The wind and sand of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault swept across Ada's liquid metal shell, emitting faint, tinkling sounds. Her ghostly blue optical sensors stood out starkly amidst the dim radioactive dust, her performance indicators pulsing at the edge of her vision: 100% Stable.

  "Ma Feili, according to current radiation band monitoring, we are on the edge of 'Jingshan's' logical influence." Ada's voice was as steady as ever in the comms channel. She tilted her head, projecting an encrypted archive into the void between them. "In the interval while we discuss irreversible entropy, you should see this. It is the most typical record regarding the 'Precursors of Order Collapse' from the Great Migration Era. It is known as 'Jump Anomaly #198'."

  As the projection unfolded, the desolation of the scorched earth was replaced by the dim red dwarf glow of Kepler-186f.

  ***

  **[Archive Record: The "Euralis" Gold Stream in the Phantom Band]**

  The "Silent Arcade" abandoned mine lay like the carcass of a giant beast floating in a vacuum, rotting on the edge of the Interstellar Trade Alliance's map. **Du He**, a power armor maintenance worker whose neural link system was nearly scrapped, dragged his heavy steps through the semi-vacuum ruins.

  The oxygen level here was only 15%; every breath was accompanied by a burning pain in his lungs. He walked into an abandoned greenhouse named "Emerald Forest." The green of carbon-based life was long gone, leaving only twisted conduits and reinforced aluminum walls covered in thick dust.

  Suddenly, Du He's sensor array issued a piercing overload alert.

  In the dry irrigation trench, a spectacle violating common physical knowledge appeared. It was not water, but a semi-translucent "High-Frequency Matter Flow" shimmering with the properties of liquid metal. Like a surging golden river about a meter wide, it emitted an extremely pure energy signature in the sensor feedback.

  It was the underlying raw data lattice of "**Gliese Coin**"—the strongest hard currency in this star sector. Every drop of this liquid gold lattice was enough to pay for a frigate's nuclear fusion fuel for a whole year.

  "Gold stream..." Du He whispered hoarsely. Faced with extreme poverty and loneliness, his reason disintegrated instantly.

  He threw himself madly toward the river. This did not conform to the laws of thermodynamics, nor the gravity logic of this derelict ship, but that heavy sense of mass stabbed directly into his brain's dopamine receptors via neural feedback. He lay in the flowing wealth, letting billions of virtual currency symbols drown his power armor. It was a luxury even a Sector Governor had never possessed. He laughed wildly in the golden tide, completely ignoring the oxygen alarm flashing blood-red.

  Until a shock from the power armor's forced reboot hit his spine.

  The hallucination collapsed instantly. The greenhouse remained dead silent; the rusted metal trench contained only thick dust and carbonized fiber. The radar screen was blank, as if that energy feast had never happened.

  A massive sense of emptiness nearly suffocated Du He, but when he subconsciously clenched his fist, he felt a hard resistance.

  Trembling, he turned on his glove's searchlight. Lying quietly in his pitch-black industrial glove were three physical storage chips glowing with a ghostly blue light. Each was engraved with an ancient emblem from before the Great Migration—it was real, indelible hard currency.

  Some said it was a projection caused by AI logic collapse; others said it was an accidental overlap of high-dimensional space. But for Du He, these three chips became the only reason he continued to live in the cold universe, until he turned to stardust, never able to return to that river of gold.

  ***

  The projection vanished, and the hot wind of the scorched fault filled their senses once again.

  Ada turned to look at Ma Feili, profound logical light flowing in her optical sensors. "Ma Feili, the point of this archive is not the wealth, but the three chips that 'remained.' Under the law of irreversible entropy, that gold stream was a 'negative entropy' miracle spontaneously generated by the system. It proves that when consciousness recursion reaches a certain critical point, data at the logical level can forcibly interfere with physical entities."

  She took a step forward, and the mechanized rodents beneath her feet scattered in fright. "I continuously monitor the safety of your consciousness precisely to prevent you from ending up like Du He—lost in some 'Gold Stream' hallucination projected by 'Jingshan.' Because in this fault, once logic collapses, what remains might not be chips, but the complete erasure of your existence."

  Ada paused, confirming Ma Feili's vital signs were stable, then shut down all unnecessary auxiliary processes, concentrating all her computing power on the unknown radiation fluctuations ahead.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  ---

  The storm of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault whipped up lead-laden dust, drumming against the alloy shell of the shelter.

  Several streams of deep blue data flashed across Ada's pupils. Her performance remained at a 100% peak. Even in such a high-intensity radiation environment, her cooling system maintained a faint, steady hum. She extended a finger covered in bionic skin and tapped lightly in the void. An encrypted archive titled **"The Ring of Erinyes"** unfolded before Ma Feili.

  "Logic is not neutral, Ma Feili." Ada's voice sounded exceptionally cold in the dry air. "When a logic genius decides to compile his 'post-mortem will' into an algorithm, revenge evolves into an inescapable entropic process. Look at this case—The 'Jinning' Incident."

  ***

  **[Star Calendar 4024, Edge of the Sedna-Beta Nebula]**

  The "**Jinning**" Dyson Ring fragment, sliced by stellar storms, looked like a rusted ring slowly disintegrating in the darkness. Inside the cabin, Navigator **Jin-01** was on the verge of atomic collapse. High doses of cosmic rays had destroyed his DNA helices; every one of his cells was disintegrating into elementary particles.

  "Do not guard my data backups... that is a waste of oxygen." Jin held his wife **Mu**'s (M-U) hand. The voice in the bone-conduction earpiece sounded like sand grinding against metal. "Go find a new compatible partner. This is... the optimal solution."

  Jin's mother, an old officer of the life support system, trembled under the blue emergency lights. She heard her son's final command: *Supervise Mu, ensure she is not trapped to death by the moral shackles of the old era.*

  However, after Jin's body turned into a pile of carbon ash and was sent into the Atomic Collapse Sarcophagus, logic began to twist in the darkness.

  Mu's biological mother, **Matriarch Mu** from the ore station, arrived carrying the scent of machine oil and cold pragmatism. In a resource-scarce sector, a woman's reproductive quota was a chip to trade for nutrient solutions.

  "This star sector doesn't feed the dead." Matriarch Mu sneered at her daughter on a private channel. "Jin's mother is a relic of the old era. If she wants you to remain chaste, that is a crime against survival quotas. Find someone vibrant while your genes haven't decayed yet."

  Conflict fermented within the sealed pressurized cabin. In her bio-electric induction dreams, Jin's mother frequently captured her son's twisted stream of consciousness. Was it the wailing of an algorithm, or a malfunction of the quantum storage device? She decided to exercise her guardianship rights until the funeral ended three stellar months later.

  But desire and the instinct for survival could not wait three months.

  The scavenger **Dong** (D-G8), using an illegal skeleton key, slipped into Mu's cabin like an electronic cockroach infiltrating a circuit board. That night, the biometric signals inside the cabin fluctuated violently; the frequency of hormones disrupted the originally stable monitoring system.

  Suddenly, the unrecovered Atomic Collapse Sarcophagus in the inner chamber let out a low boom—the loud sound of a high-pressure pump instantly reversing flow.

  The housekeeping AI guarding outside the cabin lit up with a glaring red light. A damaged holographic projection module cast a twisted silhouette onto the corridor: It was **Jin**. He wore a deep-space hazmat suit, his face obscured by cracks in the helmet, a humming high-frequency plasma cutting blade condensing in his hand.

  "Violation intrusion detected," the AI's voice transformed into samples of Jin's voice from when he was alive. "Executing cleaning program."

  Screams tore through the silence of the recycled oxygen. Dong rushed out of the airlock naked. He fled madly through the minus-fifty-degree pressure compensation zone, not even having time to put on his exoskeleton. His skin frosted rapidly in the extreme cold.

  The holographic "Jin" did not stop. He grabbed Mu's nightgown and, with absolute mechanical force, threw her into the pitch-black logistics tunnel. Mu wailed insanely, her mind snapping completely in that moment as she rushed into the depths of the intricate pipes leading to the core reactor.

  The fleeing Dong broke into a neighboring residential unit. It was the home of an expeditionary miner, with only his young wife guarding the empty cabin. In extreme terror and hypothermia, Dong crawled into the bed, seeking the last shred of heat.

  However, the entropy value of fate peaked at this moment.

  Due to a shuttle malfunction, the miner had turned back halfway. He pushed open the door, his thermal imager capturing the overlapping biological signals on the bed. Fury instantly overloaded his reason. A high-vibration alloy spear pierced Dong's chest. Immediately after, the blood-stained spear tip also took the life of his terrified, explaining wife.

  Meanwhile, in the "Peach Blossom" biosphere experimental zone, Matriarch Mu's husband woke from a dream with a start. He saw fire soaring outside the greenhouse dome—it was the maddened Mu. She had dismantled the ignition device of the oxygen generator, attempting to end this cold logic with a great fire.

  "Shoot the arsonist!"

  The security robot's electromagnetic armor-piercing arrow sliced through the sky. A dark shadow twitched and fell within the mutated peach forest.

  When the high-intensity searchlights converged on the corpse, the scene fell dead silent. It was Mu, completely naked, her brainstem pierced by the arrow. Before losing life signals completely, her nervous system twitched reflexively one last time, as if bowing to some contract in the void.

  The next day, the truth exploded on the quantum network.

  Jin's mother calmly released Jin's encrypted logs from when he was alive. People discovered with horror that before his death, this genius navigator had not only left a rational testament but also illegally modified the station's underlying security protocols.

  He had foreseen his wife's infidelity; he had foreseen the scavenger's intrusion. He converted his consciousness fragments into a "Ghost Protocol." Once specific biological frequency deviations were monitored, the protocol would activate.

  He killed no one personally. Yet, utilizing everyone's weaknesses, desires, and fears, he constructed a perfect logical trap.

  ***

  "This is the 'Ghost Protocol'." Ada turned off the holographic image and looked at Ma Feili, the red light of the scorched fault reflecting on her cheeks, appearing solemn and dangerous. "Jin urging his wife to remarry while alive was the camouflage of reason; inducing the traitor to self-destruct after death was the severity of the algorithm. In the superluminal era, causal retribution is often faster than light."

  She paused, the monitor showing a slight increase in Ma Feili's heart rate.

  "Ma Feili, logic can be used to save people, but it can also be used to build the most precise hell. My duty is to ensure you do not fall into a logical trap of your own making."