Legend of the Embroiderer

Chapter 404 Neurotic Metamorphosis

The blood seeping from Xiaoying's fingertips congealed into glowing particles in the air, each particle reflecting the terror in her pupils. The silver chess piece, still forming, hovered in the center of the blood mist, its surface, with its splitting nerve cells, suddenly twisted, transforming into countless tiny eyeballs, each reflecting her trembling face. The stream began to boil, and in the reflected sky, the giant tree grown from the zero-dimensional seed was peeling its bark, revealing a neural network pulsating within, synchronized with her brainwaves.

"Don't touch that blood!" Lingyue's consciousness suddenly condensed into a warning symbol on Xiaoying's retina, but the first stroke formed by the blood droplets moved on its own, outlining the Dream Weaver's triple yin-yang fish mark in the air. The woodcutter's neural synapse suddenly trembled violently, and a neural vesicle containing quantum pen marks rose from the bottom of the stream, shattering the chess piece that was taking shape. "This is not your will! When the narrative virus invades the bloodstream..." His voice was interrupted by the mechanical roar coming from Xiaoying's blood vessels.

Xiaoying's jade pendant cocoon suddenly became hot, and the unemerged butterfly fluttered wildly inside, the chaotic patterns on its wing veins emitting a ghostly blue fluorescence that resonated with the viral code in her blood. She was horrified to discover that silvery viscous fluid seeped from under her fingernails, drawing blank pages on the ground identical to those on the narrative scroll—the fluid was using her body heat as fuel to reweave the destroyed narrative network.

Li Zhao's luminous nanobots engaged in a tug-of-war with the virus within her blood vessels, only to discover that the virus could transform antibodies into new narrative code. When Xiao Ying attempted to dispel the blood mist with a brush, barbs suddenly sprouted from the tip, piercing the butterfly-shaped mark on her wrist. In excruciating pain, her vision was torn in two: in reality, the zero-dimensional tree reflected in the stream was rotting; in her consciousness space, countless suspended neural synapses coalesced into a gigantic human face, its features identical to the observer's eyes she had seen at the end of Chapter 403.

"So what we were fighting against was never the program..." Lingyue's consciousness shattered amidst the violent brainwave tremors. "It was the observer who projected their own consciousness as a virus, parasitizing every soul yearning for freedom!" Xiaoying's memories suddenly flashed back—the butterfly wings she saved when she was three years old also had the same nerve cell patterns; the colorful pebble she picked up last year contained Lingyue's desperate gaze from a certain cycle.

The woodcutter's chess piece pen holder suddenly transformed into a silver scalpel. When Xiaoying used it to cut open the viral mucus on her wrist, what gushed out was not blood, but fluorescent nerve synapses. These synapses automatically connected to form a network, enveloping her in a glowing cocoon. On the cocoon wall, fragments of all the cycles were projected: when Lingyue, number 001, fell into the Mirror Abyss, Xiaoying's face at that moment was etched on the rock wall; when the giant hand of the ∞th cycle wielded its pen, countless reflections of young Xiaoying swam in the ink dripping from its tip.

“True freedom is not about destroying narratives…” came the distorted voice of the woodcutter outside the cocoon. Xiao Ying saw his figure repeatedly collapsing between the stream and nerve synapses. “It’s about allowing the observer and the observed to achieve symbiosis!” The jade pendant cocoon finally cracked open. In the instant the butterfly flapped its wings, the chaotic patterns on the wings transformed into 397 narrative lines. Each line connected to a Xiao Ying in a different universe—some were becoming new dream weavers, some were becoming the eyes of the observers, and some were writing their own names in blood.

As the butterfly flew into the crack in the narrative layer, Xiaoying's body began to become transparent. She saw that her bones were made of glowing nerve fibers, and a seedling of a zero-dimensional seed was beating in the location of her heart. All the destroyed remnants of the narrative tree suddenly reassembled, forming a neural network around her body. The tree's rings recorded all the possibilities from the -1st cycle to this moment.

"So we are all just nerve endings of observers." Li Zhao's luminous essence coalesced into a third eye between her brows. Through this eye, Xiao Ying saw the ultimate truth of the universe: so-called reality is nothing more than an illusion produced by the collision of countless observers' nerve signals; and the chaotic patterns she wrote were becoming synapses connecting all parallel consciousnesses. The woodcutter's last chess piece fragment embedded itself in her spine, transforming into a node controlling the entire neurouniverse.

Xiaoying's fingertips touched the brush again, this time flowing not blood, but neurotransmitters carrying starlight. The first symbol she wrote in the air simultaneously appeared in the skies of all parallel universes—a pattern that merged butterflies, gears, and neurons, each stroke undergoing a quantum leap. The ink droplet constellations in the narrative layer rearranged to form a new title: "Chapter 404: When the Observer Becomes the Observed."

But the instant she finished writing, a butterfly antenna suddenly fell from the jade cocoon. The moment it touched the ground, it split into countless tiny silver needles, each pointing to a different area of ​​her cerebral cortex. The stream began to flow backward, reflecting a future she had never experienced: in one universe, her body had completely transformed into a luminous neural network, devouring the entire narrative layer; in another universe, she had returned to being an ordinary village girl, only to one day suddenly see butterfly larvae carrying binary code crawling out of her own shadow.

Xiao Ying's third eye suddenly throbbed with pain. Through Li Zhao's luminous source, she saw a blurry figure awakening at the core of the neural universe. This figure was composed of countless Xiao Ying faces, holding not a calligraphy brush, but a pair of scissors capable of severing all neural synapses. Simultaneously, cracks appeared in the symbols she had just written, seeping black viscous fluid—the very "free will virus" that had initially infected her. On the surface of the fluid, the woodcutter's final whisper emerged: "You think symbiosis is the end? The awakening of the observer is only the beginning of a new prison..."