Chapter 7: Negative time zones
Su Evening Qing knelt by the Yangtze River and vomited, the metallic tadpoles in her blue blood turning the river water a rusty color. The electronic tattoo on her stomach showed **6 days and 23 hours**, and her phone suddenly received a video of her daughter - a girl folding a paper boat into a sign, with Dr. Lin's coughing in the background.
"This is the Yangtze River Bridge from yesterday!" Dr. Shen pointed to the entire bridge in the video. The two of them ran wildly to the riverbank and found that the river was flowing backwards, and the bridge that had been destroyed by a nuclear explosion three days ago had miraculously recovered. Chu Yun touches the bridge abutment with his metal left arm, and the rust suddenly disappears, revealing a steel frame carved with kindergarten graffiti.
Groups of mechanical crocodiles appear in the river, their spines inlaid with student ID photos. When Su Evening Qing recognized the ID photo of her daughter's classmate, she jumped into the river in a frenzy. As the blue blood mixed with the rusty water, a transparent shield rose from the bottom of the river, sealing Wuhan three minutes before the nuclear explosion.
In the cold storage room of an abandoned pharmaceutical factory, Dr. Shen finds a metal box labeled "Antibodies. When he opens it, he finds 300 pale green vaccines, each labeled with Chu Yun's childhood photo. When he injects half of the reagent, the festering skin begins to peel away, revealing the mechanical wiring underneath.
"This is the clone vaccine!" Chu Yun smashed two test tubes, and the nanites in the liquid drilled small holes in the concrete. Su Wanqing suddenly shivered as the electronic pattern showed **5 days**, she grabbed the vaccine and stuck it into her neck, "As long as we can get into the shield..."
The street scene began to crumble as the trio entered the shield. The hot dry noodles at the breakfast place turn into metal wires, and the bus stop sign shows a roadmap to the year 2099. Dr. Shen finds his mechanical fingers melting away - the vaccine's expiration date is only ten minutes away.
In the kindergarten at the center of the sign, two daughters are arguing. The one in the pink dress is folding paper boats, and the one in the metal jacket is taking apart a mechanical bird. As Su Wanqing rushed over, the metal daughter suddenly said, "If Mom chooses her, I'll destroy the reserve city.
The entire shield shook violently as Chu Yun ripped off the Metal Daughter's right arm, and Dr. Lin's work badge fell out from inside. Dr. Shen grabbed his pink-skirted daughter with his melted hand, and the girl suddenly turned into an electronic wave and bored into him. There's a loud clattering of gears from underground, and the entire city begins to collapse - the Jianghan Road of 2012 overlapping with the ruins of 2099.
As the mechanical crocodile crashed through the shield, Su Wanqing fell into the time rift with her two daughters in her arms. Chu Yun uses his body to jam the gears and sees hundreds of Su Evening Harvests dying in parallel time in the depths of the rift.
As the countdown returns to zero, Wuhan suddenly splits into twelve time fragments. Dr. Shen runs wildly down Zhongshan Avenue in 2012, chasing a mechanical beast from 2099. Chu Yun's remaining right hand gets stuck on the nuclear explosion countdown sign and realizes the time is **-00:00:01**.
Su Wanqing heard her daughter's laughter in the time rift. When she grabs the corner of her pink skirt, only half of the blood-stained origami paper remains in her hand - the other half appears on the hilt of Lu Li's sword a hundred years later. The Yangtze River suddenly rises as a wall of water, each wave reflecting a different era of Wuhan.
Dr. Shen's mechanical heart suddenly restarts, showing a new countdown of seven years. A metal flower bud sprouts from Chu Yun's severed arm and blooms in Dr. Lin's face. The remains of the shield form a giant clock, the hands spinning backwards, dragging everyone back to the moments before the nuclear explosion.