A young billionaire rescues an unconscious woman holding her twins in a frozen park. But when she wakes up in his mansion, a terrifying secret changes her life forever…

Chapter 1: An Angel in the Blizzard
The record-breaking blizzard of 2026 had turned New York into a white graveyard. In Central Park, temperatures had plummeted to -20°C. The wind howled through the bare maple branches like the screams of forgotten souls.

Silas Sterling, the 32-year-old billionaire head of the biotechnology corporation Aeterna, stepped out of his armored SUV. He didn’t need to be out at this time, but Silas had a strange habit: he liked to watch the collapse of nature. For Silas, the death of winter always brought a sense of orderly beauty.

At the foot of an ancient oak tree, Silas paused. His super-bright flashlight swept across an unusual pile of snow. It wasn’t snow. It was a woman.

She wore a thin coat, her whole body curled up like a human shield. In her numb arms, the twins—a boy and a girl, about four years old—were drifting in and out of consciousness. The woman had used her last vestiges of body heat to envelop them. Her skin had turned a bluish-purple, her breath a thin wisp of smoke.

“Get them in the car. Immediately!” Silas ordered the guards.

In the moment he lifted the woman, Silas felt a strange connection. Her face, though veiled in frost, possessed an ethereal beauty, a beauty he thought he had seen somewhere in his most distant dreams.

Chapter 2: The Crystal Fortress
Clara Thorne awoke in a room without corners.

Everything was white. Soft light emanated from the walls, not dazzling. Her first sensation was warmth—a luxurious warmth she had long lost on the streets of the Bronx.

“Leo? Mia?” Clara cried out, calling her children’s names, trying to sit up, but her body ached as if thousands of needles were piercing her flesh.

“They’re fine, Clara. They’re sleeping in the next room.”

A man entered. He wore a perfectly tailored gray suit, his sharp face and amber eyes radiating a cold intelligence. Silas Sterling. She recognized him. Who in America didn’t know the billionaire who had promised a future “free from disease”?

“You… you saved us?” Clara whispered.

“I found you in Central Park,” Silas said, approaching and handing her a glass of pale blue liquid. “Drink this. It’s a cell regeneration compound produced by my company. You suffered severe hypothermia.”

For the next few days, Clara lived in a dream. Silas’s mansion in the suburbs of New York was an architectural marvel. She and her children ate the finest food and wore the finest silk clothes. Silas spent time playing with Leo and Mia, teaching them to draw, and reading to them. He didn’t seem like an arrogant billionaire; he seemed like a man trying to fill a void in his soul.

“Why are you so kind to my children and me?” Clara asked one evening as they sat by the fireplace.

Silas looked at the fire, a deep sadness in his eyes. “This world is too cold, Clara. Sometimes, we save someone just to prove that we are still human.”

Clara began to believe it. She began to believe that fate had brought her from beneath the ice and snow into the arms of this savior. But she didn’t know that, in the homes of billionaires, kindness was often a price tag.

Chapter 3: Cracks in the Mirror
Suspicion begins with the smallest things.

First, there were the two children. Leo and Mia began to change. They were usually very active, but since taking the “nutritional supplements” Silas provided, they had become extremely calm, even robotic. Sometimes, Clara would find them staring at a wall for hours, their eyes unblinking.

Second, there were her own memories. Clara found she couldn’t clearly remember the face of her husband – whom she believed had died in an accident two years earlier. When she tried to recall the name of the hospital or the address of her old house, her head would ache as if an electric current were running through it.

One night, while Silas was away on an unexpected business trip, Clara decided to leave her room. She crept down the long, dark corridor towards the basement – ​​which Silas always kept locked and called his “Personal Laboratory.”

Using Leo’s fingerprints (the child Silas frequently brought there for “health checks”), Clara bypassed the security system.

The steel door creaked open, revealing a truth beyond her wildest imagination.

Chapter 4: The Terrifying Climax
The room wasn’t a pharmaceutical lab. It was a museum.

Along the walls were glass cages filled with preservation solutions. And inside… Clara collapsed, her breath catching in her throat.

At least ten versions of herself lay there. Identical bodies, of varying ages, all in a state of suspended animation.

She trembled as she approached a central computer with a file open titled: “PROJECT ELARA – EXPERIMENT 14”.

Clara glanced through the data, and her heart stopped.

“Subject: Clara Thorne (Clone #14). Status: Successful implantation of false memories. Objective: Recreate the emotional structure of Elara Sterling (Silas Sterling’s late wife). Note: Two secondary test subjects (Leo and Mia – Clone #14) are showing signs of discarding their old consciousness faster than expected. The dose of neuroinhibitor needs to be increased.”

“You shouldn’t have come down here, Clara.”

Silas’s voice came from behind, cold and devoid of any warmth. Clara turned around and saw him standing in the door, holding a syringe containing a dark purple liquid.

“You… you’re a monster!” Clara screamed, tears streaming down her face. “I’m not your wife! My children aren’t your test subjects!”

Silas’s face contorted in a pained grimace. “My wife and children died in a mining accident ten years ago! I have money, I have technology, I have everything… but I don’t have them. Do you know how many years it took me to perfect your genes?”

“We are human! We have emotions!”

“Emotions are something I programmed you!” Silas roared, stepping forward. “That scene of you lying in the frozen park? That was a stress test. I dropped you there to see if the maternal instincts of ‘version 14’ were strong enough to trigger the revival of your neurons. And you did very well, Clara. You were very real.”

Clara grabbed a pair of surgical scissors from the table, assuming a defensive stance. “I’ll get the children out of here.”

Silas chuckled bitterly. “The children? Look again.”

He pressed a button on the control panel. A curtain in the corner of the room rose. Leo and Mia lay on the operating table, their necks connected by fiber optic cables plugged directly into a massive server. Their eyes were wide open, but within their pupils were streams of continuously running code.

They weren’t children. They were semi-mechanical biological entities, designed to play the role of perfect offspring.

Chapter 5: The Final Twist
“Do you know why you get a headache trying to remember the past?” Silas approached, despite the scissors in her hand. “It’s not because your memories are blocked. It’s because you have no past.”

Silas handed her a small mirror. “Look closely at your pupils.”

Clara looked in the mirror. And then she saw it. Deep within the black of her eye, a tiny serial number was laser-etched: 00-14-AS.

“This experiment failed because you’re too intelligent,” Silas sighed. “Last time, version 13 committed suicide. This time, I thought maternal instinct would hold her back. But she chose curiosity instead.”

“You’ll never have her,” Clara whispered, her hands trembling. “No matter how many copies you create, she’s dead. And you’ve been dead for a long time, Silas.”

“Perhaps,” Silas said, his eyes vacant. “But I have the right to ‘Restart’.”

He lunged forward. Clara plunged the scissors into Silas’s shoulder, but he didn’t flinch, as if he felt no pain. He pressed the syringe against her neck. The purple liquid flooded her bloodstream.

Clara’s world began to crumble. The image of Silas, the laboratory, and the pain all faded.

Chapter 6: The Eternal Loop
One week later.

The snowstorm had passed, but the air remained chilly. Silas Sterling drove his armored SUV around Central Park.

He stopped beside an ancient oak tree. There, a woman lay huddled, clutching her twins. Snow lightly covered their shoulders.

Silas got out of the car, his face filled with compassion and kindness. He lifted the woman, feeling her fragile warmth.

“Get them in the car,” Silas told the security team. “Poor things. I will save them.”

The woman opened her eyes slightly, seeing Silas. She didn’t recognize him. She saw only a savior, an angel in the snowstorm.

“Thank… thank you…” she whispered.

Silas smiled, a perfectly chilling smile. “It’s nothing, Clara. We’ll go home. This time, I promise, things will be different.”

On the woman’s wrist, hidden beneath her worn-out dress, was a small, needle-point scar that had just scabbed over. And in Silas’s pocket, a newly created file read: “PROJECT ELARA – TEST 15”.

Beneath the icy exterior of Silas Sterling’s wealth and madness lay an endless loop, where artificial souls were trapped in a nightmare called “Salvation”.