When the bronze nerves inside the ancient tomb pierced my veins, I saw myself three thousand years in the future, destroying the world.
The night the Kunlun Mountain expedition team plunged into the icy abyss, Su Qing saw a recording of her own death on a bronze tree:
On July 16, 2023, her clone stood atop Jingshan Hill, holding a Western Zhou bronze wine vessel adorned with dragon patterns, and froze Beijing into quantum amber.
Her grandfather, an archaeology professor, left behind a final letter. A mercenary had a mechanized right eye. A chip inside the expedition doctor resonated with the bronze tree... Every clue pointed to the Queen Mother of the West Pact, signed between King Mu of Zhou and an alien civilization. When Su Qing's blood activated the quantum passageway inside the tomb, the bronze neural network dormant for three thousand years began to parasitize her:
- The eaves of the Forbidden City sprouted human-faced sores, devouring tourists and turning them into bronze statues.
- Tree resin seeped through the cracks between Chang'an Avenue's paving stones, cocooning cars in pockets of folded time.
- And the spell on the back of her neck was turning each heartbeat into a countdown to destruction.
To stop the mothership from arriving, Su Qing had to steal her own memories from the folds of time:
The first experiment beneath the ice abyss in 1983, the antimatter key hidden in her father's car accident in 1998, her battles with the mechanical symbiote across 777 cycles... When the seventh clone arrived through the wormhole, she finally saw the truth:
The so-called tomb raiding was actually a harvest of civilization planned by a higher civilization over three thousand years.
- The ancient bronze tree is actually the neural synapse of an alien mothership.
- The tomb-raiding talisman is a quantum key that locks Earth's time in place.
- And then you discover that everyone closest to you is an NPC
