Though the message "Special Memory ended" flashed before his eyes, Xia Lun did not leave immediately. His view suddenly pulled back, separating from the body in the wheelchair, and his perspective shifted from first person to over-the-shoulder third person.
Bang!
With a muffled blast, the door exploded inward. Splinters sprayed into the room like buckshot, their fine dust mingling with the violet light of the Ritual. Patrol officers in blue uniforms and inspectors wearing exoskeleton armor flooded the cramped room.
Amid a chorus of shouts, dozens of guns swung toward the body in the wheelchair.
The scene froze completely.
The cold gun barrels, brass-yellow ammunition belts, terror on the patrol officers' faces, the fixed gaze of Hatton as he lay facedown on the floor, even the violet light bursting from the Ritual—all hung motionless, like a photograph.
The next moment, Xia Lun's view pulled sharply away. The scene seemed to slip into a rectangular frame, becoming a still image.
His vision blurred. Several more ending scenes, much like the first, appeared beside it. Then their number grew explosively. In an instant, thousands upon thousands of them filled his view like screens in a surveillance room!
Startled, Xia Lun realized in a flash that this might be a rare chance to see how choices and time worked. He composed himself and rapidly scanned the images.
The ending scenes varied in color, but Hatton died inside the Ritual in every one. Sometimes patrol officers shot him. Sometimes he took his own life. In others, he even died when an illness struck.
"Hatton's fate has converged?" Xia Lun narrowed his eyes. "He's bound to die in the Ritual? The price of his 'real Time Reversal' is steep."
As he considered this, his view pulled back again. The vast cluster of ending scenes shrank