Alison pushed open the dark door, the faint light of her pocket watch casting trembling shadows in the damp air. The stone walls of the underground chamber were covered in alchemical runes, and on the central stone platform lay a female corpse with her exact face—skin pallid with an unnatural bluish tinge, a chain of black blood runes identical to hers coiled around its neck, and a gaping void in the chest revealing a precise mechanical core structure.
"Is this... another me?" She staggered toward the platform. The moment her fingertips touched the corpse, the rune-carved walls flared red. Countless mirrors surged from all directions: Lancastrian clansmen burning on medieval racks, her father on an autopsy table with his core removed, Sebastian's back as he mixed cursed potions in the lab... All reflections twisted and merged in the bloody light, converging into a piercing roar: "Welcome back to purgatory, vessel."
The floor suddenly collapsed, and Alison fell into a pool of liquid mercury. The mercury, laced with alchemical sigils, ate away at her skin as black blood rune chains extended from the corpse's chest, binding her limbs. In agony, she saw the corpse's fingers twitch—the "mirror image" was reviving, its pupils opening to shine with the same blue light as her time-travel pocket watch.
"You aren't the first vessel." The resurrected woman spoke in a hoarse voice, her tone laced with fragments of Alison's memories. "Five hundred years ago, Lancaster and Winston created us with time cores and black blood pacts. Each century, when the curse erodes a host beyond endurance, the mirror substitute plan activates... and you are the seventh."
The liquid mercury pool boiled furiously as rune chains seeped into her marrow. Alison struggled to activate her watch for a jump, but curse-corrupted coordinates threw her into a chaos of time—plague-era burning fields, future tech labs, even Sebastian's childhood alchemy school. In each era, a revived mirror image awaited, speaking with her voice: "Surrender the core, or all mirrors will consume your existence."
She crashed back into the chamber, where the resurrected woman now stood, her mechanical core clicking like meshing gears. "Sebastian is waiting," she grinned, revealing a gemstone left eye identical to Sebastian's. "The dual-core fusion ritual begins tonight at the full moon."
The chamber floor split, and Sebastian rose from below, his black robe stained with mercury. The scalpel in his hand—embedded with her father's time core—pointed at her heart. "Found you at last. Mirror substitutes have collected 60% of your existence data. Removing your core will end the curse."
Alison's watch began disintegrating under the curse, black blood seeping from its silver casing. She screamed as she triggered a final random jump, but in the vortex, she heard Sebastian's truth: "Your real name is Isabelle Lancaster. 'Winston' is a falsified memory. Dual-core fusion isn't to break the curse—it's to grant the family eternal temporal dominion..."
She landed in a void strewn with time rifts. Countless Sebastian mirrors reached from the fissures, each holding a different time core. In the distance, the resurrected female mirror flickered between her own face and her grandmother's, repeating the threat: "Surrender the core, or history will rewrite and erase every trace of your being."
Crouched at the rift's edge, half her face coated in black blood, Alison's watch shattered completely. Its dial gears resonated with her mechanical heart, bursting into a final blue light—revealing the truth: every "she" was a puppet split from the time core. The real cure lay in her grandmother's diary, written in blood across the last line: Only by self-destructing both cores can the pact be severed...