The afterglow of the red dwarf was like a layer of dried rust, thickly smeared across the crystal desert of the scorched fault.

  Ma Feili stepped on the fractured, silicified rock layers, his boot soles making a dry, cracking sound. The air was filled with the smell of ozone generated by the friction of high-energy particles. Due to the rule of the "**Law of Irreversible Entropy**," not only was there no carbon-based vegetation on this land, but even the wind seemed heavy and sluggish.

  "Abnormal signal fluctuation detected. The waveband matches the characteristics of a 'Deep Space Relic' from the Great Migration Era." Ada's voice rang in Ma Feili's neural link, clear and stable. Her semi-mechanical body reflected a cold metallic luster under the dark red light. Her status displayed as 100% healthy, logic modules running at full speed, guiding Ma Feili to avoid the mechanical rodents that shared a symbiotic relationship with the environment—tiny things gnawing on mineral-bearing rocks in packs along the edge of the fault.

  "What is it?" Ma Feili stopped, adjusting the internal circulation pressure of his anti-radiation suit.

  "A top-secret archive, Number 297." A miniature stream of data flashed across Ada's eyes. She raised her hand, and a holographic projection unfolded on the charred ground, reflecting the image of a desolate planet named K-442. "The archive title is: *The Withered Prisoner Under the Red Dwarf*."

  As Ada narrated, a cold memory sealed away for three thousand years was slowly peeled open before Ma Feili's eyes.

  ***

  **[Archive File 297: The Crystalline Parasite]**

  It was a story about a void scavenger named **Kyle**. In that era, when dignity was lighter than a vacuum, Kyle discovered a fingernail-sized, translucent "**Crystal Louse**" in a crevice of the planetary crust on Planet K-442.

  "That is a Silicon-Carbon Composite Parasitic Organism." Ada pointed to the miniature creature in the projection, which possessed an obsidian texture, her tone calm to the point of cruelty. "It maintains a breath-like frequency in a vacuum near absolute zero. Out of a pathological loneliness and contempt for regulations, Kyle did not report it. Instead, he wrapped it in multiple layers of high-polymer sealing foil and hid it in the base of a signal tower at an abandoned probe station."

  Ma Feili looked at Kyle's face in the projection, sunken and ravaged by radiation, and asked in a low voice, "He thought he could control it?"

  "Humans always believe they can control the process of entropy." Ada continued. "Three years later, when Kyle returned to the old site with a crippled body and an aging ship, he found the foil packet inside the tower base that stabbed into the sky like a broken finger. The 'louse' appeared to be completely mineralized, withered like a cicada's wing."

  The scene shifted, the hologram simulating the fatal moment Kyle took off his glove.

  "He wanted to feel his only 'kind' with his flesh and blood." Ada's voice carried a trace of logical warning. "But the moment it touched body temperature and bio-electricity, the withered prisoner awoke. It did not feed on blood, but on neural electrical signals. It expanded rapidly in Kyle's palm, turning from transparent to turbid, finally becoming a pulsating dark purple crystal tumor."

  Ma Feili felt a chill, even though the temperature inside his suit was constant at 24 degrees Celsius.

  "The parasitism did not stop. It took root along Kyle's neural network, using his spinal cord as a circuit and his brain as a processor." Ada turned off the projection, leaving only the final frame: Three months later, a patrol found Kyle on a drifting dead ship.

  His body had become a completely dehydrated mummy. Where his skull cap should have been, a cluster of massive, blood-red crystals had broken through the bone like sprouting plants. In the cold deep space, the crystal faced a void coordinate, flashing a logically rigorous, never-ending signal code.

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  "It ate its fill, carrying all of Kyle's life data, waiting for the start of the next three-year cycle." Ada turned her head, her electronic eyes locking onto an abandoned pylon deep in the fault. "Ma Feili, we are treading in a similar environment. The mechanical rodents here are not products of evolution; they are more like some kind of 'Carrier.' The existence of Archive 297 is to remind us: In the scorched fault, death is not the end; being assimilated into a signal node in the process of entropy is."

  Ma Feili gripped his electromagnetic rifle tighter, looking at the crystal clusters ahead shimmering under the red dwarf's light.

  "Understood." He stepped over the wreckage of a mechanical bird that had disintegrated due to over-crystallization. "Continue guiding, Ada. Don't let me become the next 'Prisoner'."

  "Logic link intact, risk assessment within controllable range." Ada stepped forward, her silhouette appearing exceptionally firm in the dark red twilight. "As long as my core algorithms do not fail, you will remain in the safe position of an observer."

  ---

  The wind on the scorched earth carried searing radioactive dust, emitting a whistle like wailing among the broken metal skeletons.

  Ada stood at the edge of a bottomless fault. Her body, constructed of high-strength composite materials, glinted coldly in the dim redshifted light. Her status indicator showed a perfect deep blue (100%), and her logic link ran at high speed in the background, converting the fluctuating radiation peaks of the surroundings into defense matrix patches in real-time.

  "Logic link calibration complete, Ma Feili." Ada looked back, complex data streams flowing in her electronic eyes. "Based on current entropy rate monitoring, I have extracted a highly relevant historical record from the remaining black box frequencies. It occurred during the Great Expedition Era, an event known as the '**Void Daybreak**.' Perhaps it can explain the origin of this scorched earth beneath our feet—an 'Intervention' that transcends the laws of entropy."

  She raised her hand, and a holographic projection barely coalesced in the ion-filled air. It was a memory belonging to Star Calendar Year 4102.

  ***

  **[Archive File 299: The Void Daybreak]**

  The freighter *Breaker* was navigating the gravitational lane of the **Sigma-Crux**. For the independent merchant **Jaro**, this should have been another boring "Silent Third Watch." The warp drive was cooling, and the entire ship had fallen into a death-like slumber to save energy. Outside the hull was absolute nothingness, the Southern Abyss capable of swallowing all souls.

  However, the process of entropy was brutally severed at that moment.

  No warning, no radar response. Light—a light possessing overwhelming dominance that violated the laws of thermodynamics—instantly pierced the vacuum.

  When Jaro was startled awake from his cryo-pod, the filter grid of his prosthetic eyes in the cockpit nearly burned out from overload. He did not see a stellar explosion, but an entity massive enough to reshape gravitational laws, forcibly "floating" out of the folds of subspace.

  The thing spanned several Astronomical Units, its jagged silhouette resembling the wreckage of some ancient god. What caused sanity to collapse most were its "**Eyes**": two plasma vortexes with diameters exceeding tens of thousands of kilometers. Primordial energy frantically collapsed and exploded within them, as if two newborn suns had been forcibly embedded into the cold abyss.

  This was not reflected light, but intense **Cherenkov radiation** caused by the surrounding space reacting to the disruption of spacetime continuity by its massive mass. In that instant, the originally dead silent Sigma Sector was completely illuminated. Distant asteroid belts were revealed in minute detail under the intense light, appearing as bright as day.

  "That is a miracle..." Jaro recorded trembling in his log.

  But the miracle lasted only half a standard hour.

  As the entity sank back into the gravitational folds of subspace, the blinding light began to rapidly collapse and peel away. The void was like a piece of paper burned through; the edges flickered with the final afterglow of plasma before being swallowed again by a deeper darkness.

  Half a month later, when Jaro arrived at the "Min-IV" Sector, he found that the immigrants of the entire galaxy were talking about that moment. Light-years away, they had witnessed an eerie "**False Dawn**."

  ***

  The projection shattered in the radioactive wind. Ada turned off the data interface. In her infrared vision, the scorched fault beneath their feet presented an eerie crystallized lattice structure—a permanent wound left by the instantaneous burst of extremely high energy.

  "Jaro saw the source of the light, while we are standing in its embers." Ada said in a low voice, her logic core providing a final warning. "Ma Feili, according to the 'Law of Irreversible Entropy,' energy release of that intensity does not belong to the natural evolution of this dimension. If that entity 'surfaces' again, this scorched fault will face more than just excessive radiation—it will be thoroughly erased, along with the underlying logic of our existence."

  She took a step, her metal sole rubbing against the scorched earth with a dry sound. Her logic link remained perfect, but in the face of such cross-dimensional threats, perfect logic seemed so fragile.