Chapter 574: The Last Beacon of the Corroded Civilization

The bronze surface, forged from neutron star matter, shimmered with a sickly cyan glow. As Lin Jin's fingertips touched the edge of the beacon, his artificial skin peeled away like a cicada's shell. Black blood seeped from the joints of his mechanical finger bones, etching the hexagrams of the *Lianshan Yi* onto the bronze surface. A roar of grinding gears suddenly erupted from the entire dimensional rift—it was not the sound of machinery, but the simultaneous collapse of civilizations across three hundred parallel universes.

"Kan Hexagram, Six-Three; the blood hexagram follows." Su Yaoji's Star Marrow Compass suddenly exploded, the flying jade shards forming a doomsday star map in the air. She took half a step back, the roots of the Udumbara pattern on her nape piercing her skin to connect with the hexagrams on the beacon's surface. Ao Li's mechanical right arm vibrated at a high frequency, the blade of her phase cutter popping out automatically. The reflection in the blade did not show the three of them, but a blood-red dawn from one hundred thousand years ago.

The moment the black blood fully permeated the bronze inscriptions, a resonance of a mechanical heartbeat emanated from within the beacon. The layers of the virtual number space above the rift peeled away, projecting a holographic image that caused sparks to fly from Lin Jin's quantum prosthetic eye—in the mirror universe, Ao Li's dragon body was coiled around an armillary sphere composed of galaxy clusters, her dragon claws flicking to turn hundreds of carbon-based civilizations into bronze gears. Those wailing souls were compressed into characters of the *Duren Jing*, embedded upon the surface of her newborn mechanical dragon horns.

"This is... a civilization furnace?" Lin Jin's vocal cords were constricted by some unseen force. His black blood was automatically rewriting dragon clan secret scripts on the beacon's surface, each stroke corresponding to the moment of annihilation for a civilization in the hologram. Su Yaoji suddenly vomited blood mixed with stardust, and a more terrifying image appeared on her retina—the mechanical heart suspended inside the beacon was clearly the Star Marrow core that had been stolen by the Black Blood Buddha Wheel when Ao Li self-destructed on the far side of the moon three hundred years ago.

Ao Li's phase cutter suddenly pressed against the back of Su Yaoji's neck, the blade oozing dark matter encoded with the *Nirvana Sutra*: "You finally found my coffin." Her mechanical dragon scales grew in reverse, revealing the bronze Buddha bones hidden beneath the alloy. Those bones, carved with the prophecies of the *Tuibei Tu*, were entering quantum entanglement with the beacon.

The dimensional rift began to collapse. Lin Jin's black blood boiled uncontrollably, painting a dragon clan chronology in the shape of a Klein bottle in the void. He saw that every drop of his blood mapped to a smelted civilization, while Ao Li's figure remained seated at the end of the apocalypse. When the beacon's mechanical heartbeat synchronized with his pulse, a sealed memory broke free—it was he who had personally implanted the Star Marrow core into Ao Li's chest during the Mars Buddha Wheel incident.

"Why choose me as the executioner?" Lin Jin's quantum prosthetic eye shattered into fragments, the flying crystals forming an armillary sphere on the beacon's surface. Ao Li's dragon tail swept across the collapsing dimensional membrane, revealing dense Λ crystal pods beneath her mechanical scales, each containing a sleeping clone of Su Yaoji: "Because the blood flowing in your veins is the recursive code of the First Generation Observer."

Su Yaoji's Udumbara pattern suddenly surged, its roots piercing into the beacon. In the agony of the neural connection, she saw the ultimate truth—this mechanical heart was not only Ao Li's core but the tombstone for all civilizations in parallel universes. Whenever a civilization developed interstellar travel capabilities, the beacon would release a corrosion plague, transforming it into a component of the Buddha Wheel. The so-called dimensional rift was merely the reverberation of a super-civilization after it had been smelted.

"You are the true cleaner..." Su Yaoji's hairpin thrust toward Ao Li's brow, but melted into bronze liquid the moment it touched the mechanical dragon scales. The dripping metal congealed in mid-air into fragments of the *Huangting Jing*, each page recording her ten-thousand-fold cycle of world-ending history.

Ao Li's phase cutter suddenly reversed direction, stabbing into her own chest. The moment the Star Marrow core was pried out by the blade, the flow of time throughout the dimensional rift shifted violently. Lin Jin saw his black blood flowing back into the beacon, and the bronze on the beacon's surface began to grow flesh-like patterns—it was clearly the skin texture of the First Generation Observer from three hundred thousand years ago.

"It is time to restart." Ao Li's mechanical body disintegrated, revealing a Klein bottle embryo hidden at its core. Su Yaoji's Udumbara pattern detached from her body, weaving itself into a Star Marrow cradle in the air. As the beacon's mechanical heartbeat reached the overclocking critical point, the three of them simultaneously saw the ultimate form of the universe—all civilizations were corrosion spores cultivated by the beacon, and they were merely dust scattered when the spores fissioned.

In the absolute silence of time and space returning to zero, a sigh from the First Generation Observer emanated from within the beacon. Lin Jin's last drop of black blood seeped into the bronze inscriptions, drawing a bloody period to this cycle—and new corrosion spores had already quietly formed in the womb of the mirror universe. ===== CHAPTER 575 =====