The first thing I noticed was the silence.
No champagne bubbles bursting against my lips. No fireworks cracking over the Huangpu River. No Liang's poisoned whispers slithering in my ear.
Just the hum of industrial refrigerators and the drip of a broken sink.
I stood in the Grand Hyatt's service corridor, the cold steel of a butcher's knife balanced in my palm. My tuxedo jacket was missing. My left sleeve was rolled up to the elbow, revealing fresh needle marks along my forearm.
The System flickered weakly behind my eyes, its interface glitching like a dying flashlight.
*Loop #19 initialized. Anomaly detected. Timeline corruption: 87%.*
A scream tore through the walls—not the usual cocktail-party panic, but something raw and primal, the sound of an animal caught in a trap. I moved toward it, my dress shoes sticking to the tiles with every step. The floor was wet. Not water.
Blood.
Gallons of it, pooling from beneath the double doors leading to the ballroom. My fingers tightened around the knife as I pushed through.
The scene froze me mid-step.
Bodies lay strewn across the parquet floor like discarded dolls. Not just dead—*arranged*. Each corpse positioned with its throat slit wide, heads tilted toward the center of the room where a single figure stood silhouetted against the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Anya.
No—*not Anya*.
Her posture was all wrong. The way she held herself, the angle of her neck, the mechanical precision of her breathing. This wasn't the woman who'd fought beside me through seventeen loops. This was something wearing her skin like a poorly fitted suit.
In her arms, she cradled a bundle wrapped in a bloodstained tablecloth.
Our son sat cross-legged on the grand piano, idly swinging his legs like a child at a picnic. A silver detonator dangled from his fingers.
"You're late, Father." He popped a chocolate-covered strawberry into his mouth. "Mother already finished the guest list."
The bundle in Not-Anya's arms whimpered.
Every instinct screamed at me to run, but the System chose that moment to finally stabilize, projecting a single line in pulsing crimson text across my vision:
*Termination protocol activated. All spare heirs must be eliminated.*
Not-Anya turned toward me. Moonlight caught her eyes—*golden*, pupils slit vertically like a cat's. When she spoke, Mu's voice slithered from Anya's mouth:
"Meet your daughter. The only heir who matters now."
With ritualistic slowness, she unfolded the bloodstained cloth.
The baby couldn't have been more than a few hours old, her skin still slick with birth fluids, the umbilical cord hanging like a noose from her tiny belly. But when she opened her eyes—
*Those were my eyes.*
The same shape, the same color, the same cold calculation I saw every morning in the mirror.
The baby smiled.
Then the chandelier fell.