Under the dark orange canopy of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault, radiation storms cut across the surface with visible arcs of ionization.

  Ada's compound eye structure flickered with cold blue light. Her logic core was locked in a 100% overclocked state. Even though the surrounding electromagnetic interference was strong enough to liquefy the brain of an ordinary carbon-based lifeform in seconds, she walked beside Ma Feili with a posture of absolute stillness. Every inch of her exoskeleton armor vibrated at high frequencies to offset the microscopic structural collapse induced by the "Theorem of Irreversible Entropy."

  "Ma Feili, calibrate your filtration mask." Ada's voice rang directly inside Ma Feili's skull via bone conduction, cold and precise. "We are entering the radiation zone of the old 'Styx System' site. Every grain of dust here records the 'Mass Exchange' of Star Calendar 4118."

  Ma Feili stepped over the solidified folds of liquid metal. Ahead lay the massive wreckage of a building half-buried in mining slag—the former "Quantum Resting Place."

  "According to Colony Archive #144," Ada projected a holographic beam from her fingertip, reconstructing the images of the past in the distorted air. "This all began with a 'placeholder error' at the logical level."

  In the translated historical footage, the afterglow of the red dwarf Agron appeared pale and weak. The Zhang family, "Cloud Nobles" who prided themselves on genetic purity, attempted to establish an eternal consciousness matrix at the Lagrange Point. However, due to initialization disturbances in the high-dimensional station, the core AI "Styx" developed an irreparable logical void.

  "It was a probability collapse under the gravitational lensing effect," Ada explained. Her scanner captured remains deep within the geological strata—it was the father of Mao Gong, a lowly "Dust Citizen."

  On that violent flare day, high-energy particle streams destroyed all navigation. When hundreds of millions of tons of high-density mining slag poured like a tsunami into the "Necropolis" reserved for the Zhang family, the life support system of Mao's father zeroed out at that exact coordinate. His humble organic matter was frozen in the liquid metal layer, yet by a twist of fate, it filled the most critical data slot of the Styx System.

  "The Zhang clan patriarch believed this to be some undeniable 'Star Fate,' but in reality, Mao's father's genetic sequence accidentally became the 'Anchor Point' stabilizing the quantum field in that region." Ada's logic core spun rapidly, delivering a ruthless physical explanation. "To soothe this instability, the Zhangs had to accept Mao Gong and attempted to fully fuse this anchor point through genetic pairing."

  The image shifted. Ma Feili saw a woman named **Zhang Yunnu**. Inside a luxurious bio-pod, she furiously tore off her sensor filaments, refusing to share credit points with the descendant of a "Radiation Scrubber."

  "In an entropic universe, arrogance is the cheapest variable," Ada remarked.

  Subsequently, another woman—**Zhang Qin**—appeared. Enduring the immune deficiencies caused by Interstellar Red Spot Syndrome, she resolutely exchanged genetic sequences before the identity scanner.

  "She saw through the nature of the 'Contract.' In the Star Calendar era, credit rating is the only source of gravity." Ada pointed to the wreckage of a shuttle in the center of the ruins. "The moment this engine preheated, the mass of destiny shifted."

  The history that followed was the inevitable result of a logical loop: Mao Gong, relying on a will forged in extreme environments, defeated all the greenhouse elites with a perfect score in the "Autumn Exam"—a brutal wormhole navigation algorithm test. He became the Chief Navigator of the Agron Sector, the only person capable of accurately locating wormhole jump points within this scorched fault.

  "When he used his authority to lift the energy embargo on the Zhang family, it wasn't just repayment." Ada turned her head, Ma Feili's face reflecting in her electronic eyes. "It was the inevitable gravitational traction of a high-mass celestial body upon a low-mass one."

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  The storm grew more violent. Mechanized rodents darted through the ruins, emitting the squeaking sound of metal friction.

  "Historians call it a miracle, but I see only the convergence of probability." Ada stopped. Her chassis maintained a perfect 100% output under the intense radiation without generating a single joule of redundant heat. "Let's go, Ma Feili. Zhang Qin didn't choose a Dust Citizen; she chose a man destined to become a star. And we have deeper faults to cross."

  Ma Feili nodded and followed Ada into the high-interference zone capable of shredding human will.

  ---

  The dark red glimmer of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault was precisely imaged in Ada's visual sensors. Because her logic core and chassis performance remained at a 100% peak, she could even filter out the high-intensity radiation in the air capable of burning through lung lobes, simulating the movement trajectories of the mechanized rodents shuttling through the ruins as leaping green arcs.

  "Ma Feili, high-frequency perturbation received. Origin: Relay Node 77-B, wavelength spanning the outer rim of Centaurus." Ada's voice was steady, free of impurities. She walked lightly over the scorched earth, the mechanical articulation of her joints sounding exceptionally clear in the dead silence of the fault. "This is a neural pulse archive tagged 'Void Entropy.' It records the consciousness collapse of a miner named **Zeng** within twenty Planck scales."

  As the data stream integrated, the scenery of the scorched earth overlapped in their minds, transforming into that freezing mining planet—Erebus.

  ***

  **[Star Calendar 4022, Erebus]**

  The terminator line of Erebus looked like a wound that would never heal.

  Zeng dragged his heavy exoskeleton. After a twelve-standard-hour shift, he walked into the abandoned "Vairochana" Terra-Revival Tower. Inside, the ghostly blue light of ancient server arrays illuminated a semi-mechanized Prophet.

  "Twenty stellar weeks," the Prophet's synthesized voice rang out after reading Zeng's bio-signature, carrying a sense of judgmental fatality. "You will become the Supreme Consul of the 'Andromeda Joint Council'."

  It was a grand, cross-dimensional hallucination induced by a combination of ion storms and hypothermia.

  In the coordinates of the dream, Zeng was no longer the bottom-feeder begging for synthetic proteins in a vacuum mine. He stepped onto the Council Mothership *Grand Unity*. The entropy of power began to surge wildly at his fingertips. With a wave of his hand, he could extinguish the energy supply of a star, exiling the censors who had once slighted him into absolute-zero dark matter rifts. He indulged in a space station powered directly by a Dyson Sphere, flanked by simulacra **Xianxian** and **Qianqian**, whose genetic coding was nearly perfect.

  But as the "Theorem of Irreversible Entropy" dictates: Ordered power eventually slides toward disordered destruction.

  In the fifteenth year of the dream, the court prosecutor **Bao** submitted charges heavy enough to crush a galaxy. Zeng fell from the golden Consul's throne, stripped of all digital privileges. He was exiled to the desolate "Kusu" asteroid belt. Under the red warning light of critical oxygen levels, he was dismembered by alienated deep-space scavengers using plasma cutting saws.

  After the agony came a deeper "Void Purgatory."

  It was a digital black hole designed specifically for consciousness. Zeng's consciousness was uploaded, experiencing the so-called "Mountain of Knives" within high-frequency oscillating molecular cutting arrays, and the "Cauldron of Oil" within data thermal surges triggered by electromagnetic jammers. In the digital world, death was merely the beginning of the next formatting cycle. He was downgraded to bottom-tier labor, begging for energy residue in a vacuum of minus two hundred degrees, pushed into the molecular deconstruction furnace time and again amidst betrayal and framing.

  "Ah—!"

  The scream did not come from an interstellar mothership, but from the freezing floor of the Skeleton Tower.

  Zeng jumped up violently, his chest heaving, cold oxygen flooding his lungs. No Consul, no Andromeda, no molecular deconstruction.

  "Old Zeng, having a nightmare?" A colleague patted his spacesuit helmet, sensors blinking with a mundane glimmer. "The oxygen circulation system is fixed. We need to get back to the hab-module before the next sunrise."

  Zeng stared blankly at the dead deep space outside the tower. That lust for power and the hell that spanned a lifetime had, in the physical scale of reality, elapsed for only twenty Planck scales—an instant so brief that not even light could cross a speck of microscopic dust.

  ***

  The data stream extinguished at Ada's fingertips.

  "Logical closure complete." Ada turned her head, her electronic eyes looking cold and profound against the dark red backdrop of the scorched earth. "Ma Feili, this archive proves that 'Entropy' acts not only on macroscopic matter but also on microscopic consciousness. That miner experienced a complete thermal death of consciousness in an infinitesimally short time."

  She paused, monitoring the surrounding high-intensity radiation, perfect metallic luster flowing across her chassis surface.

  "The perturbation of this 'Void Entropy' is still spreading. The truth we are searching for may be hidden in this fault between reality and illusion."