On the fifteenth day, the United Nations established the "Mirror Crisis Response Committee". As the country that had been the first to conduct research into the phenomenon, the United States proposed the "Tracing Project"—a mission to locate the origin of all timeline divergences and attempt to reverse the fusion process.
Ethan and Mason were selected to join the core team, as they were the pair of mirror humans who had achieved the highest level of fusion and were thus able to detect anomalies in the timeline's fluctuations.
The first stop for the Tracing Team was the Nevada Test Site.
On July 16, 1945, the United States' first atomic bomb was detonated at this site. According to the data, this nuclear explosion had generated seven new timeline divergences.
The convoy traveled across the desert for six hours before reaching the site of the original blast. A monument now stood where the detonation had occurred, surrounded by desolate salt flats stretching as far as the eye could see.
The team had finished setting up their equipment by dusk. The setting sun painted the desert a deep crimson, like congealed blood.
"Begin scanning," Dr. Zhou ordered.
The moment the equipment powered on, everyone present witnessed a strange phenomenon.
It wasn't an image displayed on the instruments, but something that appeared directly in their field of vision—a mirage-like scene. The barren desert was suddenly overlaid with a vision from 1945: a makeshift observation post, people in military uniforms, and a mushroom cloud rising in the distance.
But it wasn't a static image. The mushroom cloud rose slowly, over and over again, each time at a slightly different angle. It was like a video clip that had been copied and pasted seven times, with subtle variations in each iteration.
"Seven parallel versions," Dr. Zhou whispered. "All superimposed here."
Ethan felt a wave of dizziness wash over him. He closed his eyes, but the images didn't disappear—instead, they projected themselves directly into his consciousness. He saw seven different possibilities: in some versions, the test failed; in others, the explosion was far more powerful than expected; in still others, a sudden shift in wind direction caused unforeseen radioactive contamination.
Seven different histories, all existing simultaneously as reality.
"This is the divergence point," Mason's voice said beside him. "One single event, multiple outcomes, each outcome creating a new world."
Suddenly, all the images began to twist and merge together. The seven mushroom clouds slowly coalesced into one enormous, constantly shifting cloud mass. The scenes on the desert merged too—the observation post flickered between shabby and advanced, the military uniforms alternating between old and new.
"The fusion is accelerating!" the monitoring technician shouted.
Dr. Zhou immediately ordered an evacuation. But as they were packing up the equipment, the ground began to shake violently.
It wasn't an earthquake—it was something far more bizarre. The texture of the ground kept changing, the size of the sand grains shifting, even the elevation of the horizon itself fluctuating up and down.
"Move! Now!"
The convoy raced away from the blast site. Ethan glanced back over his shoulder, watching as the desert split into two, then three, then seven different versions of the landscape, layered on top of one another like sheets of transparent film.