the crack of dawn

When Su Evening was checking the codes of the ancient books for the 23rd time, the monitor screen suddenly pulsed with snowflake patterns. She rubbed her sore wrist and got up to find that the 12 shelves of Song Dynasty literature in Area D were vaporizing, the yellowed pages disappearing into the air like erased pencil marks.

“The rate of missing data has reached a critical point.”

An icy mechanical tone exploded in his ears, and Su Wan knocked over the repair table. The ink spindle tumbled to the ground, splattering pine-smoke ink that condensed into a suspended string of code in the air. She watched in horror as her left hand turned translucent, with ghostly blue points of light flowing under her skin.

“Novice Quest: Repairing the topography of the Cloud Forest Stone Record (Remaining time 00:59:59)”

“Repair progress: 38%”

“Error Code: E-1902 (Parallel Space-Time Data Pollution)”

Su Wan staggered and held onto the workbench as the ancient book's remnant pages suddenly levitated. When her fingertips touched the torn area, countless memory fragments surged in - on the smoke-filled battlefield, soldiers in nano armor were burning the tome, and a woman with the same appearance as her emerged from the flames.

“This can't be...” Su Wan retracted her fingers, and the ink on the remnants of the pages suddenly began to reform into modern Chinese characters: [Don't trust the system prompts]. The tweezers on the repair table suddenly rotated upright, carving deep spiral patterns on the table surface, something was awakening in this supposedly static space and time.

“Warning! Entropy growth rate exceeding threshold.”

The entire glass curtain wall burst in response, and the night wind swirled acacia leaves and poured into the room. Su Wan grabbed her restoration knife to defend herself, only to find that when the blade passed through the fluttering fallen leaves, those leaves suddenly revealed circuit board patterns. What was even more terrifying was that in the gaps between the roiling electronic fallen leaves, she saw her other self standing at the end of the corridor smiling.

“You're finally here.” Mirror image Su Wan raised her hand and flicked it, all the ancient book restoration lamps exploded into particles of light at the same time, “I waited for 127 time loops before I waited for the loophole in the main system when it comes to assigning hosts.”

Su Night knocked over the reagent rack as she backed up, and the silver nitrate solution splashed into the air to condense into a mercury mirror. The two time periods overlapped at this moment, and she was horrified to see blood-colored data streams flowing in the mirror image's pupils, and those codes were frantically rewriting the structure of the light points in her left hand.

“Emergency protocols activated.”

“Commence removal of contamination source.”

Su Wan's consciousness was suddenly dragged into the dark space, with countless flickering displays floating around. Each screen was playing a scene from a different time and place: in a medieval monastery, she was writing code on a parchment scroll, on a starship she was operating a bronze armillary sphere, and the most central screen was fixed in a futuristic city - there was a statue of her, and on the pedestal it was engraved with the words, “Civilization Reconstructor, Su Night, Died in 1902”.