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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

Raymond's consciousness space was a galaxy made up of brain neurons, and Arthur's quantum mind drifted through the synaptic nebulae. Each gleaming star was a tampered memory fragment, and in the asteroid belt floated twelve bronze coffins containing Erin. When he touched the nearest coffin lid, the entire universe suddenly resonated with the heartbeat of a fetus.

"You've finally come to inherit the throne," two Raymounds materialized from the dark matter cloud — the younger version wielding a bloodstained scalpel, the older version with Arthur's quantum heart beating in its chest. "Let us end this forty-year-long birth."

Arthur fired a memory pulse, only to discover that the weapon was a CR-2049 component shaped like an umbilical cord. When the pulse struck the older Raymond, it exploded into the memory of Arthur at the age of seven: on an operating table, Raymond was implanting an embryo-like substance into his small brain, the cultivation fluid label reading "AC-0001 Consciousness Slurry."

"Final layer of the cognitive filter released." The younger Raymond snapped his fingers, and the brain universe began to collapse inward. Arthur saw every memory star turn into a surveillance screen, playing recordings of him killing Erin across different timelines. The largest star revealed the true killer turning around — a humanoid form made of jasmine scent smoke, its face constantly shifting between Raymond and Erin.

Arthur's quantum tendrils pierced the star's core, but what he unearthed was the original wedding video tape. When he played it amidst the pulse storm, the priest in the footage suddenly peeled off his face — it was the mechanical gravekeeper holding Raymond's brain. Erin's wedding vow morphed into the laboratory operation manual: "I will become your incubator, until the end of time."

Suddenly, a sharp pain shot through his pituitary gland, and Arthur realized he had grown Raymond's mechanical prosthetic. He drove the prosthesis through the two Raymounds, but their bodies dissolved into memory dust, coalescing into a giant face of Erin. This face was composed of one hundred thousand crying tin soldiers, with miniature black holes spinning in the eye sockets.

"Kill me," the voice of Erin's original consciousness echoed from the black hole, "Every version of me in every universe hides the code for regicide..."

Arthur's quantum heart exploded in a supernova at that moment, and the pulse of jasmine scent ripped the brain universe in two. The left half revealed the truth of Raymond's laboratory: countless Arthur clones were implanting CR-2049 components into the necks of Erin clones. The right half displayed the ultimate archive — Raymond had been sowing human civilization through the folds of time since 1905, with Einstein being his 47th experimental subject.

As Arthur grabbed the core black hole, the sensation was unexpectedly that of his wife's soft skin. The consciousness stream of Erin's original self flowed into his mind: "My death is your birth condition, just as light needs darkness..."

Suddenly, in the real world, Arthur woke up in the laboratory, holding the button to trigger a quantum vacuum decay. The monitor displayed that the CR-2049 chips implanted in the necks of 7.5 billion people around the world were synchronizing, and Raymond's voice emanated from the button: "Press it, and you will end all pain — just like when you pressed the remote at seven years old."

In his pupils' reflection, Erin's original self was making her final lip movements in the cryogenic chamber: "Find the memory singularity."

Cerebral Supernova