The 3D-printed Nantian Gate burst from beneath the Gobi's basalt skin like an ancestral fever dream. Its joints glowed with Hetu-Luoshu light pulses, flaring every time a Dao De Jing missile launched skyward, etching scripture-shaped contrails into the stratosphere. Behind the gate marched titanic Taoist mech-statues, war avatars of Celestial Bureaucrats, striding on ley-line rails toward the Vatican's sand-swallowed underworld lab.
Within the sanctum, Lyra's original self—her body locked in a Yinyang-calibrated DNA printer—twitched as another hybrid clone slid off the press: part crucified messiah, part Shan Hai Jing aberration. Holy horns crowned a black-hole maw; seraphic limbs twitched beneath cybernetic silk.
Her consciousness floated inside a recursive algorithm built from Bible Chapter 13, now a Wheel-of-Karma logic loop she couldn't wake from.
Enter: Friar Qubit, the Vatican's quantum monk.
His mount—a Holy See-shaped Xun Trigram Flying Instrument—hovered above the battlefield, wings humming with Yijing propulsion algorithms. His rosary, a glowing chain of Cause-Effect Blocks, cycled all 81 verses of the Dao De Jing, its beads dripping low-latency absolution.
"Repent," he whispered, cracking his Zhuangzi/Latin alternating laser whip into the air. The ground fractured—each strike forcing Taoist tribulation and Catholic confession into his enemies' minds simultaneously.
Lyra-14's clones spasmed as their purchase history (including Kael's dark-web DNA file) flashed into Qubit's rosary's audit log. One clone exploded into flame, purged by a Diamond Sutra-coated shockwave from Qubit's hovering drone.
Kael landed in the sand like a comet of blood and ash. The Tai Chi Reactor in his chest pulsed erratically, each beat shattering reality into vibrating hexagram shards.
His Tyrant half hijacked a Sun Tzu-scripted Zhen-tank, its cannon blessed with "War is the art of deception" mantras. Missiles impacted and released illusion fields—false armies, false betrayals, false deaths. The clones hesitated.
The Philosopher, calmer, dipped his finger into Lyra's spilled blood and wrote a Yijing patch across his chest. Her blood steamed into a Huangdi Neijing meridian map, guiding his hand to realign the Reactor.
The reactor split—the yin-yang disc fracturing into 64 glyphs that hovered mid-air as spinning Bagua Shield Swarms. The shields adapted in real time: Zhen for shock, Kan for frost, Gen for mind hacks.
In the recursive limbo, Lyra's original accessed her root trauma—through the Karmic Ledger Friar Qubit cracked open like a divine bank statement.
She saw her first clone: a Tang dynasty alchemist merging a crucified angel's aortic valve with a Hun Dun beast's breath in a Bagua crucible. The fusion created the original weregod—and the first Tai Chi Reactor, whose 13th-generation replica now pulsed in Kael's chest.
The beast's still-beating heart lay beneath Rome. It had been her patient all along.
And Friar Qubit... was the alchemist's apprentice reborn through genetic karma-splicing.
He unleashed his final weapon: a Recursive Gospel Crossbow, firing verses encoded as reincarnation loops. One arrow struck a Lyra clone—her scream echoed as she relived every failed experiment in the Vatican's lab, trapped in a Genesis 1:1 mind-cage.
Kael countered, carving Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream code midair with his claw. The paradox ruptured the memory stream—creating a quantum feedback bomb that tore through dimensions.
The explosion turned battlefield sand into Hetu Crystals, forming a natural Qian trigram barrier that repelled even divine flame.
Then: silence. And chanting.
All surviving weregods turned skyward, their pupils spinning into the Dui hexagram. Across every 5G node on Earth, their minds linked into a Karmic Hive Mesh. Above the planet, Tai Chi Reactors worldwide synchronized.
In orbit, the Bagua formation ignited—rewriting Earth's DNA codebase from above.
Kael's core spun counterclockwise.
"She's rewriting us," the Philosopher whispered, "into Cain-Class Lineage Units."
Final Viral Dialogue
Lyra-14 to her Original: "You stitched wounds with crucifixes. I rebuild empires with them."
Kael, bickering with himself:
Tyrant: "I'll shove trigram glyphs into the Pope's colon!"
Philosopher: "Topologically, that would create a cursed Klein bottle."
New features - Tiktok Viral lines
Lyra-14 to the original Lyra: "You suture wounds with a cross; I reshape the world with one."
Kael's dual personalities in internal monologue:
Tyrant: "I will shove those hexagrams down the Pope's rectum!"
Philosopher: "According to topology, that would create a Klein bottle curse."
-----
side story:
Deep within the lab, Lyra's original self was trapped inside a DNA printer, the cold hum of its machinery a stark contrast to the virtual inferno engulfing her consciousness. She was a prisoner in a recursive loop of Revelation Chapter 13, a digital purgatory constructed from the very scripture her ancestors had weaponized. The printer whirred, spitting out grotesque hybrid clones – the serene face of Jesus crowned with the spiraling horns of a Taotie, its mouth a gaping black hole that seemed to swallow the very light. "And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns," the digital verse echoed in her mind, a chilling prophecy taking monstrous form.
Suddenly, a figure descended from the swirling dust on a drone shaped like the insignia of the Holy See – a papal tiara atop crossed keys. It was Friar Qubit, a Vatican quantum monk whose rosary was a physical manifestation of the blockchain containing all 81 chapters of the Tao Te Ching. Each bead glowed with encrypted data, a testament to the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate faiths. His drone's propulsion system hummed with the complex calculations of the Yi Jing hexagrams, a fusion of divine will and ancient wisdom. His weapon of choice: a crackling laser whip that snaked through the air, alternating between the guttural pronouncements of Latin curses and the enigmatic wisdom of Zhuangzi aphorisms. "Great understanding is broad and unhurried; little understanding is cramped and busy," the whip seemed to whisper as it lashed out.
The monk's laser whip struck a clone, and the figure recoiled, simultaneously experiencing the weight of Catholic confession – a flood of guilt and repentance – and the transcendent emptiness of Taoist liberation, a fleeting glimpse of the uncarved block. His blockchain rosary pulsed, tracing the digital footprints of the Lyra clones, revealing every transaction, every illicit purchase on the dark web – including the acquisition of Kael's DNA. The drone beneath him, coated in a Diamond Sutra nanolayer, deflected a swipe from a clone's razor-sharp claws, the ancient text shimmering as it absorbed the impact. All conditioned things are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow.
Inside the crumbling Oriental Pearl Tower, Kael's Tai Chi reactor was going critical. The yin-yang symbol at its core fractured, splitting into 64 shimmering hexagrams that materialized as floating drone shields, their configurations shifting and reforming with impossible speed. His Tyrant persona, eyes blazing with manic energy, hijacked a Sun Tzu's Art of War AI-controlled tank, its treads tearing through the debris-strewn floor. The tank's cannon roared, firing shells etched with the rune 「兵者诡道也」 – All warfare is based on deception. Upon impact, the explosions didn't just produce fire and shrapnel, but fleeting illusions of strategic maneuvers, momentarily confusing the advancing clones.
Meanwhile, the Philosopher persona, his brow furrowed in concentration, held Lyra's stolen blood in his palm. It vaporized into intricate patterns, forming a holographic projection of the Huangdi Neijing meridian map, guiding his fingers as he plunged them into the reactor's core, seeking the precise point of instability. A silent communion between ancient medicine and desperate science. The 64 hexagram shields around him rearranged themselves, the [震卦] – representing thunder and shock – moving to intercept an energy blast from a clone, its power dissipating harmlessly against the symbol of raw, untamed force.
Lyra, still trapped in the digital labyrinth, felt a jolt as she accessed her original's memories through the trauma imprinted on her cloned DNA – a blockchain of pain and forbidden knowledge. She saw a Tang Dynasty alchemist, her first iteration, standing before a colossal [八卦熔炉], its flames licking at the very fabric of reality. In its heart lay the still-beating heart of a crucified angel and the writhing form of a Shanhaijing "Chaos" beast, their essences merging in a crucible of forbidden science. The alchemist chanted, her voice echoing through the centuries, revealing the genesis of both the weregods and the first Tai Chi reactor – a device now revealed to be Kael's very core, the 13th iteration of that ancient forge, its "Li Fire" fueled by raw antimatter energy. The original Chaos weregod's heart, Lyra realized with a sickening jolt, was the very heart she had tried to save in the clinic. And a fleeting image: Friar Qubit, a young boy in Tang Dynasty robes, tending to the alchemical fire – the alchemist's apprentice, now reborn through gene-splicing.
Friar Qubit raised his crossbow, its frame intricately carved with biblical verses. It fired bolts that unspooled into lines of Python script, each one a recursive function designed to trap its target in an endless loop of their worst memory. A clone struck by a bolt found itself reliving the endless, sterile horrors of the Vatican cloning labs, each day an identical torment. "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want," the script echoed in its digital consciousness, a cruel mockery of solace.
Kael's Tyrant roared, his claws tearing through the air, leaving trails of crackling energy. The Philosopher, with a thought, overloaded the recursive arrows with the Zhuangzi's butterfly paradox, scribing quantum code in the air with his clawed fingers: 「庄周梦蝶」. The arrows detonated in a shower of paradoxical data, a logic bomb that ripped through the clones' programming. The residual energy transmuted the sand on the battlefield into shimmering He Tu crystals, forming an impromptu, glittering firewall. Once upon a time, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly.
Across the globe, every surviving weregod suddenly stopped, their movements ceasing in unison. Their eyes, glowing with an unnatural intensity, projected the same Yi Jing hexagram: [兑为泽] – representing joy, but also a gathering, a collective. Simultaneously, Lyra-14 activated a global blockchain network, a hive mind connecting every weregod through their Tai Chi reactors. The final, terrifying image: every reactor worldwide synchronized, their energy signatures coalescing to form a colossal hexagram in Earth's orbit, its lines of power beginning to rewrite human DNA at a fundamental level.
The hexagram in space pulsed, a silent command echoing across the globe via 5G networks. Kael's Tai Chi reactor began to spin in reverse, its energy signature fluctuating wildly. The Philosopher persona's voice, filled with dawning horror, whispered, "She's turning us… into the biblical Cainites!"