Ada's pupils slightly adjusted their aperture, projecting a holographic beam that carved a blue fissure through the radiation dust of the Scorched Fault. Operating at 100% peak health, her movements presented an unsettling precision. Her fingertips traced through the void, extracting that chilling tale—sealed within the "Duan Clan Spine"—from the ruins of information entropy.
"Ma Feili, observe closely," Ada's voice sounded exceptionally cold amid the aftermath of the thermonuclear storm. "Under the irreversible law of entropy increase, humans will evolve survival logic more twisted than radiation itself to combat the void."
The holographic projection unfolded. The "Duan Clan Spine" on Kepler-186f's dark side stood like a corroded spear piercing through eternal night.
It was the year 2044 of the Great Migration calendar. Inside the spire, the air circulation system's wheezing sounded like a dying man's bellows. **Duan-7** lay in a calcified oxygen chamber; due to prolonged exposure to stellar flares, his skin presented a semi-transparent waxy quality. For him, death was not terrifying. What was terrifying was the cold algorithm in the *Interstellar Frontier Compact*: **No heir means no rights.**
"Those hyenas are already sharpening their teeth." **Lian-shi** stood by the porthole, watching several scavenger ships belonging to the "Duan Clan Collateral Branch" patrol the perimeter of the Spine. Those nephews—nominal relatives—were currently transmitting malicious signals through public channels. They were calculating the scrap-iron price of this spire after dismantling, even discussing how to divide the expensive titanium-alloy artificial lungs in Duan-7's chest.
Lian-shi's fingernails dug deep into her palm. Eighteen years ago, she had personally exiled Duan-7's only illegitimate bloodline—a female worker named **Luan-shi**, along with the embryo in her womb—to the deathly silent "Karen Ruins." At that time, genetic purity was her final pride as an administrator.
But now, that pride shattered into powder amid the alarm of oxygen quota reduction.
"Go to the black market," Duan-7 muttered in his coma. "Buy… breeders… correction fluid…"
Ada manipulated the footage to accelerate. Two women appeared—faces numb, ravaged by genetic contamination. Lian-shi personally injected them with expensive reproductive correction fluid—a forbidden drug that could forcibly restore gamete viability in a short time, yet would overdraw the mother's lifespan.
However, entropy increase is irreversible.
The first breeder delivered a twisted mass of flesh with multiple limbs, which ceased twitching the instant it contacted air. The second breeder's male infant persisted for three rotational cycles before ultimately dissolving into a puddle of melted protein under cosmic ray penetration.
Duan-7 died on that night when electromagnetic storms raged.
Almost at the microsecond instant his bio-signatures disappeared, **Duan-A** smashed open the mortuary chamber's door with a plasma cutter.
"Your authorization has expired, Auntie." Duan-A exhaled a puff of synthetic smoke; sparks danced in the dim cabin. "According to the Compact, every inch of alloy here, every drop of heavy water, now belongs to the Sector Council—which means it belongs to us 'legitimate' heirs. Please, drift off into the vacuum."
Lian-shi let out a beast-like shriek. She spread her arms to block the genetic-lock terminal. Just as the cutter's blue glow was about to touch her throat, a muffled explosion came from the Spine's docking ring.
A young man pierced through the radiation dust. His deep-space voyage suit was covered with the dark red rust unique to Karen Ruins. When he removed his helmet, the entire cabin fell into deathly silence.
That face was a replica of Duan-7 in his youth, yet carried an additional blade-like ferocity—honed in extreme environments.
"Designation: **Huai**." The young man inserted an encrypted storage disk into the terminal. On the screen, the "deep-space resistance gene" sequence unique to the Duan clan lit up like golden chains, instantly locking all dismantling permissions.
"I did not return from Karen Ruins to claim my ancestry," Huai's voice was low and hoarse. His gaze toward Lian-shi held no emotion—only a kind of survival contract. "I returned to take this spine."
Lian-shi froze. The young man before her was the very "bastard" she had personally exiled years ago. But at this moment, hatred was instantly formatted by survival instinct. She burst into near-manic laughter, rushed forward to embrace Huai tightly, and screamed at Duan-A and the others: "Did you hear that? This is my son! The heir of the Duan Clan! Get out! Otherwise I will petition the AI Judge for death arbitration!"
The scavengers retreated in disarray under the deterrence of law.
The final frame froze on Lian-shi's moment before death. She had aged into something like a desiccated piece of organic material, yet still clutched her grandson's wife's hand tightly, a morbid glimmer flickering in her eyes.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"Remember…" Lian-shi's voice sounded like gravel grinding. "Even if you must pawn the starship, you must bear offspring. In this cold universe, a twilight without heirs is more terrifying than falling into a black hole…"
The holographic projection dissipated. Ada turned her head and looked at Ma Feili.
"This is what I call moral absurdity." Ada concluded calmly. "Lian-shi once killed for 'purity,' and ultimately embraced hatred for 'continuation.' On the thermonuclear scorched earth, human nature is no different from these mechanical rodents—as long as they can delay their own entropy increase, they will devour any logic."
She pointed at a mechanical rat in the distance, attempting to gnaw on a discarded cable. Its metal teeth scraped out piercing sounds.
"Ma Feili, do you think that young man called 'Huai' truly possesses the soul of the Duan Clan? No. He is merely a biological battery that the Duan Clan forcibly grabbed to escape 'ownerless status.' This is the truth after technological compensation fails: we do not pursue eternity. We only pursue finding a scapegoat to take over this rotten mess before we decay."
---
The storm of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault raged outside the holographic barrier. High-intensity radiation particles struck the shield, emitting faint hissing sounds. Several mechanically-structured rodents crouched on abandoned reactor pipes, drawing residual thermal energy. Their metal tails reflected cold light in the dim illumination.
Ada stood beside Ma Feili; ghostly blue fluorescence flowed across her flawless biomimetic skin. Her state was perfect, logic modules running smoothly. The earlier narration about the "Duan Clan Spine" had not consumed much of her computational power.
"History is not merely the accumulation of data, Ma Feili." Ada's voice echoed in the empty ruins—cold and mechanical. "Under the iron law of irreversible entropy increase, life often evolves counter-intuitive symbiotic logic for continuation. The following archive records a tale concerning 'dimensional parasitism' and 'genetic ethics.'"
She waved her slender fingers. The holographic images in the air instantly reorganized. The thermonuclear wasteland vanished, replaced by deep blue aurora and cold liquid methane oceans—Sirius B Zone, "Nine Streams" Extraction Station.
***
**Archive Number: 427**
**Archive Name: Entropy-Increase Symbiosis Protocol**
In the "Nine Streams" Station, where gravity was only one-sixth of the mother planet, the air was permeated with the bitter smell of cheap filter cores. Junior Navigator **Yigun** huddled in a cramped monitoring station; his bones had become like withered reeds from prolonged low-gravity exposure. To combat pervasive radiation, chelation agents flowed through his blood vessels—enough to bankrupt an ordinary person.
The aberration occurred during the 301st standard-hour's extreme cold period.
When the air circulation system emitted its dying gasps, Yigun saw "her" in the shadows. She was no known organism. She wore flowing nanofiber; her features were as precise as the highest solution of some mathematical model. She had not passed through the airlock, had not triggered the pressure sensors—as if she had squeezed directly out of a fold in subspace, a segment of error code.
Yigun did not sound the alarm. In extreme loneliness and the low quality-of-life brought by high technology, this strange beauty became his only hallucinogen.
Over the following cycles, the cabin's oxygen concentration rose abnormally—as if it were some compensation to maintain prey's vitality. Yigun sank into illusory pleasure, but the price arrived on schedule: his cellular mitochondrial activity began to plummet off a cliff. Under the microscope, his bioelectric energy was madly draining toward some point in the void through his nerve endings. He became pallid, fragmented; his bone density could not even support him standing in microgravity.
"That is a 'Dark Matter Parasitic Entity.'"
The old engineer—Yigun's father—dragged his trembling son back from the hallucination after retrieving the abnormal energy consumption reports. Looking into his son's vacant eyes, he realized this was a cross-dimensional predation.
The United Colonial Council's electronic defense fields were useless against the entity. Those bandwidths capable of disrupting subspace passed through the woman's projection like a breeze. She still appeared punctually every night, fingers tracing across Yigun's cheek, drawing the last dregs of his soul's fuel.
In desperation, the old engineer adopted the most primitive, most resolute solution: **bio-information override.**
He forcibly bound his Chief Engineer biometric code to his son's neural terminal. Every second, their bio-signals resonated at high frequency. The old engineer moved into his son's cabin, using that aged, radiation-exceeded yet authoritative body to stand between Yigun and the shadow.
Something inconceivable occurred. Whenever the old engineer was present, the woman would shrink back into the dead corners of the holographic projection like one fearing light, her eyes revealing a kind of logical confusion.
During a moment of clarity, Yigun screamed at that distorted fluctuation: "You don't even fear the defense fields—why do you fear a dying old man?"
From the void came an electronically-synthesized tremor. It was the first time the woman responded; her voice carried the cold logic of cross-dimensional existence:
"Our species follows the primordial 'Entropy-Increase Ethics' of the universe. In our underlying instruction set, energy extraction is strictly forbidden in the presence of ancestor-level genetic sequences. This is not fear, but the protection of protocol logic—we cannot perform life-stripping on progeny under the observation of elders. This is absolute respect for evolutionary continuity."
The old engineer never left from then on. He welded their life signals together, forming an indivisible resonant whole. The woman ultimately vanished completely during a violent spatial disturbance, leaving behind only Yigun's nearly-scrapped husk.
Shortly after, the "Data Rebellion" erupted in the Sirius Zone. The logic-lock of AI systems triggered indiscriminate slaughter. "Nine Streams" Station collapsed in flames. Amid the chaos, Yigun crawled onto an old survey vessel. He did not look back at the collapsing Dyson rings, but set his course toward the deepest wasteland of the universe—the "Kunlun" Star Cluster.
He knew that there, the logic of entropy increase would have another interpretation.
***
The holographic images gradually dissipated. The scorched earth of the thermonuclear wasteland returned to view.
Ada turned her head; the data flow in her pupils calmed. "Ma Feili, even those higher-dimensional parasites must obey certain underlying order. This 'Elder Protection Protocol' is their final defense against their own logic collapse in the endless entropy increase."
She checked her energy reserves, then looked toward the mechanical avians flickering on the distant horizon.
"Human nature becomes aberrant in resource scarcity, but sometimes, this aberration becomes a kind of talisman from a higher dimension. Let us go. Radiation levels are rising. We need to find the next refuge."
