The dark red halo of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault rolled across the horizon. High-intensity radiation clouds drifted slowly through the leaden sky like a swarm of hunting electronic jellyfish.

  Ada's compound eye sensors flickered with ghostly blue light, a sign of ample energy (92%) and the high-speed operation of her logic core. She crouched on a rusted titanium alloy beam; beneath her feet were several mechanized rodents gnawing on lead-bearing ore with tiny alloy teeth. The theorem of entropy increase was ruthlessly executed across these ruins—all things were irreversibly disintegrating, with only information continuing to flow.

  "Ma Feili, the non-carbon-based behavioral logic of 'Story-104' has completed modeling." Ada's voice vibrated in the dry air, carrying a sense of precision. "Now, I am parsing Archive 108—*Stardust Sacrifice*. This is a record concerning the 'irrational bonds' forged by carbon-based life in desperate situations, and how they combated entropy increase."

  As Ada's consciousness linked in, a holographic projection unfolded across the scorched earth.

  ***

  **[Archive 108: Stardust Sacrifice]**

  Great Expedition Era, Year 4221. The alarms of the Jin clan's colonial space station were not blaring, but rather emitting a sort of desperate tremor. The gravitational tides triggered by a collapsing supernova acted like the reaper's scythe, harvesting everything within the star system.

  Jin Dayong stood before the porthole, watching his home being swallowed by a sea of purple fire. Behind him stood Gengniang, a genetically optimized noble engineer, clear cold light flowing in her eyes. Her bio-chip was frantically calculating escape probabilities, while Jin Dayong only focused on gripping her hand tightly.

  The *Predator* emerged from the shadows of the Kuiper Belt like a shark scenting carrion.

  Captain Wang Shiba, a man whose face was covered in cheap bionic skin and whose eyes hid a tar-like greed, opened the hatch to them. He acted like a deep-space saint, even taking the initiative to help Jin Dayong move the heavy cryogenic embryo vault—the last continuation of the Jin family's bloodline.

  But during the claustrophobic voyage toward the Oort Cloud, Gengniang fed back an encrypted message to Jin Dayong via a retinal scan:

  *"Dayong, his dopamine secretion curve showed a deformed peak when observing me. He is coveting my genetic key. This is not a rescue; it is a hunt."*

  Jin Dayong looked at the star collapsing into a black hole behind them and fell silent. In the face of absolute destruction, the devil's cabin seemed the only safe harbor.

  When the spaceship entered the Titan-class debris field—a steel graveyard formed from the wreckage of ancient dreadnoughts—Wang Shiba finally tore off his disguise. The roar of the rapid decompression sequence masked the tragedy. Jin Dayong's parents were thrown into the absolute-zero vacuum in their sleep, transforming into two eternal ice sculptures. Jin Dayong roared and charged the cockpit, only to have a high-energy particle beam pierce his chest. His body, like a doll with cut strings, tumbled into the darkness deep within the ruins.

  Wang Shiba locked down the main control room. He did not kill Gengniang immediately, because the genetic key in her brain was the only credential to unlock the old empire's vaults. He had his bionic wife—tortured into a walking corpse by a neural-control interface—monitor Gengniang, while he immersed himself in the megalomania of impending wealth.

  On the night they arrived at the abandoned mining planet "Barren Mound," Gengniang displayed a chilling submission.

  "In this cold, lonely space, if there is no resonance of senses, what meaning is there to survival?" she whispered softly, her voice piercing directly into Wang Shiba's brain via bone-conduction earpieces.

  She personally formulated the neural-coupling fluid. Inside the dim life-support cabin, light and shadow danced across Gengniang's austere face. Wang Shiba disengaged his exoskeleton and plugged into the neural link, believing he was about to welcome a feast of consciousness. However, as the drug took effect, a dopamine overload plunged him into boundless hallucinations.

  In the exact moment he completely lost mobility, Gengniang drew a high-frequency vibration scalpel from beneath the console.

  It was ultimate precision. The first cut severed the spinal cord, depriving him of pain transmission; the second cut pierced the heart, terminating the greedy pumping. Afterward, she walked over to the bionic woman who had already lost her self-awareness and granted her a final release.

  To avoid becoming a plaything for the scavengers who would inevitably follow, Gengniang inputted a 3,000-word accusation into the ship's public channel. It was a final judgment upon this chaotic era. Then, she lay down in the medical pod, initiated "Emergency Cryogenic Stasis," and manually severed the oxygen pump before her consciousness faded.

  When local interstellar nomads discovered this drifting "coffin," they were awestruck by Gengniang's resolute posture, even while frozen in ice. They did not plunder her; instead, they enshrined this "Goddess of Deep Space" within an abandoned Dyson ring in the southern outskirts, allowing the starlight to wash over her chassis.

  However, within the law of entropy increase, perturbations called "miracles" occasionally arise.

  Jin Dayong did not die. He was rescued from the ruins by an ancient AI persona named "Old Yin." In the oil-scented medical bay of the *Benevolence*, he not only recovered his parents' remains but even unexpectedly rescued a woman drifting in a stasis pod—it was Wang Shiba's true original wife, who had triggered the escape sequence during the chaos.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Hatred became Jin Dayong's sole fuel for survival. He joined the Vanguard Army, fighting in the sea of fire at the Lagrange points, rising from a navigator to a cold-blooded guerrilla commander.

  Years later, as his fleet passed the Jinshan Orbital Station, a dilapidated shuttle brushed past his flagship. In that instant, Jin Dayong's subspace detector caught a faint, familiar wave frequency.

  It was the private channel they had set up as newlyweds to evade the surveillance of their elders.

  Trembling, Jin Dayong broadcasted that absurd, secret proposal code over the open channel:

  "Have you seen that flock of silicon-based ducks fly into the sky?"

  A long silence ensued, feeling like a century. Until a voice, laced with electromagnetic static yet still clear and cold, replied:

  "Is the greedy cat craving the stench of cyber-fish?"

  It was Gengniang.

  Within that Dyson ring, a group of tomb-robbing scavengers had violently dismantled the medical pod to steal its energy, accidentally reviving her from suspended animation. Relying on the deterrence of a bio-engineer, she subjugated the thugs, eventually becoming the adopted daughter of the interstellar magnate, Madame Geng.

  Amidst the freezing interstellar dust, two souls that should have been erased by entropy crossed the dimensions of life and death, converging once more amidst the intertwining of metal and plasma sparks.

  ***

  The projection extinguished, the wind and sand of the scorched fault blowing past Ada's metal shell.

  "Logical closure complete." Ada stood up, her mechanical tail stabilizers swaying gently behind her. "Even under the irreversible law of entropy, this information redundancy known as 'love' can still forcibly rewrite pre-determined destruction protocols. It does not conform to thermodynamics, but... it is intensely fascinating."

  ---

  Thermonuclear · Scorched Fault.

  The air here was saturated with ionized metal dust; every breath brought the friction of minute particles against lung blades. Ada's ocular sensors flickered with ghostly blue light. She was operating at peak status, her energy matrix presenting a cold sense of order beneath the dark red canopy.

  "Logic core has completed irrational strategy modeling for *Stardust Sacrifice*," Ada's voice sounded in Ma Feili's earpiece, carrying a metallic, calm texture. "Parsing the next deep-space signal: Archive 109, keyword 'Tomb of Entropy'. Ma Feili, this record may explain why, in this heat-dead universe, 'waste' sometimes adheres more to survival logic than 'conservation'."

  The holographic projection forcefully unfolded within the radiation storm, revealing a mining space station suspended on the edge of the Ophiuchus Arm—*Final Horizon*.

  ***

  It was the final afterglow of industrial civilization.

  Station Master Liu Fanghua was a freak who defied the "First Law of Survival." In an era where oxygen quotas needed to be calculated to the milliliter, his space station acted like an eternally burning furnace, taking in all destitute souls. From the footage, Ma Feili saw that the station's interior was filled with the scent of expensive synthetic proteins—the smell of burning money.

  Among those freeloaders, Gong Mengbi was the most unique. He didn't look like he was begging; rather, he seemed to be inspecting. He often took Liu Fanghua's son, Liu He, walking along the station's bottom deck, which was covered in grease and weld marks.

  "Look, Liu He." Gong Mengbi pointed at the mining slag stuffed into the maintenance trenches, his gaze piercing the alloy plates. "These are 'star cores.' When the universe completely cools and all stars extinguish, only those who know how to bury seeds will possess a sun."

  Ten years later, the mineral veins of Ophiuchus were completely depleted, like marrow sucked dry.

  Liu Fanghua died in a reactor accident—the final protest of aging equipment against extreme overload. The station's lights went out one by one. The freeloaders who had once sung his praises at banquets fled as swiftly as startled mechanized rodents.

  Only Gong Mengbi remained. From the lining of a spacesuit so tattered it had almost lost its protective functions, he extracted a high-energy credit crystal. Its light was blinding in the dark mourning hall, paying for Liu Fanghua's final dignity.

  "If a man does not learn to stand on his own, poverty is his ultimate dimension." Before disappearing, Gong Mengbi casually tossed a pile of rubble into the corner of Liu He's living quarters. At the time, Liu He did not understand what that rubble meant from a thermodynamic perspective.

  Despair is a slow collapse.

  Liu He traveled to the "Dyson Sphere" metropolis to seek his fiancée, Huang Xi. That was another extreme world: absolute precision, ruthless quotas. The doors of the Huang family were like an absolute-zero barrier. The guard's voice echoed in the vacuum: "Bring one hundred standard units of antimatter fuel, or you are merely a redundant grain of entropy in this universe."

  In the slums at the bottom of the metropolis, only Old Lady Liu at the recycling station gave Liu He a can of expired synthetic rations.

  The turning point occurred when Liu He broke into that nearly abandoned space station.

  As he tried to clear out the mountainous piles of "rubble" to free up life-support space, his scanner let out a piercing alarm. That was not waste; they were "high-purity isotope crystals" encapsulated by hyper-dimensional technology. Locked within each "stone" was the pulsation of a miniature star.

  Liu He frantically pried open the bottom deck. The "mining slag" buried by Gong Mengbi ten years ago had, under the catalysis of time, transformed into the most stable energy cubes.

  This was the cause Liu Fanghua had planted by dissipating his fortune, and the effect Gong Mengbi had left behind across dimensions.

  Years later, standing at the command podium of the Galactic Trade Alliance, Liu He received the Huang couple and their entourage, who had become refugees due to a supernova explosion. He felt no thrill of revenge. He merely looked at the shimmering energy slag in the container and delivered a speech to the trembling aristocrats below:

  "I once saw a rich man who, in order to save the battery power of his lung filters, allowed metal dust to petrify his respiratory system. He died in silence guarding the mining rights of several star systems, failing to leave behind even a single photon. Everyone, entropy increase is irreversible. If you dare not burn your energy, then what difference is there between this life and the silent void?"

  ***

  The holographic projection dissipated in the radioactive dust of the Scorched Fault.

  Ada turned her head, her optical lens capturing a glimmer of light on the horizon—it was some kind of mechanized avian utilizing radiation energy to recharge.

  "Logical closure established," Ada concluded. "Liu Fanghua's 'waste' was a cross-temporal venture capital investment, and Gong Mengbi was the actuary of this investment. Ma Feili, according to calculations, our current energy reserves are sufficient to support us to the next coordinate point, but I recommend adjusting the life-support system's output power upward, increasing 'non-essential' heat release by 3%."

  "Why?" Ma Feili asked.

  "Because in this freezing fault," Ada's mechanical fingertips touched the charred ground, "we need a posture of 'burning' to combat this damned entropy increase."