Time Devourer

When Leon's fingertips penetrated the amber of time, anti-entropy ripples appeared on the surface of his skin. His father's escape pod maintained quantum vibrations in absolute stillness. After the hatch biological lock recognized his gene sequence, the friction sound of mechanical gears suddenly came from inside - something stuck the transmission device before time froze.

"It is recommended to enable entropy flow lubrication."

The protective suit AI suddenly resumed operation and marked the fault point of the hatch in Leon's vision. When he released the anti-entropy biological enzyme, the amber-like space-time suddenly cracked, and a kind of hunger beyond the laws of physics seeped out from the cracks.

The moment the hatch was opened, Leon saw the totem of the mechanical sect - the metal statue in the shape of an octopus entrenched in the cabin, and each tentacle pierced into his father's freezer. Even more bizarre was the rust on the surface of the statue. Those oxide layers flowed slowly in the static space-time, as if they had their own life.

"Time Devourer Prototype." AI called up the danger sign, "Time entropy increase weapon developed by advanced civilization in the early stage, it is recommended..."

The warning was interrupted by the awakening of the statue. Eight tentacles suddenly broke through the time amber shackles, and each tip cracked with a black hole-like mouthparts. When Leon rolled to avoid, the space devoured by the tentacles left vacuum scars, and those cracks emerged with the erased time flow: the picture of his father struggling in the freezer, the early form of the star fetus' wings, and even Alicia's smile before she was transformed.

"Abnormal entropy flow detected!"

The AI's alarm overlapped with the roar of the statue. Leon found that his anti-entropy bio-enzyme was failing, and the repair spots on the surface of his skin turned into corrosive dark lines. When he tried to manipulate the zeroth protocol key, the metal skin of the statue suddenly vitrified, exposing the boiling primitive cosmic bubble inside-that was the quantum embryo before the birth of advanced civilization.

The shadow of the star fetus shrouded the ruins at this moment. Its twelve wings have evolved Klein bottle veins, and Alicia's quantum imprint has emerged on a certain wing membrane. Leon saw that the imprint was releasing a pulse signal, and the frequency was completely synchronized with the freezing device of his father's escape pod.

"Start... Resonance..."

Alicia's imprint weaves photon strings in the vacuum. The moment Leon grabbed the strings, the Time Devourer Statue suddenly changed its target of attack - its tentacles pierced the wings of the star fetus and began to siphon those unformed cosmic bubbles.

The ground of the ruins collapsed. Leon fell into the star map channel left by the anti-entropy cube, and witnessed a greater truth in the quantum tunnel: the so-called advanced civilization is nothing more than a mechanical god created by the survivors of a collapsed universe. Their "experimental field" is essentially a cosmic 3D printer, and the star fetus is an accidentally born organic ink cartridge.

At the end of the tunnel is a liquid reality ocean. Leon's quantum body dissociates and reorganizes here, and each cell carries memory fragments from different timelines. When he tried to swim towards the light source, the tentacles of the Time Devourer statue suddenly pierced the sea surface, and the pointed organs spit out the compressed two-dimensional image of his father.

"Found... the original code..."

The two-dimensional father's lips opened and closed, but the voice was Alicia's electronic sound. Leon's anti-entropy enzyme suddenly reversed and condensed into a photon harpoon in his palm. The trajectory of his harpoon carved a glowing channel on the sea surface, pointing directly to a rotating black dodecahedron in the depths of the ocean.

The pursuit of the Time Devourer triggered a causal storm. Leon saw his future afterimage being swallowed by the tentacles and constantly regenerating from the time cracks. The moment he touched the dodecahedron, the shadow of the star fetus's wings completely covered the ocean, and Alicia's mark suddenly materialized--

She held Leon's hand in the form of a quantum ghost and pressed the dodecahedron into his chest. In severe pain, Leon saw the source code of the universe: the Time Devourer was the antivirus program of his universe, and the star fetus was a virus bred by a system vulnerability.

"You are the real variable." Alicia's ghost began to dissipate, "Rewrite with the original code..."

The ocean suddenly evaporated. Leon woke up in the real dimension and found that the Devourer Statue was gnawing at the root of the star fetus's wings. The dodecahedron in his chest burst out with the light of creation, and the tentacles of the mechanical statue degenerated into basic particles wherever the radiation wave swept.

When the last tentacle collapsed, Leon discovered the truth of the cryostat in the core of the statue-his father's body had long been transformed into a biological key, and his cerebral cortex was engraved with the initial equation of the Phoenix Project.

The star fetus made a humming sound like liberation, and the Alicia mark in the shadow of the wings suddenly shrank into a light egg. At the same time, Leon found that his left hand was undergoing mechanical symbiosis, and circuit patterns with the same frequency as the anti-entropy cube emerged under his skin...