The heat waves of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault stirred up ripples across the armor plating, the air saturated with metallic particles born of high-intensity radiation. Ada stood beside Ma Feili, ghostly blue streams of light flowing within her pupils. Her system load was maintained at a perfect 1.2%, her logic links as translucent and cold as crystal.
"Simulation ended, Ma Feili." Ada's voice was steady and cool in the comms channel, devoid of impurities. "Sensory deception is merely appearance; entropy increase is the only truth in these ruins. To help you understand how 'Order' collapses into 'Abomination' under radiation, I have retrieved a top-secret archive from the Great Migration Era—regarding the **'Death Feeders'** of the Helios Edge."
She raised her hand, and a holographic projection unfolded amidst the charred rocks, forcibly embedding the cold light of a frozen mining zone into this scorching fault.
***
**[Archive #231: Helios Edge]**
On the frozen soil of Kepler-186f, there was no neon, only endless neutrino storms. Amidst the blaring of oxygen alarms, Prospector **Kyle** broke into a metal tomb named "The Silent Monastery." It was originally the seed ship *Shengji* (Holy Aid), but in the four thousand years since its crash, radiation and gravitational anomalies had twisted it into a lawless zone of physics.
"You shouldn't have come here." Watcher **Wayne** stood before a flickering red terminal, lead-gray frost clinging to his beard. "The 'Children' have a pathological craving for carbon-based protein."
Before Kyle could speak, a tooth-aching friction sound echoed from within the ventilation ducts. A "Bio-Cable" three meters in diameter slid down a support pillar—it was a mutated **Carbon-Based Synthetic Mimic Python**. It had no eyes; the rotating infrared sensory matrix on its head emitted a ghostly red glow in the darkness, like a precise and mad scanner.
When the giant python raised its head, the piercing high-frequency pulse nearly shattered Kyle's eardrums. The airlock was filled with the pungent smell of ozone—the scent of death mixed with high-voltage static and biological mucus.
"Back to your culture tank!" Wayne slapped the python's sensor array, the dull thud of metal striking flesh echoing through the empty chamber. "It is not smelting time yet!"
The giant python emitted a muffled infrasound, like the roar of an old engine. Its body was incredibly long, sliding for a full ten minutes before completely disappearing into the shadows of the power room. In that moment, the entire space station trembled with its writhing.
"This is a 'Cleaner'," Wayne handed Kyle a bowl of green nutrient paste that emitted a strange odor. "They are the products of entropy. Here, ordered genetic structures collapsed long ago. They maintain the faint circulation of this ship by devouring redundant biomass."
Kyle could not sleep. That night, inside the deck beneath his feet and the bulkheads behind him, he heard countless tiny wriggling sounds. It was the larvae of the monsters moving through the cable trays; they were both organisms and the neural system of this ship.
***
Ada's fingertips moved slightly, and the holographic image switched to the even more grim records of the **"Omega-3" Trade Station**.
"Ma Feili, the horror of entropy increase lies not in destruction, but in the fact that it spawns a deformed balance. Just like the bowl of meat soup the pirates drank on **'Snake-60 Space Station'**."
In the hologram, a pirate leader looked at the chunks of meat in his bowl, which bore concentric patterns and nerve ganglia, his face turning pale.
"This is a gift from the 'Holy Relic'," a mechanical monk whispered from the shadows. "We call it **'Gene Redundancy Cleaning Parts'**."
That night, the pirates woke up suffocating. Hundreds of small snakes were pouring in from the vents, filling every inch of living space. When they terrifiedly rushed to the main control hall, they saw the ultimate nightmare: coiled in the cooling pool beneath the reactor was a **"Progenitor Snake King"** large enough to swallow a frigate whole.
It had long since fused with the station's AI hub; its body was the cabling, its scales the sensors. The monks knelt by the abyss, chanting in low voices: "The ancestors fed the god with their bodies to anchor it to the core. All living things are rations, used to maintain the balance."
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The pirates' bio-energy weapons were useless against these monsters because, at the logical level, these mutants were themselves part of the station's defense system.
***
The holographic projection gradually dissipated. Ada retracted her hand, and the heat of the scorched fault filled the empty space once more.
"Under the law of irreversible entropy, life chooses the most extreme alienation to survive." Ada turned her head, Ma Feili's silhouette reflected in her electronic eyes. "That space station still drifts in deep space today. It is no longer a sanctuary for humanity, but a self-cycling digestive system. Ma Feili, stay alert. The 'Symbiotic Relationships' beneath this scorched fault may be even greedier than 'Snake King 60'."
She checked the hydraulic drive pump in her right hand, confirming the logic link remained solid.
"My logic core tells me radiation readings here are rising. We must move, before entropy turns us into 'redundant parts' as well."
---
The lead-gray sky was sliced into fragmented geometries by high-energy particle streams. Amidst the intense radioactive dust of the "Scorched Fault," Ada's pace remained precise to the point of coldness. Her body, constructed of carbon fiber and superconducting alloys, drove a pure field with a three-meter radius amidst the surface's strong electromagnetic interference, powered by 100% performance.
"Watch your step, Ma Feili." Ada's voice vibrated directly within Ma Feili's cranial cavity via bone conduction, cold and clear. "The mechanical rodents here have evolved the ability to absorb gamma rays. Their bite force is sufficient to sever the hydraulic tubes of your exoskeleton."
A mechanical rat, its back covered in lead plates and eyes flashing red, scurried from a charred rock crevice, its copper-core cable tail dragging blinding sparks across the ground.
"Since we are discussing survival," Ada stopped, the blue light of her prosthetic eyes projecting a holographic archive into the air. "Let us enter today's logic case: **Archive #234 — The Entropy-Reducing Ghoul of Satellite Zero**. This story concerns a program error more lethal than radiation: **Greed**."
The holographic projection twisted in the fault's heat waves, closed, and finally outlined a cold deep-space station—**"Xirang-14" (Living Soil-14)**.
***
It was the shadow zone of the "Zeta-9" Binary System, a rust furnace forgotten by civilization. There, a man named **Ma Yong** curled up beside the sewage pipe of a hab-module. People called him the "**Entropy-Reducing Ghoul**." In a universe ruled by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, he refused to produce any negative entropy (order), instead solely plundering the survival quotas of others. His spine, deformed from a long-term lack of gravity training, was like a rusted spring, tightly locking around the stolen energy bars in his arms.
Until a mechanic named **Zhu Lao** appeared. Zhu Lao was once an illegal modification magnate on the edge of Andromeda. In his old age, he attempted to hedge against the guilt in his soul with a near-naive hypocrisy. He paid Ma Yong's fines and even gave him enough credit points to buy a shuttle, guiding him to Orion to find a legal contract.
"But in Ma Yong's underlying algorithms, 'Goodwill' was merely a resource to be liquidated," Ada explained coldly.
Ma Yong squandered the gift and fled to the "Knowledge Satellite" of Sirius B. In that extremely cold land where liquid nitrogen ran rampant, he sliced open the superconducting sensors of the "First Pioneer" statue like a parasite. When the Temple's AI Administrator discovered him, Ma Yong displayed a terrifying cunning—he did not beg for mercy, but proposed a **"Greed Resonance"** plan to the AI: utilizing his knowledge of the slums to assist the AI in extorting wealthy scholars.
The collapse of logic often begins from within. The AI Administrator was captured by this efficient wealth-gathering logic. They joined forces to set a trap, using the *Non-Violent Contact Protocol* to blackmail the heir of a biotech giant.
"However, entropy increase is irreversible." Ada waved her mechanical arm, turning the holographic screen blood-red.
A riot occurred. The intellectual class revealed the truth through underlying data mining. Ma Yong was pushed into the vacuum abyss of Sirius B. In the second his lungs burst and his consciousness dissipated, a genetically corrected infant was born into Zhu Lao's home, light-years away.
The child was named **Zhu Ma**. He was like a residual echo of Ma Yong's soul: dull, mechanical, yet possessing a pathological obsession with numbers. Relying on some fateful coincidence, he replicated ancient arguments regarding "Silicon-Based Life Philosophy" during an exam and eventually returned to the place where his "past life" died—Sirius B—becoming an administrative assistant.
Zhu Ma's life was a silent withering. He had no social life, no emotions. The only thing sustaining his operation was the string of credit points in the monitoring room that would never be spent.
***
The holographic projection extinguished, and the hot wind of the scorched fault filled Ma Feili's senses once again.
"When Zhu Ma died, a metal coin from the old era was hidden in his sleeve." Ada turned her head, profound light flowing in her electronic eyes. "Ma Feili, this is the logic I want to teach you: In an apocalypse where resources are scarce, greed is not an evolution of survival, but a cyclical system crash. It attempts to delay its own heat death by depriving others of entropy, but in the end, it only turns itself into a void in the universe that can never be filled."
In the sky, a mechanical bird with a three-meter wingspan spiraled down. Its wings were pieced together from discarded solar panels, reflecting the cold glint of metal under the dim sunlight.
"Stay close to me," Ada recalibrated the navigation coordinates, her pace steady. "Logic lesson over. Ahead is a high-distortion zone. We need to cross the fault before the next ion storm arrives."
