The white room compressed around us like the belly of a dying star. We shrank to quantum-locked specks—insects drowning in the greasy fingerprints of a god-sized arcade token. The red-scarved hunters' weapons elongated into fractal fly swatters, each swing unleashing tsunamis of corrupted data that dissolved matter into screaming 8-bit particles. Three temporal iterations of me formed a trembling defensive triad:
'99 Wang: Parrying digital storms with his Nokia 3310, its cracked screen displaying the looping digits 00:00:00.
Cyborg '45 Me: Arm cannon firing chroniton lasers that rewrote enemy collision boxes into Möbius strips.
'23 Me: Wielding a joystick ripped from the Street Fighter II cabinet, its cord whipping with bioelectric venom.
"Root access override!" Xiao Yu jammed her quantum rose into the coin slot. The CRT screen fizzed to life with cathode-ray screams, revealing a glitching pixel-art purgatory:
> TITLE: CHRONO'S CRADLE v0.7 > PLAYER: OVERALLS_KID [HP: █░░░░ 12%]
A tiny sprite in acid-washed denim dodged falling red-scarf demons against a background of melting nursery wallpaper.
"That's Grandpa's beta build!" Xiao Yu trembled as rose thorns pierced the machine. "The night before the lab fire... he let me play the prototype..."
Dr. Lin's golden blood boiled over. She finger-painted Ouroboros fractals across the control panel. Instantly, scarved hunters glitched into stop-motion puppetry, necks craning to reveal pulsating UPC barcodes. Wang's Polaroid snap-snap-snapped like gunfire. Developing photos revealed nightmare metadata:▢ [TRAUMA_19930412]: Xiao Yu's adoption papers burning in an orphanage furnace.▢ [DIVORCE_20151107]: My wedding ring dissolving in a sink of liquid code.▢ [CYBERHEART_20291031]: Lin's original heart floating in a jar of glowing preservative.
"They're crystallized chrono-tumors!" '45 Me ripped open his chest cavity. A smoldering neural chip pulsed within rib-wires. "Flash this temporal malware into the BIOS!"
The chip stabbed into the arcade's service port. Reality rewrote itself in corrupted .dll files—pristine walls bled into nicotine-stained wood paneling. We stood in the Golden Star Arcade, circa 1989, drowning in the stench of burnt PCB boards and childhood sweat:
SEGA's House of the Dead flickered beside us, screen showing Dr. Lin's corpse impaled on a zombie's claws, her glass heart counting backward from 365.
Claw Machine imprisoned sobbing versions of us at ages 5/15/25, their fingers scratching at the glass in infinite loops.
Counter Girl: Miniature crimson girl sucking a lollipop wired directly into her occipital lobe. Her feet kicked through ossified memories:My first molar—filled with squirming nanites that spelled "SUBJECT 7".Xiao Yu's pacifier oozing cerebrospinal fluid.Lin's kindergarten report card stamped GENETIC RECIPIENT: VIABLE.
"Welcome to the Childhood DLC expansion pack," the girl giggled, lollipop lenses zooming with mechanical whines. "Let's debug your broken nostalgia~"
Scarved hunters cartoonified into rubber-hose animation horrors. Weapons morphed into Super Soakers firing liquid binary. Where the poison struck:
My left leg plasticized into LEGO bricks that clicked with every step.
Wang's arm mutated into a G.I. Joe kung-fu grip snapping at his throat.
Xiao Yu's hair crystallized into glass beads containing frozen screams.
"Cheat code coordinates!" Xiao Yu pried a Dance Dance Revolution pad from the floor. Underneath—her grandpa's engraved confession: "Lǚ Wēníng 1983: FORGIVE ME".
Wang pummeled a boxing machine. Flesh tore from his knuckles as he scored 999—the number of resets endured. The ceiling cracked open, vomiting a treasure chest lined with fetal skin. Inside: a corroded Nintendo Zapper cartridge leaking black ichor that smelled of placenta. Dr. Lin bit into it with crackling molars. Gold blood dissolved plastic, exposing circuit boards etched with sonogram images of us all. "Gestational malware... harvesting innocence for temporal fuel!"
Behind us, PAC-MAN activated with a death knell chime. The maze unfolded into the Ouroboros Arena's blueprints, corridors labeled with extinction dates. Ghost sprites wore pixelated red scarves. Each dot consumed erased a gas-mask soldier from existence—but the player ID froze our spinal fluid:> USER: LUZHAO_AGE6The sprite wore an Ultraman T-shirt identical to one incinerated in my childhood closet.
"That's my kindergarten avatar!" I choked. "The afternoon I vanished from the playground..."
All screens detonated into analog static. The crimson girl's lollipop shattered like safety glass, revealing a camera lens threaded with human optic nerves. "The backdoor is your stolen afternoon—the two hours where Subject 7 overwrote your timeline!"
Scarved hunters combusted in cobalt flames. Pyrotechnics birthed holograms: Shanghai Children's Hospital - Operating Theater 4 - September 15, 1999.
5-year-old me: Strapped to a surgical table, ribs pried open with clockwork retractors.
Dr. Zhou: Implanting a quartz data-chip into my third rib, its surface etched with Ouroboros circuitry.
25-year-old Dr. Lin: Monitoring vitals on a Commodore 64, her unmodified eyes dripping tears onto the keyboard.
Dr. Lin's glass heart flared with sympathetic resonance. She clawed at her sternum. "I'm your... chrono-compatible vessel... cloned from your bone marrow!"
The arcade imploded. Pixels rained like radioactive hail. Xiao Yu's rose drilled into the linoleum, blooming into a 8-bit garden where flowers chimed the Tetris theme. We leapt into its stamen core—
—and crash-landed in Golden Star Arcade - 20:13, September 15, 1999.
Smoke hung thick between Final Fight cabinets. At the improvised surgery station:
5-year-old me: Chest cavity splayed, ribcage glittering with embedded code like cursed jewelry.
25-year-old Dr. Lin: Scalpel trembling over my thymus gland, tears dissolving her surgical mask.
Grandpa Lü: Crouched over a Commodore 64 wired directly into my open chest via neural jacks piercing my spine, fingers flying across keys sticky with blood and cola.
"Kill the terminal! He's compiling the final virus!" '45 Me roared, arm cannon overloading.
The child on the table opened eyes devoid of pupils—only swirling galaxy fractals. His voice synthesized through blown arcade speakers:"Runtime error: Corrupted assets detected. Initiating garbage collection."
True Red Scarves emerged from shadowed coin-ops. They unwound their mufflers with insectoid precision—revealing our own childhood faces rendered in uncanny-valley wax, eyes replaced by ticking Ouroboros chronometers. The *5-year-old me* doppelgänger raised a Super Soaker brimming with liquid void that erased photons on contact. Behind them, the arcade's exit sign morphed into a colossal INSERT COIN prompt.
(End of Chapter Eight)