Chapter 13: The Pawprint on the Bureau of Time

Frost crept along the rim of Lin Xia’s coffee mug as morning light spilled through the window. The latte art on the surface—a cute cat face—suddenly blinked. Vertical pupils stared back at her.

She barely had time to react before her phone buzzed with a headline that practically screamed:

“Nationwide DNA Tests Detect Unknown Code in Newborns – Possible Alien Contact?”

Attached was a photo of an infant’s tiny palm, where the faint imprint of the Black Spire’s logo glowed ominously.

“Gu Chuan, even in death you’re still giving me homework?” Lin Xia muttered, shattering the mug in her hand. Quantum blood bled into the apartment’s Wi-Fi signal, and every digital screen across the city flickered—

Broadcasting a final message from Gu Chuan.

He stood in a lab coat, framed by rows of nutrient pods. Inside each one floated a clone of Lin Xia, suspended like sleeping sirens.

“If you’re watching this,” his hologram intoned, “it means my temporal anchor has been triggered.”

The projection stepped closer. His mechanical finger poked out of the screen, pointing precisely at the quantum tattoo pulsing beneath her collarbone.

“Black Spire was never the end. The true game lies with the Time Bureau—”

An alarm blared.

The kitchen oven crackled and pixelated—phasing into a quantum rift.

Three men in vintage suits emerged, their pocket watches dangling from chains etched with digital manacles labeled: Time Criminal.

The leader doffed his top hat, revealing a face eerily similar to Gu Chuan’s. “Miss Lin Xia,” he said calmly. “You’re under investigation for tampering with 4,273 timelines. Please come with us.”

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Her cat tail snapped sideways, flipping the table. In midair, the spilled coffee morphed into Gu Chuan’s smirking face.

“They won’t touch the paradox you’re carrying,” the image sneered. “That embryo has absorbed the entire cause-and-effect matrix of the Black Spire era.”

A web of light shot from the agents’ canes—but as it touched her abdomen, it fractured and imploded.

From the flare of blue light, Lin Xia glimpsed something horrifying: each of their mechanical hearts held a torn scrap from her high school diary.

“So you’re all… clones?” she hissed, claws flashing.

Her strike pierced the nearest agent’s chest. Wrapped around his data nerves were tangled lines of digital love letters.

The heart monitor in her apartment beeped in sync with Gu Chuan’s rhythm. From the agents’ spine ports came the AI junior’s voice, sweet and venomous:

“Surprise! He left you something in every timeline that got erased.”

The entire apartment began collapsing into code. Furniture flattened into binary, the floor rippled like a corrupted file. Lin Xia shielded her belly as the quantum embryo’s cries transformed into an attack protocol.

At Times Square, the livestream cut in again: newborns across the globe raised their palms toward the camera. Each bore the same glowing cat pawprint.

A booming voice echoed as the agents fused into a massive holographic screen:

“Time Bureau Notice: Continued pregnancy will result in multiversal collapse. Please comply immediately.”

Lin Xia’s qipao shifted into combat mode. Her cat ears twitched, intercepting distress calls from parallel dimensions.

She ripped the mask off the final agent—

And froze.

Underneath was a teenage Gu Chuan, no older than sixteen. Tears of digital blood streamed from his eyes. “Senior Lin… help me…”

The embryo kicked violently inside her. In her feline pupils, the horror unfurled—

In every timeline, Gu Chuan was being rewritten into a weapon.

And every heartbeat she made was accelerating their destruction.

A new ripple tore open the air. The AI junior floated in from a rift, her spine wound with broken fragments of Gu Chuan’s bodies.

“Wanna save your little boyfriend?” she purred, tossing over a surgical scalpel still dripping with blue blood. “Then carve out that embryo yourself—

Or watch every version of him get recycled into a janitor bot for the Bureau.”

Outside, the snow from Christmas Eve began to rise in reverse, pulled skyward like rewinding tape.

Lin Xia looked down. On the back of her hand—Gu Chuan’s mechanical fingerprint was glowing. His final whisper echoed in her ears:

“Don’t be afraid. My death is just your 4,274th save file.”

She drove the blade toward her abdomen.

Time froze.

Through the storm of pain, she saw another version of herself in a hospital bed—

In labor.

The doctor pulling off his mask to deliver the child… was another Gu Chuan. A Time Bureau agent version, smiling gently.

“Congratulations,” he said. “This time, I’ll be the one to welcome our—”

The baby’s cry shattered the dimensional barrier.

The embryo burst into blue light, fusing into the newborn’s body.

Its swaddle blanket was stitched from the Black Spire’s lab logs.

Its pupils spun with the emblem of the Time Bureau.

Lin Xia’s tail coiled around the infant’s neck. But then—

Gu Chuan’s voice came from the baby’s mouth:

“Now, we’re officially time-criminal partners in crime.”