Chapter Eighteen: The Cocoon of Paradox

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The darkness of the sewer gathered around Kane once more, a cold, viscous tide slowly swallowing him. The last trace of pale blue light from the quantum switch faded away, leaving only the copper key’s nearly imperceptible warmth lingering in his palm. All around him remained the monotonous whimper of filthy water—and a deeper, hollower echo rising from within himself: the sound of his sense of existence being stripped away.

He lowered his head and stared at his hands. His fingertips should have been invisible in absolute darkness, yet he could “feel” a strange transparency spreading through them. It was not a visual disappearance, but the withdrawal of some “substance” that constituted his being, as though he were slowly being bleached from the negative of reality, on the verge of becoming a blank film. Every breath bore an indescribable weight. He was not inhaling air, but the cold dust of time itself. A weariness born in the depths of his soul pressed down on him like ten thousand tons of seawater, nearly lulling him into eternal sleep beneath the polluted earth.

“Tokyo... the eve of the nuclear blast...” The four words escaped his dry lips, light as a thread, yet struck the sewer walls and returned as a heavy echo. They were no longer the coordinates of a mission, but the cold anchor of fate—the center of a vortex that devoured everything. The abyssal eyes of his aged self surfaced clearly in the darkness, filled with both liberation and madness. The withered hands that had seized his wrist and dragged him toward the release button still seemed branded beneath his skin: cold, resolute, and marked by a despair as inevitable as destiny.

He had to go back.

Not as a time cleaner carrying out an erasure, but as the sole variable capable of unraveling the fatal Möbius knot that had coiled around him from the moment of his birth.

The copper key trembled faintly in his palm, like a weak heartbeat. Kane clenched it tightly. The cold touch of the metal was the last solid connection he had with this world. He closed his eyes and stopped trying to perceive through sight. Instead, he gathered all the mental strength he had left and wound it around the key like strands of spider silk, probing into the remnants of the anchor network Edgar had constructed within it.

His consciousness sank into a sea of chaotic, dim light.

It was no longer the tangible array of switches beneath London, but a flowing, dynamic star chart made up of countless scattered points of light. Each point corresponded to the last lingering echo of an ordinary anchor object: the stain at the bottom of a coffee cup, the worn fur on a teddy bear’s ear, the dust caught between the keys of a calculator, a hairline scratch across the lens of a pair of reading glasses...

They were as faint as the cosmic background radiation, yet stubbornly present, forming an incomplete web spread throughout space and time. Kane’s consciousness struggled to slide and leap across it, like a sailor clinging to a torn fishing net on a stormy night, searching for the strongest “current”—a fold in time leading to the eve of the Tokyo nuclear blast, not yet entirely annihilated by Thorne’s reverse flow.

Time here was no longer a smooth river, but a raging ocean riddled with whirlpools, reefs, and fracture zones. Thorne’s reverse-flow equation, Δt = −71, acted like a powerful acid, continually corroding the structure of time and creating countless chaotic currents and lethal rifts in space-time. Kane’s consciousness surged left and right through the violent data storm. Every contact might tear him apart in a confused stream of causality or drag him toward some unknown abyss of entropic stillness beneath the pull of the reverse flow.

His sense of “thinness” intensified. Every impact of consciousness made the “outline” of his being blurrier, as though he might dissolve completely into the turbulence of time in the very next moment.

Just as his mind was about to collapse, one point within the consciousness network sent out an extremely faint yet astonishingly stable resonance.

The reading glasses.

The “imprint” they had left within the network did not point toward a physical location, but was anchored to a particular scene: a community activity center, afternoon sunlight streaming through tall windows, tiny motes of dust drifting through the air. The gentle voice of an elderly white-haired woman echoed within the imprint:

“...With the two ends joined, endlessly circling back upon themselves—that is the magic of time...”

Her words were accompanied by the rustling and delighted exclamations of countless children making Möbius strips from paper. Because of the pure understanding of time’s topological nature contained within it, and the concentrated attention shared by so many participants, the scene itself had formed an exceedingly small yet remarkably sturdy “harbor” amid the chaos of the temporal currents.

Kane’s consciousness slammed into the imprint without hesitation.

There was no passage through a bizarre, dazzling tunnel, no violent displacement of space. It was as though he merely blinked. The foul air, damp walls, and sound of running water vanished at once.

In their place came a suffocatingly purified scent—a mixture of ozone, disinfectant, and some kind of chilled metal. Absolute silence enveloped the surroundings. Only the heavy pounding of his heart and the roar of blood surging against his eardrums remained unnaturally clear.

He stood in a pure-white corridor. The walls, ceiling, and floor blended seamlessly together, radiating a soft, cold light. There was no sign of a joint, door, or hatch anywhere. The air was cold and dry, and every breath carried a stinging pain. The corridor stretched ahead, its far end vanishing into a deeper, unsettling blue.

The Tokyo Deep Biological Isolation Laboratory. Core Sector.

Kane lowered his head and examined his hands. The sense of thinness remained, as though an invisible mist enveloped him, yet his form was now strangely solid. The golden dandelion pattern that had once been reinforced by the Möbius network—and had nearly been extracted by Thorne—had vanished completely from his arm. His skin was smooth, as if the mark had never existed. He touched his face. The roughness of his stubble was still there, but the condition of his body... seemed frozen at some moment before he had entered the sewer, giving him the bizarre sensation of having been forcibly “nailed” to a single slice of time.

He opened his palm.

The crucial copper key was gone.

A chill shot instantly from his spine to the crown of his head. Without the key, without the Gardener network, he was nothing more than an intruder empty-handed and slowly vanishing at the level of existence itself.

Suddenly, from the blue region at the end of the corridor came the faint sound of machinery—a deep, steady hum, carrying a powerful sense of restraint. Its frequency faintly overlapped with the countdown roar he remembered piercing his eardrums.

The target was there.

The cage of Pandora—and the source of the nuclear catastrophe.

Kane forced himself to remain calm, suppressing the tremendous panic brought on by the loss of the key and his own condition. Like a wisp of fading shadow, he pressed himself against the cold, smooth corridor wall and moved soundlessly toward the blue glow.

As he drew closer, the corridor’s cold white light gradually gave way to the blue radiance permeating the far end. Extremely fine streams of golden particles floated within it like living things. They moved slowly along intricate trajectories, constructing an invisible barrier.

A molecular isolation wall.

In theory, an absolute barrier that could not be crossed. Any matter passing through it would trigger a chain reaction of molecular collapse and set off an alarm. Yet during the previous mission, his aged self had passed through it.

Kane stopped a few steps from the flowing golden particles and held his breath.

He observed carefully.

The particle flow was not entirely uniform. Near certain areas of the ceiling and floor, its trajectory seemed to contain minute, periodic “stagnation points,” like barely perceptible rests in a perfect musical composition.

He understood instantly how his aged self had done it.

Not by “piercing” the barrier, but by “synchronizing” with it.

After enduring the erosion of countless time loops, the molecular vibrational frequency of the aged Kane’s existence had become profoundly unstable, approaching some chaotic critical point. During the brief moments when the particles in the isolation wall periodically stilled, he had temporarily “merged” with that chaotic state, like a drop of water dissolving into a wave.

“Thinness...” Kane looked down at his half-visible hands.

Was his current state not an even more extreme form of chaos at the level of existence itself? Time had “precipitated” him from reality. He existed in this moment, yet did not entirely belong to it.

Perhaps this was not a weakness, but the only key he had left.

He concentrated all his strength, feeling the hollow, stripped-away thinness within his body, and tried to imitate and amplify it. At the same time, he fixed his eyes on the fleeting stagnation points within the particle flow, like a leopard locking onto its prey.

A stagnation point appeared.

Right above him.

Kane had no time to think. His body’s instinct outran his mind. He lunged forward—not so much running as projecting himself outward. The instant he touched the golden stream, he clearly felt the material foundation of his body violently “shudder,” as though it were about to dissolve into the most basic quantum foam. A searing tearing sensation spread through every nerve ending, more profound than any physical injury, reaching straight into his soul.

Yet within that ultimate agony, he succeeded.

No alarm sounded. No flash erupted. Like smoke passing through glass, he crossed the theoretically indestructible barrier without resistance and fell into the blue-lit core.

Cold air closed around him.

He found himself standing at the center of a vast circular chamber. The domed ceiling rose high overhead, made of some transparent composite material. Beyond it lay deep strata of rock and endless darkness. At the center of the chamber stood a gigantic cylindrical container enclosed by countless layers of energy fields, radiating a gentle blue chill.

Within the container, a nameless mass resembling a living nebula slowly rotated and pulsed, displaying dreamlike violet-gold hues interwoven with ominous dark red.

The primal organism of the Pandora neural-erosion virus.

Each pulse sent faint ripples through the surrounding air and released an invisible low-frequency pressure powerful enough to warp the mind.

Beneath the container, dense bundles of pipes converged upon a huge central console flashing with a scarlet countdown.

[00:03:17]

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[00:03:16]

[00:03:15]...

The crimson numbers advanced mercilessly. Each change struck Kane’s heart like a heavy hammer.

The nuclear blast countdown.

He had returned—just before the fatal moment.

Standing before the central console with his back to Kane was a figure in a white protective suit. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and the suit could not completely conceal the strength contained beneath it. He was studying the complex holographic interface floating before him, his fingers moving rapidly across the virtual keys as though entering the final sequence of commands.

It was not his aged self.

Beneath the transparent visor of the protective helmet was a face Kane knew down to the marrow of his bones, yet which seemed utterly unfamiliar in that instant: young, taut, eyes sharp as surgical blades, carrying the absolute ruthlessness required to execute an ultimate mission, along with a trace of fatigue pressed into him by an overwhelming burden of responsibility.

It was himself.

The young Kane, who had not yet endured countless loops, who had not yet been worn down by time until nothing remained but despair.

Kane’s heart hammered wildly within his chest, as though it might burst through his ribs. He saw his own fingers hovering above a huge virtual button blinking with blinding red light.

The virus release control.

Once pressed, Pandora would erupt. Tokyo would become a sea of fire, and that despairing Möbius loop would begin turning once more.

“No!” Kane roared. His voice sounded horribly hoarse and broken within the cold circular chamber.

The young Kane spun around.

The eyes beneath the protective visor locked instantly onto the intruder. His pupils contracted sharply with shock and an overwhelming sense of danger. He had never imagined that anyone could penetrate the molecular isolation wall, still less that the intruder would appear so... unnatural, his body’s outline blurred with an unreal quality.

“Who are you?” the young Kane demanded sharply. His voice emerged through the protective suit’s built-in speaker with a metallic chill. His right hand left the interface in an instant and flashed toward the specialized particle pistol at his waist, the muzzle pointing at Kane without hesitation. His left hand moved even faster. Almost as soon as he turned, his index finger was already stabbing toward the hovering, deadly red button.

Time seemed to stretch infinitely.

Kane saw the unquestionable resolve in his younger self’s eyes. They were the eyes of Kane the time cleaner—the eyes of a man willing to press the button of destruction without hesitation to prevent a greater catastrophe, even if the price was an entire city and millions of lives.

That coldness. That fatigue compressed beneath the weight of responsibility. That fear hidden deep within the sharp gaze, a fear even he himself had never recognized.

Kane knew it all too well.

Now he understood why his aged self had seized his hand and slammed it toward the button.

It had not been to create the catastrophe, but to forcibly initiate the reversal.

After countless loops, the aged Kane had discovered in despair that only by allowing the disaster to occur—only by sending time seventy-one days backward—could he obtain a chance to reshuffle the board. He had been attempting, through the most extreme means possible, to break the dead loop.

But the young Kane did not know that.

The young Kane knew only how to carry out his mission: erase Pandora and its creator, and prevent the virus from spreading at any cost.

In the thousandth of a second before the young Kane’s fingertip touched the virtual red button—

Kane moved.

He did not try to draw a weapon, nor did he rush toward the console. Both would be too slow. He did the only thing that might stop the other man.

He violently tore open his coat, still stained with sewer filth and now appearing unnaturally thin.

There was no weapon beneath it. No explosive.

Only his bare chest.

And over his heart, his skin had taken on a horrifyingly translucent quality. Beneath it lay no flesh or bone, but countless fine crimson threads of light resembling cracks. They were deeply embedded in his “existence,” like parasitic, burning roots greedily drawing out his life force. From them radiated an icy, savage aura born of the same source as Thorne’s right eye.

Thorne’s final curse.

At the instant the stone chamber beneath the river collapsed and Thorne’s projection was gravely wounded by the prime meridian activated through the little key, a malicious energy containing the reverse-flow equation’s core entropy-increase directive had invaded Kane’s thinning body like a parasite burrowing into bone, following the backlash route of the Möbius network.

It had lain dormant like a hidden virus. Only now—when he stood face-to-face with his younger self, under the immense shock to his mind and the crisis threatening his existence—did it erupt completely.

“Look!” Kane’s voice rasped like sandpaper dragged across stone, filled with the agony of a soul being torn apart. “This is... the future you want! This is... the end of countless loops!”

He pointed to the crimson threads across his chest, burning like fissures.

“Thorne... he never left! He’s inside this loop! He grows within every moment of our... despair!”

The young Kane froze completely.

His finger stopped less than a millimeter from the virtual interface, trembling faintly. Beneath the protective visor, every trace of color drained from his young, merciless face. The sharpness in his eyes was replaced by an enormous, reality-shattering horror and disbelief.

He stared at the inhuman crimson marks spreading across the intruder’s chest, radiating Thorne’s presence, then abruptly raised his head to look at the intruder’s face. Though blurred and thin, it bore an exhaustion and weariness too deeply rooted to counterfeit—a worn outline he had glimpsed only in fleeting moments in the mirror, before immediately forcing it down beneath the weight of duty.

“You...?”

A terrible thought, one capable of shattering everything he believed, wound around the young Kane’s heart like a poisonous vine.

Then—

[00:01:59]

[00:01:58]...

The countdown crossed the two-minute mark without mercy.

At the same time, beyond the transparent composite armor of the circular chamber’s dome, a point of blazing white light appeared without warning amid the darkness of the deep rock strata. It came not from any lighting system, but from within the rock itself, carrying annihilating heat and energy radiation. In an instant, it illuminated the outer rock walls as brightly as day.

The light pierced through the domed armor and cast the entire blue-lit core laboratory in the ghastly pallor of hell.

The nuclear countdown was real.

The trigger for the catastrophe was not merely Pandora’s release. Buried in the rock beneath the laboratory was a fusion device intended as a final failsafe.

When the Temporal Bureau had constructed the facility, it had established two layers of protection: if the virus escaped containment, or if the core sector were illegally breached and the intruder could not be eliminated before the countdown reached zero, the laboratory would self-destruct.

The young Kane’s mission was to erase the virus and its creator before the countdown ended, preventing both the spread of the virus and the self-destruction.

Kane’s intrusion had triggered the latter.

“Self-destruct... initiated!”

The young Kane’s voice carried a tremor he himself did not notice. His gaze shifted from the intruder’s terrifying chest to the light beyond the dome, growing brighter by the second like a miniature sun.

Energy readings on the central console surged wildly upward, accompanied by shrill alarms. He understood at once that whether or not he pressed the release control, everything here—including himself and the intruder before him—would cease to exist within a few dozen seconds.

The mission...

Had it failed completely?

Despair pierced his tightly strung nerves like cold steel needles. Almost unconsciously, the young Kane looked once more at the intruder—the ghost whose chest burned with Thorne’s curse, whose face was blurred yet carried the weary contours of his own future.

He saw the intruder’s lips moving, as though silently saying something. There was no fear of death in his eyes, only bottomless sorrow and a nearly liberated... understanding.

At the instant despair and confusion swallowed the young Kane, Kane moved.

He did not leap toward the console. He did not rush at his younger self.

With the last of his remaining strength, he hurled himself toward the Pandora virus container enclosed in layers of energy fields.

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His target was not destruction.

It was an embrace.

“No!” The young Kane cried out in horror and instinctively tried to stop him, but it was already too late.

Kane’s thin body, like a moth flying into a flame, slammed into the outermost energy barrier of the container.

There was no violent explosion. The expected backlash of energy did not occur.

Instead, something utterly bizarre happened.

The “thin” substance composing Kane’s body and the crimson threads of light burning across his chest like living things—threads that represented Thorne’s will—underwent a violent, uncontrolled reaction the instant they touched the container’s energy barrier.

The crimson threads seemed to scent a delicious kinship. They writhed and multiplied frenziedly, like countless greedy tentacles thrusting toward the virus container.

At the same instant, the primal organism of the Pandora virus—the living nebula of dreamlike violet-gold and dark red—erupted with unprecedented radiance. It no longer rotated slowly, but began boiling with savage violence, as though injected with a lethal stimulant.

Violet-gold light and crimson threads intertwined and clashed furiously, whipping up a catastrophic energy storm inside the container.

The container itself released a shriek of unbearable strain.

Spiderweb cracks raced across the surface of its reinforced composite shell. The multiple energy fields surrounding it flickered and warped violently, emitting a piercing hum of overload.

“Warning! Virus container structure overloaded! Energy-field collapse imminent! Pandora activity index increasing exponentially!”

The alarms from the central console distorted into a shrill, agonized howl.

The young Kane stood stunned by the upheaval, which surpassed all comprehension. He watched helplessly as the intruder, like a block of ice thrown into a furnace, grew thinner and more transparent beneath the dual assault of the crimson threads and the virus’s energy. His outline was nearly dissolving into the blinding radiance erupting from the container.

Yet within that vanishing silhouette, the young Kane clearly saw the intruder’s eyes.

They pierced through the dazzling light and locked fiercely upon him. There was no pain in them, only a resolve burning at the utmost limit, almost indistinguishable from madness, and a silent, weighty charge.

[00:00:47]

[00:00:46]...

Beyond the dome, the white light within the rock had grown too bright to look upon. Terrifying heat radiation scorched the air through the armor.

The self-destruct sequence had entered its final seconds.

Inside the container, the crimson threads and the boiling energy of Pandora had reached the height of their conflict, like two cosmic singularities devouring one another. The cracks in the container wall widened in an instant.

A blinding torrent of energy—violet-gold, crimson, and destructive white—burst from the largest fissure like a demon dragon tearing free from its cage, shooting straight toward the dome of the circular chamber.

Its target was unmistakable:

The fusion core buried in the rock, already beginning to detonate.

At the critical instant, the young Kane’s mind went blank. Only the instincts carved into his bones by countless life-and-death drills remained. He abandoned all thought of the intruder’s identity and the meaning of this grotesque transformation.

There was only the torrent of destruction surging outward, powerful enough to detonate the fusion core ahead of schedule and bring the catastrophe down at once.

“Stop!”

He roared like a beast. His body exploded with speed and strength beyond its limits as he lunged toward the central console—not to press any button, but to drive his fist with all his might into an inconspicuous physical emergency-brake valve marked with the symbol Omega on the console’s side.

Crack!

He smashed the metal valve handle clean off.

Hummm—!

The entire circular chamber erupted in a deafening roar, as though space itself were crying out in agony. Every screen on the central console went black at once. The layered energy fields surrounding the Pandora container abruptly died as if the power had been cut. The laboratory’s primary lights vanished simultaneously.

Only the ever-nearing white radiance of destruction beyond the dome and the chaotic energy pouring through the container’s cracks remained, illuminating everything like a painted vision of hell.

The instant the energy fields vanished, the violent torrent of chaos lost its greatest restraint. Yet its momentum faltered as well.

Within that hesitation of less than a second—

Kane’s body, thin beyond all limits, completed its final mission.

Beside the container, he vanished completely.

Not a trace of physical matter remained, as though he had never existed. Only a point of pale blue light, so faint it was almost imperceptible, flickered once where he had disappeared like a guttering candle in the wind, then plunged instantly into the boiling core of the Pandora organism, exposed by the collapse of the energy fields.

At the same time, the chaotic torrent—freed from the fields that had restrained it, its momentum slightly diminished yet still lethal—finally slammed into the laboratory dome.

Boom!

An indescribable roar and blinding light swallowed everything.

The young Kane was hurled violently away by the immense shock wave and crashed into the cold circular wall. His consciousness plunged instantly into darkness.

In the final second before he lost consciousness completely, the afterimage burned into his retinas showed him not the dome shattering or magma surging forth.

He saw the boiling core of the Pandora virus.

After swallowing that point of pale blue light, its violently churning violet-gold and crimson radiance did something utterly bizarre.

For the briefest instant, it solidified.

Then, deep within the core of that living nebula, a point of pure pale blue light containing a strange, absolute order emerged like an immaculate lotus blooming from a filthy mire.

Weak—

yet impossibly persistent—

it began to shine.

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