"Is it worth it..." Ling Shuang caught the falling Su Ye, his body temperature was fading with the star pattern, "You only have... 12 hours..." The Snow Shadow Wolf shrank back into a palm-sized cub, and the star-blue pattern on the tip of its tail oozed golden red blood. In the dissipating bronze rainstorm, Qian Shisan's star core fragments reassembled into a giant wolf skull, and in its eye sockets was beating the brain of Madam Red: "The game of the Lord of the Star Ruins... has just begun."
There was a crisp sound like glass breaking in the sky, and the Eye of Star Ruins split into twelve pupils. In each pupil, a clone of Su Ye appeared, and they walked out slowly with fragments of the Star Key in their hands. X-000, the leader, raised his right hand, and the complete first-generation star pattern on his forehead illuminated the clouds: "Father, we are the perfect container." All the clones raised their hands at the same time, and the first-generation original bodies of the Snow Shadow Wolf jumped out of the void - the gray spots on the tips of their tails were like living venomous snakes, wrapping around Su Ye's gradually cold body.
The twelve pupils of the Star Ruins were like wounds tearing the sky, and the bronze clone army poured down. Each replica perfectly reproduced Su Ye's appearance, but there was a unique coldness between their brows. When they walked with the fragments of the Star Key in their hands, the ground automatically spread out the veins of the stars, and the grass and trees turned into data streams and dissipated the moment they touched the tips of their boots. The air was filled with the smell of burnt metal ionization, which was a sign that the structure of space and time was forcibly rewritten.
The Snow Shadow Wolf cub blasted open the star-blue barrier at the tip of its tail, but the light curtain showed a quantum tunneling effect the moment it touched the clone's light blade. When X-003's blade penetrated the barrier, it brought out not blood, but sticky bronze mucus - these liquids immediately multiplied into miniature star pattern puppets after landing. "Father... they took away my pure genes..." The cub's golden eyes flickered like a light bulb with unstable voltage, and the data stream deep in the pupils showed that the clone was reversely parsing its life code. The crack in the star skeleton on Su Ye's chest suddenly shrank, and the countdown number soared red on his retina: [2 hours remaining]. He staggered to one knee and found that his shadow was twisting and deforming uncontrollably.
"Form a formation!" Ling Shuang's ten fingers burst out with icy spider silk, and these nano-scale fibers condensed into a hexagonal honeycomb defense network in the air. Mo Yan bit his wrist, and the red lotus fire flowed through the blood vessels and meridians into the spider web, and the red and white fire wall instantly rose three feet high. Clone X-000 showed an expression for the first time - its mouth twisted into the unique sneer of Madam Red, and its fingertips lightly touched the fire wall. The data flow of the firewall suddenly reversed, and the ice crystals on the spider web began to grow in reverse, piercing Ling Shuang's knuckles. She groaned and saw the same star pattern code as the clone appeared on her forearm.
The mechanical roar of gears meshing came from the clouds, and the skull of the wolf controlled by Madam Red slowly descended. The mechanical wolf head reconstructed from the remains of Qian Shisan opened its jaw, revealing Madam Red's brain suspended in nutrient solution. The cerebral cortex suddenly discharged violently, and all the clones raised their hands synchronously. Their first-generation star patterns formed a firing matrix for the annihilation cannon in the air. In the center of the matrix, a holographic projection of the first-generation original body of the Snow Shadow Wolf emerged, but this time, the gray spots on the tip of its tail had spread to its entire body.
Su Ye caught the bronze blood drop from the Snow Shadow Wolf, and the liquid boiled and vaporized in his palm, revealing the strange characteristics of quantum entanglement. The Star Remains Crystal suddenly projected a holographic image - it was the surveillance footage of the confinement room at the bottom of the first generation laboratory. Madam Red, wearing a neurosurgery helmet, was splitting the heart of the original Snow Shadow Wolf into two on the dissection table. The gray part was injected into the culture chamber numbered X-1997-A, and the star-blue part was sealed in the micro-coffin of X-1997-B. The energy fluctuations generated when the two containers came into contact were exactly the same as the resonance frequency of the Star Key fragments on the battlefield at this moment.
"So you are... the key!" Su Ye tore open his chest. The broken star crystal had grown nerves and blood vessels, taking root between his ribs like a parasitic plant. He stuffed half of the crystal into the Snow Shadow Wolf, and the cub suddenly let out a quantum howl that shattered the surrounding glass. The sound waves left visible ripples in the air, and those ripples actually formed the ancient beast alliance contract text.
The "Eternal Ash Wolf Soul" reorganized in the quantum storm. The giant wolf's left eye was star-blue like the newborn universe, and the iris was filled with an uncontaminated genetic map; the right eye was gray and like a whirlpool of the Ruins of the Underworld, and the soul fragments of tens of thousands of contracted beasts were floating in the depths of the pupil. The fragment of the Star Key in the clone's hand suddenly broke free and flew to the wolf soul's forehead like iron filings attracted by a magnet. Ling Shuang endured the severe pain and shot out spider silk to entangle half of the fragments, but found that the star patterns on the surface of the fragments were mutating - those patterns automatically reorganized into the topological code of the Gate of the Ruins of the Stars, and each symbol corresponded to the gene sequence of an extinct contracted beast.
Sister Mo Yan's shadow suddenly materialized from the red lotus, and her translucent soul blocked the Star Ruins Gate that was taking shape. When her fingers passed through the crack of the door, Su Ye saw countless parallel time and space scenes flashing back in it. "Remember...the deepest part of the fire is hidden..." Before she finished speaking, her figure was pierced by the bronze tentacles extending from the door. Where the shadow dissipated, a red lotus condensed into a red gold dagger and fell into Mo Yan's hand. The handle of the dagger was engraved with a miniature version of the Star Altar pattern, and the edge of the blade flowed with the same star-blue light as the Snow Shadow Wolf.
The Star Ruins Gate opened completely with a harsh sound of metal twisting, and the ten thousand meter long wolf skeleton descended from the black hole horizon into reality. Each of its bones was made of bronze star marrow, and the joints were inlaid with living star pattern engines. When the tailbone swept across the battlefield, the three clones instantly collapsed into bronze statues - these statues maintained horrified expressions, and the mechanical ticking sound of time flowing backwards came from inside.
"No!!!" Mo Yan's red lotus pattern burned to a white-hot state, and the phoenix condensed by the fire of karma crashed into the pupil of the wolf's eye. The flames burned spider-web-like cracks on the surface of the pupil, revealing the rotating star map inside - that was an enlarged version of Su Ye's star pattern, and each node of the pattern was emitting a stream of star marrow particles. Su Ye took the opportunity to jump on the head of the wolf soul, and the light blade pierced into his remaining heart without hesitation. The moment the crystal core shattered, billions of star patterns broke out of the ground like quantum thorns. These chains with the genes of the Snow Shadow Wolf dragged the wolf skeleton to the gate of the Star Ruins. Each chain showed the afterimage of the soul of the contracted beast, and the clearest one was the red-gold light transformed by Sister Mo Yan.
Ling Shuang's Ice Soul Spider King suddenly regressed genetically, and its spider legs pierced into its own temple to extract cerebrospinal fluid. The poisoned spider silk precisely entangled Madam Hong's brain, and the memory data forcibly read out formed a holographic projection in the sky - in the picture, Madam Hong was handing the baby to the first generation, and in the secret compartment under the operating table, the Snow Shadow Wolf Primarch was gnawing at the quantum chain that bound it. The most horrifying thing was that the baby's swaddling clothes were pinned to the prototype of the mechanical prosthetic eye that Qian Shisan later used.
The shockwave from the closing of the Star Ruins Gate tore the clouds into concentric circles and spread. The Snow Shadow Wolf Soul injected the last star-blue lines into Su Ye's body before the quantum dissipation. When the morning light pierced through the bronze sky, Su Ye, who was kneeling on the ground, slowly raised his head - his left eye was the golden vertical pupil of a cub, and his right eye was the gray-spotted compound eye of a wolf soul. With the superposition of the two visual spectra, he saw every quantum state process of the clone army collapsing like a sand castle.
At the core of the newborn Canglang constellation, a star-blue light resonated with the cavity in Su Ye's chest. This frequency activated the final contract buried deep in his genes: "With the stars as witness, with blood as guide..." As the spell was completed, a three-dimensional snow shadow wolf star pattern emerged under his skin, and each hair was a miniature star track model.
Qian Shisan's mechanical arm suddenly twitched, projecting the memory fragments of Madam Hong sealed in her frontal lobe - in the deepest part of the Star Ruins, tens of thousands of frozen Snow Shadow Wolf Primarchs opened their eyes at the same time. The gray spots on their tails formed a constellation chain, and at the end of the chain was a huge bronze door engraved with the Ω symbol. What seeped out from the crack of the door was neither light nor darkness, but a "non-color" that transcended human cognition.
Su Ye's shadow walked independently in the morning light, and the Star Ruins mark on his forehead suddenly cracked. When the bronze fingers stretched out from the cracks and touched the cub in his arms, everyone saw that the gray spot that reappeared on the tip of the cub's tail curled up a miniature version of Madam Red's face. And when her lips opened and closed, she was repeating a key word that was covered by the noise of the Star Ruins.
The morning light poured down on the charred battlefield like broken glass, and Su Ye's shadow twisted strangely in the light. The shadow gradually expanded and bulged, the crisp sound of bone growth mixed with the hum of electronics, and finally peeled off into an independent entity. Su Ying's skin glowed with a cold bronze light, and when she raised her hand, the star mark on her forehead lit up, generating quantum entanglement with the Canglang constellation above the sky. Wherever the energy ripples swept, the gravel was suspended in a star track array.
"Father, this is the perfect contract." Su Ying's vocal cords vibrated with dual frequencies, with Su Ye's unique hoarseness and the electronic tremolo of the first generation corpse. The corners of his mouth were torn to the roots of his ears, revealing not flesh and blood, but the crystal fangs of the Snow Shadow Wolf - the tips of those teeth flowed with the dark blue of the star marrow, and each tooth enamel was engraved with miniature contract terms.