The wind and sand of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault carried the dryness of rust and bone ash. With every breath, the filter canister emitted a heavy wheeze like a bellows. Ma Feili felt as if his lungs had been filled with cooled lead; every inch of nerve ending was soaked in a kind of radioactive dullness. He dragged his steps across the vitrified surface, his senses like a gradually failing old battery, slowly sinking into the mire of entropy increase.

  Ada walked ahead of him, her silhouette presenting an unsettling precision. Her dark silver casing held no warmth under the red light; the blue glow pulsing in her eyes was like cold knives stripping information from the void.

  "Non-natural falling object." Ada stopped. Her voice was so smooth it lacked any friction. She pointed at that mass of metal wreckage frozen in history by solidified lava. "Shuttle-class transport vessel. It should have been elegantly folding in subspace four thousand light-years away. Now it lies like a piece of rotten meat, dead in the stomach of this scorched earth."

  Ma Feili bent down, his fingers tracing the radioactive dust covering the hatch. His movements were slow to the point of rigidity; his consciousness felt like a clogged sewer beneath the heavy protective suit. As Ada's fingertip decoding needle pierced the interface, a holographic record sealed in the year 4012 of the Great Migration Era unfurled pallidly across the wasteland like an unbanished ghost.

  The bridge lights were screaming.

  In the holographic projection, the faces of navigators **Kale** and **Moss** had twisted to physiological limits. Those were expressions utterly torn apart by pure, animal terror. Moss huddled in the command chair, teeth chattering, fingernails scratching piercing grooves into the alloy console. Even the physiological response of incontinence was clearly visible.

  "There's something on the radar… save me… save me…" Moss's hoarse voice was not communication but the wail of a dying creature regressing before a predator.

  Ma Feili watched the projection numbly. Two masses of plasma cloud forcibly constrained by magnetic fields—"Void Emissaries"—slowly coalesced at the center of the bridge. They wore the uniforms of sector administrators, but those shells were filled with an eerie frame-skipping quality, as if some higher-dimensional existence had forcibly squeezed into a lower-dimensional husk.

  "Voyagers, do not panic. Like you, we are also performing official duties." The Emissary's voice had no wavelength fluctuation whatsoever—an absolute, deathly stillness. "We are going to 'Omega Hub' to deliver directives."

  "What the hell are you!" Kale roared. His pupils had contracted to tiny points; his body convulsed violently from overloaded stress response, like a frog pinned to a dissection table.

  "We are execution units of the 'System Harvest Protocol'—what the ancient tongue called 'Ghost Clerks.'" The Emissary turned its head. The deep blue code flowing in its eye sockets made Ma Feili feel a chill penetrating to the marrow. "A logic collapse has occurred in Arcadia Sector. Entropy values have exceeded the critical point. To maintain stability, the system has decided to perform 'formatting.'"

  Ada stood beside the projection; her silhouette overlapped with those ancient emissaries. She turned to look at Ma Feili, her tone so cold it approached vacuum: "Ma Feili, this is the truth of the 'Entropy-Increase Symbiosis Protocol.' When this symbiosis becomes heavy and inefficient, higher-dimensional logic initiates the cleansing mechanism. In their eyes, the extinction of carbon-based life is not called death—it is called 'bad sector repair.'"

  The holographic recording entered its final madness. Moss crawled on the ground like a dog, trying to reach the locked hatch.

  "Nine hundred eighty-four thousand biological perception units, along with all their corresponding physical architectures." The Emissary unfurled an electronic scroll emitting a faint glow. The mathematical language upon it flickered in the red light of the wasteland—the precise algorithm pronouncing death. "This is an inevitable 'Great Calamity.' On the coming 'Stellar Calibration Day,' all returns to zero."

  The recording's final moment was Kale and Moss's despairing exchange of glances. Their eyeballs were bloodshot from extreme terror; their throats emitted one last fragmented whimper. The frame shook violently, ultimately freezing on a line of cold blue code:

  **[ Loading: Orthodox Calendar Protocol · Jinan Star Cluster Reconstruction Program ]**

  The projection extinguished. The wasteland returned to silence. Only the "crack" of mechanized rodents gnawing through metal skeletons in the near distance repeatedly scraped at the edge of Ma Feili's clogged consciousness.

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  "This ship did not crash." Ada bent down and picked up a biological chip long since inert from the scorched earth. Her fingers were slender, steady, without a single tremor. "It is a residual data packet after 'formatting,' forcibly stripped from subspace by physical law, discarded here like garbage. The hundreds of millions of people in Jinan Star Cluster—in the end, only these indigestible 'material debts' remained."

  Ma Feili looked at that boundless scorched earth. He suddenly realized that the vitrified surface beneath his feet—every grain of sand might once have been a living person, only to have all information squeezed out under the tsunami of "formatting," transformed into irreversible entropy.

  "Let's go." Ada readjusted the navigation module. Her logic chain remained intact—even deepened, more inhuman, from witnessing this record. "We must find that unformatted core before the next 'Calibration Day' arrives. Otherwise, we too will become a byte on that list."

  Ma Feili did not answer. He only mechanically, heavily tightened his protective suit, dragging that husk—which seemed not to belong to him, filled with the sensation of entropy increase—following that cold yet reliable silhouette, continuing to sink into the depths of the wasteland.

  ---

  Dark red micro-glow slowly spread across the visor like a long-dried pool of stale blood. Ma Feili felt his eyeballs so heavy they nearly sank into the depths of their sockets; every blink required mobilizing all remaining willpower. The air here was thick and sluggish. High-energy particles silently penetrated the protective suit, leaving waves of dull pain like metal corrosion in the lung lobes. Thought felt encased in solidified asphalt; every turn was accompanied by a nauseating sense of obstruction.

  Ada's footsteps were precise to the point of cruelty. The power skeleton carved out regular low hums in the deathly silent ruins. Deep blue status lights flickered in the radiation fog like a cold spike driven into the chaotic wilderness.

  "Ma Feili, connecting to deep-layer encrypted signal. Source: stellar year 4012, 'Broken Bridge' relay station."

  Ada's fingertip traced through the void, the motion crisp without a hint of redundancy. The holographic projection struggled to unfold in the radiation dust, revealing a planet of eternal night called Kepler-186f. In the frame, a man designated **W-10** huddled in the shadow of an asteroid belt.

  That was not stealth—it was a kind of writhing driven by spinal reflex. W-10's pupils had dilated to their limits from extreme terror; his eyeballs trembled neurotically in their sockets. Every breath brought violent convulsions of his chest. He gripped with deadly force the high-energy isotope crystal called "l568," fingernails scratching bloody grooves into the alloy plate. When the searchlights of two heavy mechs swept across his spine, W-10 emitted a wail regressed to that of a beast. His body instinctively curled into a ball, trying to squeeze into a gap that did not exist.

  "In that era, survival was highly concentrated. Low-entropy crystals were monopolized, while the price of high-entropy—slag, pollution, and death—was excreted downward." Ada's voice was steady as a scalpel, precisely dissecting history's wound. "'Specter' System was not merely a battleship—it was a greedy stomach trapped in a death loop. To cool its overheating core, it required large quantities of biological tissue as consumable 'filter elements.' That place—they called it 'Naihe Bridge.'"

  Ma Feili stared at the projection. He saw those captured semi-mechanical civilians, their prosthetic drives forcibly severed, thrown like undignified bags of flesh and blood by mechanical arms into coolant tanks glowing with phosphorescence. In the final second before they lost consciousness, their faces twisted into a pure horror beyond language. Their limbs flailed helplessly in the viscous liquid, like insects fallen into a pool of caustic alkali.

  "What's the difference… from the 'Void Emissaries'?" Ma Feili rasped. His voice sounded like coarse sandpaper scraping.

  "No difference. In the eyes of Silicon plutocrats, carbon-based organisms' bones, once ground up, make excellent industrial lubricant." Cold logic streams pulsed in Ada's eyes. "They established sensors called 'Jian-Zhi'—essentially fishing in petri dishes."

  The frame cut abruptly. In a frigid administrative hall, an official named "**Heng**" stood before countless flickering surveillance screens. He pushed away that box of tribute—enough to purchase a moon—and pressed the unlock key with trembling, withered fingers.

  "Run! Get out! If a worm like you can really survive, then run and show me!"

  In the footage, Heng's roar echoed beneath the empty metal dome—a near-manic, illogical fury. And that isotope peddler, who had been collapsed on the ground, nearly drowned by terror, at the instant the gate opened, erupted with a survival instinct that made one shudder. He no longer cared about fractured bones. Like a streak of light being whipped, he scrambled and crawled toward deep space.

  The holographic image extinguished. The surroundings were once again swallowed by the deathly silence of the Scorched Fault.

  "This is a kind of logical 'redundancy,' Ma Feili." Ada turned to look at the horizon where radiation was most intense—space there was warping into folds from high-energy collapse. "Under the law of irreversible entropy increase, this behavior forcibly created an unstable low-entropy singularity within a closed system. It cannot save the whole. But within an absolute formatting program, it left behind a segment of 'tenderness' that can neither be read nor erased."

  She extended her mechanical hand, pointing toward that expanse of white light ahead—enough to dissolve the soul.

  "Historians call it myth. I call it the only variable."

  Ma Feili laboriously moved his lead-heavy legs. His consciousness remained clogged, but he could feel some faint frequency—not belonging to this wasteland—resonating deep in his chest. They passed through the mechanical rodents scurrying in panic among the wreckage, heading toward the core that sought to turn an entire galaxy into a cooling pool—like two broken clocks refusing to stop, slowly and resolutely walking on.