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In 2035, in San Francisco, quantum physicist Arthur Crowder's wife was killed in a "perfect murder." There were no fingerprints, no witnesses—only half of a high-tech alloy button, clearly belonging to future technology. To uncover the truth, Arthur infiltrated his own creation, the "Novous Timefold Experiment," but a malfunction in the equipment threw him into parallel timelines. He gradually discovered that in each timeline, a different version of himself was enacting vengeance in various ways. All clues pointed to a more terrifying truth—the murderer was Raymond Stone, his mentor, who had "died" twenty years ago due to an experimental failure caused by Arthur himself. After crossing twelve timelines, Arthur was forced to choose between saving his wife and maintaining the stability of time itself. Ultimately, he uncovered an even darker conspiracy—the collective manipulation of human memories.

The Chrono's Redemption

Arthur's retina countdown showed -00:00:12, a unique "negative observation mode" of the time machine. He floated in the quantum rift of the crime scene, watching as Erin was dying twelve seconds later, while Erin twelve seconds earlier was still alive—both states superimposed into a dizzying probability cloud.

Inside the bulletproof glass, the living Erin took out a CR-2049 metal piece from the lab's secret compartment. The veins in her neck suddenly bulged with blue patterns, a sign that the jasmine toxin was spreading through her nervous system. Arthur slammed against the invisible temporal barrier, only to see his wife pressing the sharp tip of the metal piece against her throat, her lips moving to repeat their wedding vows.

"Remember, I will always be twelve seconds faster than you." These were Erin's drunken words on their wedding night, now resonating through time to reveal a chilling truth.

At the moment of death, Erin suddenly turned her head and stared directly into the void where Arthur stood. Her pupils split into a hexagonal honeycomb pattern, the characteristic of the "quantum observation eye" described by Raymond in the 1985 experimental log. The trajectory of the metal piece piercing her carotid artery perfectly matched the wound on the future body.

Arthur's eardrum ruptured at that moment—not from sound waves, but from hearing the "temporal noise" that should not exist—countless dying screams from Erin in parallel timelines, forming a chord. He vomited and stumbled out of the observation rift, only to find himself holding Erin's wedding ring, engraved with geographical coordinates: 37.7749° N, 122.4194° W—the exact location of the café where they first met.

The lab alarm suddenly blared, and Arthur staggered to the holographic monitoring screen. The playback showed that, in the negative twelve seconds of Erin's death, another version of himself crawled out of the ventilation duct, holding a syringe to inject jasmine toxin into his wife's jugular vein. But as he tried to zoom in, all the data suddenly collapsed into a 1985 Raymond lab surveillance video.

"Cogitative filter activated." The quantum computer flashed a warning box. "Observer detected attempting to breach memory prohibition."

A burning sensation pulsed in Arthur's temporal lobe. The implanted CR-2049 calibrator forcibly played the altered initial meeting scene: the latte Erin spilled in the café floated in slow motion, and Raymond's face appeared in the brown droplets. The real memory, however, flashed back on his retina—the day wasn't a coincidence at all. Raymond had led Erin, dressed in a white dress, toward him. On the girl's wrist was a bracelet modified with CR-2049 parts.

The ventilation system suddenly released thick jasmine fog, and just before suffocating, Arthur saw the most terrifying sight: his left hand, unknowingly wearing the wedding ring, and inside the ring, engraved with Raymond's initials. The quantum computer completed its calculation at that moment, and a cold female voice announced: "Conclusion confirmed: To save Erin Crowder, her death in all timelines must be ensured."

As he raised the CR-2049 metal piece to end this nightmare, the bulletproof glass suddenly reflected three figures: the present self with the knife, the decaying future self, and the one on the far left—Erin, wearing a blood-stained wedding dress, holding Raymond's mechanical prosthetic.

Schrödinger's Widow