My Clones Deliver Takeout

My Mom Posts on Social Media from a Fold in Time, While I Fix Watches

Lin Mo thinks the KPIs for his life are a little ridiculous:

Other college students skip class to play video games. He gets jolted awake in the middle of the night by his pocket watch, forced to receive “cross-time deliveries” from 1998. Sometimes it’s the star-shaped candy wrappers his mother hid in a ventilation duct. Sometimes it’s a “distress code” written in gear patterns by Grandpa Chen Shouyi. And every so often, he gets a “kidnapping warning” from the director of the Temporal Bureau, whose every word reeks of “cooperate, or we’ll throw your mom into the Jurassic period.”

The team lineup is even more ridiculous. His archenemy Su Qing has a star-shaped pendant that can predict the future, but it always accurately predicts things like “Lin Mo will step in dog poop tomorrow.” His childhood friend Chen Yang’s grandfather’s diary contains a code for saving the world, but the pages are stuffed with winning coupons for Wangzai milk.

The trio’s daily life is like one giant melodramatic comedy:

They fight “time doubles” in the Pendulum Tower. Their opponent threatens, “I can bring your mom back to life.” Lin Mo whips out his pocket watch: “What a coincidence. She just posted that the signal’s bad inside the fold.”

They search an abandoned school for gear fragments, and Su Qing’s prophecy suddenly stalls: “The next second... uh... Chen Yang will stick a marble up his nose.”

Even the villains come with a comedy buff. A Temporal Bureau technician tinkers with the Wheel of Time and ends up changing his own memories so that he firmly believes he’s a goose, then chases them down three streets honking.

Just as Lin Mo finally puts the gears back together, a new message pops up on his pocket watch. It’s a voice message from his mother: “Son, bring two skewers of grilled kidneys into the fold. The dinosaurs here eat way too much.”