As the Stardust Train crossed the Boötes Void, the Symbiotic Mark on Arui's palm suddenly twisted into spiral patterns—golden bands of light looping infinitely like a Möbius strip, with each spiral arm corresponding to the resonance frequency of a different timeline, yet at the core, a fractured Klein Bottle totem manifested. Ice Drip's algorithmic halo burst into amber warnings across the star map, and the Data Stream displayed an eerie temporal backflow: "Retrospective anomaly detected! At the hub of cosmic spacetime, a 'Retrospective Civilization' composed of pure temporal entropy exists, and its time flow is collapsing into a unidirectional destruction current at a rate of 0.32%."
Outside the portholes, the previously stable galaxies began exhibiting bizarre changes that defied all logic—young stars burned in reverse back into nebulae, ancient black holes re-aggregated into protostars, and even dust particles regressed into quark states within the temporal counter-current. Auli's Photon Harp Strings emitted a hum like a reversing hourglass, and the light particles condensing on the strings regressed to their primordial photon state the moment they formed: "Look at the spectral redshift of those galaxies," he pointed toward the gradually bluing nebulae, "the Retrospective Civilization is forcing time to flow backward, compressing symbiotic timelines into a single trajectory of destruction."
Arui touched her mark, and the spiral patterns suddenly extended vine-like timeli…
Chapter 327