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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

The furnace of the Time Management Bureau boiled with the entropy solution of humanity's collective memories, and Arthur was locked inside a crystalline cage shaped like Einstein's brain. Sixty thousand Erin clones were tossing CR-2049 components into the furnace, and the liquid memories evaporated into a paradox gas with the scent of jasmine in the high temperature.

"Each component is a solidified crime." The chief engineer removed his gas mask — it was his elderly version, his face covered in scars from quantum tunneling. "We must refine these temporal tumors into memory amber to reboot a clean timeline."

Arthur's quantum tendrils pierced the cage, but when they touched the furnace, it triggered an entropy-reduction reaction. The solution suddenly crystallized into the streets of Bern, 1905, where a young Einstein was writing his Miracle Year paper with the pen Raymond had given him. The pen's tip did not release ink, but instead CR-2049 metallic solution, etching Arthur's birth certificate number into the relativity manuscript.

"Cognitive purity test begins." The clones threw Erin's original body into the furnace. Arthur's retina suddenly tapped into her near-death perception: Erin in the flames was experiencing the superposition of twenty childbirths, each newborn possessing Raymond's mechanical prosthetic eyes. More terrifyingly, the amniotic fluid pouring out from her torn uterus was not ordinary fluid, but a silver tide made of miniature time machines.

Arthur broke his quantum shackles and leapt into the furnace, grabbing Erin's left hand in the entropy solution. The moment their skin touched, their memories began to entangle in reverse — Erin's childhood was filled with Arthur's face, while Arthur's wedding memories featured guests who were all Raymond. The pressure release valve at the bottom of the furnace suddenly opened, and the two fell into the deepest level of the Time Management Bureau — the "Cradle."

The spherical space's inner walls were embedded with six million frozen infants, each incubator labeled with an AC number. The central black stone tablet displayed the ultimate directive: "When the AC-2049 container awakens, initiate Human Civilization 2.0." Erin's pregnant belly suddenly quantumized, revealing the stone tablet's replica growing inside.

"You are the sower." Raymond's holographic image seeped out of the stone tablet, his mechanical prosthetic caressing Erin's belly. "Every Arthur is the wheat I planted in the folds of time, and Erin is the only scythe."

Arthur's quantum heart suddenly went into overdrive, and the jasmine pulse tore open the Cradle's cracks. As they fell, they saw the terrifying Time Tree — the trunk was Raymond's initial experiment from 1905, with each branch parasitizing an AC clone civilization. On the thickest branch, twelve versions of Arthur were murdering Erin across different timelines, with each weapon connected to Mary's umbilical cord.

When absolute darkness appeared at the end of the fissure, Erin inserted a CR-2049 component into her temple. Memory amber suddenly enveloped them both, forming a quantum cocoon deep in the sea of entropy. Arthur's eardrums ruptured in the silence, hearing the cries of a newborn from beyond the cocoon — it was a recording of his own birth being delivered by Raymond forty years ago, mixed with his mother's real screams of agony.

"Choose." Erin's consciousness echoed within the cocoon. "Become the father of the new world, or the tomb keeper of the old civilization." Her body began to crystallize, and within the amber, the truth of Raymond's laboratory emerged: the genetic map of every AC clone contained Erin's mitochondrial DNA.

Memory Amber