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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

In the forensic laboratory, the centrifuge was separating Arthur's blue blood, with each test tube developing strange Mandelbrot-like spherical structures. He stared at the electron microscope display, watching his mitochondrial DNA undergo Möbius strip-like recombination—base pairs extending infinitely along a Klein bottle's topological structure.

"Your telomerase activity is 2,049 times the normal value," the geneticist tapped on the mutation map. "More precisely, your cells are performing self-replication in four-dimensional space."

Arthur's left pinky suddenly crystallized, geometric patterns resembling CR-2049 components appearing beneath his skin. He recalled the calibrator implanted by his future self and, using a scalpel, cut open the sutures on his lower right abdomen—the metal device had developed neural synapses, pumping jasmine toxin into the portal vein.

In the confinement chamber on the third underground level, the holographic projector automatically played Raymond's surveillance footage. In the 1985 footage, his younger self was undergoing "memory prism" surgery, with nanorobots implanting a dodecahedral crystal nucleus into the hippocampus. Suddenly, a familiar scene prompted Arthur to press pause: the model of the electrocardiogram machine beside the operating table was identical to the device currently monitoring his heart.

At that moment, the quantum computer emitted a sharp whistle: [Zero-point module activation detected]. Arthur's retina projected a countdown, and the entire map of San Francisco reconfigured into a four-dimensional coordinate grid. He was horrified to discover that every place where he and Erin had left memories corresponded to a murder coordinate in some parallel timeline.

The wedding scene at City Hall flashed with scarlet markers. As Arthur drove there, the skin beneath his bulletproof jacket was peeling off in patches, revealing internal quantum meridians glowing with blue light. He broke open the long-sealed side door and saw the holographic recorder from their wedding day still operating—but in the footage, Erin was wearing a blood-stained lab coat, her ring finger adorned with Raymond's mechanical prosthetic interface ring.

"Second layer of cognitive filter is removed." a mechanical voice sounded in his ear. Arthur's optic nerve suddenly connected to an unfamiliar perspective. He saw himself holding a CR-2049 metal piece, stabbing it toward Erin, while all the wedding guests had Raymond's face. More terrifyingly, the bouquet the bride held concealed not roses, but a fingerprint specimen of his mother, who died in a car accident when he was seven.

At that moment, the dome of City Hall collapsed, and Arthur grabbed a falling wedding dress fragment amidst the quantum storm. Under the microscope, the silk fibers revealed binary code, which, when deciphered, was a concise execution order: [Subject AC-2049 contamination value exceeded, initiate Amber Plan].

Returning to the laboratory, he found twelve of his own corpses in the cold storage, each exhibiting different stages of quantum mutation characteristics. Corpse No. 7 suddenly opened its eyes and grabbed his ankle with a mechanical prosthetic: "We are just Raymond's human hard drives; each murder overwrites erroneous data."

When the SWAT team's electromagnetic pulse grenade shattered the bulletproof glass, Arthur was staring at the 2,049th mutated coronary angiogram—the organ had transformed into a chaotic attractor composed of CR-2049 components, pumping blue blood that evaporated into the air, emitting the paradoxical scent of jasmine.

Fractal Flesh