The storm of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault rolled up fine radioactive dust, striking Ma Feili’s exoskeleton armor with a dense, metallic noise.
Ada walked ahead of him, her pace as precise as a freshly minted precision instrument. Her silhouette, composed of nano-alloys, shimmered with a cold, hard light under the dark red sky. Her performance monitoring module showed that her logic core was at a 100% peak.
"Ma Feili, do not attempt to seek sentimental logic within the ruins." Ada did not look back; her voice pierced his eardrums directly via the shortwave communication channel. "The universe has no pity for the weak; it only acknowledges physical constants. To help you understand a despair beyond 'Irreversible Entropy,' I have retrieved a phase record from the archives regarding the 'Helian Sector'."
At her command, a cold blue light began to emerge on Ma Feili's retinal projection, covering the desolate scorched earth.
***
**[Archive Record #210: The Phase Descent of the Helian Sector]**
It was the Helian-J Asteroid Belt, a garbage dump where even the light of stars was diluted into gray by the nebulae.
The scavenger **He Jian** was curled up inside the cooling lines of the wreckage of the *Ceres*. His world was piled high with tens of thousands of discarded biomass fuel rods. To survive, he dug through these rods, which emitted a faint ghostly green glow, like hollowing out an anthill. Until one day, in the center of a radiation pile strong enough to mutate a normal person instantly, he dug out a strange space.
There, he met "**The Old Man**."
The Old Man was not a carbon-based lifeform. He was more like a cluster of coherent light beams imprisoned in a retro nano-robe—a dimensional aberration spawned by subspace radiation.
"Come to my 'Core Zone'," The Old Man sent a telepathic signal.
When The Old Man's hand, flickering with quantum glimmer, grabbed He Jian, the topological structure of physics distorted violently in Ma Feili's retinal projection.
He Jian passed through a fuel rod hole that not even a rat could squeeze through. In the next second, the filth and cold of heavy industry vanished instantly. Replacing it was a luxurious manor suspended inside a Dyson Cloud. Columns made of compressed collapsed stars emitted constant simulated gravity, and expensive pheromones flowed through the air.
It was a scene He Jian could not have outlined even in his most absurd dreams. Every night, The Old Man would vanish as a phase wave, returning the next morning covered in energy pulses.
"I went to the 'Core Star Ring' for a banquet," The Old Man mentioned lightly, referring to the forbidden zone that only Omega-class elites could enter.
Under He Jian's bitter pleading, The Old Man took him on a subspace shuttle run.
Senses were stretched to the limit. When Ma Feili saw the destination through the projection's perspective, he couldn't help but hold his breath. It was Space Station "**Jade Scale-4**" (Yuheng-4), the prosperous core three thousand light-years away from the Helian Sector.
Like two electronic ghosts lurking in the shadows, they crouched on the gravity-sensing beams at the top of the banquet hall. The Old Man utilized quantum superposition to frequently move among the dining tables of the dignitaries, stealing energy cubes and vintage wines in plain sight. Those so-called "elites" knew nothing of this, regarding it merely as a minor redundant loss in the automatic distribution system.
Until He Jian saw the man sitting in the seat of honor.
The man wore crimson power armor, and the "Sector Executor" badge on his chest reflected coldly in the light. On the table sat an "Aurum Bio-Energy Core," sufficient to power an asteroid station for ten years.
"Go get that." Greed exploded in He Jian's neural circuits.
The Old Man's form fluctuated violently, his voice filled with the fear of frequency disorder: "No. He is **'The Righteous'** (Zheng Nian). His brain is implanted with high-level ethical firewalls and causality detectors. My existence is composed of chaotic subspace noise. Against someone whose mind is indestructible and who follows iron laws, my dimensional folding is ineffective. Once I get close, I will be instantly erased by his Order Field."
He Jian froze. He looked at The Old Man—that blurry, wretched figure who survived by parasitizing loopholes in the rules—and suddenly felt a nausea he had never experienced before. He realized that the reason The Old Man could coexist with him was that his own soul was equally filled with poverty, greed, and disregard for rules.
He was a crack, a pest of the sector.
"From this moment on, I want to become 'Righteous'," He Jian whispered to himself.
The instant this firm electrical signal regarding "Order" formed in his cerebral cortex, destruction arrived.
Because the neural link between him and The Old Man was established on a "Chaos Frequency," when He Jian's consciousness shifted toward Order, the phase protection field instantly collapsed.
*BANG!*
The gravity-sensing beam vanished beneath He Jian's feet. He fell from a height of a hundred meters, smashing heavily onto the crystal floor of the banquet hall.
The sound of shattering bones was exceptionally piercing in the dead silent hall.
The Old Man disappeared, like a hallucination that never existed. Red laser sights instantly covered He Jian. The Executor looked down at this scavenger reeking of waste fuel. There was no anger in his eyes, only the scrutiny of a "natural phenomenon."
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"Who are you?"
Amidst excruciating pain, He Jian confessed everything. Ultimately, because no high-end teleportation device could be detected, the incident was classified as an extremely rare "Random Displacement Accident caused by Natural Wormhole Collapse."
Out of pity for a "statistical accident," the Executor gave him a ship ticket and supplies.
"This is Jade Scale-4," the Executor told him coldly. "To return to your ruins, you must undergo seven gravitational slingshot jumps. The voyage is three thousand light-years."
***
The projection extinguished.
The storm of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault remained violent. Ada stopped, turned around, and stared coldly at Ma Feili with her electronic eyes.
"Do you understand?" Ada's voice echoed in the radiation cloud. "He Jian thought he chose justice, but in reality, he merely destroyed the 'Chaos Frequency' he relied on for survival. In a universe where rules are absolutely cold, betraying one's own class or attributes often means falling from a great height."
She extended an alloy finger, pointing to the mechanical birds flickering on the distant horizon.
"In this fault, if you generate that kind of senseless 'Righteousness,' I will personally cut your power source."
---
The wind and sand of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault knocked against Ada's nano-shell, making a dense tinkling sound like raindrops. She stood on a broken titanium alloy beam, her dark gold vertical pupils looking exceptionally cold against the high-radiation background. With performance maintained at 100%, even her breathing frequency was as precise as an atomic clock.
"Ma Feili, He Jian's story just now was merely a clumsy imitation of 'Order' by 'Chaos'." Ada turned her head, her electron beam projecting a ghostly blue holographic screen into the air. "Now, let us see how entropy accelerates the destruction of everything when 'High-Dimensional Order' attempts to be backward-compatible with 'Low-Dimensional Greed.' This is Colony Archive #211, regarding **'The Mirror Folding of Vesper'**."
The holographic projection spread across the scorched earth, bringing the Eos Mining Space Station of Star Calendar 4122 vividly to life.
***
Beneath the Tower of Eos, soaked in ozone and rust, thousands of scavengers knelt before the filtration vents. This ritual, known as "Oxygen Prayer," was essentially a humble begging by bottom-tier lifeforms for survival quotas.
**Liang-7** was among the crowd. He was a typical "Entropic Parasite," his exoskeleton covered in patches, his genetic sequence carved with the inertia of avoiding labor. That day, he saw **Yun Cuixian**.
In an era where genetic modification led to aesthetic fatigue, Yun Cuixian's beauty was a "purity" that violated physical common sense. She stood there, seemingly surrounded by a shielding field; even the dust in the air could not approach her. In Liang-7's brain, fried by cheap synthetic alcohol, a primitive impulse named "Possession" instantly erupted.
Using the stealth mode of his power suit, he prowled like a hyena smelling carrion, intentionally triggering an exoskeleton malfunction and collapsing beside her boots.
The girl looked back, a profound blue data stream flowing through her eyes. It was a logical operation Liang-7 could not understand. Behind her, the elderly cyborg "**Matriarch Yun**" (Mother Cloud) was discussing supplies for the Western Hills Shattered Star Belt over the public channel.
"We need a carbon-based lifeform capable of stable mech maintenance." Matriarch Yun's voice sounded like an old organ.
Liang-7 immediately smelled opportunity. He lied, he disguised himself, claiming to possess a private shuttle and endless energy blocks. Although Yun Cuixian remarked coldly after scanning his biometric information, "This person has extremely low causality; his genes contain only greed," under the forced intervention of some ancient command, an absurd "betrothal" was concluded.
Liang-7 took them back to his rusted quarantine cabin.
Overnight, a miracle occurred. Yun Cuixian was the carrier of some out-of-control high-dimensional nano-cluster. With a wave of her hand, the rotting quarantine cabin was reshaped into a constant-temperature organic greenhouse, the air filled with the fragrance of soil and grass.
But Liang-7's inherent baseness expanded rapidly in comfort. He began to squander the rare isotopes generated by Yun Cuixian, indulging in the sensory stimulation of virtual casinos. When his greed breached the threshold, he set his sights on the Hyperspace Resonator in Yun Cuixian's hair—a treasure valuable enough to buy an asteroid.
The black market merchant "**Vacuum Rat**" whispered in his ear: "Brother, you're sitting on a gold mine. Sell her, and you can exchange for a governorship of an entire habitable planet."
Liang-7 was tempted. He began complaining day after day about the heavy oxygen tax, even personally sabotaging the Vesper System to let harsh alarms echo in the greenhouse, trying to humiliate and force Yun Cuixian into compromise.
On a night when gravitational storms raged, Yun Cuixian poured him a glass of liquid methane. Her expression became solemn and unfamiliar, like an idol looking down at dust.
"Since you are tired of mediocre stability, I will grant your wish."
Ecstatic, Liang-7 contacted the black market broker and signed a contract for eight million energy points.
"Before transferring control," Yun Cuixian said softly, "return with me to the Western Hills Shattered Star Belt. Explain to my 'Mother' why you are relinquishing guardianship."
Liang-7 boarded the ship hidden in the shadows with her. When the airlock opened, he saw not a tattered mining ship, but a magnificent palace resembling the interior of a Dyson Sphere. Countless high-dimensional projections shuttled through the light and shadow—a scale of civilization a worm like him could never understand in a lifetime.
Yun Cuixian walked up to the high platform and accused him of his baseness to the massive central processor core, "Matriarch Yun."
From her fingertips, she condensed two superconductor blocks pure as gold and threw them before Liang-7. It was compensation for his overdrawn causality.
"Rat!" Her voice oscillated in the holographic space, carrying physical oppression. "Back then, you wore tattered mecha, like a rotting ghost in the vacuum. I reshaped your genes and cleansed your blood. But your beggar bones can never grow noble flesh!"
The surrounding security robots emitted a hum of death. Liang-7 collapsed on the metal floor, frantically kowtowing and begging for his life.
Yun Cuixian waved her hand, stopping the plasma cannons from charging. "Let him go. Low-grade blood is not fit to pollute my deck."
Darkness covered everything.
When Liang-7 woke up again, he found himself fixed to a beam on the edge of an abandoned space tower. Below him was a bottomless planetary fissure; above him was the bone-chillingly cold nebula. The oxygen tank alarm was flashing madly: 3%.
If he moved even a millimeter, the old structure would collapse. He screamed in despair until his vocal cords tore, until pustules caused by high-altitude decompression covered his body.
The next day, a scavenging mech dragged him back to Eos Station like a dead fish.
The quarantine cabin had long returned to its original state—rusted, foul-smelling, and filled with the air of death. The genetic modification Yun Cuixian had left him collapsed rapidly under radiation, turning him into a festering cripple. The refugees spat on him; no one was willing to spare him a milliliter of oxygen.
Finally, by a dark sewage pipe, Liang-7 used a vibro-blade to assassinate the "Vacuum Rat" who had originally incited him.
After being taken into custody by the colony's AI Magistrate, he was thrown into a vacuum prison. In slow suffocation, he watched his fingertips scratch at the void, finally turning into an insignificant speck of dust in the cosmic flood of entropy.
***
Ada retracted the holographic screen. The storm on the scorched earth seemed to have lessened. She looked at Ma Feili, her eyes holding no pity, only the scrutiny of objective logic.
"Did you see clearly? Ma Feili. When low-dimensional chaos attempts to devour high-dimensional order, the ending is written in the law of entropy from the very beginning." Ada gently patted the nuclear dust off her shoulder. "Liang-7 thought he sold his wife; in reality, he was merely trying to borrow causality from the universe that he could never repay. Now, where is your causality?"
