Chapter 126: Lead Block... |
Jonas's voice was like a lead block scraped by sandpaper, pressing heavily against the damp basement air. He stood with his back to the mottled astral chart on the wall, his fingers unconsciously picking at the white crystals condensed in the stone crevices—traces left behind by leaking Sand of Time, shimmering eerily under the pale blue moonlight.
Irene curled up in the iron cage at the corner, the faint clinking of chains against bars resembling the staccato ticking of a broken second hand. Silvery-gray patterns crawled up her bare ankles—a sign of the Sand of Time eroding her flesh, creeping half an inch higher every quarter hour. Three days ago, she was still the youngest temporal calibrator at the institute; now, she had become a "vessel" sustaining the temporal loop, the Sand flowing through her veins to prevent the aftershocks of an explosion seventeen years ago from tearing apart the present spacetime.
"You already know the answer." The old man opposite him lifted his hood, revealing features identical to Jonas's, though his temples were streaked with frost-white. "Twenty years ago, I stood where you are now, asking the same question." He placed a brass pocket watch on the stone table. Inside the lid was a yellowed photograph—a young Irene smiling at the camera while holding a test tube, with a blurry figure of a boy in the background, wearing the same silver key around his neck as Jonas did now.
Jonas's Adam's apple bobbed, his knuckles whitening from tension. The future he glimpsed in the temporal rift last week wasn’t an illusion: Irene would dissolve into pure temporal energy on the night of the full moon, funneled into that rusted calibration device, while he would take the old man’s pocket watch and spend the next twenty years repeating this cycle of salvation. But last night, he had secretly cracked the institute’s encrypted archives and discovered that the first calibrator hadn’t died from energy overload—he had found a way to extract the Sand of Time. The method used the folds of spacetime itself as a filter, but the cost was that the caster would be forever trapped in the crevices of time.
"The notes you saw in the archives were left there deliberately." The old man suddenly smiled, pulling out a half-burned piece of paper from his robe. The formula on it perfectly matched the drafts in Jonas’s notebook. "Back then, I didn’t dare take the gamble. Now… look at her." Irene in the cage had woken at some point and was carving something into the bars with her nails. The crooked symbols linked together into the very spatial topology equation Jonas had spent three years researching.
The pocket watch abruptly began reversing, its hands fluttering like startled birds. The astral chart on the stone wall glowed a searing red, and the patterns on Irene’s ankles faded—only to reappear on Jonas’s wrist. He finally understood why the old man always said the temporal loop was alive—it chose those least willing to let go, weaving their guilt and love into an inescapable net.
"The full moon is in seven hours." Irene’s voice was hoarse from sleep but startlingly clear. "I saw your solution in the rift. If you replace the seventh variable with the dark matter constant, the success rate increases by 37%." She shook her wrist, and the chains she had somehow slipped out of clattered to the floor, forming coordinates—the rooftop of the hospital where Jonas was born.
The old man pushed the pocket watch toward Jonas. The lid sprang open, and the photo inside rippled, revealing an adult Jonas waving from within the temporal rift, countless overlapping images of Irene’s smiling face behind him. "Every choice births a new loop," he said, his figure turning translucent as he stood. "This time… don’t keep her waiting too long."
Jonas grabbed the key and lunged for the cage, the watch burning in his palm. Irene stood on tiptoe to straighten his collar, her fingers brushing the scar on his collarbone—a wound from when he’d saved her from a temporal fragment last week, now seeping silver-blue light. The astral chart on the wall blazed to life, forming a perfect Möbius strip, its intersection point unmistakably matching the shape of the key around Jonas’s neck.