Chapter 7: The Tyrant of the Timely Remains

The controller in Father's hand glowed with a chilling,corpse-green light,and the cemetery soil boiled wildly to the sound of gear meshing.Mechanical tentacles stretched out from the shattered tombstone of our mother,and the moment they wrapped around Lila's ankles,her pupils'gears showed the first signs of tiny cracks.

My sword,which severed the tentacles,still had salt grains from the Sea of Time,and Lila's blood splashed onto the controller's surface,causing the half-assembled giant gears behind Father to burst into dazzling sparks.The corpses suddenly twitched and turned towards him,their gem-encrusted mechanical eyes beginning to weep blood.

"Old man,"I crushed the crawling corpse's hand,and from between its fingers fell the copper pass from Mother's laboratory,"the sands of time you injected into Lila,you extracted them from your own spine,didn't you?"

The wrinkles on Father's cheeks suddenly split open,revealing the bronze gears turning beneath the skin.The wisteria crest on his neck began to dissolve,exposing the old wounds beneath that had been pecked by ravens—identical to the marks on the auctioneer's scalp.

Lila suddenly let out a high-pitched scream,and the moonlight over the entire cemetery twisted into a dizzying vortex.As the seventh gear star rose to the top of the withered branches,all the corpses'chests popped open compartments,revealing memory chips soaked in green liquid.I strung the chips together with dark element threads and projected a hologram above my head:

In the deep-night laboratory,Father was transplanting Mother's brain tissue into a mechanical body.Inside the glass jar floated the twin embryos,one with a clock gear in its heart,and the other with the Godslayer mark embedded in the back of its neck.

"So we really are monsters..."Lila laughed softly as she tore open her collar,the skin over her heart gradually becoming transparent,revealing the interlocking golden gears inside.The clock in my left eye flew out uncontrollably,colliding with her heart gear in the air to produce the melody of"The Starlit Ode."

Father suddenly froze into a puppet-like posture.The Shadow Moon envoy,emerging from the ground,slit his neck,extracted the controller covered in brain matter,and threw it to me:"Godslayer,the Council thanks you for helping to eliminate the defective product."

The moment I crushed the controller,the ground of the entire capital began to collapse.As the spires of thirty-seven churches fell,they revealed the underground mechanical wombs stretching for hundreds of miles—each incubator contained a clone of Lila,with the Godslayer marks on the back of their necks still dripping with fresh nutrient fluid.

"Brother's choice is?"The real Lila suddenly pressed the tip of her wand against my temple,the gears in her pupils devouring the golden light,"hand me over to the Council for the Time Key,or..."

The moment the dark elements autonomously formed a cage around her,I tasted blood in my mouth.The pocket watch fragments in my palm assembled into Mother's face,and the truth reflected in her mechanical eyes suffocated me:every time travel was activated at the cost of Lila's heart gear.

Countless mechanical arms stretched out from the ground cracks,and the laughter of the Shadow Moon envoy came from all directions:"Enjoy the one thousand three hundredth cycle,Godslayer.Remember,it was you who plunged the blade of time into..."

Lila's kiss suddenly blocked all my thoughts.The tip of her tongue,bitten through,conveyed the scorching sands of time,and the clone army behind her simultaneously opened their golden gear eyes.As the time of the entire capital began to flow backward,I finally saw the eternal tear on her eyelashes—cast from the bones of my ninety-nine previous cycles.