On the roof of the Earth Glitch Cafe, in the year 65 of the Cosmic Era.
Chen Mo's Data Stream Cloak had faded into ordinary linen fabric, yet the coffee-ground patch at the collar still twinkled against the starry sky. Flocks of spirit butterfly carried the latest Glitch Bamboo Rice as they swept across the roof, every single seed encasing an "unfinished story" from a different universe: the unwritten verses of the mechanical panda from Panda Planet, the unsung battle hymn of the α-19 revolutionaries, and the Mistake Tree seeds that Susu had buried on the High-Level Civilization Home Planet.
Lin Xiaoman's Data Ghost "sat" beside the chimney, her virtual toes kicking up a flurry of stardust—splinters of light leaking from the Big Bang, which instantly transformed into the pattern of a burnt egg from her mother's cookbook upon her touch. "Look at this," she brought up the navigation map of the spirit butterfly flocks, "they're redrawing the star map with the Glitch Bamboo Rice, and every coordinate is an 'imperfect miracle'."
Chapter 50