The storm of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault was not merely abrading the armor; it was attempting to strip away Ma Feili's last remaining sense of reality. Every silicon-based particle hurled by the wild wind and striking the alloy shell was like a tiny electrical discharge at his nerve endings. This shrill friction sound transmuted inside Ma Feili's cranium into a kind of thirst—not a scorching of the throat, but a pathological craving for "completeness" deep within his consciousness.

  The lead-gray canopy hung low, like a massive vacuum pump, slowly and coldly sucking the heat from the surface. On the high-voltage towers, the infrared compound eyes of those mechanized avians flickered in the darkness. Ma Feili could feel that gaze: they were calculating the frequency of his lung expansion, evaluating the bio-energy contained in each of his carbon-based cells. In that set of cold logic, he was not a person, but an isotope battery not yet disassembled, emanating an alluring warmth.

  "Ma Feili, your filter valve aperture has deviated by 0.04 millimeters. This misalignment is accelerating protein denaturation on your alveolar surfaces."

  Ada's voice slid through the communication channel, smooth without a single wrinkle, like a scalpel slicing through the viscous air. In Ma Feili's double-vision caused by hypoxia, Ada's ghostly blue holographic projection seemed exceptionally glaring—that was 100% order, an absolute resistance to entropy. Ma Feili stared at her projection, and a near-greedy sense of attachment rose in his chest. He wanted to claim this pure logic as his own, wanted to stuff it into his tottering neural circuits to fill the voids created by fear.

  "To offset your neurotransmitter overload, I am now injecting Archive STORY-372 into your forward visor." Ada's fingertip traced lightly; the light-stream, like greedy vines, swiftly covered Ma Feili's field of vision. "Look at Agron Mining Station. There, 'craving' was solidified into physical form."

  ***

  **[Archive Loading: Great Migration Era – Colonial Customs Survey]**

  At the edge of the Gliese-372 System, Agron Station was like a rusted nail, driven deep into the planet's shadow, greedily sucking up the faint residual vibrations of the planetary core.

  When Second-Class Inspector **Li Jilin** stepped out of the airlock, he was met with a physiological oppression. The hall was packed with mechanical biomimetic beasts: cats with stainless steel skeletons, canines whose electronic eyes oozed greenish acidic fluid, and cleaning machines squirming in the crevices of pipes.

  Li Jilin's right hand clamped down hard on the grip of his pulse gun. The pallor of his knuckles revealed a defensive stinginess—he was absolutely unwilling to contribute even the slightest bit of body heat to this dead silence.

  "Is this your reception etiquette?" A dry tremor escaped his throat.

  "Inspector, please forgive our... frugality." The adjutant's voice seeped from the corroded speaker, carrying a viscosity born of long-term scarcity. "Maintaining the metabolic cost of flesh is too expensive. To save that tiny bit of oxygen and protein, everyone has squeezed their consciousness, as if vacuum-packing it, into these low-power 'shells.' They are watching you only because your 'bio-energy' is too dazzling—to them, a living person is a mobile nuclear fusion deposit."

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  At that instant, the hall's sensors emitted a dying wail from data overflow. Holographic projections and physical shells tore apart in the extremely unstable link. The scene before Li Jilin's eyes distorted: the outlines of those mechanical beasts peeled open like festering wounds, revealing behind them a group of natural humans with deathly pale faces and gazes that held a black-hole-like suction. They flickered like ghosts between the virtual and the real, each flicker an attempt to capture the infrared radiation emanating from Li Jilin, then, like misers hiding gold coins, they would swiftly vanish into the darkness.

  This "pathological exploitation of matter by consciousness" reached its peak in the deep mining sectors.

  Li Jilin sat on a gravity stretcher, the surrounding air as thick as machine oil. Suddenly, a shrill scream tore through the silence. An exoskeleton operator collapsed to his knees. His movements exhibited the rigidity of a logic deadlock, as if his soul were being siphoned out through the back of his skull by some invisible force.

  "This humble one has been 'parasitized'! That's my... my..." The man howled, his hands like spasming iron hooks. He grabbed a passing maintenance robot, brutally ripped off its interface, forcibly plugged his own neural cable into it, then scrambled toward the slums.

  Li Jilin found him in an underground clinic. The high-frequency surgical knife in the silver-haired elder's hand was emitting a hungry hum.

  "It's 'Data Parasitism.'" The elder's voice was like rubbing against sandpaper. "Someone was 'fishing' your neural roots, trying to steal the last bit of computing power from your dreams."

  Li Jilin saw a lump beneath the operator's skin crawling frantically—some kind of micro-mechanical device, desperately drilling through the host's blood vessels, trying to squeeze dry every last drop of neurotransmitters. The elder sliced open the skin layer with one cut. Blue synthetic blood sprayed out, and a "pebble" flickering with a sickly red light was extracted.

  At that moment, the operator's expression was not relief, but an extremely abject, lost-and-found ecstasy. He didn't even glance at his wound before running back to his post, clutching it like his very lifeline.

  "That's 'Remote Neural Coupling.'" The adjutant whispered in Li Jilin's ear, his breath carrying the rust of metal. "The residents here treat their flesh as collateral. In the dead of night, their consciousness transforms into invisible 'hands,' slipping into your quarters to suck every bit from your data cards, to lick the faint glow emanating from isotope batteries."

  "If caught," the adjutant pointed at that red pebble, a fear born of extreme miserliness flashing in his eyes, "the signal interference clamp will grip that 'hand.' The signal backflow will instantly overload. In a hibernation pod miles away, that person's physical arm will completely rot in their sleep due to neural self-cannibalization. That pebble is the brand of their captured greed."

  Li Jilin looked at the desiccated planet outside the porthole. He felt a chill deep in his marrow: Here, existence itself was a predation upon others, and flesh was merely the final residue in this endless feeding.

  ***

  The archive gradually disintegrated on Ma Feili's retina, dissolving into countless tiny noise particles.

  The storm in the fault zone was still frantically extracting the armor's durability. Ada manipulated her main body's mechanical legs, each step falling with extreme weight, as if trying to stamp out the last remaining value from this scorched earth.

  "Entropy is irreversible, Ma Feili." Ada's voice took on a directive-like pull. "The people of Agron abandoned their flesh to survive. For us to pass through here, we must guard your last bit of bio-energy like misers. Do not let your thoughts dissipate. Lock them all inside your core."

  Ma Feili stared fixedly at Ada's perfect, lossless silhouette. In this utterly silent wasteland, Ada had become his only lifeline, one he had to clutch tightly. His consciousness clung like a hungry shadow to Ada's logic framework, sliding with her into the depths of the fault.