The moment the teeth pierced the young girl's skin, space and time stood still. The swarm of nanites solidified into ice crystals, and the ripples of energy from the leap froze outside the porthole. My consciousness was dragged into the quantum abyss, and I saw countless versions of myself tearing into the inheritors in parallel time and space - some universes where I was transformed into a thousand-meter beast devouring planets, and others where the girl of time and space backhanded me through the heart.
"At last we meet, Kronos." The silhouette of the Starling woman emerged from the darkness, sharing the same eyes as mine, her left pupil leaping with the light flames of a supernova, "This is your one thousand seven hundred and forty-ninth attempt to break through the causal closure."
With a wave of her hand she unfolded a blood-colored star map, the Earth was entangled in dense threads of causality. Each inheritor's brand was a spatial and temporal anchor point, and my devouring powers were quantum blades that cut through the shackles.
"Mother is not a betrayer, she is your tomb keeper." The Astral Spirit woman's fingertips traced over my memory screen, the cybernetic data stream of my mother's cyborg body decoded in layers, "Back then, in order to prevent you from awakening prematurely, she uploaded her own consciousness to..."
The stasis suddenly lifted. The young girl's screams and alarms exploded simultaneously, my fangs already embedded in her astral brand. The flood of sweet energy washed over sanity, and the contamination value on my retina instantly spiked to 63%. The fighter shuddered violently as the nanite swarm proliferated out of control into a cocoon of black flesh that wrapped around us.
"Brother, look at your hand!" The young girl cried out and pounded my chest. My right hand was quantumizing, the flesh and blood disintegrating into an ever-collapsing miniature black hole. The cost of devouring the Legacy was far more than expected-every cell was undergoing a Big Bang-like reorganization.
The wail of ripping metal came from outside the cabin. Mother's mechanical arm pierced through the cocoon of flesh, and the defense layer made up of nanomite swarms was as nothing in front of her. Her pupils projected an icy stream of data, "Error code 002: Inheritor missing, initiating mandatory recovery procedure."
Seven memory metal cords wrapped around my limbs, and high-frequency pulses caused the nanomite swarm to go down en masse. The young girl was sucked toward the sacrificial matrix outside the pod, the bite mark at her neck erupting into a wormhole-like ripple. The blood-colored tornado over the Pacific Ocean suddenly reversed direction and converged into a maelstrom of energy toward the fighter.
"You have no idea what you're feeding on." The mother cyborg's chest cracked open, revealing the core module of the Star Spirit Race's ark, "The Eye of the Void is a shackle of the Star Spirit Race's own making, and we..."
The surface of the sea suddenly rumbled with a thousand meter high wall of water as the real Star Spirit Race Ark broke through the waves. On the surface of this metallic creation, which was more majestic than Mount Everest, a totem identical to the branding on the back of my neck emerged. The black hole in my right hand swelled uncontrollably as the prism at the top of the ark was aimed at the war machine.
"Don't look directly at the light prism!" Xingxuan's warning was half a second late. What the prism refracted was not light, but the memory pulse of some higher civilization. My brain was instantly flooded with forty-two million years of civilization's rise and fall: how the Star Spirit Race used the Devouring System to perpetuate the fire, and how it was revolted by the void of its own creation.
The teenage girl's shrill whine brought me back to reality. Her body disintegrated and reorganized in the sacrificial matrix, and the six inheritors turned into particles of light that merged into her star-shaped brand. The giant eye in the wormhole oozed a bituminous substance, and the Pacific Ocean began to boil, the evaporated water mist condensing into inverted continents in the stratosphere.
"This is the complete me." The young girl levitated in a pillar of light, antler crystals growing into star rings, every inch of her skin flowing with star chart patterns, "Now, complete the last rites, Kronos."
Mother's mechanical body suddenly stiffened as the Starling ark released a directional pulse. My swarm of nanites mutinied en masse under the Ark's frequency band, and they wrapped themselves around me as I rushed towards the young girl. Devouring instincts roared through my brain, and the gaze of the Eye of the Void granted me the power to tear through dimensions.
But as I clasped the maiden's throat, those quantum memories suddenly became clear - in some erased time and space, I had stood side by side with her at the top of the Ark, personally sounding the death knell for human civilization.
"Eat me." The young girl took my quantized right hand and pressed it to her chest, "Then go and fix that false future."
The Starling ark began to disintegrate, each piece reflecting a different vision of doom. The mother mechanical body struggled through the data storm, "It can't be fused... The Void Gate will..."
The moment the devouring was complete, I tasted the truth. The young girl was not a sacrifice, but a safety device created by me in the last cosmic epoch. The key to breaking the closed loop was sealed in her genetic chain, and those antler crystals were reverse-compiled quantum chips.
The inverted continent over the Pacific Ocean came crashing down, only to be reduced to dust of light the moment it touched the sea. Wormholes began to spit out the swallowed stars, and my body flickered between reality and reality. The data stream on my retina finally deciphered the final message from my mother's mechanical body:
[Deep Blue Program Ultimate Directive: when Lin Mo's awakening level exceeds 50%, execute Ark Impact Protocol]
The nanomite swarms suddenly broke away from control, and they rushed towards the atmosphere, wrapped in the wreckage of the Star Spirit Race Ark. I instinctively opened the quantum barrier, but I saw my mother's human face emerge from outside the barrier-it was her last memory before her consciousness was uploaded.
"Mom chose the third way for you." Her silhouette smiled as she burned, "Go and be the one to tear apart destiny instead..."
The wreckage of the Ark exploded in the stratosphere, releasing not flames but strange particles that reversed the increase in entropy. My quantization process is suddenly reversed, and my flesh and blood reorganize in the glare. The remnants of the young girl's consciousness murmured softly inside her head, "They're coming."
A dense humming came from the other end of the wormhole, a presence beyond human comprehension. The Eye of the Void was nothing more than the eyelash of some greater being, the true gaze had only just begun.