The four⁠​​‌⁠⁠​‍⁠⁠⁠​‍‍⁠⁠​⁠‍⁠​‍​​ black mirrors reflected the figures of four Protectors.

In the depths of An Yu’s consciousness, it was as if molten lava had shattered countless mirrors, and after a momentary boiling roar, everything fell silent, as if sound would never exist again.

He felt as if he had returned to the gene induction test at the Brain—mysterious whispers circulated throughout his body, and an unspeakable pain spread deep in his consciousness, enough to shatter his mind.

His survival value on the terminal plummeted to 80%, then instantly replenished. The percentage furiously switched between the two numbers, as if two immense forces were tearing him apart. In his peripheral vision, Qin Zhilu quietly cradled the white candle, his dark eyes were resolute, without the slightest hesitation or fear.

In the Mirror Core high above, purplish-blue blood vessels gradually appeared on Bai Jing’s pale eyelids. His blood flowed faster, and his eyeballs began to slowly rotate.

At 120 seconds on the outer shattered mirror’s self-destruct countdown, Bai Jing’s eyelashes gently trembled.

An Yu looked directly up at the sleeping figure, his red pupils focused and endless time and life flowed within those eyes.

The figure standing silently behind him was as profound as the sea, suppressing all the orphanage’s bizarre occurrences beneath a dark, deep current.

The snowstorm suddenly raged. A gust instantly dispersed the smoke enveloping An Yu.

Amidst the terminal alarms, Qin Zhilu looked up at his survival value. In just an instant, the swirling white smoke once again enveloped An Yu, as if no matter how the snowstorm howled, it couldn’t be dispersed.

The entire team’s mental power rapidly decreased under the interference of the Clamor Mirror. Slade gritted his teeth. “Can Law hold Corner steady?”

Fengjian didn’t answer, merely staring at An Yu’s repeatedly bouncing back survival value and muttering to himself, “Such powerful vitality…”

If he wasn’t mistaken, the poppy vines wrapped around An Yu hadn’t actually taken effect yet. So far, Qin Zhilu was still exchanging life for life, seemingly unwilling to easily damage his own mental power.

He suddenly realized, belatedly, that Qin Zhilu had personally undertaken many terrifying missions and was even said to frequently go to the Equality Zone alone. Yet, among the many healing-type Protectors in the Spire, he had never bonded with any of them. Only the high-ranking Zhu Tao and An had treated him during missions, but only for conventional treatment when he suffered visible external injuries, never obtaining permission to view his survival value.

That was a body capable of accommodating unlimited chaotic genes, tempered by unknown experiences, so powerful that no one had ever heard his terminal alarm. Until he connected his own life to An Yu.

Self-destruct countdown 80 seconds.

The black mirror had gone insane. The extreme clamor had actually dissipated, leaving only endless, pervasive pain.

The intense pain had rendered An Yu unable to perceive his own body, but his consciousness had become unprecedentedly sharp, as if he could easily touch everything in the orphanage—

He felt the gray buildings silently endure the snowstorm, the hidden spaces abnormally folded within the mirrors, time like stagnant water, countless lives frozen in the water, still maintaining the terror of the disaster that struck ten years ago.

His consciousness hovered on the edge of fading, but in the haze, the river of time became increasingly clear. He gazed intently at that dead river, yearning for it to flow again.

High in the Mirror Core, the eyeballs beneath Bai Jing’s eyelids rotated faster and faster and his fingertips trembled.

He was about to fully awaken.

An urgent, mechanical female voice suddenly sounded in An Yu’s earpiece. “Alert! Your supervising Commander’s survival value is 20%! System has automatically granted you Commander data access. Please check Commander’s status immediately!”

Self-destruct countdown 40 seconds.

“Alert! Your supervising Commander’s survival value is 10%! System connection to Black Tower failed! Please check Commander’s status immediately!”

“Alert! Your supervising Commander’s survival value is 5%! System…”

The alarm ceased abruptly.

Qin Zhilu’s terminal was crushed under his own foot. His voice was extremely weak, but his tone remained as steady as a mountain.

“Focus,” he said.

But An Yu still zoned out for a moment.

His gaze swept over his own terminal, just catching his survival value returning to full, while the Commander’s survival value, temporarily displayed on the screen, was barely a thread.

Self-destruct countdown 20 seconds.

The swirling smoke finally dispersed in the wind.

An Yu suddenly heard a soft sigh from behind him.

Immediately, the poppy vines loosely embracing him suddenly tightened, wrapping tightly around his muscles and bones. The impact of his heartbeat became very strong, echoing in every blood vessel.

Each time, the tightening of the vines and the frequency of the terminal number’s bouncing back were perfectly synchronized, making it difficult for him to discern whether it was his own heartbeat or the Commander’s that was pulsating in his veins.

“You can do it,” Qin Zhilu suddenly spoke again. “Make time flow again.”

The increasingly intense pain churned through An Yu’s consciousness, yet he seemed oblivious, once again urging Bai Jing to accelerate his awakening with his will.

The snowstorm raged as if collapsing. He stepped forward two paces and faced the violent wind.

The vines binding him felt like ropes tightly securing a small boat. In a trance, he even felt he had reconnected with the wooden stake anchoring him deep beneath the sea.

However, at this moment, he no longer thought of the brother who had raised him.

Even without turning back, the figure silently standing behind him remained clear in his mind.

Self-destruct countdown 5 seconds.

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4 seconds.

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An Yu suddenly closed his eyes. As the intense pain rapidly peeled away from his consciousness, his heartbeat became very profound. In a trance, he seemed to sense the silent, colossal presence Chen Nian had spoken of.

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But when looking in the mirror, he was scrutinizing a fragment, while at this moment, he vaguely felt he was the one being sliced off.

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An alarm suddenly exploded in An Yu’s earpiece, pulling him back to reality!

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Above the mirror’s core, Bai Jing’s eyes suddenly opened, and the vast mirror in the sky shattered completely. The intersecting cracks instantly turned into a dense web of fissures.

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The revelry and sorrow of countless people played out in that river of time that had begun to flow again. They were loud and tumultuous, yet they subsided in an instant. The stagnant ten years passed in the blink of an eye. Between heaven and earth, all that remained was the rush of the river.

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Those eyes did not hold the emptiness of a ten-year slumber, only a heavy sorrow.

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An Yu looked behind him.

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“Comman—”

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The smell of fresh blood filled the wind. Qin Zhilu walked toward An Yu, holding the white candle, but his gaze was fixed on the young man in the pool of blood behind him.

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Even though those dark eyes remained as determined as ever.

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“Sir.”

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The single, faint point of candlelight between them seemed ready to be carried away by the wind at any moment.

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A hysterical scream suddenly came from the darkness, followed by chaotic alarms.

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“Wing Sequence D1-248 aberrant Gene Induction Accident!”

“Mental power continuously dropping! Immediately halt gene injection!”

An Yu’s vision gradually cleared. He was in a strange yet somewhat familiar all-metal sealed laboratory. On the test table, a slender young man seemed to be lying and his naked body was connected to countless terrifying tubes. At this moment, red alarm signs flashed on screens of various sizes around him, and various physiological indicators were heading towards the brink of life and death.

Under the oxygen mask, fearful, choked breaths echoed in the laboratory. That was a pain and helplessness An Yu could empathize with.

But An Yu was somewhat confused. He had already seen Bai Jing’s memory sealed in the fourth shattered mirror fragment. Bai Jing had also fallen from high above, the mirror core shattered. He couldn’t understand how he had entered Bai Jing’s memory once again.

A panicked male voice suddenly sounded from the wall.

“0930! 0930! You show no aberrant features, nor any loss of will! I repeat, you are not an aberrant. This is an energy overload accident! Please try to calm your breathing, grasp consciousness, do not fall into a coma! Medical personnel will help you return to normal soon!”

It felt like a heavy punch to the heart. An Yu seemed to lose the ability to think in that instant.

But he finally remembered. Although the facilities were older, this wasn’t the orphanage’s medical room, but the Main City’s Brain Laboratory.

He had once lain on that cold metal table too. The Main City officials spoke to him through the intercom system embedded in the wall, calling him by the temporary code name given to him on his birthday—1222.

On the test table, the dying gasps were long and hard to calm, amplified by the monitoring device and their echoes repeated one after another.

An Yu remembered not long ago, in the orphanage’s archive room, when he was creating fake identities for his teammates, he had casually asked, “Commander, what’s your birthday?” “September 30th, 2122,” Qin Zhilu calmly replied.

0930.

The metal door suddenly swung open amidst the alarms. Over a dozen medical personnel in protective suits rushed in, completely surrounding the test bed.

“Blood pressure 30-50!”

“Adrenaline!”

“Heart rate 32! Electrodes ready!”

“Gene inhibitor!”

“0930! 0930! Can you hear me?!”

“0930! Don’t sleep!”

An Yu was stunned for a long time. He was just a fleeting consciousness, existing within this accidentally triggered memory. He could do nothing but manipulate his perspective to move through the crowd by the test table and look at the indicators on the screen. Survival value 5%, mental power 32%.

Memories were chaotic, but the scenes that had once occurred, the words Qin Zhilu and Yan Xi had said to him, intertwined and suddenly became clear in his mind—

“The great disaster descended in 2122. Law’s mother was directly exposed while pregnant. Law was listed among the first batch for gene entropy testing after birth… A total of ten thousand samples were submitted for testing, he was the only extremely outlying sample…”

…

“Commander seemed very tired during those few days I was in a coma. What was he doing?”

“Sorry, no comment. You can ask Law directly… After returning from District 53, High Peak wanted Brain to restart tests on you with real abnormal genes to see how many abilities could be stimulated. Theoretically, the experiment could perfectly control the scale, but Law disagreed.”

…

“Gene induction testing is an inhumane experiment, very costly, and only initiated for extremely few individuals… It can cause strong neurofunctional sequelae. Insomnia and nightmares are the most common.”

“Did Commander just play one song to coax Jian Xing to sleep?”

“I accompanied him through some past events… Insomnia is just a disease. Orphans are uneducated. I taught him some ways to fall asleep, that’s all.”

…

“Why don’t you sleep?”

“I just woke up. I only sleep two hours.”

“Since when?”

“Since as long as I can remember it.”

…

An Yu looked down at the slender body on the test table. The young Qin Zhilu lay naked on it. His pale skin was covered in large patches of purplish-red bruising. Every prominent blood vessel pulsed with his heartbeat. His dark eyes stared directly at the ceiling, as if his soul had been drained, or as if across time and space, he was meeting the gaze of An Yu, who was looking down at him.

An Yu instinctively wanted to reach out, just as the Commander had done to him, to embrace that small body, to soothe him by stroking his head. But he couldn’t even touch him.

Not long ago, on a snowy night, he and the Commander went from the District A cafeteria to the sleeping nest to find Chen Nian. The Commander seemed very concerned about whether he had been bullied by orphanage bullies when he was little. Even after he said no, the Commander still extended a dark tentacle to shield his eyes from the snow dust.

He recognized this good opportunity to deepen their bond with the Commander and immediately asked in return, “Commander, what were you doing when you were little?”

On that day, the Commander’s expression was as calm as usual, but his voice seemed to be swallowed by the snowstorm.

“At Black Tower and Brain, occasionally home.”

Author’s Note:

The next chapter is the story of young Qin Zhilu.