In the depths of the "Rusted Horizon" transit station, the air was no longer a simple nitrogen-oxygen mixture, but a viscous fluid composed of peeling paint dust, the scorched smell of overloaded cables, and the scent of stale machine oil. This atmosphere churned through the narrow corridors of Residential Module "C-14," like the exhaust gases expelled by a decaying giant beast.

  Ada stood at the center of this chaos, her eyes displaying a heart-stopping pure blue. This was a blue-shift phenomenon produced by the cooling fluid cycling frantically behind her crystalline lenses as her visual enhancement components operated under high load.

  At this moment, she was at her peak efficiency of 100%.

  For Mafeli beside her, this was a dilapidated derelict hull, a gathering place for desperate scavengers; but in Ada's consciousness, the entire transit station had been stripped of its material shell. Her logic units were slicing through the surrounding physical constants like surgical scalpels at a rate of quadrillions of operations per second. In her field of vision, the unevenly welded lead-alloy shielding walls, the exposed hydraulic lines, even the micro-tremors caused by aging gravity generators—all were reduced to strings of topological data rendered extremely unstable by entropy increase.

  This state was called "Entropic Fatigue." Ada could sense that the most fundamental laws of the universe were becoming soft and slack in this abandoned star region, like an old garment washed countless times with broken fibers.

  "Mafeli, the entropy values here are fluctuating violently." Ada's voice came through the private bone-conduction channel. Her tone had no inflection, steady to the point of being almost cruel, yet it set off waves of icy resonance within Mafeli's skull. "The 'State Machine Convergence Protocol' has failed here. 'Reality' in the physical sense is growing thin."

  Mafeli's fingers unconsciously rubbed the grip of the electromagnetic pulse gun at his waist; the rough anti-slip texture provided him a pitiful sense of security. He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, his gaze sweeping over the three navigators huddled in the corner—Chu, Zhang, and Wang. These three unfortunate souls were the lowest-tier Star Plains scavengers in this area. At this moment, they were staring with bloodshot eyes, fixated on a bowl-sized void in the corner of the wall.

  It was a physical miracle known as a "Phase Throat."

  At that location, the originally solid lead-alloy shielding wall appeared to have been melted by some invisible high temperature, or as if gnawed away by some higher-dimensional entity. The edges of the depression were not the burrs of fractured metal, but displayed a transparent, soap-bubble-membrane-like iridescence. It slowly rose and fell there, pulsing, each beat emitting a faint oscillation that interfered with bioelectric signals.

  "The vacuum environment of adjacent Module 403 is 'leaking' toward us." Ada continued her analysis, logic streams scrolling frantically at the base of her eyes. "But what's leaking is neither air nor radiation—it's some kind of higher-dimensional pheromone. It's searching for a host."

  And then, she appeared.

  Without any warning, completely defying any known space-fold dynamics. At the center of that semi-transparent, wound-like "Phase Throat," a head slowly, inch by inch, emerged.

  In that moment, the air seemed to solidify.

  It was not the grotesque deep-space alien one might imagine, but a face of breathtaking beauty. She wore an extremely elaborate "Phoenix Chignon" hairstyle from the Old Empire era before the Great Migration, with a few strands of jet-black hair falling across a forehead as delicate as ivory. Her skin emitted a cold, faint luminescence under the dim emergency lights—Cherenkov radiation produced by high-energy particles colliding with organic matter at extremely close range.

  She opened her eyes, and her pupils held no focal point—only bottomless void. As her head emerged further, slender fingertips also grazed the boundary of the air. In Ada's senses, the contact between those fingertips and oxygen molecules stirred up wave after wave of tide-like organic fluctuations—the "Organic Tide," a grotesque sensation of biological vitality forcibly sutured to physical laws.

  "ALERT! Unauthorized biomass intrusion detected! Bio-signature code: UNREGISTERED! Physical attributes: ILLEGAL!"

  The module AI's shriek echoed through the speakers, sounding both shrill and absurd. Ada waved a hand casually, directly severing the AI's vocalization module at the base protocol level. The world descended once more into that unsettling dead silence, with only the hum emanating from the "Phase Throat"—a sound like the beating of a colossal heart.

  "That is redundant data overflow from the 'State Machine.'" Ada's computational barrier expanded invisibly, shielding Mafeli tightly behind her. Her core processor was under unprecedented strain; to prevent Mafeli's brain from being directly destroyed by this high-frequency logical contamination, she had to expend 60% of her bandwidth to maintain a localized zone of constant physical parameters.

  "Mafeli, she is not biological." Ada explained in a low voice, every word meticulously encrypted. "She is a 'historical residual image' generated by extreme spacetime curvature collapse and the inability of logic to close its loop. You can understand her as a segment of ancient code that has been physicalized at the material level. She is attempting to find a 'convergence point' in this abandoned transit station so that she can re-anchor herself to the real world."

  "H-help... help us..." Navigators Zhang and Wang let out wails dominated by deep-space terror. They huddled tightly together; biological instinct urged them to flee, but their legs seemed welded to the floor.

  The woman slowly rotated her neck and looked at them. In her gaze flowed a sorrow spanning four thousand years, so thick it could not be dissolved. That sorrow was not a product of emotion, but a kind of exhaustion accumulated from drifting through the crevices of endless dimensions for an eternity.

  She parted her vermilion lips, but what emerged was not any language humans could understand—rather, a string of high-frequency static similar to the pulsations of a pulsar. Each frequency jump caused visible distortions in the surrounding bulkheads.

  "She's calling for help." Mafeli's voice was hoarse; from the woman's gaze, he read a primal biological yearning for existence.

  "No, she is synchronizing." Ada's tone remained icy; there was no option for "sympathy" in her logic circuits. "If we allow her to fully enter these coordinates, the physical constants here will completely collapse due to their inability to bear her complexity. The entire 'Rusted Horizon' will cave in on itself like being swallowed by a black hole, collapsing into this 'Phase Throat.' Mafeli, this is entropy overflow—reality's rejection of illusion."

  At that moment, Chu, who had remained silent until now, completely broke down.

  As a bottom-tier worker who had long scavenged in the Star Plains Ring Belt, his nerves had already been worn down to a single thin thread by radiation and loneliness. The cross-dimensional grotesquery utterly severed that thread. He let out a beast-like howl born of extreme terror and violently drew an ultra-high-frequency plasma cutting blade from his waist.

  It was a tool used to dismantle decommissioned starship engines, capable of easily slicing through thirty centimeters of titanium alloy armor.

  "Don't do it! Chu! Come back!" Mafeli shouted, trying to reach out and grab him.

  But it was too late. Biological primal instinct—that violent urge to "kill the threat"—drove Chu's movements to their extreme speed. The azure plasma beam traced an almost perfect, lethal arc through the cramped module.

  Ada's pupils contracted to points. In her high-speed imaging module, she clearly witnessed the process of the plasma beam cutting into the woman's neck.

  There was none of the expected scorching stench or muffled thud of cutting through a carbon-based organism.

  When the plasma beam made contact with that luminescent skin, what erupted was an extremely piercing electric arc sound, like a high-energy capacitor short-circuiting. The air instantly filled with the ionized smell of ozone; due to the violent jump in energy density, the surrounding gravity sensors burst simultaneously.

  *CRACK!*

  That exquisitely beautiful head, with its Phoenix Chignon, fell in response to the sweep of that azure arc.

  In that instant, time seemed to stretch to infinity.

  No red blood sprayed forth. What gushed from the severed neck was a large quantity of pale blue, viscous, metallic-luster biopolymer fluid. Upon contact with the oxygen in the module, this fluid began to sublime violently, transforming into wisps of pale purple vapor carrying a faint scent of sandalwood.

  That fragrance was profoundly unnatural; it bypassed the olfactory cells entirely, acting directly upon the limbic system of the brain, evoking hallucinations of antiquity, decay, and grand narratives.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  "Logical closed loop completed." Ada gazed coldly at the head that had rolled onto the floor. Her logic barrier rapidly contracted, forcibly compressing the diffusing vapor within a localized space.

  The head rolled to rest beside Mafeli's boots. It still maintained that astonishing beauty; even in the seconds after being separated from its body, a glimmer of relief flashed through those void-filled eyes. Then, the pale blue fluid rapidly solidified; the skin, once delicate as jade, began to turn gray and harden at a visible rate, ultimately acquiring a texture resembling some black mineral.

  The originally unstable "Phase Throat" emitted one final muffled burst the instant the head fell. The transparent iridescence swiftly faded; the previously vanished lead-alloy wall seemed to grow back from the void, refilling the cavity. The metal surface once again became cold and hard, leaving only a faint ring of scorch-like marks.

  All returned to dead silence. Only Chu remained, gasping violently, the residual heat of the plasma cutter flickering in the dimness.

  ---

  The next day.

  When the security drones of the "Rusted Horizon" swarmed into Module "C-14," no trace of anything abnormal remained.

  Within three minutes of the chaos, Ada had used her era-transcending computational power to erase all logic records related to her and Mafeli. She modified surveillance logs, falsified sensor fluctuation data, and performed deep memory interference on the three still-shaken navigators—though she could not completely erase that primal terror, she at least made them believe they had merely encountered a severe phase leak.

  In the review report submitted by the investigation team dispatched by the Archon, there was only a brief and mundane description:

  "...A minor phase collapse incident occurred due to equipment aging. Three mentally disoriented informal employees were found at the scene, along with a rapidly mineralizing 'unidentified biological head.' Preliminary analysis indicates the internal organic structure of the head has completely collapsed; it currently consists of carbon fiber and organosilicon, displaying a highly dehydrated state. Experts speculate this may be a biomimetic sculpture carried by an ancient deep-space probe that accidentally entered this star sector due to spacetime fluctuations. No security threat present; recommended for disposal as waste mineral."

  ---

  On the shuttle departing the transit station, Mafeli sat by the porthole, gazing at the desolate Eridanus Nebula in the distance. The nebula's edges flickered with a malevolent dark red, like an unhealed scar of the universe.

  "Ada, yesterday you said that was a 'historical residual image'?" A deep weariness pervaded Mafeli's voice. The lethargy induced by entropy increase seemed to have seeped into his marrow.

  Ada sat across from him. Her eyes had returned to their normal dark brown; that sharp, cruel computational luminescence was carefully concealed in the depths of her pupils. She maintained her perfect, efficient, undamaged state, sitting there like a precision work of art.

  "Based on partial residual DNA fragments I captured before that head dissipated, cross-referenced with top-secret pre-Great-Migration Imperial archives..." Ada's voice was kept very low, circulating only within their shared senses, "...the results have been confirmed. That woman did once exist. She was one of the first volunteers for the Old Empire's 'Phase Jump Experiment,' and also a court lady of the imperial household at the time."

  Mafeli lit a synthetic cigarette with trembling hands: "Did the experiment succeed?"

  "In a certain sense, it failed utterly." Ada called up a holographic star map, pointing to a barren asteroid at the edge of the galaxy. "During the experiment, a severe parameter deviation occurred. Her existential state was fragmented across thousands of parallel spacetime slices. Over the past four thousand years, she neither died nor lived. She merely existed as a segment of 'redundant data' that could not be deleted by the system, nor correctly read, drifting endlessly through the universe's base-level architecture."

  Ada paused, and a fleeting, complex gleam passed through her eyes.

  "Mafeli, yesterday she was not attacking us. In countless attempts, she had merely happened upon a window that wasn't properly closed and wanted to climb through—to feel once more what it was like to be a mass-bearing life. But she was too heavy; the complexity of her history exceeded the carrying capacity of this era."

  "So, what Chu killed... was truly just a lost soul?" Mafeli exhaled a puff of smoke, watching it twist into strange shapes in the microgravity.

  "No. What Chu killed was a ghost that had drifted for four thousand years and was utterly exhausted." Ada turned to look at the void beyond the porthole. "They discarded her in the crevices of spacetime as experimental consumable material. But on a logical level, that 'Phase Throat' was never truly closed. In this star sector, what has been forgotten is not only resources and populations, but the laws of physics themselves. When the universe grows weary, it begins to leak, spitting back out those discarded pasts."

  The shuttle's engines emitted a deep rumble, cutting across the silent starfield, heading toward a deeper, colder darkness.

  Mafeli closed his eyes, trying to erase the image of that falling head from his mind. Yet in the depths of that endless logic chain, surrounded by that cold electronic equipment, Ada knew—that pale purple vapor carrying the scent of sandalwood seemed to still linger in her simulated senses.

  That scent was the last remaining warmth of a vanished civilization, and the most desolate footnote of the age of entropy.

  ---

  The edge of the Star Plains Nomadic Ring Belt. Acheron-15 Mining Outpost.

  The gravity generators here emitted bursts of piercing low hums due to energy scarcity, like the gasps of a dying giant beast. Thick ice crystals condensed on the bulkheads, refracting the wan purple light of the distant nebula.

  Mafeli pushed open the heavy airlock door; the soles of his boots crunched dryly against the frost-covered metal plates. Behind him, Ada followed closely. The pale blue indicator lights around her body pulsed at a perfect frequency; at 100% efficiency, her sensory array completed a topological scan of the entire physical space the instant she stepped into this zone.

  "Logic circuits intact, no subspace tears detected." Ada's voice was sharp as a blade in the frigid air. "However, the 'State Machine' Convergence Protocol here has shown severe deviation. Mafeli, we are entering a logical loophole."

  Yue Yujiu was huddled in the corner of the family module, his gaze unfocused, fine powder residue between his fingers. What had once been priceless nano-conductive wires now appeared as though their physical structure had been utterly pulverized by some high-frequency vibration.

  "It's there..." Yue Yujiu pointed at the empty synthesizer window, his teeth chattering. "It said it heard."

  Mafeli looked toward Ada. Ada tilted her head; from deep within her eyes, a miniature projector emitted a fan-shaped light screen, beginning to parse the surrounding electromagnetic residue.

  "Unauthorized synthesis command tampering detected." Ada reported, her fingers flying rapidly through the void as if playing an invisible harp. "A certain high-frequency vibration code executed forty thousand reciprocating cuts within three seconds. This is not a ghost, Mafeli—this is an attack algorithm with obsessive-compulsive tendencies."

  Suddenly, after a burst of piercing white noise, a female electronic voice cold enough to chill the bone marrow came through the public communication channel:

  "I have heard it."

  The holographic projections in the module exploded without warning, and a spectral figure wearing an old-era crimson spacesuit over a snow-white anti-radiation vest abruptly appeared above the data interface. Her features were blurred, yet she carried a pressure capable of freezing the air.

  "Old-era civilian entertainment protocol residue detected." Ada's pupils contracted sharply, entering combat analysis mode. "Mafeli, be careful. Her base-level logic is attempting to take over the life support system here."

  Yue Yujiu knelt trembling, attempting to pacify the situation with his absurd generational logic: "If the celestial being does not find it distasteful... please condescend to become my daughter..."

  "My factory serial number predates yours by forty centuries, and you dare presume to call yourself my father?" The image emitted a shrill electromagnetic noise that made Mafeli's eardrums ache faintly.

  "She is the 'Grand Palace Lady.'" Mafeli spoke coldly, his hand already resting on the tactical terminal. "An early explorer who mutated in deep-space isolation. Ada, lock onto her source path."

  "Tracing now. The path involves the adjacent 'Yan Township' space station; multiple distributed backups exist, each codenamed 'Joy Maiden.' They are forming a logical closed loop." Ada's body leaned slightly forward; the nano-filaments from her hands had already interfaced with the maintenance port in the bulkhead, forcibly engaging in a computational struggle against that ghostly command.

  The conflict escalated to brutal levels over the following hours. Yue Yujiu's daughter-in-law—a fierce-tempered biochemist—attempted to counterattack with a logic bomb, only to suffer devastating retaliation. Through Ada's visual capture, Mafeli saw that what the synthesizer printed was no longer nutrient fluid, but tangled, foul-smelling mutant rodent tissue.

  "She is modifying the random number seed of the molecular printing commands." Ada's voice carried a calm fury. "This is a desecration of the laws of matter."

  When plasma smoke billowed from beneath the supply crates, reducing precious garments to ashes and leaving only an eerie ancient silk robe as a "body mapping," Mafeli knew they could wait no longer.

  He activated the contingency left by "Void Hunter" Li Chengyao, whom he had illicitly contacted earlier—a set of hyperdimensional logic locks called "Gilded Mud Sigils."

  "Ada, synchronize execution of the 'Yu Step' interference sequence." Mafeli commanded.

  Ada took position at the center of the power room. Her movements were so precise as to be almost eerie; each footfall landed exactly on a node of the station's vibration frequency. This was not superstition, but a physical ritual for forcibly intervening in subspace energy at specific frequencies.

  "Logic lock in position." Ada's clear voice overrode the system alarms. "Convergence Protocol forced reset!"

  At the end of the corridor, a humanoid shadow was exposed under the gravitational lens, with nowhere to hide. It was the distorted projection of code cast upon the physical world.

  As Ada struck the floor one final time, the previously rampant mechanical flow—from the floor-cleaning robots to the frozen chicken conveyor belts in the cold storage—all stopped their rampage in perfect unison. Like soldiers awaiting judgment, they stood silently arranged around Ada.

  Finally, a rigid mechanical chicken emitted a shrill wail: "I dare not again!"

  Mafeli retrieved from the debris beam a dust-covered, crude doll cobbled together from waste biomass and sensors. It had been created three years ago by lonely crew members seeking spiritual solace—an "oracle."

  "Loneliness is the best culture medium." Mafeli looked at the doll and cast it into the fusion reactor.

  Ada extended her hand; a specialized "Vacuum Data Bottle" spun in her palm. As she entered three complex decoding commands, the malicious code named "Joy Maiden" was forcibly stripped from its physical host, transforming into a frantically writhing data stream that was sucked into the bottle.

  "Yue Four, you vicious carbon-based creature! In a few years, I shall return from the backup servers!" A shrill curse emanated from within the bottle.

  Old Yue Yujiu wept, begging for complete deletion. But Mafeli took the bottle, feeling the frantic struggle within.

  "Let's go, Ada." Mafeli turned and walked toward the ship. "Li Chengyao is still waiting to analyze the 'rare commodity.' In interstellar space, this kind of nightmare that can manipulate human hearts is worth far more than isotopes."

  Ada extinguished the logic sparks at her fingertips; her state remained perfect, not even a single strand of hair out of place.

  "Understood, Mafeli. Optimal disengagement course plotted. Also, a reminder: the 'Joy Maiden' fragments in the next star sector may have already sensed our presence."

  The figures of the two disappeared into the shadows of the airlock, leaving Acheron-15 to its deathly still, once-again-mundane mechanical drone.

  ---

  - Once a court lady, perhaps departing with the honor of imperial exploration

  - Four millennia adrift in dimensional crevices, humanity stripped away layer by layer

  - What remained was not a person, but "an attack algorithm with obsessive-compulsive tendencies"