Colorful years

On a street corner in the small town, there is an inconspicuous rice noodle shop. Every mealtime, steaming hot vapors rise from the shop, and under the refraction of sunlight, they strangely display a seven-color spectrum, like a beautiful yet mysterious rainbow.

Zhang Chao and Xiao Hong entered the store together. Zhang Chao's quantum vision instantly activated, capturing numerous anomalies. Those seemingly ordinary rice milk molecules were arranged in a way that violated the law of entropy increase, as if an invisible hand was controlling everything from behind.

When Xiao Hong picked up a mouthful of rice noodles, a nanometer-sized blue light flashed from the tip of the chopsticks. This light was so fleeting that Zhang Chao would have had no chance of noticing it if he hadn't had special visual abilities.

“This place has the most stable quantum entanglement.” Xiao Hong’s voice suddenly echoed through space and time, as if it came from the depths of distant space and time. Zhang Chao was startled when he heard this, and then realized that her weekly visits to this rice noodle shop were not simply to enjoy the food, but to calibrate this space-time node.

Outside the window, pedestrians came and went on the street, but Zhang Chao keenly noticed several blurry figures of "watchers" lurking among them. Their eyes darted around, as if searching for something. Anyone with eyes could see that they were observers from another timeline. This seemingly ordinary daily life at the rice noodle shop actually concealed an unknown secret.

After leaving the rice noodle shop, Zhang Chao and Xiao Hong rushed to the municipal building. Upon arrival, they noticed that the lock cylinder of the municipal building's security door showed signs of plasma cutting, with irregular cuts that were particularly glaring.

Zhang Chao crouched down and carefully searched the door frame for clues. He quickly discovered several metal fragments that did not belong to this era. These fragments emitted a faint light and shimmered with an odd luster in the sunlight, clearly remnants of quantum demolition tools from 2077.

Zhang Chao rushed to his office. Inside the computer case, the hard drive bay was empty; the hard drive that should have contained a large amount of data had vanished.

He quantum-scanned every corner of the scene, leaving no stone unturned.

Less than half an hour later, his birthmark suddenly became hot, and then, to his astonishment, he saw residual data streams in the air. These data streams, like nimble sprites, flickered and jumped in the air, forming a strange picture—the "stolen" novel chapters were suspended in a quantum state in the spacetime rift.

“Not an ordinary thief.” Zhang Chao’s mechanical prosthetic arm automatically deployed and entered scanning mode. He carefully analyzed the surrounding environment, trying to find more clues.

Suddenly, the digital clock on the wall flickered a few times, then projected a holographic image showing Chapter 43 of "Days of Love." This was the key code for maintaining the continuity of spacetime, and it was precisely this that the thieves wanted to steal.

Xiao Hong hurriedly came to Zhang Chao's side. Her hair was still covered with quantum dust from the future, and she looked somewhat disheveled.

She held Zhang Chao's hand with apparent concern, but secretly used a subcutaneous chip to scan his memory fluctuations.

"What's on the hard drive?" Her pupils contracted slightly, a standard interrogation response for a time-space agent. Zhang Chao keenly noticed the "watch" on her wrist—the same quantum locator worn by the observer outside the rice noodle shop window yesterday. He immediately understood that Xiao Hong's identity was far from simple.

Zhang Chao sat down at his desk and took out the "spare USB drive" from the drawer. The moment he took it out, a dragon pattern from the 25th year of the Daoguang Emperor's reign suddenly appeared on the surface of the USB drive.

This was no ordinary storage device; it was an heirloom quantum memory. When Zhang Chao plugged it into the computer interface, the office suddenly went quantum-like, and real-time footage of the burning of opium at Humen appeared on the walls. The billowing smoke seemed to transport people back to that era of war and turmoil.

“They stole the bait,” Zhang Chao sneered, already having a plan in mind.

It turned out that he had already encrypted and stored the real novel inside the stone pile, and the one on the office computer was just a disguise. Xiao Hong's expression froze instantly, a hint of astonishment flashing across her face. Her mission had failed, and at that moment, the security chief's walkie-talkie suddenly crackled with Morse code from 1839.

Zhang Chao's robotic arm shot out a beam of blue light, tracing the quantum trajectory of the thieves in the air. The trajectory pointed to the past, indicating that the thieves were traveling with the "stolen goods" to the scene of the great fire in 1902.

"Chase!" Zhang Chao shouted, smashing open the window and leaping out. During his descent, his clothes rapidly reformed into the Time-Space Watcher uniform, and his ancestral quantum pistol appeared at his waist. Xiao Hong stood frozen, her "watch" displaying a countdown: Remaining mission time: 00:15:00.

Zhang Chao landed in a rice noodle shop nestled in a spacetime rift. This wasn't an ordinary restaurant at all, but rather the 379th outpost of the Time and Space Administration, disguised as a eatery. The seemingly ordinary "owner" was processing fragments of history with a quantum grinder; the "rice noodles" in the bowl were actually nanofibers used to repair spacetime. The thieves were cornered in the kitchen, their "hard drive" melting into primordial quantum slurry.

Zhang Chao's sidearm didn't fire bullets, but rather a string of encrypted equations left by his great-grandfather. The thief who was hit twisted in pain, revealing his true identity—a time criminal from 2077.

As the countdown reached zero, Xiao Hong suddenly appeared in the kitchen. Her "watch" projected a holographic image of her superior: "Destroy the target document immediately." But when she saw the childhood image of Zhang Chao appearing on the wall—the little boy who rescued the quantum server from a fire in 1902—her finger hovered over the detonation button, unable to press it.

"Am I your mission?" Zhang Chao smiled bitterly. It turned out that this "love affair" was, from beginning to end, a surveillance operation by the Time and Space Administration. For the first time, genuine pain appeared in Xiao Hong's eyes; the Administration's brand on the back of her neck was fading.

Suddenly, a Dao Guang edict was projected through the square hole of the stone pillar: "The Time-Space Watchers have the right to rewrite destiny." Zhang Chao grabbed Xiao Hong's hand and shoved the quantum pistol into her palm: "Now you are the 380th generation Watcher." The hard drive floated between the two, and the data streams formed a Möbius strip.

The final chapter of "Days of Love" was automatically written, and the first sentence was: "Our love began in the 25th year of the Daoguang Emperor's reign..."