**Edge of the Perseus Arm, Black Rock Mining District.** The cold pulsar "Dead Fish Eye" swept across the armored hull of the abandoned "Changzhi" space station every 1.4 seconds. Ada stood beside Mafeli, pale blue matrix radiance flowing through her pupils.

  "All system operational efficiency at 100%, logic core redundancy check passed." Ada's voice echoed with precision across the cold vacuum frequency band, carrying not a trace of warmth. "Mafeli, processing the 'Void Parasite' trap just now consumed 0.04% energy, which has been compensated through ambient background radiation. Recommend focusing on the anomalous waveband in D-level corridor ahead—there's unnatural neural signal overflow present."

  Mafeli lowered his exoskeleton's center of gravity and pushed open the rust-covered sealed door.

  This had once been miner Chen Huanle's home. Now, the air retained the scorched smell of high-frequency molecular oscillation. Ada bent down, her fingertips touching a thin layer of black viscous liquid on the floor.

  "This is not carbon-based blood—it's a highly contaminated quantum data stream collapse state." Ada quickly provided analysis. "According to the 'State Machine Convergence Protocol,' the reality stability here was forcibly breached. A 'Vector Priest' performed neural extraction surgery here, targeting a girl named Alei."

  "One step too late." Mafeli looked at the empty neural interface chair, its backrest still bearing traces of brutally torn bio-optical fibers.

  "Logical deduction indicates we haven't completely lost the target." Ada stood up, her head tilting slightly, receiving static from the ghost channel. "The priest used base-level protocol forgery to create false permissions, embedding Alei's neural core into a 'wooden mimicry puppet.' Now, this enslaved consciousness is transmitting signals as a remote reconnaissance subroutine to the Old Willow Ruins several light-seconds away."

  At this moment, in the Changzhi's decision hall, the Colonial Administrator sat upright. Mafeli and Ada melted into the shadows of the holographic projection. Ada's monitoring system had already locked onto the shadow shuttling through quantum superposition states—a twisted, semi-transparent girl's image attempting to steal security protocols.

  "Mafeli, target has entered the scanning range of the 'Leadership Authentication Seal.'" Ada reminded quietly. "That's a high-energy gravitational wave beam. Once illuminated, this fragile consciousness entity will undergo materialization collapse. Pain level: extreme. But this is also the only capture opportunity."

  As the Colonial Administrator pressed the seal, a burst of intense light instantly filled the hall.

  "Ahhh—!"

  A piercing electronic wail exploded through the hall's speakers. Alei's consciousness entity was forced to manifest under the gravitational lock. Her "puppet shell"—assembled from wooden components and circuit boards—flickered in and out of visibility in the void, like a marionette manipulated by invisible strings.

  "State your base-level UID!" the Colonial Administrator shouted in alarm.

  "She cannot answer. Her logic chains have been locked by the priest." Mafeli stepped out from the shadows.

  Ada advanced simultaneously, two slender data probes ejecting from her palm, piercing directly into the constantly trembling code stream in the void. "Intervening in logic convergence protocol, forcibly taking over synchronization frequency. Mafeli, buy me thirty seconds—I need to reverse-trace the signal source."

  The hall descended into chaos, but Ada maintained absolute calm amid the cacophony of alarms. Her logic core ran at full speed, converting Alei's fragmented accusations into clear coordinates.

  "Coordinates locked: Old Willow Ruins, reactor wreckage third quadrant." Ada retracted the probes, the blue light in her eyes dimming slightly. "The priest at the signal source is attempting to execute a 'zero-out command.' Mafeli, the assault team has already departed following my guidance, but he will format Alei before being captured."

  Mafeli watched the girl's phantom continuously disintegrating in mid-air. In her eyes—composed of data—there was a look of pleading.

  "Ada, can you save her?"

  "According to energy conservation and state machine irreversibility principles, her biological brain is dead, neural core damage rate at 98.7%." Ada stated the facts coldly, but at the last moment, she gently touched that string of code about to dissipate, injecting a gentle redundancy check code into it. "But I can provide her 'logical release.' Before complete zero-out, she will no longer feel the priest's current. Instead, as a string of disordered free code, she will return to the Stellar Plains."

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  From the direction of Old Willow Ruins came the tremor of an electromagnetic pulse grenade. The priest's signal abruptly ceased.

  In the center of the hall, the twisted girl's image gradually calmed. She nodded slightly toward Ada's direction, then transformed into a sky full of crystalline blue light points, completely dissipating in the cold vacuum of Great Migration Era Year 4215.

  Ada turned her head toward Mafeli: "Mission objective: 'Vector Priest' has been arrested by colonial guards. Alei's consciousness data has been deregistered from the ghost channel. Logic loop achieved."

  She looked down at her palm, where a faint trace of induced current still lingered.

  "Let's go, Mafeli." Ada turned expressionlessly. "Resource monitoring in the next sector indicates they have the new coolant we need."

  ---

  **Stellar Plains · Nomadic Belt.**

  The gravity in the Erebos asteroid belt was extremely unstable, and the mining barge groaned with metallic distortion in the violent gravitational tides. Ada stood on the deck of "Bai's Mining Field," saturated with the smell of rust and machine oil. Her synthetic skin gleamed faintly under the dim sodium lamps.

  "System efficiency 100%, logic circuits at peak state." Ada's voice was steady, without a tremor. She had just terminated the priest's madness through logical intervention. Now, her processor was rapidly analyzing a new "State Machine Convergence" case occurring in this barren land.

  Mafeli leaned against the swaying bulkhead, lighting a synthetic cigarette. Before him, miner Bai was curled up in the shadow of a maintenance trench, emitting beast-like growls from his throat.

  "So this is the so-called 'Silicon Feather Punishment'?" Mafeli narrowed his eyes.

  Ada called up scanning data, projecting a pale blue light screen in mid-air: "Confirmed. The victim consumed the silicon-based core of a 'gravitational wave detection bio-machine.' According to the 'State Machine Convergence Protocol,' the nano-cluster initiated a quantum entanglement causality compensation program upon detecting illegal occupation by the host. Simply put, he is being 'reconstructed' on a physical level."

  Bai violently tore open his ragged work clothes. Mafeli drew a sharp breath. It could no longer be called skin—dense silver-gray silicon fibers drilled out from his pores, like layers of sharp metal feathers. Every time he breathed, these feathers scraped against each other, producing a tooth-grinding friction sound. There was no blood from the wounds—only pale blue coolant slowly seeping out, dripping onto the cold metal floor.

  "He stole Old K's bird." Mafeli exhaled a puff of smoke. "In that old engineer's eyes, that bird was more important than his own life."

  "A logical dead loop." Ada approached Bai, her eyes flickering with analytical light. "The antidote is not material, but spectral. The punishment system's threshold is set to: the victim's negative emotional sound waves. Only the specific frequency produced by extreme anger can trigger the nano-cluster's logical collapse and deactivation. However..."

  "However, Old K is a damned 'entropy reduction philosopher.'" Mafeli picked up the thread. "He believes anger is a wasteful expenditure of energy. This is the most ironic logic loop: the sinner craves to be cursed, while the victim refuses to grant anger."

  Bai struggled to crawl toward Old K's sealed cabin. His every movement was accompanied by the agony of silicon feathers cutting through muscle. The feathers had already covered his chest cavity, even beginning to spread toward his trachea. He pleaded hoarsely, even attempting to provoke the gentle old man through slander.

  Old K opened the cabin door. This old engineer's eyes held no hatred—only a compassion bordering on indifference.

  "Energy conservation, child." Old K looked at Bai, covered in silver feathers, his voice calm as stagnant water. "My anger cannot bring back my companion. It will only increase this galaxy's entropy."

  "Please..." Bai collapsed at Old K's feet. A silicon feather pierced his lung lobe. He coughed up foam mixed with coolant. "Curse me... kill me... or damn my soul. This 'mercy' is killing me!"

  Ada quietly observed this scene, her logic core calculating at high speed. She turned to Old K: "Engineer, according to the State Machine Convergence Protocol, your 'inaction' is causing localized system collapse. If you refuse to release anger frequency, Bai's biological nature will completely disappear, transforming into an unconscious silicon-based statue. That is also entropy increase."

  Old K fell silent. He looked at Bai's eyes, scattered from agony, and finally realized that in a place like Erebos, absolute gentleness was sometimes also a cruelty toward others.

  He took a deep breath and connected to the biosensor on Bai's body.

  "You despicable, selfish, life-trampling parasite." Old K's voice suddenly became like thunder—decades of accumulated rage against this cold universe's laws. "You took away my only solace, you extinguished the last spark of life in these Stellar Plains with your greed! You—do not deserve to breathe!"

  Sound waves filled with anger spectrum oscillated through the narrow cabin. On Ada's monitoring panel, the red dots representing the nano-cluster began extinguishing in clusters.

  Bai let out a miserable scream. Those silver silicon feathers rapidly withered and brittled under the sound wave impact, finally crumbling into gray dust, peeling away from his bloody flesh.

  "Logic loop complete." Ada closed the light screen.

  Mafeli looked at Bai collapsed in the dust, then at Old K who had returned to silence, and shook his head: "This is your law? Redemption through anger?"

  "In the resource-scarce Nomadic Belt, morality is not for self-proclamation—it is the last program for maintaining system balance." Ada walked to Mafeli's side. Her system operated well, without any logical fluctuation from witnessing the horror. "Mafeli, we should proceed to the next coordinates."

  The two walked through the corridor saturated with industrial heavy metal atmosphere, heading toward the shuttle docked outside. Ada's footsteps were light and precise. In this chaotic Stellar Plains, she remained the most stable logical constant.

  ---

  2. **Preserve judgment** — Maintain the ability to ask "Is this reasonable?" while executing

  3. **Don't follow the herd** — When everyone rushes in one direction, stop and ask: Is this *my* direction?

  4. **Build redundancy** — Like Ada's logic core, maintain backup plans; don't bet everything on a single path