Chapter 542: Black Blood Trace

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The aftershocks of the explosion refracted into twelve layers of afterimages within the Klein bottle barrier. As Lin Jin retreated, he stepped on a viscous substance, and looking down, he discovered the laboratory floor tiles were melting into a thick, starlight-like fluid. His tactical goggles suddenly flashed a red warning—the Λ crystals floating in the air were rewriting physical constants.

"Gravity vector shift by 37 degrees!" Ao Li flicked out three dragon scale talismans, a cyan energy net shrouding the collapsing ventilation duct. "Watch out for cognitive contamination!"

Before the words had even faded, blood-colored seal script suddenly emerged on Lin Jin's retinas. Those undead characters he had seen on the interstellar battlefield were now eroding his neural synapses in reverse. The Annihilation Revolver suddenly trembled violently, the barrel turning toward his own temple of its own accord, the Ouroboros pattern lighting up with a bloodthirsty glow.

"Trying to rebel again?" Lin Jin bit his tongue, spraying saliva mixed with dragon blood crystals onto the weapon's body. The god-slaying weapon emitted a sharp shriek like a baby crying, black slime seeping from the dark gold patterns; the moment those liquids hit the ground, they transformed into struggling humanoid shadows.

Ao Li's Reverse Scale Dagger tore through space-time, slicing the contaminated area into twenty-seven independent quadrants. When her dragon claw pressed against the back of Lin Jin's neck, their memories suddenly underwent quantum entanglement—Lin Jin saw the scene of Ao Li gouging out a dragon pearl before a bronze compass, while Ao Li glimpsed Lin Jin's body being reassembled inside an antimatter reactor.

"Your memory entropy..." The scales on Ao Li's dragon tail suddenly bristled; she saw a writhing black shadow deep within Lin Jin's memories, a thing that was gnawing away at every image of his childhood.

A sharp metallic tearing sound interrupted the resonance. Three hundred culture pods burst simultaneously, and the clones crawled out in postures that violated human ergonomics, the Ouroboros emblems on their chests opening scarlet compound eyes. They emitted shrieks like electromagnetic interference from their throats, and the laboratory's emergency lights began projecting war illusions from the previous epoch.

"Don't look directly at the emblems!" Ao Li threw out her dragon pearl, a miniature black hole twisting three clones into Mandelbrot set figures. But more mutants stood up from the culture fluid, Λ-shaped crystal clusters growing from their spines, projecting a holographic image of Lin Jin holding a gun to his own throat onto the walls.

Lin Jin suddenly pressed his throbbing temple, and the trigger of the Annihilation Revolver pulled itself. The antimatter bullet pierced through seven dimensions, blasting a fusing clone into a cloud of boson particles. But in the vacuum decay zone left by the trajectory, fragments of his lost memories suddenly emerged—a woman wearing a bronze mask pressing the revolver against his brow, the Ouroboros on the gun body devouring its own tail.

"Lin Jin!" Ao Li's dragon roar carried high-frequency oscillation waves, shattering the vacuum decay zone that was about to close. Blood beads seeped from the dragon scales on her forehead. "The black blood is reconstructing your causal chain!"

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The laboratory suddenly plunged into absolute darkness, all sound swallowed by quantum foam. Lin Jin felt cold fingers rewriting his DNA chain, the same Ouroboros pattern as the clones emerging on his forehead. A bizarre sense of satisfaction came from the Annihilation Revolver; those devoured memories were being converted into its energy.

"Azure Dragon Seven Mansions: Yang!" Ao Li's roar tore through the darkness, Big Dipper starlight piercing the dimensional barrier. Her cyan jade dragon horns shattered inch by inch, revealing the rotating galactic nebula within. The miniature black hole and antimatter energy reached a delicate balance, slowing the laboratory's time flow to one-millionth of its normal speed.

In the frozen time-space, Lin Jin saw a shocking truth—each clone was a time slice he had lost, and those memories devoured by the God-Slaying Revolver were reconstructing flesh through the Λ crystals. In the deepest culture pod, a "Lin Jin" with crystal wings on its back was assembling a type of star gate device, the pattern on the door being the very causal law weapon used during the ancient god wars.

"So it was you..." Lin Jin suddenly laughed; he finally understood why the black market merchant would trade three hundred star systems for him. The Annihilation Revolver was not a weapon at all, but a key to opening ancient god ruins, and those devoured memories were the true password.

Ao Li's dragon blood drew an entropy-reversing array in the slow time flow, her long hair turning snow-white at a speed visible to the naked eye. "There are only twenty seconds left before the reality anchor fails," she coughed up blood foam mixed with stardust. "We must destroy the Λ crystal mother body!"

The moment Lin Jin rushed toward the star gate device, all the clones suddenly fused into a giant. An eye spanning three dimensions opened on its chest, its pupil reflecting a bronze giant tree on the far side of the moon. The Annihilation Revolver emitted a joyful hum, voluntarily inserting its barrel into that eye.

"As you wish." Lin Jin sneered as he pulled the trigger, blasting the last three antimatter bullets into the pupil. Amidst the light of a supernova explosion, he heard the bronze-masked woman's sigh: "You chose this world-line after all..."

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When the laboratory returned to calm, Ao Li was using her dragon pearl to repair the shattered dimensions. She noticed all the Λ crystals were displaying a countdown—23:59:59.

"The black blood contamination was just bait," Lin Jin said, wiping the cracked Annihilation Revolver. "Someone wanted us to discover the time loop." He kicked aside the remains of Researcher 9527 and dug half a bronze compass out of a crystallized heart.

Ao Li's pupils suddenly contracted. What was engraved on the back of the compass was the very taboo the Azure Dragon Clan had guarded for one hundred thousand years—the star chart coordinates of the "Candle Dragon's Pupil." Even more terrifying, when she injected her dragon blood, the compass needle pointed toward her own evaporating heart.

"On the night of the next full moon," Lin Jin tossed the compass to Ao Li, the revolver barrel pressed against his own temple, "remember, before I am completely quantized..." He suddenly turned the muzzle and shattered the observation window; outside the window, where there should have been the night sky of a Mars colony, there were now three hundred Ouroboros coffins suspended in the air.

Ao Li's dragon claws dug deep into the console. In a blind spot not scanned by the holographic surveillance, her shadow was growing in a bizarre, reverse direction; it was clearly the outline of the bronze mask Lin Jin had seen in his memory illusions. When the green light of the alarm deactivation shone, both pretended not to see the Λ-shaped patterns emerging on each other's bodies.

As the laboratory cleaning robots began to process the remains, a certain Λ crystal fragment suddenly flickered. In the future scene it reflected, Ao Li was embedding her dragon pearl into the bronze giant tree in a lunar crater, while behind her stood the crystal-winged Lin Jin, the Annihilation Revolver in his hand already transformed into an Ouroboros scepter. ===== CHAPTER 543 =====