The particle afterglow of the Starling Ark was still shimmering in the stratosphere, and my bones had crystallized into a quantum state. The moment I raised my hand in a false grip, the wreckage of the falling carrier in the Pacific Ocean suddenly rewound back to the coordinates it had been at ten minutes ago - this was not a time rewind, it was a reorganization of the chain of causality cropping.
"Warning! Four-dimensional space curvature anomaly!" Xingxuan's alarm sounded from his wristwatch, "Approaching anti-entropic lifeform detected!"
The buzzing sound coming from the other side of the wormhole materialized into a solid body, a swarm of glowing geometries. Orthododecahedrons unleashed Klein bottle force fields as they spun, ball lightning weaving Möbius rings. They had no intent to attack, just to wrap the planet in a topological cage.
The maiden's residual consciousness suddenly awakens in her quantum brain, "They are cosmic monitors, here to remove excess entropy." I looked down into my palm, the temporal power gained by devouring the maiden was vaporizing the ocean - the gaping hole in the dark cloud that had been casually erased exposed the true location of the galactic cantilever.
The Monitor's attack was gentler than light, more silent than death. My left arm is suddenly erased from the timeline, not severed, but the record of existence rewritten from the atomic level. Swarms of nanites spontaneously constructed models of the Dirac Sea, fishing for deleted particles in the void.
"Can't win this fight." I tore the skin from my chest and embedded the Starling ark core in my heart. There was a sudden data turbulence in the Monitor matrix-they hadn't expected their prey to actively absorb antimatter.
As the monitors launched a descending strike, I did something crazy: twisted Earth's spacetime curvature into a Möbius loop. The ruins of New York and the scorched earth of Tokyo overlapped in a Klein bottle, and humans and monsters mirrored each other in four dimensions.
"Found you." Mother's voice suddenly came from the Monitor's core. A certain icosahedron cracked into her face, this time a purely energetic life form, "The final stage of Project Deep Blue is for you to become a vehicle for the Monitor."
Memories shatter like glass. I witnessed the truth of what happened twenty-two years ago: my mother was voluntarily quantized only to bury a viral program in the Monitor system. She endured forty thousand tears in her consciousness in exchange for this moment inside and out.
The Monitor matrix began to implode, and the geometries blossomed into supernovas. I took the opportunity to devour their core algorithms, and my temporal abilities evolved to the point where I could observe the causal network. Suddenly, I see the horrifying truth - all survivors on Earth are connected to the tentacles of the Eye of the Void above their heads, including myself.
Star Xuan's quantum communication forces access at this moment, "Look at the North Pole!" Twelve Starling arks were forming a positive dodecahedral array on the surface of the melting ice cap. The true Eye of the Void emerged from the Earth's core, a giant pupil of flesh and blood made of mantle material.
"Welcome home, my half." The Eye of the Void emitted a voice identical to mine, "It is time to end this farce."
The swarm of nanites suddenly rebelled, and they wrapped around my body and crashed towards the North Pole. The memories gained from devouring the maiden were complete at this moment - the so-called inheritors were nothing more than genetic backups of me. Each Kronos of time and space creates seven of itself to counter the Monitor's harvest.
A resonance comes from the center of the earth, and my quantum brain vibrates in sync with the Eye of the Void. The Earth began to pixelate, mountains and oceans turning into flowing streams of data. Survivors realized with horror that their flesh was parsing into raw genetic code.
"This is the truth." The Eye of the Void stretched out a palm made of magma, "We are experiments imprisoned in a simulator, and the Devouring System..."
Mother's residual virus program suddenly activates, the core algorithms of the Monitor invade the Void Eye in reverse as she manipulates them. I seized on the billionth of a second break, compressing the power of space-time into a Planck-length singularity.
"Goodbye, Mother." In the white light that erupted from the singularity, I personally sent her quantum state into void space. It was her final directive written at the bottom of the virus - to initiate the self-deletion protocol when the child transcends the Creator.
Earth rebooted in a dimensional tremor, and the ark array at the North Pole dissolved into stardust. When the survivors awoke from the beach, faint star-shaped imprints floated on the backs of their necks. My body floated in near-Earth orbit, watching the fires of a civilization I had tampered with reignite.
Star Xuan's last question faded with atmospheric friction, "Was it worth it?"
The remains of the Monitor shimmered in synchronous orbit, like a ring for civilization. I looked to the center of the Milky Way, where the stars aligned themselves in a giant devouring vortex. The retina pulsed with a message from Kronos of all time and space:
[Don't Be Us