Three months after the end of the federal celebration, Chu Yun found the pocket watch vibrating abnormally in the farm warehouse.
When he wiped the surface, the minute hand suddenly accelerated and reversed, and the unharvested ears of wheat in the warehouse instantly ripened and turned back to green. Dr. Shen detects fluctuations in the curvature of space-time and realizes that the entire farm is in a forty-eight-hour cycle.
During Xiao Man's lecture, the classroom projector automatically plays Dr. Lin's unpublished video, "When you see this image, it means that the metal ring's insurance program has failed." The image shows Su Wanqing's husband injecting some kind of purple crystal into an embryo culture chamber in the background of the lab.
The scope of the farm's time loop expanded to the entire neighborhood. Chu Yun crashes through the time boundary with his Harvester Mech and finds that the outside world is in ruins - the Interstellar Federation is gone, and mechanical beasts roam the wreckage of the crystal buildings. Dr. Shen finds a temporal anchor point within the loop zone: an old radio that is playing a loop of a nuclear explosion alert from seven years ago.
Xiaoman's light pattern energy materializes here as an hourglass, each grain of time sand a miniature civilization. As she tries to invert the hourglass, Su Wanqing's silhouette suddenly appears, "This is Hongjun's last defense mechanism."
Chu Yun follows the silhouette into the interior of the Time Sand and sees that each civilization gravel is going through the same time cycle. Dr. Shen cracks the radio's code and discovers that its chip is encoded with Dr. Lin's daughter's DNA. Xiao Man's light pattern resonates with the DNA, and the time loop suddenly accelerates, throwing the trio into the unactivated Hongjun prototype lab.
On the lab bench lies the sleeping mechanical girl, whose energy core is in the very form of an hourglass. Su Wanqing's silhouette fused with the mechanical maiden, initiating the self-destruct program, "I am the original time-sand container."
Chu Yun used the Harvester Mech to sever the energy pipeline, and Dr. Shen rewrote the time anchor point to interstellar coordinates. A small full of light pattern energy infused the core of the Xiao Mann, and the flood of time sand broke through the cycle. Returning to reality, an alert comes over the Federation communications network: all metal rings are reorganizing into giant hourglasses, and the countdown shows 48:00:00.
The pocket watch in the farm warehouse stops completely, purple crystals oozing from cracks in the surface. The light pattern of the Xiao Mann could suddenly see the remaining lifespan of others, and the number above Chu Yun's head was exactly forty-eight hours.