Allison followed the coordinates and leaped into Dimension X-19, plummeting into a realm woven from emotional spectrums—the sky flowed with liquid anger, despair, and ecstasy; the ground was a maze pieced together from countless memory fragments; buildings were constructed from temporal contract runes; and floating shelves displayed sealed memory commodities: "Berlin Ruin Smoke Fear Agent," "Plague Village Rotting Blood Sorrow," and even Allison's own vengeful obsessions, encapsulated in thorn-patterned glass vials.
"Welcome, Rift Knight," her grandmother's voice echoed from all the shelves. Her projection wore a robe inlaid with the emblems of dimensional buyers, holding a translucent "Emotion Aggregation Core" covered in the of Allison's roots. "You destroyed the hunter, but you never knew this is the true end of the family curse."
The crown of thorns revived automatically, its roots piercing dimensional barriers to absorb spectral energy. Allison discovered the exchange's guards were "emotional avatars" of generations of Winston and Lancaster members—her father's remorse over poisoning her materialized as corrosive slime; her grandmother's ambition condensed into a - manipulating Spider Queen, each avatar wielding the fatal weapons of their respective family members.
"We refined emotional purity from every battle of yours," the Spider Queen spewed contract threads, binding Allison's thorny armor. "Now, it's time for your ultimate emotion—the desire to end the family curse."
She embedded the Reversal Wheel into her heart's core, her roots reverse-devouring the threads and forging them into a "Contract-Breaking Blade." The blade severed the contract runes, and the guard avatars began to disintegrate, but her grandmother's projection sucked the dissolving emotions into the aggregation core. The core erupted with black hole-like suction, devouring memory commodities from surrounding shelves.
"The more you resist, the stronger the exchange's energy grows," her grandmother manipulated the core to unleash a temporal collapse wave, reducing the maze buildings to gear ruins. Allison leaped into the collapse's center, her roots piercing the core's cracks, only to discover its internal structure was a hybrid of her grandmother's vertebrae and the traitorous knight's heart.
"Forging an immortality engine from family and knight corruption... this is your immortality plan," she drove the blade into the core, her roots tampering with the engine's code. The collapse wave reversed into expansion, flooding the devoured memory commodities back onto the shelves. Her grandmother's projection screamed amid the reversal: "You can't tamper with the dimensional buyers' contracts!"
A new resonance echoed from the exchange's depths, and a figure rose from the black hole—the dimensional buyer "Merchant of Entropy," its body stitched from countless temporal wounds, pupils glowing with currency symbols of different dimensions, and holding a clone of Allison's crown of thorns in its hand.
"Subject #07, the secret of your heart has been priced," the Merchant of Entropy tossed her grandmother's unactivated parasite embryos, which split into "temporal borers" in midair, gnawing at the exchange's dimensional structure. Allison realized her grandmother had collaborated with the buyer, using the exchange's destruction to release the borers and hatch new rift markets.
She fused the anchor spear with the Reversal Wheel, firing a composite wave of dimensional collapse and reversal. The borer swarm dissolved in the wave, and her roots absorbed their code, forging "Rift Healing Nails." She drove the nails into the exchange's pillars, and the structure began to solidify, but the Merchant of Entropy tore apart the healing nails and hurled her grandmother's heart—that thorn-entwined organ, its surface carved with the names of all Allison's enemies.
"Your heart is the key to the immortality engine," her grandmother's heart erupted with a temporal flood, and Allison's roots automatically resonated with it. The watch face flickered with blue light reading "50% Heart Core Unlocked." In the flood, she saw her grandmother's complete resurrection plan: the Knights, experiments, and dimensional buyers were all pawns, with the ultimate goal of devouring all rift energy to ascend as a "God of Time and Space."
Allison drove her roots into the heart's core, tampering with its source code, and her grandmother's resurrection process stalled in the tampering. The Merchant of Entropy dissolved into entropic dust, and the exchange collapsed into gear debris. She clutched her own heart as the unlocked information flooded her mind: "Your origin is not Winston blood... but a 'Stitcher Prototype' born from the Dimension God to counter rifts."
The Dimensional Management Committee's bounty alert blared again, the signal laced with her grandmother's lingering laughter: "The game never ended, Allison. You've merely found a new chessboard."
The crown of thorns switched to dormant mode, its roots lying dormant. Allison looked at the collapsing exchange, realizing her identity mystery was more dangerous than the family curse. In the dimensional abyss, new rifts were quietly splitting open.