Lin Shen’s scalpel stopped for the 24th time. The morgue drawer numbers shifted automatically with an inverted pendulum clock. The gear-shaped birthmarks on every corpse’s wrist matched the one in his palm perfectly, and the batch number on the antipsychotic bottle was the date his younger sister died in a fire. Inside the bloodstained gear cufflink handed to him by his reflection in the mirror was a birthday he had never seen before: the date he died as “Test Subject 0” in the 0th cycle.
At 3:47 a.m., the typewriter delivered a secret message: “When you see your own corpse, don’t ask, ‘Who is he?’ Ask, ‘Which cycle of me is this?’” A mirror wall suddenly revealed 24 versions of himself. Each one’s left little finger was bent at a 90-degree angle, pointing toward the foundations at No. 7 Gear Street. Buried there was the core of the time device, along with the corpse of his 7th-cycle self, stitched up by his own hands.
The dissection room’s ultraviolet lamp was always on, illuminating the bloodstains on his white coat as they changed with each cycle. The day before, they had formed the death coordinates of New Moon Lane. Tonight, they had become a chipped gear on his sister’s hairpin. The gears of the 24th cycle were about to mesh, and Lin Shen finally realized that the starting point of every cycle was the moment he pulled the trigger on himself in the mirror.
