In the seventh second after the explosion-proof chamber plunged into the underground pipeline, Leon tasted his own blood in the cushioning gel. The photon emergency lights flickered to life on the chamber walls, and in that instant, he saw over four hundred reflections of himself blinking simultaneously on the diamond-shaped walls. This was a custom-made counter-surveillance chamber from the Mirror Merchant Guild, rumored to deflect 99% of quantum tracking waves.
"Survival confirmed," a mechanical female voice sounded, and the door was forcibly ripped open. Thick mist, laden with the scent of decayed organic matter, surged in. Leon's nostrils were immediately filled with the distinct, sweetly pungent smell of fungal spores. This was a smell native to the surface—ever since the floating city ascended, the surface of Selena had become a haven for mold and mutated vines.
Through the fog, the silhouette of Alicia Witt appeared. She was dressed in faded hunting gear, her deer-hide boots dusted with fluorescent blue spore powder, and data wires tangled in her dark red curls, as if she had sewn the finery of a guild heiress together with the gear of a surface scavenger. Most striking was the slave code tattooed on her neck—the relic of an old era, banned by federal law.
"So the last heir of the Stone family didn't die in the photon furnace?" She tossed a suppressant towards him. The silver liquid swirling in the glass vial reminded Leon of the boiling restoration fluid in his workshop. "If you don't want to turn into a glass sculpture, inject this within five minutes."
Leon gripped his carving knife tightly. "How do you know the emergency chamber's password?"
Alicia suddenly leaned in close, the breathing valve of her gas mask almost brushing his nose. In the magnified pupils of her eyes, Leon saw the crystal-like veins beneath his skin beginning to recede. "Because every security device your father designed," her breath carried the coolness of electronic mint, "has a backdoor written in Morse code."
The words hit Leon like a blow to the chest. His father had turned into a glass statue in the photon lab accident when he was only six. The Morse code etched on the edges of the experimental table had been a secret known only to them, father and son.
The ground suddenly trembled, and dozens of searchlights pierced through the mist. Leon looked up to see the armed helicopters of the Mirror Merchant Guild hovering low in the air, their photon resonators hanging from the undersides like giant beehives, humming ominously. This was the signature equipment of the "Scavenger" unit, capable of crystallizing an entire city block into a glass cemetery in just three seconds.
"Customers ordering custom prisms," Alicia pulled him into the abandoned sewer, "but they don't want antiques. They want the death memory of Colvin inside your head."
They ran through tunnels covered in glowing moss, while the tracking devices dropped by the helicopters exploded behind them into sheets of ice crystals. Leon noticed Alicia's combat style was unusually strange: she never hesitated at crossroads, as if she could foresee the terrain beyond every corner. When a tracking dart shot toward them, her phoenix tattoo on the back of her neck would glow with a rainbow light, and her body would perform spins that defied the laws of physics.
"What exactly are you…?"
"Product code E-739, seventh-generation genetic edit subject of the Mirror Merchant Guild," Alicia kicked open a rusted iron door, "a defective product with 48 hours of precognition ability. Market value is equivalent to half the floating city—if you survive until tomorrow, you might even catch my auction live stream."
A sudden burst of intense light blinded Leon. They had barged into a spherical space made of liquid photons, and the walls were flowing with rainbow-colored streams of data. This was a quantum beacon station built by the first council, one that should have been destroyed long before the floating city ascended.
Alicia's fingers danced on the light screen, waking up a dusty hologram: "This is the truth you wanted."
Leon saw Colvin, forty years ago, standing before a control panel, recording logs. The young chief scientist's eyes burned with a disturbing zeal: "The greatest breakthrough in the memory glass project is that we've discovered the essence of the human soul is a photon helix..."
Suddenly, all the projections began to distort. The data streams converged into images of their escape, down to every wound's exact location. When Leon reached out to touch them, the light screen suddenly collapsed into an equation:
Ψ = Σαe^(-βE)
"This is the Boltzmann brain equation," Alicia's voice trembled, "It explains why you can trigger Aurora-class memory retrospection—your consciousness is resonating with the photon network of all of Selena at the quantum level."
The equation suddenly began to bleed. Scarlet liquid oozed from the hologram, swirling across the glass floor to form a warning:
They are watching.
The roar of helicopter engines pierced through the dome at that moment, and twelve purple tractor beams locked onto their limbs. Alicia's phoenix tattoo erupted in blinding white light, and she tore off her hunting gear, exposing her back—where seven quantum cores were embedded, overloading.
"Hold on to me!" She grabbed Leon and crashed toward the flowing wall. The instant their bodies merged into the liquid photons, Leon heard the sound of glass shattering from her heart.