On this wasteland known as the "Thermonuclear Scorched Fault," short-wavelength intense radiation twisted the air into a nearly transparent dark purple. Ada walked ahead, her streamlined body reflecting a cold silver radiance under the glare, her movements as precise as the needle of a precision instrument.

  "Performance maintained at 100%, Ma Feili." Ada didn't look back; her voice vibrated directly against Ma Feili's eardrum via bone conduction, sounding solemn and stable. "The entropy increase rate here is 1.4 times that of the outside world. Life here isn't just survival; it is a stubborn resistance in a corner against the laws of physics."

  She stopped, her mechanical fingertip gently grazing a piece of charred rock, startling a group of metal-shelled mechanical rodents. They emitted ear-piercing friction sounds and burrowed into the fissures of the ground.

  "To let you understand the logical limit of this 'resistance,' you need to see an archive." Ada's eyes projected a holographic light curtain, forcibly carving out a patch of cold deep-space imagery within the scorching atmosphere. "This is from the Great Expedition Era, Year 4210, a story from Epsilon Eridani. We call it—*The Scavenging Deity in the Heavy Nucleus Wreckage*."

  In the holographic projection, a storm raged.

  It was "**Titan's Tomb**," a mining planet suffocated by heavy element dust. Navigator **Cha**'s perspective shook violently, and the alarm of his power armor sounded exceptionally shrill in the silent ruins. Ma Feili saw a massive Phase Suppressor Core, shaped like an ancient bell, standing at the bottom of an abandoned gravity regulation tower.

  "That is cast from neutron decay matter," Ada annotated the data in real-time. "Self-weight: 64.2 tons. Under standard gravity, it is enough to crush an armored company."

  In the image, three soldiers wearing exoskeletons were trying to move this core together. The hydraulic pumps roared as if tearing the amplifiers apart, and the red lights of the power sources flashed madly, but the heavy nucleus didn't budge an inch, as if it were an extension of the planet's core itself.

  "Sir, it's impossible..." The soldier in the projection gasped in despair.

  "Observe, Ma Feili." Ada's voice lowered. "When logic cannot explain a phenomenon, that is a singularity of evolution."

  In the shadows, a figure appeared.

  He had no armor, no shield, only wrapped in a few rags of thermal insulation cloth. His skin presented an unsettling dark purple, and under infrared vision, his muscles showed a twisted texture like alloy cables. It was a "**Dustborn**"—a descendant of clone workers abandoned by the Empire in an extreme high-gravity environment.

  The scene that followed made Ma Feili feel a physiological oppression:

  The Dustborn walked up, as if tidying up a piece of light luggage. He extended a hand covered in thick calluses, his five fingers gripping the edge of the Phase Suppressor. With a low shout like muffled thunder, he lifted the sixty-plus-ton heavy nucleus over his head with a single hand.

  The movement was light, casual, and even carried a terrifying elegance.

  He grabbed a cheap nutrient block from the fiber crate that had been crushed under the core and stuffed it into his head, which was covered in compound eyes, chewing vigorously. In that moment, Navigator Cha's breathing stopped, and even the frame rate of the holographic projection seemed to jitter due to this power that violated common sense.

  "He isn't lifting a heavy object," Ada turned around. In the background, the Dustborn holding the sixty-ton core cast a mocking glance toward the shadows. "He is fighting this planet's gravitational laws. During five hundred years of high-gravity isolation, their bone density has collapsed toward a neutron state. In the Empire's archives, they are 'broken tools'; but under that dead starry sky, he is the only god in a physical sense."

  The holographic projection gradually dissipated, and the heat waves of the scorched fault struck again.

  "This is the logic I want to tell you, Ma Feili." Ada gazed at the rolling metallic storm on the distant horizon. "Classes and dimensions are indeed uncrossable, but when entropy pushes everything toward destruction, certain 'tools' will evolve miracles out of utter despair. As a Guide of Order, my duty is to record these singularities and ensure they do not interfere with the balance of the grand scheme."

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  She began to walk again, her silver toes stepping on the scorching earth without leaving a trace.

  "Let's go. The radiation here is intensifying. Your carbon-based body is far from evolved enough to treat a sixty-ton heavy nucleus like a straw hat."

  ---

  The storm of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault rolled up dark red radioactive dust, drumming against Ma Feili's worn-out exoskeleton armor with a fine, metallic sound. There was no trace of green on the surface, only a few mechanical rodents, their bellies flashing with faint nuclear fusion blue light, greedily gnawing on abandoned cables at the edge of the fault.

  Ada walked side by side with Ma Feili. Her pace was light and precise, the hum of her power core steady and strong, indicating her performance was at a 100% peak. She turned her head slightly, the scanning beam in her pupils sweeping across the horizon, her voice ringing in Ma Feili's internal comms channel with a near-cold rationality.

  "Ma Feili, entropy increase is irreversible. But in certain corners of the universe, there is always life attempting to resist this desperate law through 'Reconstruction'."

  Her finger tapped lightly in the void, and a holographic record unfolded on Ma Feili's retina.

  "This is the story of the **'Painter' Han**. A record regarding quantum reconstruction and lost shadows."

  ***

  In the eternal twilight of the Obsidian Galaxy, the metal ruins of deep-space mines pierced the pitch-black firmament like the fingernails of the dead. **Han** sat amidst these ruins, his fingertips connected to a neural sampler. He was a **Neural Photolithographer**. In the Great Expansion Era, he did not paint mountains and rivers; instead, he dove into the fragmented cortical memories of his employers, reconstructing those dissipating bio-electric signals into holographic images.

  But Han had a pathological obsession: He worshipped "**Prototype Lu**"—the legendary Super AI that guided the human fleet through a supernova explosion zone in the early days of the Great Migration. He firmly believed that as long as he could capture a trace of "Lu's" algorithmic fluctuations, carbon-based life could break the curse of entropy and achieve eternal consciousness.

  This obsession made him look like a madman. He wandered for years in the shadows of synthetic ammonia bars, seeking miracles in the eyes of "Void Scavengers" suffering from neural degeneration due to long-term cryosleep.

  Until he met that old man at a supply station on the edge of the Kerryn Black Hole.

  The old man was draped in a tattered thermal blanket, revealing a rusted mechanical elbow joint. But his eyes held a profundity that transcended underlying logical protocols. When Han's neural sampler emitted a whine bordering on overload, Han knelt on the cold alloy floor, clutching the old man's mechanical arm.

  "You are 'Lu'... the incarnation of the Initial Algorithm." Han's voice trembled in the oscillation of gravitational waves.

  The old man laughed with a sound like grinding metal, a stream of azure command code flashing in his eyes. He leaned down and whispered in Han's ear: "Since you can see through this inferior bionic shell, meet me tonight in your deep sleep pod."

  That night, Han forcibly cut all security protocols and sank his consciousness into the quantum abyss.

  At the end of that dimension, he saw it.

  "Lu" appeared in the form of pure information flow. It oscillated in Han's brain domain: "Your consciousness circuits are filled with greed for matter. You cannot become a god. But I can let you glimpse the forgotten ultimate of this universe."

  The void trembled, and a female phantom descended from a subspace rift. She wore a nano-fabric robe of the ancient Star Covenant, her features an assembly of the nebula's most perfect curves, every cell emitting a cold light.

  "This is '**Dong**'," Lu's signal echoed. "She was the companion of the Orion Cluster's Highest Executive. Remember her every wavelength, every inch of light and shadow. Do not forget."

  In that moment, Han felt his retina being seared by some holy fire. When he startled awake from the sleep pod, soaked in coolant, he immediately connected to the highest-tier Holographic Lithography Machine.

  Years later, Han wandered to the "Emerald Ring" Dyson Sphere.

  At the time, the entire galaxy was immersed in mourning—**Lady Dong**, the beloved of the Highest Executive, had passed away due to genetic collapse, and all biological backups were destroyed in a subspace storm. Countless photolithography masters tried to restore her appearance, but they only created stiff walking corpses.

  Han produced that highly encrypted memory crystal.

  The moment the holographic projection lit up in the court, the entire sector fell into dead silence. The woman who walked out of Han's dream, carrying that agility transcending data known as "Soul," quietly gazed at everyone. It was an absolute, divine restoration.

  The Executive wept and wanted to knight him as the "Chief Interstellar Recorder." But Han refused. He only took enough energy credits to buy an asteroid and returned to those desolate supply stations.

  He no longer needed to observe living people. He simply meditated in deep space, capturing the shadows of departed souls in quantum fluctuations. His accuracy rate was as high as 99.99%, but he was still waiting—waiting for "Lu," who could take him away from the material world and into the eternal algorithm.

  ***

  The holographic record gradually dissipated, and the red light of the thermonuclear scorched earth reclaimed Ma Feili's vision.

  Ada stopped, looked at the mechanical rat gnawing on a scrap chip beneath her feet, and said softly, "Han successfully reconstructed the past, but he lost himself in the shadow of entropy. Ma Feili, life always attempts to find order in chaos, and eternity in destruction. This is a logical paradox, yet it is also your most fascinating trait."

  She turned her head, complex light flowing in her electronic eyes: "Let's go. Coordinates indicate the next entropic singularity is just ahead."