xiu's consciousness felt as though someone had seized it and forced it into deep water. When he opened his eyes again, his surroundings had become an ocean of flowing runes.
Every rune glowed ghostly blue. Touching his skin left a burning, stabbing pain, while the air reeked of ionized scorch.
His armor still existed within Consciousness Space, but its golden patterns had dimmed somewhat—this place's rules seemed to suppress the power of technology.
"Don't believe any logical loopholes."
A woman's voice came from behind him.
Lin Xiu turned and saw Eileen Wu standing atop a wave of runes.
She wore her laboratory coat, its cuffs still stained with fluorescent reagents from the quantum entanglement experiment. Yet her figure was like paper soaked in water, its edges fading away.
This was his partner who had "disappeared" in a laboratory accident three years ago. Surveillance footage showed that, the instant she entered the Quantum Collider, her entire body had crumpled like a shattered holographic projection.
"Eileen?" he blurted out, and a brief gap appeared in the Nanite Swarm's defensive matrix.
"This is a game of rules." Her voice carried a crackle of static. "They're testing your understanding of 'existence.' Remember, all logic here is artificial..." Before she could finish, a wave of runes swept her away, leaving only the trailing remnants of her voice: "Don't..."
Lin Xiu's nails dug into his palm.
The pain from reality pierced through Consciousness Space, abruptly clearing his thoughts.
The Oracle System displayed a stream of data across his retina. "Consciousness Space rule detected: logical consistency > physical laws. Traditional combat mode is advised to be abandoned. Switch to analytical reconstruction."
He took a deep breath as the Nanite Swarm across his armor began to reassemble.
This time, it did not take the form of weapons. Instead, countless slender tendrils extended outward, each one capturing the vibrational frequency of the surrounding runes.
When one tendril swept across a string of spiral-shaped runes, the system suddenly buzzed—the vibrational frequency had an 87% overlap with the Tesseract's quantum entanglement waveform.
"So that's it." Lin Xiu let out a soft laugh, the corner of his mouth rising beneath the mask.
He controlled the Nanite Swarm to weave a quantum model within Consciousness Space, mapping the runes' magical energy into wave functions.
As the final wave crest was locked in, cracks suddenly appeared across the ocean of runes before him, like ripples on a lake struck by a stone.
Boom—
Consciousness Space shook violently.
Lin Xiu's nanite tendrils recoiled into his armor from the impact. Looking up, he saw Icarus Vaughn's figure emerge in the void.
This time, he saw the man's face clearly: deep-set features and a high nose, a crescent-shaped scar above his left brow, and pupils as purely black as night, yet gleaming with an inhuman chill.
"You are learning."
A third voice sounded, a low whisper like two stone slabs grinding against each other.
Lin Xiu's Nanite Swarm suddenly turned as one, gathering toward an empty direction—there was a blurred shadow there, like a crumpled piece of black cloth, with only the outline beneath its hood barely distinguishable.
"This is not a variable you can control."
Icarus's pupils contracted for an instant.
Lin Xiu noticed that his fingers curled slightly at his side, as though he were forming a hand seal.
The next second, the runes in Consciousness Space began collapsing wildly, like grains of sand sucked away by a vacuum.
Lin Xiu's temples throbbed. For one brief moment, he felt his consciousness split into countless fragments, each fighting for control.
Bang!
A sound from the real world suddenly exploded in his ears.
Lin Xiu snapped his eyes open and found himself kneeling on the library's wooden floor. Beads of blood from where his nails had pierced the back of his hand dripped into the dust, the smell of blood intertwining with mildew.
The surrounding bookshelves trembled, and every book automatically flipped open to the same page. The rustling of paper sounded like countless people whispering.
He braced himself against a shelf and stood, his gaze landing on the book at the front: Dimensional Eye.
At the center of its yellowed page was a line written in red ink. The handwriting looked as though it had been written in blood, still glistening faintly: "Welcome to the real battlefield."
Police sirens sounded outside the window.
Lin Xiu looked down at his watch. 10:03—he clearly remembered spending only a few minutes in Consciousness Space.
Nanite Swarm crawled out from the gaps in his armor and onto the page, attempting to analyze the red ink's composition. The instant it touched the ink, however, it curled into a ball as though burned.
The Oracle System's alert sounded again, this time with rare instability. "Detected... Dimension Anchor... energy anomaly..."
Lin Xiu closed Dimensional Eye and placed it in the inner compartment of his armor.
The scent of lavender suddenly drifted from somewhere in the corner—it was Mia's perfume.
He looked out the window. Searchlights swept across the direction of East River Pier, while in the library's shadows, a figure in a dark green robe flashed past, its fingertips still dusted with falling starlight.
"Looks like I'll be late for the East River Pier meeting," he murmured as his armored mask slowly closed.
When his golden eyes lit up in the darkness, Dimensional Eye inside his jacket suddenly grew hot, like a piece of red-hot iron.
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