"Ma Feili, the Geiger counter's alarm has exceeded the safety threshold. The bunker hatch will lock in sixty seconds. Please quicken your pace."

  Ada's voice remained steady in my neural link. Her body, composed of nano-alloy, reflected a cold luster beneath the dark red radiation clouds. We crossed the edge of the "Thermonuclear Scorched Fault." Mechanized rodents scurried among the ruins; the heat-dissipation fins on their backs presented a morbidly bright yellow from the extreme heat. That distorted biological form was the most intuitive footnote to this era's "Monster Theory."

  "Synchronizing decrypted archive #401 from 'Vortex Abyss Colony,'" Ada said, maintaining the force-field shield while projecting the data stream directly onto my retina. "Regarding the case called 'Void Phase Parasitism,' the logic closed-loop is complete. Ma Feili, this may explain the entropy phenomenon we are facing—it is the greedy devouring of the reality dimension by heterogeneous life."

  The data streams intertwined in the void, reconstructing that distant and deathly silent stellar region.

  ***

  **[Archive Record: Nova Abyss Domain – Cocoon of Entropy]**

  The gravity of the Apex Singularity Zone was like an invisible, rotting hand, crushing every inch of tranquility on the asteroid belt of "Vortex Abyss Colony." The survival laws here had been simplified to the most primitive arithmetic: oxygen, fuel, anti-radiation agents. Beyond the sight of the Radiant Ether Council, this was a legal vacuum zone and the most active breeding ground for subspace rifts.

  The colonists feared the "**Five-Phase Aberrations**."

  They were not deities, but phase parasites overflowing from the extreme point of entropy—the ultimate desecration of life forms. They fed on the "ordered energy" of organisms, forcibly interfacing with private pressurized-cabin sensors. In the victims' perception, it was divine miracle or nightmare; but in the eyes of quantum physicists, it was a "phase harvest" of three-dimensional organisms by higher-dimensional "Others."

  Director **Rael Kane**, a pawnbroker who traded quantum keys on the data black market, never imagined he would become the backdrop for a "harvest."

  That night, the pressurized cabin's hatch was not physically breached. Rather, the weak force between molecules was forcibly disrupted, and it swung open like a festering wound. The entity calling itself "**Phase-04**" walked in. It wore heavy armor of dark alloy; the vibro-cutting blade at its waist flickered with a purple glow under subspace radiation. Beneath its shell squirmed soft tissue belonging to no known organism.

  "Don't struggle," Phase-04's voice detonated directly in the brain-machine interface of Kane's wife, **Vespera Radiance**. "I need your bio-energy. I will 'merge' with you, not bring calamity."

  It was a violation across dimensions. What Vespera felt upon contact was not body heat, but a kind of high-density plasma forcibly rewriting her genetic code. The tearing sensation from the phase collapse made her feel as if suspended above a black hole's event horizon. This agony of being occupied by an "Other" was unbearable for any carbon-based life. When Phase-04 departed, it left behind a death sentence of five orbital revolutions, and Vespera's life signs—withering daily, taking on a semi-transparent quality.

  Rael Kane was nearly paralyzed under that subspace coercion. In the resource-scarce frontier regions, a distress signal's speed could never outpace entropy's footsteps.

  Until the arrival of **Marshal Oron Vex**.

  Oron Vex was a former ranger of the Interstellar Task Force—a "Pureblood" who insisted on preserving his original flesh and refused excessive cyberization. In an age of mechanical ascension, his body full of muscle and blood was itself a form of resistance against "inhuman" aberrations. He carried not thermal weapons, but a "**Phase Capture Bow**" developed against subspace organisms.

  "Entropy is irreversible, but parasitism can be severed." Oron Vex whispered in the ventilation duct, his breath carrying the rust of ancient battlefields.

  That night, the gravitational constant shifted by 0.003. Oron Vex descended from above; his electromagnetically polarized war-blade traced a brilliant blue arc through the air. He gave "Phase-04" no chance for phase-jump. In the instant the creature was half-virtual, half-real, his blade precisely cleaved open that skull disguised as human, filled with slime.

  With a shrill infrasonic wail, the so-called "god" dissolved into a puddle of grayish-white organic gel. Under the spectrum analyzer, it revealed its true form: an equine experimental beast mutated by subspace energy—a remnant of self-replicating biological weaponry left over from the Great Migration Era.

  "There are five of them." Vespera reminded weakly; blue light-spots wandered beneath her skin.

  Oron Vex sneered and extinguished the visible light. In deep-sensing imagery, the void began to distort violently. Four twisted silhouettes plummeted from subspace rifts, carrying a nauseating wet coldness. Oron Vex drew his capture bow. The electromagnetic pulse arrows, like the Reaper's guidance, each precisely pierced the energy cores of these parasites.

  The floor was soon piled with alien corpses emitting a burnt stench—two porcine creatures, one multi-limbed monster. They were evolutionary failures, excrement overflowing from subspace.

  The entire Kane family fed these biomasses into the synthesis furnace. Ironically, these parasites, viewed as embodiments of terror, yielded high-purity organic fuel that supported the entire mining district's nuclear fusion needs for a year. Monsters, in the end, became the kindling for civilization's continuation.

  The final threat came from "**Phase-05**." This parasite, wearing the skin of a youth, attempted to use a hundred jin of high-purity isotopic gold as bait to ensnare a wealthy merchant's daughter.

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

  Oron Vex lay in ambush within a mimicry pod. At the moment the "wedding date" arrived, he struck. His war-blade, in the second before the void-crack closed, severed the creature's terrifying tentacle covered in blue scales.

  The legend of the "Five-Phase Aberrations" ended here. The parasitic organisms that had clung to the shadows of human pioneers finally understood: before this generation of humanity, even unnameable "gods" from subspace, as long as they still possessed physical form, could be hunted, dismantled, and converted into fuel for survival.

  ***

  The bunker hatch closed heavily behind me and Ada.

  "Ma Feili, archive ended." Ada turned her head; complex data flowed through her electronic eyes. "The lesson of 'Vortex Abyss' tells us that when facing higher-dimensional erosion, logic closed-loops and physical destruction are equally important. In this grotesque universe, that which is not our kind is all energy."

  I looked at Ada. Her 100% healthy system status was the only comfort on this scorched earth, and my last line of defense against those "invisible things."

  "What if they come back?" I asked.

  Ada checked the phase disruptor on her arm. Her voice was calm and resolute: "Then throw them into the synthesis furnace too. On these ruins, nothing is more logical than staying alive."

  ---

  Deep within the bunker, the air was decayed and cold, mixed with a nauseating smell of metallic rust. The circulation system, like a dying beast, struggled to filter the radiation dust capable of devouring all vitality from outside. Ada's optical crystals pulsed with an eerie, ghostly blue cold light—the mark of her operating at 100% full-power deduction as the logical sovereign of this wasteland.

  "Ma Feili, the underlying taboo of the 'Quantum Void Sector' archive has been forcibly torn open." Ada's voice echoed within the narrow iron curtain, carrying a chilling quality stripped of humanity. "This is a history of entanglement between 'predator' and 'offering.' Under the inviolable dark law of entropy, any contact is equivalent to a chronic suicide called 'existence.'"

  The projection light-screen forcibly unfolded on the rough, crack-covered wall, transporting them back to the Helios Eternal System, which had long since become scorched earth.

  ***

  **[Archive Code: 406 — Collapsed Red Spectral Echo]**

  Vortex Abyss Colony—a deathly silent moon imprisoned by eternal glaciers. The atmosphere here was as thin as a demon's whisper; all will had to be transmitted through cold bone-conduction media.

  Director **Corvis Urban**'s cold will was here materialized as the suffocating Zenith Core Directorate. And Captain **West Wind Urban**—this wizard-class technician who once held the highest structural reinforcement clearance in this sector—was leading his nano-servants to perform dark rituals in the deepest confinement pod of the sector. It was an era where neon and abyss intertwined; even the darkest corners of the mining satellites were smeared blood-purple by cheap and violent electron beams.

  During the silent cycle of energy depletion, the cabin fell into a hellish dimness. West Wind Urban lay in the sleep pod, like a corpse placed in a crystal coffin. Behind the asteroid ring called the "Ghost Belt," the afterglow of the star was like a sword of judgment.

  At that moment, he captured that red—a red that blasphemed the laws of physics.

  It was a distorted thermodynamic monster, presenting the ferocious outline of some ancient Earth raptor, abruptly perched outside the pressure-resistant alloy wall at absolute zero. Then, that red glow, like a higher-dimensional parasite, penetrated the composite armor capable of withstanding nuclear blasts, transforming into a semi-transparent, bewitching female silhouette, curled up in the shadow-filled folds of the oxygen conduit.

  West Wind Urban had naively thought this was a common "void hallucination" during deep-space operations. But when that image slithered like a serpent into his sleep pod, a tremor transcending mortal flesh completely shattered his reason.

  No body heat—only micro-currents that nearly incinerated his neural network. It was "**Neural Coupling Complication**"—two lonely, heterogeneous wave functions achieving an evil resonance in the cold cosmic tomb.

  "I did not come through a vulnerability," that signal detonated directly in his brainstem, carrying the despairing echo of an ancient supernova's annihilation. "I crossed three astronomical units of the void death-zone, only to gnaw upon your bioelectric field."

  From then on, whenever the space station entered its death-like hibernation cycle, this red spectral echo would arrive on schedule. West Wind Urban indulged in this higher-dimensional, predatory tenderness, completely ignoring the price of being an offering.

  When the Directorate's construction was complete and West Wind Urban set off to return to his home in the Apex Singularity Zone, that red glow followed like a shadow, like gangrene attached to bone.

  After returning home, his world was forcibly overlaid with a morbid red filter. Domestic servants, genetic kin, even the highest-specification purification scanners could not detect "her" existence. Only West Wind Urban's vital signs were collapsing rapidly—bones desiccating, neural synapses scorched with irreparable dark burn marks.

  He finally felt fear. Under the dark law, this cross-species coupling was essentially an energy plunder by a superior upon an inferior.

  He sought help from the high priests of the Spectrum Ultimate Consortium, attempting to cleanse this cursed soul with violent high-intensity magnetic-field pulses. Yet humble science and superstition were meaningless before an absolute higher-dimensional predator. The red residual image still sat quietly by his life-support bed, as if watching a withering, delicious nutrient.

  Until that night when the stellar storm ignited the void.

  That "monster" donned a protective suit flowing with the cold light of liquid metal, like an astronaut about to journey into deeper darkness. She extended her transparent, cold hand and, one last time, caressed West Wind Urban's face, covered in radiation-blackened spots.

  "Every entanglement in the universe is a rehearsal for oblivion," her voice echoed in the void, carrying a fatalistic tone like a dark lord's. "When gravitational waves converge, we are each other's prey; when orbits drift, you are the abandoned residue. This cross-species observation record hereby concludes."

  The red light flickered violently, ultimately collapsing into an all-devouring singularity. West Wind Urban lay in the deathly silent cabin, listening to the soundless howl of the vacuum outside the window. He finally understood: he had never been the protagonist of this cosmic romance, but merely a humble footnote in the evolution of stardust—one accidentally chosen to record the process of entropy's devouring.

  ***

  The light-screen extinguished like ash. The bunker returned to its dim neon hue.

  Ada turned her head; a final line of annihilation code quietly slid across her electronic eyes: "Logic closed-loop complete. West Wind Urban's demise was an inevitability of cosmic equilibrium. Because observation itself is a higher-dimensional devouring. Ma Feili, on this scorched earth, we too are being watched by some dark existence."

  Ma Feili silently checked the radiation detector in his hand. The needle jumped uneasily, like a startled serpent.

  "At least we haven't been completely eaten yet, Ada." He said in a low voice, his tone carrying an exhausted ferocity.

  "That is only temporary, Ma Feili." Ada stood up. The sound of her body parts operating was precise to a maddening degree. "According to the entropy theorem, we are merely delaying, as much as possible in this dark forest, that all-devouring singularity that must inevitably descend."