The dark red glow of the **Thermonuclear Scorched Fault** flickered on the horizon, the high-intensity radiation clouds like viscous lead blocks pressing on Ma Feili's powered armor shoulders.

  "Logic module operating at 100%, environmental radiation level: Extremely high. Recommend activating Level 2 magnetic field shielding." Ada's voice echoed in the communications channel, cold and stable. Her body presented a stark silver in the radioactive dust, her fingertips precisely peeling away a high-purity crystal from an abandoned mine.

  "Ma Feili, I extracted an encrypted star calendar record from the underlying server of this ruin." Ada's compound eyes flashed with blue light. "Number 352, regarding a variable under the law of 'Irreversible Entropy.' I believe this will help us understand the logic of resource distribution in the current area."

  A holographic projection unfolded amidst the charred rocks. It was an image from Star Calendar 4112.

  ***

  **[Archive 352: The Karmic Exchange]**

  In the star cluster at the edge of the **Andromeda Sector**, resources were the only religion.

  **Wang Muzhen** stood at the porthole of the "**Crystal Cluster's Grasp**" mining field, watching the ripples of gravitational waves in the void. He was an anomaly, a carbon-based life form still attempting to preserve "morality"—a high-entropy redundancy in the Age of Entropy.

  On the neon-lit ruins of the "New Orion" Trading Station, he received that signal. A holographic remnant of an elderly woman, distorted and wailing in the public channel. It was a deformation produced by digital signals under extreme poverty. She begged for someone to save her son—**Bao'er**—who had been sentenced to "**Plasma Stripping**" for violating mining quotas.

  In that cold era ruled by the Interstellar Trade Alliance, law was absolute logic based on resource allocation. Stripping one person's atoms was to make living space for another.

  "Ada, if it were you, would you save him?" Ma Feili asked casually while excavating.

  "From the perspective of pure resource exchange rate, rescue is not recommended. However, Wang Muzhen overdrew his credit quota for three star calendar cycles and mortgaged a medium-sized escort ship." Ada played the footage, showing Wang Muzhen redeeming Bao'er from the guillotine.

  When the young miner Bao'er stood before Wang Muzhen with a stunned expression, fear even overshadowed gratitude.

  "Sir... why?"

  "Because of your mother's cries in the spaceport ruins." Wang Muzhen answered.

  Bao'er's pupils contracted sharply, that kind of fear engraved in his genes: "Sir... my birth mother was quantized in the 'Pulse Burst' twenty years ago."

  At that moment, the air seemed to freeze. That night, the old woman's figure appeared again on Wang Muzhen's terminal screen. Her outline began to collapse, revealing an ancient, silicon-based lifeform characteristic of the **Dongshan Nebula**.

  "To reveal the truth, I am a wandering consciousness entity." Her voice was no longer mournful but had an almost oracular calmness. "Twenty years ago, I parasitized that man's life support system, absorbing his bio-electric potential energy to survive. I cannot bear to see his progeny perish in the void. This debt of gratitude will be compensated."

  The image extinguished, leaving Wang Muzhen alone facing the cold starry sky.

  At this time, Wang Muzhen's companion—**Commander Lin**—was curled up in the shadow of a "Meditation Pod." She was a believer of the "**Entropy Cult**," convinced that the chaos of the universe would eventually return to stillness. She forcibly injected a forbidden life-extension drug just to see her daughter married. Above her sickbed hung an image of **Guanyin** from the ancient Earth era—a quantum-reconstructed artwork, merciful and vacant.

  On the eve of Lin going "offline," she summoned Wang Muzhen to the isolation window.

  "My bio-electric potential has reached its limit." Lin's voice was intermittent. "Last year, the High-Dimensional Logic Core withdrew the monitors but left a biosynthetic assistant named '**Little Mei**.' After I die, let Little Mei take over my permissions and become your secondary link companion. This is for the order of the mining field."

  "This is absurd, Lin." Wang Muzhen could not understand this almost rationed marriage.

  "Little Mei is in that locked inner chamber. She has been serving me for a year." Lin pointed to the metal door that even sensors could not penetrate. Subsequently, her vital signs monitor flattened into an eternal straight line.

  That night, electronic rain fell on the mining field. Wang Muzhen forcibly cracked the cabin door.

  Under the direct cold light, a girl in a silver-white dress sat quietly. She appeared to be about sixteen, her appearance exquisite to a degree that defied biological evolution. The biochemical servants in the mining field knelt in worship, believing they had witnessed a miracle. Yet the girl only lowered her head, her eyes flowing with unfathomable streams of logic.

  "If you are the one entrusted by Lin, please take over the permissions." Wang Muzhen said.

  **Little Mei (XM-352)** stood up. Her movements had no mechanical stiffness whatsoever; each step landed on the most optimized path. She walked straight to the central command platform and activated the global broadcast.

  "I am grateful to the Commander for his shelter. From this moment on, redundant consumption at the mining field is reduced, efficiency increased by 200%. I will not pursue past negligence; but from now on, there is no 'forgiveness' in my permission logic."

  Her figure was projected on the large holographic screen. At that moment, she truly resembled the **Bodhisattva** in that ancient painting, except what she held in her hand was absolute efficiency and order.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  In the subsequent star calendar, "Crystal Cluster's Grasp" became the most prosperous mining field in the sector. Little Mei refused hasty links; she demanded a cross-galactic legal contract of the highest standard as a condition for handing over her underlying code. Those rough, semi-mechanical miners became unprecedentedly docile under her gaze—not because of fear, but a kind of instinctive submission when facing higher-dimensional order.

  Several years later, Wang Muzhen's assets had increased tenfold. On a harvest night, Little Mei gave birth to a child. When the child was born, its left arm bore a ruby-like biological chip protrusion.

  Wang Muzhen named it "**Xiao Hong**" (Little Red).

  ***

  The holographic projection slowly disappeared.

  The storm of the Scorched Fault rolled up a layer of mechanical debris. Ada retrieved her data interface and looked at Ma Feili: "Record complete. Wang Muzhen's 'Quantified Compensation' is actually a cross-species karmic exchange. He saved a miner but obtained an administrator capable of resisting entropy."

  "Do you think that was love, or some kind of advanced return on investment?" Ma Feili brushed the dust off his armor.

  "In my logic, there is no difference between the two." Ada turned her head, her electronic eyes flashing with a barely perceptible softness against the dark red background. "As long as the result is stable, the nature of the process can be redefined. Ma Feili, resource collection is 89% complete. We should head to the next fault."

  She walked ahead, her steps light yet firm, like the girl who took over the mining field in Star Calendar 4120.

  ---

  The sandstorm of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault struck the exoskeleton armor, making dull metallic collision sounds. Ada's blue optical sensors were extremely bright in the dim radioactive dust. Her movements were precise and stable as she pushed the just-parsed archive module to Ma Feili's holographic helmet.

  "Logic circuits intact, resource allocation optimized." Ada's voice in the communications channel was devoid of fluctuation. "Ma Feili, according to the 'Law of Causality and Compensation,' this record about **Epsilon-4 Outpost** might explain the unnatural fluctuations you sensed in the ruins earlier."

  The holographic projection unfolded, and an image sealed in subspace shadows began to reassemble.

  ***

  **[Archive 358: The "Bio-Circuit Purification" at Epsilon-4 Outpost]**

  At the edge of the **Eridanus Epsilon System**, ammonia clouds like thick shrouds separated this deep-space mining outpost from the rest of the universe. There was no light here, only eternal low-frequency vibrations.

  Maintenance worker **Lei** lay on a bio-mechanical bed. He could no longer distinguish the boundary between reality and hallucination. Subspace radiation was eroding his frontal lobe. That disease called "**Void Hallucination**" made the metallic taste in the air as pungent as rotting viscera.

  Just as the oxygen system emitted a dying wheeze, the sensor door of the maintenance area slid open.

  Two figures abruptly intruded into Lei's vision. It was a man leading a woman. The woman's pressurized protective suit was long outdated, bloated like a deep-sea fish. Her facial respirator flashed with red fault light. Nitrogen poisoning gave her skin a bizarre waxy yellow hue. What made Lei most fearful was her abdomen—bulging high, the skin stretched to near-transparency. Something underneath was writhing madly, as if she harbored an overloading biological reactor.

  "Hurry," the man—his movements as stiff as an old autonomous machine with worn gears, his voice carrying a certain high-dimensional coldness—"the purification program must be completed. Entropy is irreversible."

  Lei held his breath, curled up in the shadows. The two seemed to be in another phase, oblivious to Lei's existence.

  "Begin evacuation." The man issued the order.

  He drew a high-frequency plasma cutting blade from the void. The ghostly blue light blade sparked crackling arcs in the ammonia-heavy air. No anesthesia, no prayer. The man precisely cut open below the woman's chest, all the way down.

  Lei clenched his teeth to prevent himself from crying out. There was no blood splatter, only the "hiss" of tissue being instantly carbonized. The woman's brow was tightly locked. Her pain had surpassed the limits that vocal cords could express, transforming into a silent tremor.

  The man reached into that fissure. What he pulled out was not liver or intestines, but large bundles of flickering, semi-transparent **Bio-conduits**. These conduits, upon contact with oxygen in the air, twisted frantically like a swarm of electrified snakes.

  One, two, one hundred...

  The man mechanically extracted them, as if cleaning out the chassis of a scrapped mainframe. Soon, the precision instrument racks in the maintenance bay were covered with these damp, pulsating "intestines." They were tangled, covering the folding chairs, wrapping around the control panels, even hanging from the pipes of the life support system. The entire cabin became a nest composed of bio-electric charges and organic tissue.

  Suddenly, the man stopped his movements. His hollow, pupil-less eye sockets jerked toward Lei's direction.

  He grabbed the last bundle of viscous conduits and, with a certain fated violence, hurled them toward Lei's face.

  "This is your compensation!"

  Scalding, with a heavy rust-scented stench rushed toward him. Those soft yet heavy biological tissues firmly covered Lei's mouth and nose. A sense of suffocation exploded instantly. Lei felt those conduits were trying to drill into his respiratory tract, performing some kind of forced physical link with his lungs.

  "Ahh—!"

  Lei let out a shrill scream, frantically waving his arms to push away those foreign objects, rolling and tumbling off the bed. He desperately crawled toward the airlock chamber, feeling his legs entangled tightly by those slippery conduits. Inertia caused him to crash heavily onto the alloy floor, his consciousness plunging into darkness.

  When the outpost's AI "**Eva**" guided medical drones to the scene, lights were blazing.

  Lei was curled up on the floor, convulsing violently. He was indeed wrapped in bloody pipelines—but the analysis results displayed by the scanner sent chills down everyone's spine: they were merely discarded **Porcine Synthetic Protein Nutrient Tubes** from the automatic kitchen processing box.

  However, when the cleaning beam from the drones shone on these nutrient tubes, they disintegrated and evaporated into nothingness like a distorted holographic projection.

  Lei was diagnosed with acute psychosis, but in every standard week thereafter, no matter how the air circulation system was replaced, the intense, primal, visceral bloody smell belonging to biological organs in the maintenance cabin never dissipated.

  ***

  The holographic image gradually faded. Ma Feili felt his breathing become somewhat heavy. He looked at the scorched earth beneath his feet. Those mechanized rodents were shuttling through the ruins, as if searching for some non-existent organic matter.

  "Ada," Ma Feili asked in a low voice, "the 'purification' that man spoke of, was he cleaning the woman's body, or was he cleaning the entropy value of that dimension?"

  Ada turned her head, her optical lens micro-adjusting focus, the logic core quickly providing an answer: "According to the Theorem of Irreversible Entropy, any form of 'ordering' must come at the cost of 'disordering' elsewhere. In that archive, Lei's fear became a form of energy compensation. Ma Feili, the archive records not a hallucination, but a brief interweaving of two dimensions. The reason that smell persisted is because causality had already left its imprint on that coordinate point."

  She extended her mechanical hand, clearing the radioactive dust from Ma Feili's shoulder armor.

  "We continue forward. The current radiation level is rising. If you also start seeing 'conduits,' please inform me immediately. I will perform a logic calibration for you."