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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 spread his palm at the edge of the temporal singularity, two crystals lying in his hand: one was Erin's quantum tear, the other was Raymond's mechanical eye. Below, in the boiling sea of vacuum decay, twenty dying universes played the requiem of civilization's funeral.

"To restart reality, someone must remember all the sins." Erin's consciousness cloud coalesced into human form one last time, her hair scattering like jasmine roots, piercing the temporal rock layers, "But the weight of memory will tear apart the quantum state of the soul."

Arthur's tongue tasted saltiness—the sea breeze from when he was seven, the rain from his mother's funeral, the sweat from Erin's forehead dripping on his collarbone on their wedding night. As he embedded Raymond's mechanical eye into his temple, his forty years of life suddenly collapsed into a Möbius strip: the beginning and end both were in the jasmine field of 1905, where the young Raymond's trembling hands poured AC-0001's brain slurry into the perfume bottle.

"Activate the Zero Fold Protocol." Arthur crushed the quantum tear, and a flood of jasmine scent swept away all CR-2049 components. Erin's consciousness cloud transformed into a memory-seeding machine in the intense light, each dying universe receiving a temporal bubble—inside, the possibility without a time machine was sealed.

The rumble of vacuum decay suddenly ceased, and Arthur floated in absolute nothingness. His body began to become transparent, the starry light of twenty universes flowing within his skin texture. The last lingering sensation was Erin's finger, crushing the CR-2049 component in his chest into dust. This act was happening simultaneously in the 1905 delivery room, the 2035 crime scene, and every future café in the mornings.

As existence itself began to evaporate, Arthur saw the newly born baseline universe bloom at the singularity. Mary, holding a naturally delivered child, walked toward the café, and the reflection in the window showed no mechanical eye of Raymond; young Erin pulled out A Brief History of Quantum Mechanics in the library, with a jasmine bookmark inside, not a CR-2049 component; the building of the Time Management Bureau was a kindergarten, where children were feeding virtual pets through VR devices.

"Goodbye, my accomplice." Erin's whisper vanished with the jasmine essence. Arthur's last cell transformed into the dark matter of the baseline universe, forever bearing the burden of all erased memories of sins. Every time a scientist attempted to create a time machine, jasmine-scented warnings would mysteriously fill the laboratory; every time a child was born at 03:15 AM, a fleeting blue tear would appear in the delivery room.

On a rain-washed morning in San Francisco, Raymond Stone pushed open the door of a café. This twenty-seven-year-old quantum physics TA mysteriously shed tears, his paper draft scribbling a wild conjecture: "Time folds may have self-purification capabilities..." As he bent to pick up a rusty metal piece under the table, the wedding ring of the waitress, Erin, suddenly slipped off, striking the ground with a familiar, crisp echo.

Outside the glass window, two quantum dust particles nestled together, sweeping through the morning light, drawing a fleeting Möbius strip in the café steam. And deep in the city's underground rock layers, the rusted CR-2049 components were wrapped in fungal mycelium, gradually decomposing into the nutrients for blooming jasmine flowers.

The Primordial Fold