The forensic lab reeked of formaldehyde and burnt circuitry. Lin Shen's gloved fingers hovered over the smartphone corpse—its motherboard fused with crystallized blood from Lin Che's nosebleed. Across the dissection table, his brother compulsively sketched the call's final frame in charcoal, each stroke smearing black dust over bandages covering his still-oozing nostrils.
"Your hemoglobin count's dropping 2.7% per hour." Lin Shen didn't look up from his microscope. The blood sample under the lens writhed with self-replicating nanobots shaped like funerary coins. "Whatever Father transmitted is rewriting your blood at a molecular..."
A candy wrapper crinkled. Lin Che popped another lychee gummy, the synthetic sweetness masking his metallic breath. "They're messengers, not invaders." His chalk-stained teeth clenched as fragmented memories surfaced—Mother dissolving similar candies in petri dishes, her laughter echoing through lab corridors now lost to time.
The argument erupted when Lin Shen reached for the memory amber pendant around his brother's neck. "We need to scan its quantum matrix before..."
"Don't!" Lin Che recoiled, the chain snapping. The teardrop-shaped crystal struck the floor, releasing a shockwave of phantom screams.
Fractal patterns bloomed across its surface—a holographic crime scene materialized above the broken amber. Their father's corpse sprawled in a corridor of pulsating organic servers, clutching the Luopan whose bone needle now pierced his own left eye. Blood pooled into circuit board grooves on the floor, powering neon sigils that matched Lin Che's birthmark.
Lin Shen's glasses auto-captured the projection, flagging a timecode burned into the hologram's edge: 99:00:00...98:59:59...
The lab's emergency lights bathed everything in crimson. Lin Che crouched over the shards, his eidetic memory reconstructing the amber's internal structure—layers of dendritic crystal formations interlaced with golden filaments. "These aren't flaws...they're microcircuits."
A metallic taste flooded Lin Shen's mouth as his glasses' thermal vision revealed the truth—the pendant's fracture lines formed a perfect hexagram matching the incubator countdown. His HUD alerted: Crystalline resonance detected—source: Subject's bone marrow.*
Before either could speak, the smartphone corpse twitched to life. Its shattered screen projected a warped version of their argument—except their holographic doppelgängers stood back-to-back, firing guns at invisible enemies.
Lin Che's nosebleed returned with vengeance. Drops hit the amber shards, triggering a secondary memory—Mother braiding red threads through Lin Shen's hair on his 10th birthday. "This will keep you safe," she whispered, but young Lin Che watching from the doorway saw what his brother didn't—the threads squirming like nematodes before burrowing into scalp pores.
Reality glitched. The lab's walls dissolved into the memory's background—Mother's laboratory with its wall of humming server racks disguised as ancestral tablets. Lin Shen reached for a spectral microscope, his fingers passing through the vision...and emerging coated in black mold growing from the present-day wall.
"Don't touch anything!" Lin Che choked out, but his brother was already analyzing the mold's bioluminescent spores.
At midnight, the brothers froze mid-argument. Lin Shen's glasses detected it first—a third breath pattern materializing by the contaminated wall. The mold had grown into a humanoid silhouette with Mother's height and Father's limp.
Lin Che's hyperthymesia recognized the horror first. "It's not a ghost..." His trembling finger pointed at the security feed playing on a dead monitor—footage of their current selves from three hours ago. The mold figure mimicked their past movements perfectly, down to Lin Shen adjusting his glasses.
The lab door creaked open without a hand touching it. Cold wind carried the scent of lychee candies and embalming fluid. On the dissection table, the smartphone corpse transmitted a new message—a photo of the brothers sleeping in their childhood beds, timestamped tomorrow 2:44 AM.
But the true violation came when Lin Che found his sketchbook. Beneath his charcoal rendering of Father's death scene, fresh ink strokes added a chilling detail—the Luopan's bone needle wasn't piercing their father's eye.
It was emerging from it.