Chapter Four: The Autophage in the Poisonous Mist

The cold metal closet pressed against his back, and the sharp edges of the pocket watch dug into his palm, sending a stinging pain through his skin. Kane curled up in the narrow darkness, his heavy breathing sounding deafeningly loud in the silence. On the watch face, the scarlet digits pulsed silently in the dim light like a demon’s brand:

70:23:45:12

Every time the numbers ticked down, it felt as though icy gears were grinding a new notch into his soul. The seventy-one-year countdown was no longer just a warning hanging on the wall of a distant laboratory; it had become the pulse of his own life, an inseparable part of him. The Mobius strip had not only begun to turn, but had locked him firmly onto this desperate, self-consuming track that joined head to tail.

"Loop... key..." The final, breathy whisper of his aged self echoed like a ghost’s sigh in Kane’s chaotic mind. The tiny Ouroboros symbol etched into the withered wrist was the only lighthouse piercing through the torrent of data. What did it point to? Was the "key" the symbol itself, or the essence of the cycle it represented?

He needed a breakthrough. An entry point to verify this absurd cycle and glimpse a shred of the truth.

Fragments of memory surged under the high pressure. Before his aged self dissipated, the flicker of anxiety and the subtle hint in those cloudy eyes... what were they pointing to? Kane forced himself to remain calm, like someone searching for a single perfect bean in a pot of boiling oil. He dismissed the burning streets of Tokyo, the cold underground laboratory, and the suffocating metal cage of the Time Bureau... Finally, the image settled on a blurred corner—in the last moment before pressing the release button, the withered hand of his older self had seemed to touch, ever so slightly, an inconspicuous, dust-covered corner beneath the console.

A location! An infinitesimal physical detail overlooked even by the tampered memory!

Kane’s eyes snapped open. In the absolute darkness, his consciousness was clearer than ever before. He needed to verify this! He needed to return to the source of the mission! He needed to check... the mission logs!

The Time Bureau did not completely seal off information from its "Cleaners." To ensure the precision of mission execution, they had limited access to their past mission briefings and basic environmental data on their personal sleep pod terminals—naturally, in versions that were "purified" and "verified as safe."

He had to take the risk.

Carefully, as if dismantling a bomb that could detonate at any second, Kane pushed open the closet door. A faint light spilled in, illuminating his pigeonhole-sized sleep pod. Cold metal walls, a hard cot, and a palm-sized square terminal screen embedded in the wall—that was all there was.

He walked to the terminal and took a deep breath. The lingering scent of ozone and metal stung his nostrils. There was no start button; the screen lit up automatically as he approached, casting a soft, cold glow. The Time Bureau’s emblem—an abstract symbol composed of countless precision gears and flowing sand—rotated in the center for a few seconds before disappearing, revealing a concise interface.

[Operator: K-7 (Kane)]
[Status: Between Missions - Sleeping/Standby]
[Clearance Level: Gamma (Cleaner)]
[Access Options: Mission Logs (Completed/Archived Only) | Environmental Database (Limited) | Physiological Monitoring]

Kane’s heart hammered heavily against his ribs. He extended a slightly trembling finger and tapped [Mission Logs].

The list expanded:
[Mission #1: New York - Codename "Green Lullaby" - Status: Completed]
[Mission #2: London - Codename "Rust Dome" - Status: Completed]
[Mission #3: Cairo - Codename "Molten Core" - Status: Completed]
[Mission #4: Tokyo - Codename "Third Impact" - Status: Catastrophic Failure - Archive Locked (Insufficient Clearance)]

The Tokyo mission was indeed locked. Kane’s gaze remained fixed on the first line: [Mission #1: New York - Codename "Green Lullaby"].

New York. His starting point. Was it also the corner hinted at in the memory fragments of his aged self?

He opened the New York mission record. The interface switched to show the standard mission briefing summary:

[Target: Professor Carson - "Neuro-Symbiotic Spore" Prototype (Codename "Lullaby")]
[Disaster Type: Unauthorized Biological Leak - Airborne Neuro-Symbiotic Spores]
[Environmental Summary: Lower Manhattan, Greenwich Village vicinity, high-concentration spore smog (continuously spreading), environmental corrosivity: moderate (non-biological materials), biological toxicity: lethal (mammalian nervous system dissolution)]
[Execution Record: Target location confirmed (Carson’s private lab), recovery of target item confirmed (spore incubator), physical annihilation of target individual confirmed. Follow-up shockwave coverage (standard cleanup procedure) ensured complete eradication of contamination source. Mission Rating: Excellent.]

Cold, concise, and flawless. This was the "thread" the Time Bureau wanted him to see.

Kane scanned the official jargon and swiped his finger to open the attached [Environmental Database (Limited)]. This was the key. Briefings could be whitewashed, but real-time environmental data might leave traces.

Massive, highly filtered data streams began to scroll. Air composition analysis (toxic spore percentage, inert gases, trace metal dust), temperature fluctuation curves, sonic spectrums (mostly structural collapse and low-frequency infrasound), topographical scan fragments... The information was complex and cold, like searching for a specific needle in a junkyard.

Kane forced himself to focus, recalling the spot his older self had touched—beneath the console, the dusty corner. In a doomsday laboratory like that, what would be under the console? Cable ports? Backup power? Or... some physical port for local data backup?

His eyes searched rapidly through the scrolling data categories. Suddenly, an inconspicuous sub-item caught his eye: [Local Electromagnetic Anomaly Record (Non-Disaster Core Related)].

Non-core related? "Noise" data usually ignored by executors. Kane clicked it immediately.

The list was short, with only a few sporadic records, all timestamped within the final minutes of his mission. One coordinate caught his attention:

[Coordinates: N40°43'51.396" W74°00'21.528"]
[Anomaly Type: High-Intensity Directional Short-Wave Pulse (Non-standard frequency band)]
[Duration: 0.87 seconds]
[Signal Characteristics: Highly encrypted, complex structure, carries unknown data packet (unparseable)]
[Relevance Assessment: Low (possibly residual experimental equipment failure or external interference)]

These coordinates... Kane’s pupils contracted! He hurriedly pulled up the topographical map attached to the mission briefing and located them!

The coordinate point was clearly marked on the electronic map—right in the core console area of Professor Carson’s private lab! It was almost exactly the corner his older self had touched in his memory!

A high-intensity directional pulse! Issued from that position in the final moments of his "annihilation"! Carrying an unparseable data packet! The Time Bureau had classified it as "irrelevant noise"!

This could not be a coincidence!

A thought, so bold it was almost insane, struck Kane like an electric shock: Could this pulse signal be his aged "self," at that time node, attempting to send information to the "past" (his current self)? A distress signal sent across the cycle, using the environmental chaos of the mission’s final moments as cover? Or perhaps... a guide?

"Key... loop..." The aged whisper sounded again.

Was this coordinate, this signal, the keyhole the key pointed to? Did it point to the New York mission itself? To that point in time?

Kane felt a mix of dizzying excitement and deeper fear. He needed to know the content of the signal! He needed to know what was hidden in that "unknown data packet"! But his clearance... as a Gamma-level cleaner, he could only see the conclusion: "Unparseable."

What could he do?

His eyes scanned the terminal screen and stopped on an inconspicuous icon in the corner: [Physiological Monitoring - Historical Record]. This was the only data stream that might have recorded his own real-time state during the mission. Perhaps... it also contained the subtle effects the environment had on his body at the time? For instance... did that eerie pulse leave some "mark" on him without his knowledge? Just like the Mobius siren from Tokyo was branded onto his consciousness?

Clinging to a final, faint hope, Kane opened his physiological monitoring history for the New York mission.

The charts unfolded: heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline levels, EEG spectrums... standard vital sign curves. In the final stage of the mission, all curves spiked due to high tension and intense activity, then dropped rapidly after he confirmed the target's annihilation, consistent with the physiological performance of an "excellent" mission.

Kane’s heart sank. Had he guessed wrong?

Reluctantly, his gaze swept over the complex EEG spectrum. Colored lines representing different brain region activities were intertwined. About a minute before the mission ended, a tiny, abnormal dip—lasting less than 0.1 seconds—appeared in the deep blue line representing the prefrontal cortex (high-level cognitive area). Immediately after, a short but higher-amplitude spike appeared in a thin line representing gamma waves in the temporal lobe (related to memory and auditory processing)!

These two anomalies were too faint, too brief! In the overall violently fluctuating spectrum, they were like two grains of sand in the ocean, completely ignored by standard analysis algorithms and marked as "motion artifacts/environmental electromagnetic interference."

But Kane’s intuition was screaming! The timestamp! The timestamp of that gamma wave spike coincided exactly with the start time of the high-intensity short-wave pulse in the environmental data!

It wasn't interference! It was reception! His brain had received and processed that signal without his knowledge! That unparseable data packet had been subconsciously captured and stored by his brain! It was hidden deep in his temporal lobe, mixed in with countless normal memory fragments!

"Loop... key... inside... myself?" Kane muttered, feeling a chill run through his body. His aged self, at the end of the New York mission, had sent a data packet to his past self (or rather, to the self who would inevitably return to this node in the cycle). And this packet was buried deep in his own memory! Ignored by the Time Bureau’s data scrubbing, covered by tampered memory corridors, yet brought back to the surface of his consciousness by the anchor of these coordinates!

He squeezed his eyes shut, ignoring the terminal screen. All his willpower, like the most precise probe, focused and pierced toward his temporal lobe, toward the memory area corresponding to that gamma wave anomaly! He strained to recall the final moment of the New York mission: the light that erupted when the particle beam struck Professor Carson (that face, so similar to his own!), the screech of overloading laboratory equipment, the weird smell of spore smog being incinerated by high heat... and... was there something hidden beneath the background noise of that chaos and destruction?

Focus! Focus more! Imagine the coordinate point! Imagine the invisible pulse!

*Hum...*

A faint, buzzing sound, as if from a distant void, rang deep in his mind! With the hum, a blurry, intermittent, signal-distorted fragment of a scene, like the wreckage of a sunken ship, smashed through the silt of his memory and surfaced in his consciousness!

The image was highly unstable, filled with snow and noise. The perspective was low and shaking, as if he were lying on the ground. The background was the iconic, ruined streets of Greenwich Village, New York, now shrouded in thick, toxic green fog. The focus of the image was on a semi-collapsed newsstand not far ahead.

The glass display case of the newsstand was mostly shattered, but on a relatively intact pane of glass, a torn, brightly colored rock band poster was pasted. Beneath the poster, a front page of the *New York Times*, soaked with rain and grime, hung down, revealing a corner of another newspaper pressed beneath it.

On that corner of the newspaper, a bolded black title word stubbornly revealed itself through the shaking image and noise:

...cle...

Immediately, the image shook and distorted violently, as if hit by heavy interference, and vanished instantly!

Kane snapped his eyes open, cold sweat beading on his forehead, his heart racing uncontrollably. Only this one word! A partial word! "Cycle"? "Circle"? "Clearance"? Or... "Mobius Cycle"?

The clue pointed to that newsstand! To the newspaper pressed beneath the other!

His aged self, in the final moment of the New York mission, had used his life to pass on the message that he should check that newsstand? To check the newspaper pressed under the *New York Times*?

Why? In that apocalyptic environment, what could an ordinary newspaper record? What truth hidden by the Time Bureau could it reveal? Could it point to the "key" to breaking the cycle?

Countless questions rolled in Kane’s mind like boiling bubbles. But at this moment, he had only one thought, as clear and urgent as the scarlet countdown on his pocket watch: He had to go back! Return to New York! Return to that point in time! Before the newsstand was completely destroyed by the shockwave, he had to find that newspaper!

The cold touch of the pocket watch reminded him that the countdown continued: 70:23:10:05. Every jump consumed the few grains of life he had left. But this time, the jump was not to execute an order, but... to save himself! To rebel!

He did not hesitate. His fingers gripped the pocket watch tightly, his knuckles turning white. He sank his consciousness into the watch’s cold metal casing, as if grasping the key to the gates of hell. Target coordinates: New York, "Green Lullaby" disaster site, final moment of mission execution, Greenwich Village, in front of that semi-collapsed newsstand!

The solidified darkness swept over him again, accompanied by the familiar, soul-tearing pain. But this time, amidst the agony, a faint but incredibly firm flame burned—he would find that newspaper, he would tear open the lies meticulously woven by the Time Bureau, and he would pry open the first crack in this self-consuming Ouroboros loop!

The darkness was torn apart.

The thick, nauseating green fog, a mixture of sweet rot and chemical agents, instantly enveloped Kane. He had arrived in the hell of New York.