Chapter 9

**Chapter 9: Returning to the Place of Birth**

The snow of the Northern Wasteland has turned the color of memory.

Gray-white ice crystals float in the air, each one reflecting fragments of different time and space. When Lin Jin steps over the ruins of the clan stele, the chain scar suddenly burns—the childhood memories erased by the woman in the ice coffin are surging from deep within the scar.

"Listen, the ice coffin is crying."

The younger version of himself crouches in the corner, poking at the black blood seeping from the ice coffin. The Lin Jin in reality reaches out to touch it, but the phantom shatters into ice dregs, and the distorted face of his mother appears in the dregs.

**Burial Coffin Forbidden Ground: Rebirth Ice Cave**

Broken soul-suppressing chains hang from the dome of the ice cave, and the blood droplets congealed on the chain links maintain the shape they had on the day he was born. Lin Jin's Burial Star Pupil suddenly stings; he sees miniature space-times curled up in every blood droplet:

His mother is pinned before the ice coffin, and beneath the arc of her protruding belly, ice-blue cracks are vaguely slithering—the patterns of the cracks are exactly the same as the ice patterns in his right eye.

"So I am the original coffin."

Lin Jin presses on the aching chain scar, and seventy-two strands of civilization fire automatically gather into a knife. The instant the ice knife stabs into the floor of the ice cave, the entire Northern Wasteland begins to collapse, revealing the terrifying truth buried beneath the ice layer—

Countless infant ice coffins are embedded in the ice walls, each coffin sealing a corpse with a face similar to his. The ice coffin fragments at the umbilical cords of these corpses are connecting the "Lin Jin" of different time and space through dimensional folds.

**Observer Experiment Log (Fragment)**

**Number: 000**

**Experiment Name: Coffin Recursion**

**Sample Description: Implant the gene sequence of the First Observer (Ice Coffin Woman) into embryos of seventy-two time-spaces, observing the probability of their dimensional breakthrough. **

**Note: Northern Wasteland sample (Lin Jin) shows abnormal recursion, suspected of triggering the Mother Body awakening protocol. **

The ice knife suddenly shatters, turning into ice mist that drills into Lin Jin's seven orifices. He is forced to relive the most primitive pain—the instant his soul was split by ice coffin fragments when he was born, the sigh of the woman in the ice coffin was not a curse, but a desperate wail:

"Don't wake up... don't become us..."

**Reverse Time Flow**

When Lin Jin digs out the Burial Star Pupil from his right eye with his bare hands, the ice cave finally reveals its core: an ice coffin less than three feet long, with his infant self curled up inside. The infant's umbilical cord has grown together with the coffin lid, and what is engraved on the coffin lid is actually the entry rune for the Observer laboratory!

"The starting point of recursion..."

He crushes the Burial Star Pupil fragments, which congeal into the shape of a key in the air. The instant it is inserted into the infant's coffin, time in the entire Northern Wasteland begins to flow backward—

The ice coffin reassembles, the clansmen walk backward, and the ice patterns on his mother's belly shrink into light spots. When time flows back to the beginning of creation, Lin Jin sees the birth of the woman in the ice coffin in the void:

She is a clone crawled out of a giant culture tank, and the tank label reads **"First Observer Clone-72"**. And on the laboratory wall where the culture tank is located, it is covered with design blueprints for Northern Wasteland clan steles of different time and space.

**True Birthplace**

The infant's cry pierces the dimension. Lin Jin holds the infant ice coffin and steps into the white light at the end of the reverse flow. There is no ice or snow here, only countless floating culture tanks, each containing an aging clone of the woman in the ice coffin.

The frost-white hair on his wrist suddenly pulls taut, pointing to a culture tank that is melting. Lin Jin finds half a dinosaur tooth fossil at the bottom of the tank, perfectly fitting the one at the entrance to the Primordial Desolation. Blood seeps from the surface of the fossil, gathering into the handwriting he is familiar with:

**"Kill all clones, including me."**

—Ice Coffin Woman - First Observer

**Matricide Paradox**

The first clone ice coffin opens at his feet, and an aged woman in the ice coffin reaches out: "You are my most perfect work..."

Lin Jin's chain scar splits open, and seventy-two civilization fires turn into Taotie, swallowing the clone along with the culture tank. Every time he swallows a clone, the frost-white hair on his wrist rots by an inch, and the snow in the Northern Wasteland recovers its pure white in the present world.

When the last clone dissipates, the entire laboratory begins to collapse. The infant ice coffin in Lin Jin's arms suddenly opens its eyes, its pupils rotating with the Observer's identification symbol: "You think you won? We were already in your soul..."

The ice coffin explodes, and the infant's fragments stab into all the acupuncture points of Lin Jin's body. His skin begins to crystallize, and a cold system prompt appears in his field of vision:

**【Recursion complete, sample Lin Jin promoted to Formal Observer.】**

**The Last Night of the Northern Wasteland**

Pure white snow falls on the youth's stiff body. Deep within the Burial Star Pupil re-congealed in his right eye, the data stream unique to Observers flickers. But when he bends down to scoop up a handful of snow, his fingertips suddenly stab into his chest, pulling out a segment of umbilical cord covered in viscous liquid—

Inside that umbilical cord that connected him to the ice coffin ten thousand years ago, the true infant Lin Jin is curled up.

"The end of recursion is a restart."

He crushes the data-fied pupil and places the infant into the Northern Wasteland ice coffin that has re-congealed. The instant the coffin lid closes, all the Observer identification symbols dissipate like a receding tide, and the true woman in the ice coffin walks out of the snow, no longer having chains beneath her skirt.

"Now," she ties the frost-white hair around the youth's wrist, "you are the new clan stele of the Northern Wasteland."

Seventy-two ice coffins burst out of the ground, with the epitaphs of all the devoured civilizations engraved on the inner walls of the coffin lids. And Lin Jin sits alone on the highest ice coffin, watching the chain scar on his palm gradually extinguish—

Every disappearance of a scar is a "Lin Jin" of a time-space breaking free from the recursion curse.

The snow falls without a sound.

The infant's cry comes from within the ice coffin, as clear as it was ten thousand years ago.