The Era of the Wolf's Howl

Chapter 4

A raindrop hung suspended just before the tip of my nose.

I blinked, and the water droplet suddenly solidified into a hexagonal prism. The rain across the entire street came to a standstill; millions of prisms shimmered faintly in the air. Zhong Xiaoman reached out to touch one, and with a sharp *clink*, the prism refracted a blinding splash of light—

Standing within that light was another version of me.

*That* "me"—the one who had chosen to trust Bai Yan—stood amidst the burning ruins of a city, her foot resting upon Lu Lin's shattered spectacles.

"Every beam of light is a parallel world." Lu Lin's retinal patterns flickered wildly as the shard-like textures began to automatically reconfigure themselves. With a wave of his hand, the suspended prisms suddenly rearranged, projecting a third scene—

In *that* world, Zhong Xiaoman had snapped the winding key of her music box, and the moon was in the process of devouring the sun.

Blood dripped from my palm. Ink-black runes writhed within the wound; as the droplets struck the "memory text" scattered across the ground, the falsified script suddenly began to self-correct. "Observer in Position" transformed into "Observer: The Variable."

"Don't touch the prisms!" Zhong Xiaoman suddenly screamed. Her music box began to play of its own accord, its melody causing every prism to vibrate in perfect unison. The refracted images suddenly pivoted, turning their gaze entirely upon her—

Behind the ear of every Zhong Xiaoman across every parallel world, the exact same barcode was visible.

"Subject 023..." Lu Lin's pupils constricted violently. "Are *you* the first successful prototype?"

Zhong Xiaoman's hair began to lose its color. Starting from the roots, the black pigment receded like a retreating tide, revealing strands of pale gold beneath. She reached up to touch the area behind her ear; her skin suddenly cracked open, exposing the intricate mechanical structures concealed beneath.

The midnight bell tolled its first chime.

All the prisms suddenly pivoted toward the sky. They converged into a single, blinding column of light, illuminating the truth hidden behind the clouds—

Two moons were devouring one another.

The larger of the two was veined with crimson, while the smaller bore the same spiral patterns etched into Zhong Xiaoman's music box. The rain of moonlight began to accelerate its descent, each falling drop accompanied by the faint *click-clack* of miniature interlocking gears.

My blood suddenly began to boil. The rune in my palm floated into the air, piecing together a line of hovering text amidst the curtain of rain:

"Kill the Observer."

Zhong Xiaoman's mechanical eye turned toward me, her pupil contracting into the shape of a clockwork keyhole.

Chapter 9

Zhong Xiaoman's mechanical eye was whirring.

The grinding of gears emanated from the depths of her pupil, resonating with the twin moons hanging in the sky. The blood-rune in my palm suddenly grew heavy, dragging down my arm like a block of lead.

"The Observer *is* the variable," Lu Lin said, suddenly seizing my wrist; the patterns within his retinas were rapidly reconfiguring. "Correction Bureau Core—now!"

The elevator shaft in Sector E-7 was flooded with moonlight. We leaped downward, stepping upon hovering prisms; with every step, we left behind the afterimage of a parallel world. Six versions of "me" flickered within the light—each having activated that silver instrument at a different point in time, and each having been reduced to a hollow, blank automaton.

The Lunar Calibrator was far more rudimentary than I had imagined.

The control console held nothing but a rusted dial, its markings consisting of inverted numerals. A line of text flashed incessantly across the display screen: "Memory Carrier Required."

"Six versions of you, spanning thirty years..." Bai Yan suddenly stumbled out of the shadows. His mechanical left arm had detached, and blue blood dripped from the severed joint. "...All of you chose self-sacrifice..."

He thrust a pocket watch into my hand. The moment the cover sprang open, I saw a young Zhong Xiaoman spinning in circles beneath a tree at the orphanage—a memory untainted by mechanical implants, where the moonlight in her eyes was nothing more than simple moonlight.

"The Prime Directive..." Bai Yan coughed up a gear. "Moonlight kills the clones... We had it backward all along..."

The Calibrator suddenly let out a piercing shriek. The countdown began—ten minutes remaining—and the twin moons had already overlapped by two-thirds. I tore open the control panel, revealing a smaller screen hidden beneath the circuit board: three hundred versions of "me" from three hundred parallel worlds were simultaneously operating the exact same instrument.

"It doesn't have to be a burden borne by just one person." I bit my finger, drawing blood, and used it to type a new line of code onto the keypad. As the droplets of blood seeped into the circuitry, the text on every screen—which had read "Memory Carrier"—suddenly shifted to display: "Memory Sharing."

Zhong Xiaoman suddenly smiled. As she leaped onto the operating table, the music box slipped from her pocket. Its winding key spun automatically, and the melody it played sent the calibration device's dial spinning wildly.

"Daddy."

A child's voice drifted from the music box.

A sudden, searing pain shot through my temples; my memories burst open like a torn-apart case file. Beneath the trees at the orphanage—yes, I *had* given a little girl a music box there... before the mechanical implants, before it all began.

The calibration device erupted in a blinding flash of white light.

Within that light, Zhong Xiaoman's body disintegrated into countless specks of light—each speck holding a tiny fragment of memory. The instrument's display screen flickered with a final message: "Natural Laws Restored."

Suddenly, the ceiling turned transparent.

The two moons ceased their collision, and the blood-red veins staining the larger moon began to fade away. The moonlight turned a pure, pristine white, casting its glow upon the operating table—where nothing remained but the music box, a strand of pale golden hair still lodged in its winding keyhole.

Suddenly, the intricate patterns within Lu Lin's retinas snapped into sharp focus.

Fractal cracks—resembling shattered glass—formed a map pointing toward the orphanage's basement. On the floor, Bai Yan's mechanical left hand twitched erratically before finally displaying a countdown:

47 hours.

Chapter 10

The moonlight was white.

I stood by the window, watching a vampire noblewoman kneel in the middle of the street, weeping. Her diamond earrings were losing their luster, and with a sharp *snap*, her fangs broke off against the asphalt. Across the street, a human in a neighboring building clapped a hand over their mouth and rushed into the bathroom, only to retch up a blood-streaked fang.

Lu Lin removed his glasses. The shattered-glass patterns within his eyes began to peel away—sloughing off into his palm like a shedding snake skin—leaving behind nothing but the ordinary signs of presbyopia.

"The existential baseline has been reset," he murmured, rubbing the transparent shards between his fingers. "The clones... they've all become phantoms."

The music box lay quietly inside an evidence bag. I turned it over; under the sunlight, the tiny inscription etched into its base became visible: "To Subject No. 7—A Success." The orphanage's records indicated that there had originally been twenty-three test subjects; only seven had survived long enough to reach the day of memory implantation.

Suddenly, a fountain pen rolled across the desk entirely of its own accord. It rose upright and wrote on the report sheet: "Memory Anchor Saved Successfully." The ink spread, gradually coalescing into a profile of Zhong Xiaoman—she was smiling, and the barcode behind her ear had vanished.

I reached out to touch it, and the ink suddenly turned wet.

That drop of liquid crawled from my fingertip up my arm, forming new runes beneath my skin. Sunlight streamed in just then, casting my shadow upon the wall—and within the shadows on either side of my neck, gill-like fissures were rhythmically opening and closing.

Bai Yan pushed the door open and walked in, his left hand wrapped in bandages.

He handed me a vial of pale blue liquid; the label on the test tube read: "Moonlight Sample." Tiny specks of light floated within the liquid; upon closer inspection, one would discover that each speck held a fragment of Zhong Xiaoman's memories—the swings at the orphanage, the first strawberry-flavored popsicle she ever tasted, the lightning bolts she counted while hiding inside a hollow tree during a torrential downpour.

"The Observer's backup," he said, tapping the test tube. The specks of light suddenly rearranged themselves into a single line of text:

"Next time, let's watch the real moon together."

Cheers rang out from beyond the window. People embraced one another, holding aloft their recently shed fangs, while my own shadow grew fainter and fainter in the sunlight. Just as the traces of the gills vanished completely, the fountain pen on the paper finished writing the final half of the sentence:

"Variable Anchored."