Above the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault, the scarlet sun was churning the atmosphere's refractive index into fragmented chaos. The radiation dust, under extreme temperatures, presented a transparent gelatinous quality, flowing slowly across the field of vision.

  Ada stood at the center of the heat waves. The micro-circulation system beneath her biomimetic skin was precisely maintaining a constant temperature of 36.51 degrees Celsius. The scorching heat outside—sufficient to dehydrate carbon-based organisms—manifested in her underlying logic merely as a set of real-time thermodynamic load values. She raised her right hand; the distance between her index and middle fingers was precise to the micron. She carved open an absolutely flat incision in the void.

  Azure holographic ripples unfurled silently before Ma Feili. Snow-static completed vector reorganization in 0.003 seconds, constructing a planet locked tight beneath heavy metal cloud-haze—**Shu-β**.

  "Before observing the 'Void,' logic must come first." Ada's voice was so steady it lacked any fluctuation, like a precision scalpel cutting through dry air. "When consciousness separates from its physical carrier, if it cannot complete topological reconstruction, it will collapse into information distortion. This is an observation record from stellar year 4210: a failed 'Ascension.'"

  ***

  In the footage, the obsidian mountain range stood like a row of jagged black fangs, piercing the lead-gray atmosphere suffused with sulfurous stench.

  The power-armor joints of the heavy mech squad emitted piercing wails under the abrasion of metallic dust. Commander **Peng Hong**'s breathing sounded heavy and disordered in the communication channel. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose onto his tactical visor, only to be evaporated again by his rapid panting.

  Before the rust-mottled gravity-sensing gate of the "Great Awakening Experimental Field," several scavengers huddled in the shadow of rubble. Their pupils had already dilated; their irises, under intense radiation, presented a morbid semi-transparency. Their bodies spasmed uncontrollably from excessive stress response—like a cluster of mollusks thrown into boiling water.

  "Don't… don't go in…" Broken syllables squeezed from a scavenger's throat—noise twisted from vocal cords under extreme terror. "That is the Semantic Terminator… it will devour your 'meaning.'"

  Peng Hong did not respond. His fingertips gripped the handle of his plasma cutting blade until his knuckles turned blue-white from excessive force. As a soldier who believed in thermodynamic laws, he was trying to use anger to suppress that chill originating from deep within his spinal cord.

  As the sensing gate opened with a teeth-aching friction, darkness surged out like a tide.

  **First level: the Vestibule.**

  A black shadow flashed past the edge of infrared vision. Ada's real-time annotation data calmly jumped at the side of the frame: [Target: Soap-Vulture. Attribute: Biomechanical mutant. Threat level: Low.] The thing flapped its incomplete wings composed of nanofiber—like a crumpled black musical note—and instantly vanished into the depths of the crisscrossing pipe networks.

  **Second level: the Central Control Room.**

  Dead silence. Scrapped control consoles emitted dying hisses amid arcing sparks. Pale blue holographic fragments drifted chaotically in the air—the shattered memories of experimental personnel before death, undergoing their final, utterly illogical recombination under the law of entropy increase.

  When the squad entered the core area—the "**Consciousness Ascension Pavilion**"—biological defense instincts were instantly triggered to their limits.

  Without warning, the soldier at the very front suddenly let out an inhuman scream. He had not suffered any physical attack, yet he was frantically clawing at his titanium-alloy helmet with armored fingers. His fingernails cracked in the metal seams; blood mixed with tissue fluid seeped from the edge of his visor.

  "It's writing… it's writing in my brain!"

  Peng Hong felt a sharp burning sensation transmitted from his cerebral cortex. It was not sound, but some kind of logic dead-loop forcibly loaded directly into his neural circuits, bypassing the sensory system entirely. In Ada's parsing view, countless chaotic, semantically undefinable primitive codes were frantically assaulting the soldiers' cognitive foundations.

  Above the dark grating came the violent sound of metal being squeezed and twisted.

  A colossus slowly descended from the shadows. Its silhouette presented an eerie pipa-lute shape, yet was purely silicon-based arthropod structure. Cold, hard metallic sheen flowed across its pitch-black carapace. Dozens of leg-limbs like long spears scraped blinding sparks across the metal walls. Most spine-chilling was its towering tail-hook, at whose tip pulsed purple light flickered at extremely high frequency.

  "This is the '**Formless Demon**.'" Ada whispered in Ma Feili's ear, her tone so calm it bordered on cruelty. "It is the residue of a failed 'consciousness upload.' Those soul fragments that could not be digitized parasitized the experimental field's maintenance machinery. It no longer possesses biological warmth—it is merely a segment of error code with physical lethality."

  In the footage, Peng Hong's face was pale as paper. Suppressing his nausea, he tremblingly activated the mech's forced neural blockade. Visual signals instantly degraded to monotone grayscale. He could only see the silicon-based monster nimbly leaping across the ceiling. With every flash of its tail-hook, another soldier lost consciousness in undignified convulsions, collapsing like bags of garbage into pools of blood.

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  "Retreat… all units retreat!" Peng Hong's voice was fragmented, carrying the sobbing tone of impending collapse.

  At the instant of charging out of the experimental field, he input the authorization command on the terminal with trembling fingers. In his eyes flickered a near-desperate, pre-mortem biological madness.

  "Requesting orbital strike. Coordinates: Sector S-9-Theta. Launch thermonuclear fusion bomb."

  Three minutes later, the cloud layer was violently torn apart.

  A searing, absolutely pure white light pierced through the heavy dust clouds. The experimental field, the spire, and that carapace deity that had lurked in the shadows for a century—all were instantly vaporized at temperatures of tens of millions of degrees. The glare of the thermonuclear fusion bomb erased all logical chaos, returning all collapsed semantics to the most primordial entropy.

  ***

  The holographic projection dissipated like smoke. The hot wind of the Scorched Fault once again filled the senses.

  Ada turned her head. The data flow in her pupils had calmed, presenting a profound, utterly unbiased cold stillness.

  "Peng Hong thought he had eliminated the threat, but he only erased one manifestation form of information." She checked her system status—logic core running steadily, energy reserves sufficient. "The interference wave that monster emitted was the most basic breath of the 'Void.' When information loses the logic that carries it, chaos gives birth to false gods."

  She looked at Ma Feili. Her silver casing reflected an eternally unchanging halo under the blazing sun.

  "Now, Ma Feili, are you ready to contact the true 'Void'?"

  ---

  The wind and sand of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault rhythmically struck the alloy shell of the refuge. This frequency was automatically filtered in Ada's auditory compensation module into a set of dull white noise.

  Ada stood beside the holographic projector. Deep within her pupils, ghostly blue light-streams pulsed—the linear representation of system load held constant at 100%. She extended her finger; the trajectory of her fingertip tracing through the void showed not a single tremor. She precisely cut open the encryption layer of the archive titled *Black Feather: The Echo of H-4N Star Stream*.

  "On the macroscopic scale where entropy increase is irreversible, the biological brain's sampling rate of reality always takes priority over stellar collapse." Ada's tone was so steady it approached vacuum, devoid of any rhetorical coloring. "These samples exhibit typical cognitive deflection: they attempted to rebuild illusory order upon logical ruins, but this only accelerates their own collapse."

  The light-screen reorganized in the absolutely still air.

  The Great Migration Era, the fortieth century. The light of the Cassiopeia-Σ Sector presented a morbid deep purple due to redshift. Instructor **Han** stood before the porthole of "Orion-9" Mining Station; his silhouette was stretched extremely long by stellar radiation.

  "His auditory cortex has completely necrotized." Ada pointed to the miniaturized seam arranged in a silver matrix at the back of Han's skull. "'**Linghu**' is an illegal subspace consciousness fluid, originally designed as a temporary neural enhancement plugin for miners. It could encode atomic vibrations directly into semantic information, replacing damaged senses. But in Han, it became an upper-level substitution—within six stellar cycles, he no longer 'heard' sound. Instead, he was performing high-frequency calculations on the universe, interpreting every radiation pulse as 'whispers of deities,' eavesdropping and calculating the psychology of others."

  The frame switched. Red code cascaded like a waterfall—the final self-destructive formatting of the Linghu AI before algorithmic failure.

  "When the algorithm predicted that heat death was the inevitable destination, it chose to zero out, to avoid meaningless computational loops." A series of data indicators swept across Ada's retina. "But Han's biological instinct refused this interruption. Driven by the illusory survival rights represented by credit points, he attempted to forcibly simulate the divine auditory domain using retinal afterimages—a usurpation of underlying logic. This directly triggered a comprehensive collapse of the feedback chain."

  The projection of the audit banquet unfolded. Molecules of synthetic alcohol suspended in the air at extremely high concentration. The angles at which the instructors bent their spines presented a mechanical compliance as they stuffed faintly glowing chips into the gaps of the Education Commissioner's magnetic boots. It was a highly coordinated instinct based on greed.

  However, in Han's sensory world, the universe was an absolutely still silent film.

  When the Education Commissioner projected the inquiry about "phonon activity" on the screen, Han's neural link underwent catastrophic deflection: the greed-logic concerning "wealth" in his mind forcibly coupled with the erroneous algorithm of "simulated hearing." He mistakenly believed that peddling black-market contraband could earn "divine favor," thereby repairing his auditory domain.

  "Sir, this 'eighth-generation enhanced version' is the finest product…"

  In the footage, Han screamed. Having lost the auditory closed-loop feedback, his vocal cord vibration frequency was extremely disordered—like blunt heavy metal dragging across scorched earth. His face wore an almost manic sycophancy, eyes bloodshot and fanatical, completely oblivious to the frozen dead-silence space around him.

  "Before the highest audit official, he attempted to peddle a vulgar stimulant capable of destroying the nervous system." Ada closed this waveform-distorted record. The blue light in her pupils did not ripple in the slightest. "A典型案例 of semantic collapse: after the compensation protocol fails, biological communication degrades into random fluctuations amid interstellar dust."

  The light-screen jumped, switching to the cold-silence archive of Kepler-186f.

  "Another sample: Archive Administrator **Zhu Ziqing**." Ada pointed at the micro-mechanical device blinking a red dot on the ceiling. "Long-term loneliness and resource-plundering desire led him to establish a self-consistent wrong view. He regarded a maintenance drone—whose power system had failed, retaining only basic collection logic—as his sole 'confession object.' He believed that by confiding all secrets to this fragment of code, he could obtain supernatural feedback from the void, even reverse entropy increase."

  In his fanatical delirium, Zhu Ziqing revealed the precise coordinates of the hidden energy crystal cores. When he discovered the ventilation duct was empty—the drone had long been reclaimed by the system—that wail echoed through the refuge's speakers, its waveform sharp and fragmented.

  Ada waved her hand, gathering all the light-screens. Outside the window, the radiation cloud masses of the Scorched Fault were undergoing disordered Brownian motion.

  "Ma Feili, the data model has closed its loop." Ada turned her head; her eyes were like two constant sensors. "Even when armed with the most advanced neural components, human greed and madness remain that antiquated, inefficient, error-ridden primitive code. Entropy is increasing. This biological deflection has never been corrected—it will only generate more noise, until total annihilation."

  She remained still for 0.5 seconds, completing the final self-check of her logic core.

  "Archive demonstration complete. Cognitive bias excluded. Now, commencing calculation of the optimal vector path through the radiation zone."