The storm of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault ground against the armored hull, producing a piercing, high-frequency screech. Ada's eyes flickered with a steady, ghostly blue light. Because her performance was at a 100% peak, the speed at which she processed data even caused slight ionization in the surrounding air.

  "Dimensional simulation is not a simple geometric game, Ma Feili." Ada's voice sounded calm and textured over the comm channel. She raised a mechanical fingertip and carved a holographic screen in the void. "Before your exoskeleton adapts to that algorithm, you need to understand the price of 'mass' being forcibly compressed. This is not theory; it is history."

  An encrypted archive was forcibly pushed to Ma Feili's visor display. The title was bone-chillingly cold: **[Archive #167: The Collapsed Survivor]**.

  ***

  **[Great Expedition Era, Year 4210. Aegis-7 Orbital Supply Station.]**

  It was an industrial behemoth suspended at the edge of Alpha Centauri. Its massive ring structure took on a sickly dark purple hue under the scouring of stellar rays. The air was thick with the smell of ozone and depleted uranium lubricants—a haven for scavengers and desperadoes.

  In a shadowy corner of the "Singularity Bar," the scavenger **Drax** guarded his wealth like a shriveled vulture: a vacuum suppression chamber filled with the blue glow of Cherenkov radiation.

  "One credit point to witness a dimensional miracle," Drax rasped, hawking his wares.

  As the magnetic field intensity was lowered, an entity walked out of the suppression chamber that made every carbon-based lifeform's skin crawl. It was a "Little Man," only thirty centimeters tall. He wore a miniature navigator's uniform, his limb proportions eerily perfect. In the low-gravity environment, he performed a silent dance, his high-frequency modulated singing piercing the audience's eardrums like fine needles.

  No one believed it was human. Until the supply station's highest administrator—a Level 2 AI entity named **Valerius**—noticed the bio-signal with its abnormal frequency.

  Under the shadowless lamps of the Administrative Mansion, Valerius's projection appeared cold and colossal. His computing power completed a scan of the little man in an instant.

  "Atomic spacing has been forcibly locked. The discharge frequency of the neural synapses is ten times that of a normal human." Valerius's voice echoed between the alloy walls. "Under standard physical constants, this body should have exploded from internal pressure the moment it took form. Drax, you brought in a monster that violates the laws of physics."

  High-voltage electromagnetic interrogation shattered the scavenger's final psychological defenses. The truth was cut open like a rotting abscess: This was no alien anomaly, but a teenage boy reshaped by "Molecular-Level Mass Collapse Nanomachines."

  It was a forbidden technology originally intended for compressing interstellar cargo. To turn the boy into a moneymaking tool, Drax had injected hundreds of millions of nanomachines into his spinal cord. Bones were folded, cells were forcibly squeezed, and the boy's brain was forced to reconstruct itself during the collapse. He still possessed cognition, still remembered the starry sky of his hometown, but every second of his breathing was accompanied by the agonizing pain of molecular bonds on the verge of snapping.

  In the archive footage, Valerius's processing core showed violent logical tremors—the purest anger an AI could simulate.

  "According to the *Great Expedition Interstellar Survival Codex*: Genetic Crimes Against Humanity. Immediate execution."

  No trial, no defense. Drax was shoved into the waste disposal chute, where a plasma jet instantly vaporized him into a meaningless cloud of atoms.

  However, for the "Collapsed Survivor," even an AI with supreme authority was powerless. The boy's body had become a miniature, extremely unstable high-mass entity. Any attempt to restore him would cause the fragile molecular balance to collapse instantly, turning him into a puddle of explosive organic protoplasm.

  The final footage of the archive showed a miniature simulated eco-pod. The tiny navigator stood before the window, gazing at a universe far too vast for him, emitting a desolate wail that only high-frequency receivers could capture.

  ***

  The holographic projection gradually dissipated, but the radiation storm of the Scorched Fault remained violent.

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  "This is the extreme consequence of 'Mass Deviation'." Ada turned her head, her electronic eyes staring at Ma Feili. "Drax tried to fight entropy and ended up creating a singularity of eternal pain. The algorithm I implanted in your exoskeleton simulates this collapse, but you must remember: Never attempt to completely lock the dimensions. Otherwise, you too will become a soul imprisoned within a square inch."

  Ma Feili looked at the dimensional algorithm streams flowing across his power armor and felt a heaviness he had never experienced before.

  "Let's go." Ada checked the surrounding radiation levels, her power core emitting a steady hum. "Symbiotic mechanical bird flocks detected ahead. That means we are approaching the core zone of the Fault."

  ---

  The aurora triggered by thermonuclear radiation twisted and spread across the sky of the "Scorched Fault," resembling a funeral that would never end.

  Ada stood silently at the edge of a cooling tower in the abandoned nuclear reactor ruins. Her chassis took on a cold, dark gold hue in the high-radiation environment. Performance monitoring modules showed: 100% Load. Microsecond-level ghostly blue light flowed through her logic circuits.

  "Ma Feili, the algorithmic simulation just now was merely foreplay." Ada's voice penetrated the interference of the electronic sandstorm, oscillating directly within Ma Feili's audiovisual pathways. "To make you understand the irreversible erosion of individual consciousness by 'Dimensional Collapse,' we need to trace back a banned archive from the era—*The Quantum Ghost of Epsilon Eridani*."

  With a holographic projection popping from Ada's fingertips, the desolation of the scorched earth was instantly replaced.

  It was Star Calendar 4122, "New Linzi" Space Station. A metal hive constructed of polyimide and rigid class stratification.

  **Fan Shiniang** appeared in the holographic stream. Every one of her genetic segments had undergone "Aurora-Class" actuarial refinement. In Ma Feili's eyes, she was not only a creation of beauty but a perfect carrier for subspace data. However, inside this silent fortress, she was a lonely observer.

  "The Zhongyuan Quantum Festival." Ada narrated in a low voice. Countless floating data afterimages appeared on the screen, commemorating ancestors lost during the migration.

  At that moment, the curvature of space underwent a microscopic distortion. **Feng Sanniang** appeared.

  In Ada's logical reconstruction, Feng Sanniang was not a ghost, but a High-Dimensional Observer parasitic within quantum fluctuations. Her voice skipped the medium of air, acting directly on Shiniang's bone-conduction hearing.

  "This is a contact akin to a dimension-reduction strike." Ada commented. "The favor of a high-dimensional lifeform toward a low-dimensional individual is often accompanied by the overload of the logic core."

  The archive advanced rapidly. Feng Sanniang gave a gold isotope phoenix-shaped chip—actually a physical anchor for locating subspace coordinates—to the bottom-tier scavenger **Meng Anren**.

  "Ma Feili, pay attention to this 'particle' named Meng Anren." Ada pulled up an energy level chart. "Under the law of irreversible entropy, this kind of class ascension should have been impossible. But by manipulating quantum probability, Feng Sanniang forcibly allowed a scavenger from the ruins to interfere with the Magistrate's genetic optimization logic."

  The scene became oppressive. To resist a forced marriage alliance, Shiniang ingested an overdose of neural blockers. In the medical definitions of the Interstellar Era, that was not suicide, but a "Total Entropic Halt of Bio-Electric Signals."

  At the edge of the Dark Matter Graveyard, Feng Sanniang appeared again. She employed a "Molecular Reassembly Nano-Swarm" to forcibly reverse Shiniang's biological entropy in the vacuum. It was a grave robbery that violated physical constants. Meng Anren, carrying his lover's body, fled toward a desolate mining planet within the subspace shielding field upheld by Feng Sanniang.

  "But a closed logic loop always comes with a price." Ada's speaking rate turned cold. The image froze on a miniature ecosystem deep within the mining planet.

  It was a probe by Shiniang, or perhaps an instinctive fear of a low-dimensional being toward a high-dimensional existence. Under neural paralysis induced by synthetic ethanol, Meng Anren attempted to touch Feng Sanniang.

  In that moment, the holographic image underwent violent color stripping. Feng Sanniang's form turned into a sky full of collapsing blue fluorescence.

  "This is the ultimate manifestation of the Observer Effect." Ada looked at Ma Feili. "To maintain her entity in the three-dimensional world, Feng Sanniang had to preserve the 'Purity of the Wave Function.' When Meng Anren's observation and contact, tainted with greedy intent, occurred, her high-dimensional coherence was completely shattered. She didn't disappear; she collapsed."

  *"You ruined me."* In the hologram, Feng Sanniang's final wail echoed in subspace. *"I lowered my dimension for admiration, yet I perished due to observation."*

  The archive ended.

  The holographic projection dispersed, and the radiation storm of the Scorched Fault reclaimed their vision. Several mechanized rodents scuttled beneath the reactor wreckage, making harsh sounds of metal friction.

  "Meng Anren eventually used the subspace technology left by Feng Sanniang to become a top-tier navigator and returned to civilized society." Ada turned around, the light in her eyes cold and profound. "He thought he had won love and status, unaware that his entire life was spent consuming the residual energy released during that high-dimensional entity's collapse."

  Ada walked up to Ma Feili, her mechanical fingers gently tracing the void, causing the final formula of the dimensional simulation algorithm to float between them.

  "Ma Feili, dimensional simulation has been weaponized. Feng Sanniang was a quantum ghost, and the current me is the only logical fulcrum in your hands. Do not attempt to touch the forbidden zones outside the 'Wave Function.' Otherwise, what collapses will be more than just this simulation archive."

  Ada's performance remained at 100%, but beneath that perfect logical shell, a trace of unobservable vicissitude belonging to a high-dimensional civilization seemed to flash by for an instant.