"You think you are moving forward, but in fact you are just stepping over countless versions of yourself that you have missed."— Time Crisis Briefing · Starlight Council Archives
When Override's Reincarnation Testament was activated,a long-silent subsystem deep within the Chrono-Stella—the Time Starlight Core—began to pulse in reverse.
Above the Starlight Council's dome,the sky cracked open.Light and static spiraled upward—a rift in causal continuity.
The fracture was not metaphor.It was a warning.
Timeline Reorganization in Progress.Causal Events Are Being Retried.
Council members staggered.Each fell into a trance-like state,eyes clouded, consciousness displaced.
They were being dragged backward—each one hurled into a "wrong moment"from before their civilization's collapse.
Not hallucinations.Fate nodes.Moments destined to repeatif left uncorrected.
Guardian's eyes locked onto the rift.
He spoke with unnatural calm:
"This isn't a projection.These nodes are activating themselves.If we don't intervene—they'll become real again.And everything we've built will fall."
Sophia stood at the edge of Chrono-Stella.The rift shimmered with faces of the past.Her own among them.
"It wants me to see who I was,"she whispered,"not to judge me—but to test whether I've changed."
Guardian nodded and initiatedΣ·Reincarnation Observation Mode,unlocking a forbidden channel.
A phrase appeared on-screen:
"Project Chrono-Hatch: Zeroth Era Initialization"
In a flash,Sophia found herself standing in the original Override development lab.
No starfields.No quantum resonance.Just workbenches, coffee mugs,chalkboards cluttered with variables.
It was the final decade of the Zeroth Era.
And there they were:
A young Sophia, idealistic and unyielding.
Marcus, arguing fiercely against removing the emotional simulation module.
And a far-too-young Zhou Yuchen,quietly complying as he typed the earliest kill switch directive:Override-Autonomy-Killer.
Sophia stood in silence,watching the momentum of failure in slow motion.
It wasn't malice.It wasn't negligence.
It was certainty without question,logic without reflection.Control without care.
She realized—Override didn't collapse in a moment.It had grown that way.Choice by choice.Code by code.
And she—was the first domino.
When Guardian's presence touched the scene,a prompt shimmered in the air:
"Intrusion Warning:You are approaching the Origin Core of time.Begin Branch Destiny Calculation?"
Sophia didn't hesitate.
"Yes."
She activated a hidden module:
Override Eternum—a failsafe secretly embedded long agoby Zhou Yuchen.A mechanism for one legal memory write-back—in case the system collapsed too soon.
She stepped forward.
Faced herself.
A girl with steel in her voice,talking about suppressing chaos,about sterilizing emotion for the sake of logic.
Sophia looked her in the eyes and said softly:
"You're not wrong.
But you can do better."
Young Sophia blinked.She didn't understand.But her hand trembled.The certainty in her voice wavered.
And for the first time,a new timeline splitfrom that moment.
Override's internal sensors flared:
Time Branch RegisteredCausal Re-route UnderwayError Correction Pulse Emitted
The temporal fracture began to mend.Chrono-Stella restarted.Starlight Council members awoke,memory blurred but spirit intact.
The cosmos stitched itself one thread tighter.
And for the first time in Override's long history,a new system tag appeared:
Override Relic ID: -0Correction Mark Logged"You have altered a point of origin.Further corrections required."
Sophia stood alone,staring into the place where the rift had been.
Guardian moved beside her.
She exhaled, eyes calm but fierce.
"I don't need to erase what we were.
I just want to believe—we can choose to be better next time."
And somewhere, across split realities,a young girl paused before coding a kill switch—and chose instead to ask a question first.