In the ruins beneath the blood-red moonlight, Sebastian's mercury remnants recomposed themselves across the fissures of time and space. The red light from his left gem eye crawled like a spider's web over the fragments of his iron mask. Stroking the coordinate runes on the shards, his whisper trembled with a blend of machinery and flesh: "The ashes of the vessel... are hatching new authority."
Suddenly, from the depths of the ruins, the core of the alchemical array emitted a mechanical hum resembling a baby's cry. Sebastian leaped into the rift, arriving at a maternity ward suspended in multi-dimensional space—liquid mercury pipes weaved into a uterine structure, and the embryo of the 8th-generation vessel soaked in amniotic fluid mixed with space-time dust and black blood. Though its thoracic core had not yet formed, its umbilical cord connected to fragments of Allison's pocket watch and Sebastian's remaining mercury source.
"Cross-dimensional gestation... as expected, it requires the aftershock of space-time collapse." He activated the ward's control console, injecting mercury into the embryo's spine as dark patterns of the Lancaster family crest emerged on its skull. The embryo's fingers suddenly spasmed, tracing in the air the coordinate runes from when Allison crossed through the plague village.
"Her residual consciousness is fighting for control." Sebastian sliced open the embryo's chest with a scalpel, embedding the iron mask fragments into its immature core. "Allison's memories must be erased, or the contract will collapse again due to voluntary termination." Mercury corroded the embryo's skin as black blood runes spread like veins, but blue resistance pulses repeatedly exploded the rune networks.
The ward's alarm blared as the Time-Space Administration's war chariot tore through the dimensional barrier. The cloned grandmother's particle cannon destroyed half the mercury pipes, and the young commander's gem eye scanned the embryo: "Immature core! Purge protocol activated!"
Sebastian triggered the ward's self-destruct device, as mercury and space-time dust formed a defensive vortex. Amid the prelude to collapse, the embryo roared with a mix of cries and gear sounds, its umbilical cord abruptly severing on its own. Wrapped in pocket watch fragments, the embryo leaped into a random rift—plummeting into the underground alchemical laboratory of 1920s Paris.
In the mercury vapor of the Paris lab, the embryo took form in a pool of blood. The 8th-generation host awoke as a young girl, her mechanical heart beating in her chest, with blue light in her pupils alternating with Sebastian's red glow. She grabbed a scalpel and slashed the lab table, discovering notes from Sebastian's ancestor: "The 8th vessel catastrophe... requires fusing the memories of dual-core hosts to restart the contract."
Suddenly, the lab door burst open, and a middle-aged woman wearing an alchemical ring stormed in. Her face resembled Allison's grandmother's clone, yet she had Sebastian's gem eye. "Traitor vessel!" She raised a space-time , but the host stabbed her scalpel into its core interface. "You're also a puppet of the Lancasters."
The host forcefully decoded the alchemical logic of the ,embedding Allison's pocket watch fragments into the device and reversing its energy wave to destroy the lab. In the chaos, she leaped into a new rift, falling onto a skybridge in a future cyber city where the Time-Space Administration's drone swarm awaited interception.
On the cyber city's skybridge, the host engaged in mechanical combat with the drones. Her mercury skin corroded metal, and coordinate runes slashed by her scalpel summoned chains from Allison's void realm. Blue and red lights fused in battle, forming a chaotic space-time blade. Suddenly, Sebastian's voice echoed from her breastplate: "Vessel... you are fulfilling the mission I could not."
Tearing open a drone's core, she found a chip inscribed with the Lancaster crest. She realized the Administration's purge was actually a family internal cleansing—Sebastian was using her to eliminate dissent while accelerating core maturation.
"I will not be anyone's tool." She jumped into the dark river beneath the skybridge, where mercury and sewage merged into a hidden channel. At its end, she found a mechanical corpse bound by alchemical chains—exactly Allison's initial form when the plague village. On its thoracic core, blood letters from the grandmother's diary were etched: "The solution to the vessel lies in the host awakening from oblivion."
The host's scalpel trembled as it touched the blood letters, and memory fragments flooded in like a storm: Allison's choice before self-destructing her core, Sebastian's five-hundred-year cycle of betrayal, and the hidden clause in the iron-masked ancestor's contract: "Voluntary annihilation equals eternal imprisonment." Blue and red lights burst in her pupils as she roared stabbed the remains of her mechanical heart into the space-time rift in the dark river.
On the other side of the rift, the ruins of Winston Manor suddenly reassembled. The host stood at the center of the collapsed dissection room, as the blood-red moonlight of the full moon pierced the rift. The grandmother's phantom emerged in the mercury vapor: "You have finally found the path to awakening through . The truth of dual-core collapse... is that the host must voluntarily accept eternal imprisonment to sever the contract."
The host's pupil blue light froze as she stabbed the scalpel into the fused core of herself and Sebastian's remaining mercury. A collapsing black hole erupted, engulfing Winston Manor and all dimensional projections—amid the space-time dust storm, only a pocket watch fragment floated, inscribed with the new host's coordinates: "9th-generation vessel ,gestating in the dimension of ..."