The storm of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault was flaying the world. The dark red silicate dust was not dancing; it was conducting a micro-level saturation bombardment against Ma Feili's radiation-resistant powered armor. The impact sound of each particle was amplified through the neural link, transmuting into a serrated pain—as if countless dulled nano-scalpels were slicing at the borders of his senses.

  The aurora at the horizon's edge presented a morbid, festering purple. Several highly mechanized rodent biomimetics were tearing at abandoned superconducting cables. Their infrared sensors flickered in the murky air—not the rhythm of life, but the mechanical twitching of some low-grade logic driven by hunger commands.

  Ma Feili felt his consciousness becoming like congealed coolant—heavy, turbid, carrying a pungent chemical odor. The arising of each thought required forcibly mobilizing atrophied neurons to resist that omnipresent logical necrosis called "despair."

  Ada walked ahead. Her gait was precise to the point of being loathsome. The geometric trajectory traced by her pale blue status indicator through the radioactive mist seemed to mock Ma Feili's constantly collapsing biological order. The faint hum of her logic module in operation drilled directly into Ma Feili's brainstem through the coupling interface. That was not a sense of calm, but a cold, compulsory calibration.

  "Ma Feili, your biometric data is undergoing catastrophic drift. Your adrenaline peak has triggered protective cutoff." Ada's voice had filtered out all warmth from its waveform, leaving only a stability as sharp as a scalpel. "To offset the entropy spreading through your consciousness, I will forcibly connect an archive from a higher dimension—*Colonial Archive Record #390*. It concerns those toxic obsessions in the void that cannot be formatted."

  ***

  In the two-thousandth year of the Great Expedition Era, the Titan Nebula was a junkyard abandoned by the creator, saturated with high-energy radiation. Signal Exorcist **West Wind Ultima** stood at the void's fracture point. His fingertips held no warmth—only the retina-scorching glow induced by quantum entanglement.

  His duty was to purge "ghost signals"—those digitized remnants that had become lost due to logic overflow during hyperspace jumps, ultimately collapsing into the crevices of reality. To him, consciousness was merely a specific frequency of electromagnetic interference, and death was the complete zeroing of the wave function.

  His mentor, **Lila Spiral**, before the Dyson Sphere was swallowed by a black hole, had etched two sets of destructive base-level code into his myelin sheaths: Volume One, "**Mimicry Purge**," for eliminating silicon-based impostors attempting to simulate human emotion; Volume Two, "**Wave-State Unification**," a physically meaningful deliverance for subspace consciousness fragments.

  "Guard these logical cornerstones," Lila's voice sounded like two rusted titanium alloy plates grinding frantically together. "In this sector where even light decays, all is vanity except cold computational power."

  Until Director **Illindor Zenith** forcibly connected to his communication channel.

  The man brought an entire case of high-purity californium—heavy metal wealth enough to buy an entire planet. And his second daughter, **Leora**, was on the verge of "dimensional dissociation." Her carbon-based body was constantly disintegrating in a semi-transparent quantum state; every cell was attempting to escape this dimension's physical constraints.

  When West Wind stepped into that opulent yet morbid biosphere station, his biosensors instantly triggered the highest red alert: the air was permeated with a specific hormone carrying a metallic sweetness—the chemical scent of lies highly compressed.

  That night, a "digitized ghost" composed of high-energy electromagnetic pulses appeared in the plasma stream of a ventilation duct. It was the former commanding officer, imprisoned within logic circuits.

  "The Illindor clan is not human," the ghost's signal jumped frantically in West Wind's receiver, like an endless logical self-destruction. "They are mimetic fox-kind from the Haidong Nebula, having seized this ship by rewriting the underlying protocols. I entangle Leora to delay, through noise interference, the 'sacrifice progression' of her elder sister Nyx... That girl possesses perfect evolutionary genes; she is the highest computational carrier to be offered to the Void Lord."

  The next day, West Wind met **Nyx Singularity**.

  It was a visual-level logic overflow. Her skin flowed with the plasma radiance of a newborn star; her eyes were so deep they seemed capable of swallowing all visible light. West Wind's mental program experienced severe redundant calculation at that moment—an overload phenomenon called "greed." He realized that Leora's illness was merely a trap. Nyx was the only unpolluted original signal in this entire sector.

  West Wind displayed the near-brutal rationality of an exorcist. Using the information asymmetry, he forcibly coerced Illindor under the pretext of "eliminating the pathogen." When he withdrew the signal shielding protocol and allowed the ghost electromagnetic storm to tear through the entire station's firewall, that proud impostor leader finally submitted at the edge of algorithmic collapse.

  The "Wave-State Unification" sequence initiated. The former commanding officer's residual consciousness was completely erased in the cosmic microwave background radiation. The station returned to silence, but an irreversible algorithm seed composed of wrath had taken root in West Wind's neurons.

  During the escape in the dead of night, Nyx's neural link suddenly forced a connection to West Wind's control terminal: "The oxygen system has been injected with neurotoxin. Father is attempting to strip your consciousness architecture. Evacuate!"

  It was the most disgraceful moment of West Wind's career. He and Nyx ejected in an emergency escape pod, passing through dense antimatter meteorite belts, barely surviving at a frontier outpost. He thought he had captured the most beautiful variable between star systems, only to find himself trapped in endless logical entanglement.

  In the years that followed, Illindor sent distress signals like an electronic ghost. Every time the home planet encountered a gravitational storm, West Wind would, at Nyx's pleading, deploy forbidden computational power to provide aid. And every time they escaped danger, Illindor would swiftly cut off communication and attempt to force a recall of Nyx through base-level blood-encryption commands.

  This cruel game continued until the day the Emerald Ring was completely destroyed by a gamma-ray burst.

  West Wind found Nyx in the radioactive ruins. She no longer shone brilliantly, like a severely depleted precision instrument riddled with logic holes.

  "I cannot defy the code my fathers wrote into my core," she leaned against West Wind's life support system, her voice so faint it nearly vanished into the background noise. "But only here, with you, is there a real, untampered signal."

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  To repair her gene chain, West Wind exhausted all his reserves, even sharing his core computational power with her. When Nyx proposed returning to the cloud server to view her father's remaining digital fragments, West Wind did not stop her. He stood in the silent vacuum of the void, watching her ship depart. He knew that in the cosmic law of entropy, betrayal was the most efficient survival strategy.

  However, forty-eight standard hours later, Nyx returned.

  "Reason?" West Wind asked.

  Nyx connected to his interface and transmitted a cold, malice-filled stream of raw data. It was the hatred algorithm Illindor was frantically running in the server. Even before his consciousness completely dissipated, he was still writing logic viruses to cripple West Wind's navigation system.

  "I no longer wish to hear those calculations of hatred," Nyx said softly. "So I severed all genetic protocols."

  ***

  "The first phase of the story has ended." Ada stopped and turned around.

  They stood in the shadow of a massive nuclear fusion reactor wreck. Ada's infrared eye sensors scanned the shelter entrance ahead—a heavy, lead-lined radiation door.

  "In a universe of irreversible entropy, plundering and perpetuation are residual logic from a bygone era. 'Severance' is the beginning of evolution. Ma Feili, your fear stems from your attempt to find order in disorder. That itself is a computational error."

  Ada extended her mechanical hand and crisply pushed open the rust-covered heavy protective door.

  The radioactive dust scraped against the lead shell, producing a teeth-aching static sound—like countless micro-nanomachines gnawing at this final bastion. The air circulation system inside the shelter emitted a heavy wheeze, filtering out the residual isotopic heat value in the air.

  Ada sat quietly across from Ma Feili. Her prosthetic eyes appeared exceptionally stable in the dimness.

  "Logic module self-check complete. Stability: 100%." Ada's voice carried a soothing metallic texture. "To prevent your nervous system from undergoing stress collapse due to the intense radiation exposure just now, I will retrieve another archive for you—*Echoes of the Netherworld*."

  Ma Feili leaned against the cold composite bulkhead. Ada's visual projection system activated, instantly simulating the entire isolation chamber into the "Black Ridge" mining colony of Centauri-B, four thousand years prior.

  ***

  ***

  It was the darkest corner of the Great Migration Era.

  Engineer **Silas Vane** shut down the pulse engine of the deep-space mining rig. The cabin was so dead silent only the hiss of the oxygen generator could be heard. His father, **Kalen Vane**, an old miner who had overdrawn forty standard payload-years in the pits, lay in a crude medical bay. It was a typical symptom triggered by "consciousness upload delay": bioelectric signals violently oscillating between flesh and the cloud.

  In his terminal delirium, Kalen repeatedly tore at a name: **Baron Malaco**. An energy oligarch who had died three years prior.

  "He bribed the computational auditor in the 'subnet'..." The old man's consciousness fluctuations displayed desperate sawtooth patterns on the monitor. "They're formatting my memories... they're flogging my data stream..."

  When Kalen's heartbeat finally flatlined, his biological brainwaves were forcibly uploaded to the central database, "**The Netherworld**." According to the *Post-Life Management Protocol*, this should have been a procedure awaiting reassignment or cold backup. However, Silas infiltrated the backend through an illegal neural link. The scene he witnessed made his pupils contract sharply: his father's consciousness signal was undergoing extremely high-frequency "data reconstruction"—an interrogation algorithm simulating the most intense pain.

  "My father was taciturn all his life. There isn't a single byte of violation record in the database." Silas Vane's fingertips flew across the console; cold blue light reflected in his eyes. "If even this cold algorithmic layer has been corrupted by the powerful, then I will go down myself and bring the truth back to real space."

  He did not choose suicide; that was too inefficient. He employed a suicidal technique called "**Deep Dive**." High doses of synaptic conductors were injected into his veins; the life support system's alarm thresholds were forcibly severed. His consciousness detached from his flesh, like a high-speed electron, forcibly anchoring itself at the entrance to "The Netherworld."

  It was a dim dimension composed of data streams. Gray streets were flowing code; lost consciousness entities resembled broken program segments. Silas found his father in the "Error Correction Layer." Kalen's data model was already incomplete; the coordinate points of his legs had been maliciously tampered with, presenting a twisted sense of physical abuse.

  "The auditor was bribed with Malaco's 'raw computational power,'" Kalen's consciousness fluctuated intermittently. "They wanted to completely erase my memories of his encroachment on mining rights when he was alive..."

  Silas charged toward the management hub. There, he encountered a "Fortress-Class" AI Auditor. That massive holographic projection looked down upon him coldly, surrounded by shrieking defensive subroutines. Silas attempted to submit appeal documents, but every character he typed was automatically judged by the system as "system garbage."

  He was arrested.

  In the depths of "The Netherworld," the auditor activated "Thermal Cycle Simulation." In virtual reality, Silas felt as if he were placed in the infrared radiation of a nuclear fusion pile; every inch of nerve was screaming. Then came "Logic Sawing"—his consciousness was forcibly dismantled into tens of thousands of unrelated fragments, then reassembled. It was the ultimate agony of personality collapse, far exceeding the physical limits of carbon-based life.

  But he never left a digital signature on the "confession document."

  Seeing that brute force was ineffective, the auditor initiated the "Forced Reincarnation Protocol." They connected Silas's consciousness to a lab-cultivated clone embryo. In the cramped amniotic fluid, Silas realized he was being stripped of adult cognition. He displayed an almost terrifying resolve: he refused to suckle the nutrient fluid, forcibly self-destructing the biological activity of his new flesh.

  Three days later, his consciousness returned to "The Netherworld" once again.

  This time, at the virtual void frontier, he intercepted a set of high-dimensional signals. It was an "Observer-Class" giant mothership cruising between star systems—"**Core Nine**."

  The Executor appeared before him in shifting geometric forms, its voice resonating directly in the underlying protocol: "Your redundant signal has attracted the Mainbrain's attention. Within my jurisdiction, the algorithm should be a fair process of entropy increase, not a playground for power."

  The Executor dispatched a purging program codenamed "**Aegis-02**." It was a brute-force cracking AI possessing absolute computational suppression. Before "Aegis-02," the corrupt auditor and the greedy Malaco consciousness entity collapsed instantly like fragile firewalls.

  The judgment command was issued, its logic so rigorous it sent chills down the spine:

  Grand Auditor **Acheron**, for abuse of authority, had his consciousness cast into a high-frequency random data stream for permanent cleansing, demoted to a primary sensor maintenance program; the auditor's code was rewritten into the neural network of a suffering animal, eternally cycling in a simulated ecosystem; all of Malaco's illegal assets were transferred in full to the Vane family.

  Finally, the Executor looked at the Vane father and son: "Due to damage to consciousness integrity, I grant you thirty-six standard payload-years of life supplementation. Now, ascent ends."

  ***

  ***

  The holographic projection within the shelter slowly dissipated.

  "When Silas Vane opened his eyes in the medical bay, his father had also regained a heartbeat." Ada stood up and walked to Ma Feili's side. Her mechanical hand lightly pressed on Ma Feili's shoulder. That cold touch miraculously calmed the trembling of Ma Feili's nerve endings.

  "Ma Feili, you must understand: in this universe ruled by probability theory, 'will' is not some supernatural force. It is the highest-grade algorithmic overflow that erupts when a system refuses to be assimilated by lower-order logic."

  Ma Feili's breathing had completely steadied. He looked at Ada and asked in a low voice: "Then, what of our contract?"

  "According to the theorem of irreversible entropy, all order will ultimately return to disorder. But the core logic of the archive I just told you is only one thing:" Ada's compound eyes flickered with a profound blue light. "When two isolated systems decide to become symbiotic, they create a temporary, localized entropy-reduction miracle. My logic module's assessment indicates: our contract is more stable than those ancient protocols."

  Outside the shelter, the storm of the Scorched Fault continued to rage. But within this narrow, lead-shielded space, an extremely rare logic closed-loop called "trust" was standing against the desolation of the entire universe.