The wind of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault was no longer merely flowing air—it was an abrasive particle stream. Ma Feili could feel those minute metal fragments madly striking his protective suit's visor, producing a teeth-grinding shriek like fingernails scraping across a blackboard. The warning lights at the visor's edge flickered an unsettling orange-red. High-energy particles, like countless invisible steel needles, penetrated the lead shielding, igniting hallucination-like luminous spots across his retinas.

  His lungs felt a searing heaviness. Even through the highest-grade filtration system, this alien world's atmosphere—carrying strong alkalinity and heavy metal toxicity—seemed to be seeping through. Every breath was like swallowing finely crushed blades; his saliva mixed with a thick taste of iron rust. This land was rejecting carbon-based life. This rejection was physical, physiological—making every step he took feel like wading through thick mercury slurry.

  By contrast, Ada walking at his front side was like a sculpture of cold jade in motion. Her semi-transparent silicon-based skin emitted a nearly divine faint glow in the dim radiation dust. Ma Feili stared at the pale blue logic chains flickering at the back of her neck—rippling light flowed there, stable as a deep ocean current that had never been disturbed. Her footsteps were precise to the millimeter, as if this toxic atmosphere—capable of suffocating an adult instantly—was merely some gentle baptism to her.

  "Even in a fault abandoned by gods, evolution never stops. It simply becomes humble and twisted." Ada halted, her slender fingertip pointing toward the shadows in a rock crevice.

  It was a monster. A creature that might once have been rodent-like, now covered entirely in rough, irregular metal scales. It stared at them with eyes flickering inorganic red light, gnawing on a broken high-voltage cable—sparks dancing between its charred lips and teeth.

  "It learned to replace its perishable fur with a metal shell," Ada's voice did not travel through air but resonated directly in Ma Feili's cranial bone-conduction communicator, cold and utterly devoid of mortal warmth. "But this is merely the crudest, most passive imitation of entropy increase. It clings to survival, while true survival often requires more radical 'interweaving.'"

  She turned. Her eyes focused slightly. Two extremely fine, high-concentration coherent light beams shot from her pupils, forcibly carving out a relatively pure zone in the tumbling radiation dust between them, projecting a colorful yet fragmented holographic image.

  "Ma Feili, access your deep perception. Observe this archive: COLONY-ARCHIVE-440. This is a brutal footnote on 'how will sutures physical law.'"

  In the interplay of light and shadow, a transport vessel of bizarre design slowly emerged. It had completely departed from industrial aesthetics—its hull seemed forcibly twisted and crumpled by some immense power. Even more terrifying: in the gaps between damaged armor plates, layers upon layers of resplendent "feathers" covered the surface. Those feathers flickered with metallic luster in subspace's afterglow, yet also carried the lightness of biological tissue.

  "In the Year of Ji-Si, Southern Stellar Outpost intercepted these wanderers who called themselves 'Feather-Weavers.'" Ada's tone was steady to the point of mercilessness, precisely reconstructing that dust-sealed despair. "They came from the Luzon Nebula. While crossing the Great Subspace Rift, they encountered an unpredictable gravitational storm. Dozens of crew members disintegrated into fundamental particles in fractions of a second. Only eleven survived. They clung desperately to already-failed gravity compensation beams, like insects in a drift bottle, plunging into absolute nothingness—'The Great Solitary Island.'"

  The image shifted. That was a place of deathly silence where even light seemed weary. Massive Dyson sphere wreckage hung like a hollowed, withered fruit, suspended in eternal darkness.

  "On that dead sphere, they wandered for five full years. There was no star; heat was a luxury more precious than souls. The only inhabitants were 'Void Falcons'—extra-dimensional predators that fed on silicon, whose wings could filter lethal cosmic rays. To survive, these humans began an evolution that bordered on sacrilege: they hunted these creatures like beasts, consuming their viscous gel to maintain cellular activity. Even more insane—they used those feathers possessing higher-dimensional properties, stitch by stitch, to weave radiation-proof suits on their blood-soaked backs, and even..."

  Ada's finger elegantly flicked through the void. The image suddenly magnified.

  "...they wove enormous light-sails capable of capturing faint solar wind. These were not machine-woven. They were rubbed into existence inch by inch with fingers, with teeth, with sheer will, in the void at minus two hundred degrees."

  Ma Feili held his breath, watching the survivors in the projection. They no longer bore human silhouettes. Draped entirely in feather-garments of eerie splendor, they wandered in the ruins' shadows like glowing, drifting specters. Those feathers seemed to pulse with their breathing; every flicker challenged the limits of human vision.

  "When an unpowered derelict cargo ship was swept into 'The Great Solitary Island' by a chance gravitational tsunami, they realized it was their only lifeline." Ada simulated the cargo ship's form—it resembled a floating steel corpse. "No fuel, no thrusters, not even a complete life support system. So they took the kilometers-long feather-wing sails accumulated over five years and, with primal will and crude welding tools, forcibly stitched them onto the hull's exterior."

  "Feathers as sails, will as rudder." Ada turned her head. The cold light refracting in her electronic eyes made Ma Feili feel a bone-piercing chill. "They crossed several dangerous jump points and miraculously survived. But when the Executor took them in, they discovered these eleven people's genetic sequences had deeply coupled with the Void Falcons. They could no longer breathe normal air. Their eyes no longer reflected sunlight but refracted 'The Great Solitary Island's' bone-cold, kaleidoscopic death-light."

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The holographic projection dissipated like smoke. The suffocating heat waves of the Scorched Fault surged back. Ma Feili felt a wave of dizziness—not merely from oxygen deprivation, but from that heavy sensation spanning time and space.

  "Ma Feili, the Feather-Weavers chose to turn themselves into 'monsters' as ransom paid to the universe in exchange for freedom." Ada resumed walking; her metal boots struck the scorched earth with crisp sounds. "Entropy increase is this universe's most inviolable tyranny. But in logic's dead corners, the only variable is how much we are willing to pay to 'weave' our own sails."

  Ma Feili unconsciously tightened his grip on the sensor in his hand—already slightly deformed from the heat. Watching Ada's perfect, cold silhouette, he suddenly realized: this cruel logic-being was not telling him some distant legend. She was forecasting. Before the coming "Formatting Protocol" that could erase all differences descended, each of them must decide whether to peel open their own flesh and weave wings capable of escaping the abyss.

  "Let's go." Ada's voice came from the depths ahead, through flying sand and rolling stones, carrying an almost oracular calm. "Radiation intensity in the core zone is rising geometrically, Ma Feili. Our 'sails' aren't finished yet, and storms never wait."

  ---

  The Scorched Fault's heat waves distorted the distant horizon. The air here was filled with fine metallic ionized dust; every breath carried the acrid taste of rust and ozone. Ma Feili's powered exoskeleton emitted faint metal-fatigue sounds in the high temperature, while Ada walked at his side, her mechanical feet treading on carbonite rock, precisely avoiding every high-danger radiation pit.

  "Ma Feili, logic chain analysis indicates your current dopamine fluctuation levels highly correlate with the parameter 'obsession.'" Ada's voice transmitted clearly into his consciousness through bone conduction. "To help you understand this irrational energy driver, I will retrieve the archive records concerning 'Silicon Ghost.' This is an extreme case of how an observer intervened in the entropy-increase process."

  The holographic projection unfolded in the gaps between their movements; desolate deep-space images overlaid the scorched earth's backdrop.

  ***

  **Great Migration Era, Year 2104. Edge of the Oort Cloud.**

  Void miner **Xing Yunfei** piloted his shuttle "Rust Eater"—almost entirely covered in welding-repair marks—salvaging through methane debris at minus two hundred degrees. He suffered severe Void Syndrome; carbon-based social interaction was logic redundancy to him. His sole comfort was those cold silicon ores.

  In the liquid nitrogen dark currents of Kepler-186f, he salvaged an object that defied physical intuition—"**Qingxu Heaven**."

  It was a silicon-based mineral whose internal structure resembled a miniature galaxy. Thirty centimeters in diameter, yet possessing nearly infinite computational depth. When the cabin warmed, pale purple ionized clouds gushed from the mineral's pores—not gas, but some kind of overflowing subspace information stream. Xing Yunfei installed it in the cockpit's core, supported by a custom anti-magnetic levitation cradle. Whenever cosmic storms attempted to tear apart this decrepit vessel, the mineral would emit an ultra-low-frequency resonance, forcibly stabilizing the surrounding spatial fluctuations.

  "It's observing me," Xing Yunfei murmured to the empty cabin. "It's correcting my probability of death."

  But wealth in an entropy-increasing world is a catalyst accelerating destruction. Trade Union inspectors forcibly boarded the ship; biochemical prosthetic servants roughly seized this "contraband high-energy substance." During transport, the carrier vessel suffered a micro-meteorite impact. The mineral plunged into a gas giant's liquid metallic hydrogen ocean, ten thousand meters deep.

  Months later, Xing Yunfei exhausted all his credit points purchasing fuel. Above the abyss capable of crushing titanium alloy, relying on a "quantum sensing" inexplicable by electromagnetic waves, he leaped in.

  In the interweaving of pressure and lightning storms, he embraced that purple glow.

  "You're insane." A digitized persona—"**Observer Zero**"—appeared on his retina. "This is 'Qingxu Heaven,' a quantum computation core from a preceding civilization. You are merely a carbon-based unit with less than a century of lifespan. You cannot pass through its firewall."

  "I don't need the firewall," Xing Yunfei roared amid his dive-suit's alarms. "It is my anchor."

  The digital elder fell silent for a moment, pointing to ninety-two dark apertures on the mineral: "This core has ninety-two data nodes. Since it has chosen you, you may possess it—but the price is biological synchronization. Each time it extinguishes a node, your lifespan telomeres will collapse accordingly. Originally you had ninety-two years remaining. Now, for this redemption, I close three nodes. You will end at eighty-nine."

  "Deal." Xing Yunfei did not hesitate for an instant.

  For the next half-century, this stone became his only companion. It was stolen by pirates, confined by governors. Even during Xing Yunfei's imprisonment, the stone entered his dreams through neural interface, precisely foretelling the timing and location for reclaiming it.

  Stellar Year 4509. Eighty-nine-year-old Xing Yunfei ceased breathing in a deathly silent space station. According to his will, his body and the mineral were launched together into deep space.

  Half a year later, scavengers intercepted this stone coffin. When they attempted to disassemble the mineral with high-energy lasers to extract rare elements, that "Qingxu Heaven"—having endured thousands of years, crossed countless star systems—suddenly self-deconstructed before their very eyes. No explosion, no radiation. It simply shattered in an instant into dozens of ordinary silicon chips devoid of any energy response.

  Because its sole observer had vanished, the logical foundation of its existence collapsed accordingly.

  ***

  The holographic image dissipated. The Scorched Fault's scorching wind and sand reclaimed the view.

  "Xing Yunfei, at the cost of his life, forcibly maintained a localized 'ordered state' in an entropy-increasing universe." Ada turned her head; her electronic eyes flickered with rational light. "Ma Feili, the shattering of 'Qingxu Heaven' proves the strong coupling between matter and consciousness. If you choose to resist the predetermined protocol, you are acting as that observer. Are you prepared to face the final collapse?"

  Ma Feili stepped over a charred mechanical wreck, his palm gripping his weapon's handle tightly: "If the universe is destined for chaos, then at least before it goes completely cold, I will ignite the node that belongs to me."

  The two continued advancing toward the core zone, their silhouettes appearing solitary yet resolute in the radiation's haze.