Chapter 560: Phase Rift

The seven afterimages of Ao Li collapsed into a star map in Banach space within the laboratory.

Lin Jin's quantum right arm trembled in the dimensional fold; he saw each Ao Li phase wearing a different style of dragon horn—from the delicate coral horns of a young girl to the broken horns of an elderly woman, the seven dragon clan princesses of time and space were constructing a killing array using the hexagrams of the *I Ching*. The young Ao Li on the far left held a bronze mask, the inside of the mask engraved with the forbidden changing line of the top nine of the *Weiji* hexagram: "Possessing sincerity, yet losing the way; knowing the end, yet knowing the ruin."

"Seven phases of the *Li* hexagram, each presiding over a killing intent." The phase of the middle-aged Ao Li waved a burning *He Tu*, and the laboratory's gravitational field suddenly inverted. As Lin Jin collided with the ceiling, he caught a glimpse of the black blood seeping from the back of the bronze mask forming a miniature Ouroboros—identical to the curse seal that had contaminated the dragon clan's holy mountain three hundred years ago.

The original Ao Li attempted to activate her star marrow left eye, only to find that every phase was vying for control of the dragon pearl. When her fingertips touched the hem of the childhood phase's clothing, three hundred segments of memory flooded in simultaneously: on the night of her fifth birthday, her mother had been swallowed by black blood while wearing a bronze mask, and the lower half of the face revealed when the mask fell was highly similar to Lin Jin's!

"You are the source of the contamination!" The elderly phase suddenly detonated the Nine Palaces hexagram array. Before his quantum tentacles were annihilated, Lin Jin captured a terrifying truth—every remnant scroll of the *I Ching* in the hands of the phases was missing the top nine line of the *Weiji* hexagram, and that page of the line text was pasted onto the Λ-crystal reactor at the heart of the laboratory, transforming the entire building into a coffin of phase superposition.

The bronze mask suddenly emitted the Pavilion Master's laughter. The childhood Ao Li phase pressed the mask onto her face, black blood gushing from her eye sockets, drawing the neural network diagram of the Mechanical Buddha in the void. Lin Jin's gene chain suddenly boiled, and the equation spontaneously calculated by his quantum right arm was, shockingly, the energy model for the Buddha devouring Ao Li's mother clan!

"Use the Nine Nether Dragon Soul to pin the *Zhen* position!" The original Ao Li's star marrow left eye streamed blood and tears. In the turbulence of the phases, she saw an even more horrifying scene—a miniature Crescent Engine was embedded in the heart of every phase, and a version of herself at a different age was sealed within each engine's fuel chamber.

The laboratory suddenly fell into Minkowski space. Lin Jin grabbed the childhood phase amidst the time-space curvature, but the mask suddenly proliferated bronze shackles, welding his quantum tentacles onto the Buddha's neural diagram. When the shackles touched the contaminated black blood from three hundred years ago, all phases chanted in unison: "The *Weiji* ends, knowing life and death."

Ao Li burned her Reverse Scale to release a Nine Nether Dragon Roar. The dragon soul dragged from the black hole coiled around the seven phases, but triggered an even more terrifying mutation the moment they fused—a Λ-crystal interface split open on the spine of every phase, currently assembling into the bronze star sundial of the First Generation Observer. Lin Jin's right arm suddenly inserted into the core of the star sundial, pulling out an infant soaking in black blood, the infant's umbilical cord actually connecting to the Buddha wheel coffin of the Mechanical Buddha!

"So we are all sacrifices..." The original Ao Li's dragon horns cracked inch by inch. When she shattered the bronze mask in the hands of the childhood phase, the mask fragments suddenly transformed into three hundred Ouroboros nails, permanently anchoring the seven phases at different positions on the coffin Buddha wheel. The infant in Lin Jin's arms suddenly opened its eyes, the final hexagram of the *Tui Bei Tu* rotating in its pupils—it was a reenactment of the scene when Ao Li's mother was swallowed.

Before the phase space completely disintegrated, the star marrow left eye finally saw through the ultimate truth: the missing top nine line of the *Weiji* hexagram was engraved on the inside of the bronze mask on the Buddha's chest. And when the nine Ao Li phases fused within the dragon soul, the gene encoding of Lin Jin emerged on the back of their necks—this sacrifice spanning epochs had been written into the fate line of all dragon clan members the moment the Crescent Engine was started. ===== CHAPTER 561 =====