Chapter 1: The Frozen Silver Pocket Watch**
The razor-sharp blade pierced between the fourth rib with surgical precision when Lin Xia heard it—a faint yet crystalline sound reminiscent of intricate clockwork gears engaging in methodical rotation. That rhythmic *click-clack* of precision mechanics was hauntingly familiar. Every time she cornered a target, this mechanical dirge would emerge as doomed souls desperately thumbed the chronograph buttons of their antique timepieces with dying breaths.
But this time defied all logic. Her blade that should have effortlessly pierced the heart now hovered millimeters from its mark, suspended by an invisible force. Crimson blood oozing from the wound crystallized into ruby droplets midair, hardening into translucent amber fragments that glowed with eldritch luminescence.
Outside the window, raindrops transmuted into silvery needles. They pierced her cooling flesh in a metallic hailstorm, impaling her body before she could react. Lin Xia stared in horror as her fingertips began dissolving into ethereal particles, memories surging like lightning through her neural pathways.
"Top-tier assassins must learn to kill within a time stop." Her enigmatic instructor's words from age twelve—once dismissed as training rhetoric—now burned with visceral truth.
The stench of rotting apples assaulted her senses as vertigo gripped her. Blinking through disorientation, Lin Xia found herself staring down the barrel of a barcode scanner pressed against her forehead. A panicked teenager in school uniform clutched instant noodles, stammering: "L-Lin Jie? I just wanted credit..."
Muscle memory took over. She seized his wrist, but froze upon glimpsing her reflection in stainless steel—amber eyes with a jade birthmark at the left canthus, hands bearing ink calluses instead of gunmetal scars.
"What...date is it?" Her voice grated like gravel on glass.
The boy trembled toward the digital clock: *March 18, 2024*.
Memories detonated—parents obliterated in a three-day-old car crash, insurance adjusters cold as actuarial tables, the supermarket transfer agreement binding her future. Darker still, those midnight rituals before the mirror: silver watchchain coiling around her wrist as suspended groceries defied gravity.
A gear clicked in the half-open cash drawer. The gilded pocket watch within bled crimson rust, its edge engraved: *Tempus Edax Rerum* (Time, the Devourer of All Things).
"Package for Ms. Lin!" A baritone rasp cut through the air.
A hulking deliveryman blocked the doorway, shadows clinging to his navy uniform. Dark fluid seeped from the box in his hands, pooling like fresh kill. Lin's pupils contracted—his stance betrayed tactical readiness, right hand hovering near a concealed draw position.
As his fingers brushed the bloodstained tape, Lin thumbed her watch. The world drained of color. Flyers froze mid-descent at 17 cm elevation. The man's smirk petrified into a rigor mortis grin.
Five seconds. The second hand twitched with seismic portent.
Lin circled behind him. The silver hourglass emblem on his inner lining struck like a thunderclap—identical to the intruders' insignia from her fragmented memories.
She ripped open the sodden box.
A severed head stared back with her face—no, the original owner's face. Golden chrono-bubbles shimmered along the neck's cross-section, the telltale signature of a cross-temporal assassination.