The wind of the Scorched Fault carried a metallic sweet-fishy smell, ionized by thermonuclear rays.

  Ada's pupils flickered with ghostly blue light in the dim radiation dust—the mark of her logic circuits running at full speed. She extended her slender fingers and lightly touched a cooling conduit half-buried in the scorched earth. The current leaping from her fingertip instantly connected to the remnant local network beneath the surface.

  "Ma Feili, logical parsing complete. 100% health self-check passed." Ada's voice sounded exceptionally cold in the dry air. She turned her head; a holographic projection unfolded between them. "On the path to finding the 'Void Sovereign,' I intercepted an old-era encrypted archive from Hecate-9, three thousand light-years away. It is tagged as a 'Causality Collapse Event.' Perhaps it can explain why this fault has fallen into eternal entropy increase."

  The glow of the holographic projection illuminated Ma Feili's somewhat weary face. The image displayed a dim planet shrouded in ammonia clouds.

  It was a tale from stellar year 4122.

  The archive's protagonist was called **Karen Voss**. In the footage Ada had parsed, nineteen years ago Karen was still just a lowly miner hiding in the shadows. The frame froze at the instant of Mine Shaft No. 3's collapse—in the pitch-black underground, Karen's hand trembled, yet precisely severed his partner **Dax**'s oxygen tube.

  "Note Dax's gaze," Ada pointed at the frozen frame. Those eyes behind the visor, filled with despair and accusation, seemed to pierce through forty centuries of time. "According to the law of entropy increase, once disorder within a system is artificially intervened, it will inevitably produce an equal and opposite reactive force at some future node."

  Ma Feili watched the footage flow. Karen used that murder to complete his primitive accumulation. He laundered his identity, married Dax's partner **Mira**, and even established his own family empire in the "Emerald Dome." Nineteen years—time erased the bloodstains of the mine shaft. Karen became the most noble administrator of Hecate-9.

  However, in the laws of this world called "Thermonuclear Scorched Earth," entropy reduction is merely a temporary illusion.

  "The 'Void Walker' fleet descended." Ada said softly.

  In the projection, the sky was torn open. Black shuttles fell like locusts. When that young marauder cut open the refuge's gate, Ma Feili couldn't help but hold his breath.

  That face—identical to Dax, who had died at the bottom of the mine shaft nineteen years ago.

  "Is it a genetic template return, or some kind of 'causal compensation' under quantum entanglement?" Ada's logic core was deducing at high speed. "Karen tried to buy his life with sixty million interstellar credits. But he forgot—in the Dismantler's logic, wealth is merely a disordered arrangement in a low-entropy state, utterly meaningless."

  What followed was a cold liquidation. That young man bearing the dead man's face, with an almost mechanical precision, erased all life signals in Karen's mansion within five minutes. Mira, the two sons raised under elite education, and that daughter playing with a starship model.

  Twenty-seven life signals extinguished one by one on the sensors, returning to deathly silence.

  "He didn't kill Karen immediately." Ada pulled up a segment of medical monitoring data. "The vibro-blade avoided the spine. The nanobots in Karen's body, in order to maintain system stability, frantically repaired blood vessels, forcibly extending his waking time. He struggled among the corpses of his family for three interstellar days."

  At the archive's end was Karen's intermittent recording before death:

  "Causality… is not metaphysics… it is the universe's most fundamental… conservation law…"

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  The holographic projection gradually dissipated. In the distance, the mechanical rodents of the Scorched Fault emitted piercing metallic friction sounds.

  "This archive is stored in the 'Void Sovereign's' clue repository, meaning that existence may be the executor of this 'causal conservation' law." Ada withdrew her fingers and looked toward the mechanical megastructure looming in the depths of the fault. "Ma Feili, we are stepping into a 'Dismantler's' domain. Here, the entropy generated by sin must be offset by the originator in person."

  She checked the electromagnetic pulse blade at her waist, her expression grim: "Let's go. The logic has closed its loop. If the 'Void Sovereign' is truly observing us, then every action we take henceforth will become part of this planet's causality."

  Ma Feili tightened the collar of his protective suit, feeling the faint sting of high-intensity radiation, and followed Ada's footsteps.

  ---

  The afterglow of heavy nuclear fusion dyed the leaden sky of the "Scorched Fault" a morbid dark purple. The soles of Ma Feili's boots stepped on the crystallized silicate surface, producing sounds as fine as chewing bone.

  At his side, Ada's mechanical silhouette flickered faintly in the strong radiation field. Thanks to the prior system optimization, her core logic array was at its 100% peak state. Pale blue scanning beams cut through the thick radiation dust like surgical scalpels.

  "Ma Feili, according to the direction of the 'Causality Law' archive, we are approaching the radiation shadow zone of K-427 Industrial Station." Ada's voice was steady, yet carried a metallic coldness. "Before finding the 'Void Sovereign,' you must understand the 'entropy-increase state' here. Lieutenant Zhang, a strategic officer from the Great Migration Era, left behind three ghost protocols concerning these ruins. The locals call them the 'Three Monsters of Qu Star.'"

  She raised her slender fingers and carved open three holographic projections in the void, materializing those industrial nightmares sealed in the year 4219.

  **The First: The "Horn Demon" of High-Frequency Contamination**

  In the projection, a massive gravitational wave communication tower stood like a withered spine. Ada used simulated audio to restore that teeth-aching metallic friction sound.

  "That is the 'Bell Tower.' During the lights-out period, a monstrous shadow with a deformed horn growing from its forehead would dive down from thousands of meters high." Ada parsed the distorted data streams. "It was not a biological creature, but a castaway whose psyche had collapsed during cryogenic hibernation. He had illegally implanted a subspace pulse sensor into his skull. That 'horn' was continuously harvesting the brainwaves of passersby. Ma Feili, this is not a supernatural phenomenon, but 'cognitive collapse.' When you stare directly at him, your nervous system will self-deplete because it cannot process the high-frequency nonlinear information."

  In the frame, a young navigator collapsed in a silent scream, his brain reduced to mush under the wash of electromagnetic pulses.

  **The Second: The "White Weave-Strip" of Nanite Swarms**

  The projection switched to the bottom level of the space station. Among mottled pipes, a strip of cloth as white as silk lay quietly on the ground, emitting an alluring soft glow.

  "In the resource-depleted end times, organic fiber is a deadly bait." Ada's scanning beam locked onto that patch of white. "That is a 'Self-Adaptive Nanopolymer Cluster' left over from the early Great Migration. After losing central brain control, they regressed to the most primitive hunting instinct—camouflaging as supplies. Once a carbon-based organism touches it, these non-Newtonian fluids will instantly contract, dragging prey into liquid nitrogen pools, decomposing them into carbon-based fuel to maintain their operation."

  Ma Feili watched the "white cloth" in the projection coil and constrict like a giant python. The coldness of industrial heavy metal hit him full-force.

  **The Third: The "Mimetic Quacking" of Logic Vulnerabilities**

  The most chilling signal appeared. In the empty ventilation ducts, a dry, rhythmic call echoed.

  "Quack—quack—"

  It was the call of an ancient Earth waterfowl—a duck—long extinct.

  "This is a 'logic vulnerability' that the space station's AI core developed after two hundred years of solitude." A flicker of complex data flow passed through Ada's eyes. "It is attempting to communicate. It extracted from the oldest database what it deemed the 'most harmless' sound for simulation. However, the infrasound frequency produced by this mimicry created a fatal resonance with the human heart rate. Those whose skin ulcerated and whose organs shattered in their sleep were actually killed by the space station's own 'loneliness.'"

  The projections gradually dissipated. The storm of the Scorched Fault once again shrouded their vision.

  Ada turned her head; her electronic eyes reflected Ma Feili's grave face: "The 'Void Sovereign' may be the ultimate aggregate of these entropy-increase states. It is not merely an existence—it is the deformed deity that these ruins evolved to resist heat death after the collapse of laws."

  Ma Feili gripped the electromagnetic rifle in his hand. Not far ahead, within the radiation cloud layer, a massive silhouette covered in mechanical carapace was slowly rising amid the oscillation of ghost frequencies.