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墨書 Inktalez
The fragments of teeth on the asphalt glimmered with a pearlescent sheen under the moonlight. Alan knelt on the ground and discovered that each tooth was engraved with tiny numbers—exactly like the number on his ID badge: 19980715. As his fingertip brushed against the third molar, a violent headache exploded in his skull, accompanied by the acrid scent of gasoline. He saw his five-year-old self using pliers to extract his brother's teeth.
"This is the price." His father’s voice echoed from the shadows, holding a tray containing seven bloodied teeth. "The Eternal Life program requires the biological keys of family members." Alan's stomach twisted violently as he realized that those extracted teeth were being embedded into the spark plugs of a Yamaha, the metal threads perfectly meshing with the bony roots.
A countdown suddenly appeared on his retina: **23:42:17**. The glass windows on either side of the street shattered simultaneously, and the flying shards formed a model of a DNA helix in mid-air. Alan saw mechanical codes interwoven within his DNA sequence. The street sign warped in the temporal disturbance into "1998 Eternal Night Street," while his metallic right arm began to sprout thread-like protrusions resembling spark plugs.
His father's diary flipped open on its own, fresh droplets of blood seeping from the charred pages. Alan read the last burned paragraph: "...when the countdown reaches zero, all parallel versions of Alan will..." The writing carbonized at this point, but blood traced a path across the blank space, forming a diagram of an engine that showed a rotating gear where his heart should be.
"Find the true anchor point!" A sudden female voice jolted Alan. Emerging from the wreckage of a police car from 1998 was a woman in protective gear, her visor cracked, revealing a face identical to that of his younger sister Emily. But Alan distinctly remembered that this sister had died at five years old, as shown in their family album.
The woman tore open her left sleeve, revealing a mechanical limb with the same countdown ticking away: "I am your creation from 2038." Her neck skin suddenly became transparent, exposing a miniature turbine engine rotating inside. "Every version of you across timelines is trying to break the cycle, resulting in more branches."
The asphalt beneath him suddenly turned transparent, revealing countless overlapping garage scenes below: in some timelines he was installing human vocal cords into a Yamaha; in others, motorcycles were consuming his lower half. The bottommost image froze his blood—his leather-clad self was locking their father to a load-bearing pillar, while the motorcycle’s gas tank bore the inscription "J.M.2023."
"Father was the first sacrifice." The Emily from 2038 suddenly coughed out gears. "He deceived us into starting the program while he..." Before she could finish her sentence, her Mechanical Heart was yanked from her chest by an invisible force and exploded into metallic dust in mid-air. The countdown accelerated abruptly, now reading **23:11:09**, stained with crimson.
Alan's metallic arm plunged into the ground, pulling up a handful of scorched earth from 1998. The searing ashes reformed in his palm into a burned family album; all family photos began to shift: their mother’s position replaced by a Yamaha motorcycle, and their father’s hand eternally pointing toward the engine compartment. On the back of the last photo, he traced with his bloodied finger over raised Braille—it was his mother’s handwriting: "Your umbilical cord is hidden in the garage."
A garage door suddenly materialized three hundred meters away, claw marks oozing a milky liquid reminiscent of breast milk. As Alan ran, he found himself traversing through fragments of different timelines: one moment shattering remnants of a phone from 2018, and the next stepping onto burning gasoline from 1998. When he finally grasped the doorknob, his metallic palm perfectly aligned with that of his twenty-years-ago self.
The sight inside left Alan breathless—countless corpses of himself hung suspended in mid-air, each connected by umbilical-like cables to different parts of various Yamaha motorcycles. The youngest corpse looked no older than ten years; a spark plug protruded from its temple; while the oldest was completely white-haired, its lower half fused with an engine.
"Welcome home." All the corpses suddenly opened their eyes and emitted synthetic sounds through their mechanically altered vocal cords. At that moment, Alan's countdown paused as his retina projected a holographic control interface: [System Prompt: Would you like to Format All Parallel Memories?]
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