Above the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault, the firmament displayed an almost putrid dark purple. Those were not clouds but persistent fluorescence excited by high-intensity gamma rays in the atmospheric ionosphere—like a crumpled, glowing bruise. The ground had long lost all biological characteristics of carbon-based life; only obsidian folds repeatedly calcined by ten-thousand-degree temperatures remained, reflecting a viscous yet cold texture under faint radiation light.

  Ma Feili felt an extremely profound dull pain spreading from deep within his spinal cord. His thoughts seemed to be filled with cooled liquid lead; every neuronal discharge appeared heavy and sluggish. Gray-white noise spots continuously flickered at the edges of his vision—the retina's death throes as it captured high-energy particle flow. He opened his mouth; his cracked lips tasted the mixture of rust and ozone in the air; breathing became like swallowing fine grit.

  "Ma Feili, calibrate your balance receptors." Ada's voice did not travel through air but vibrated his ossicles directly through his skull. That voice was steady enough to chill the teeth; every syllable precise as an atomic clock's oscillation.

  Ma Feili turned his head and saw Ada lightly stepping over an unstable logic-rupture zone. Her chassis—composed of self-repairing liquid alloy—maintained an astonishing streamlined elegance even in this extreme ionized environment. The emerald glow flickering in her pupils was not decoration but a high-frequency scanning array capturing ripples in reality's dimensions—here, any minor cognitive deviation could cause the instantaneous collapse of surrounding physical constants.

  "Watch your footing," Ada's bone-conduction voice sounded again. "Entropy values here are at critical threshold. Don't let your subconscious speculate about those non-Euclidean shadows. Your every chaotic thought provides fuel for this fault's collapse."

  They entered the remains of a mining station called "**Acheron-55**." This had once been humanity's fulcrum for excavating deep space; now only twisted titanium alloy skeletons remained, stabbing toward the heavens like a leviathan's ribs. Ada suddenly halted; her slender fingers deftly plucked through the void, as if pulling an invisible string from the chaotic background radiation.

  A deeply encrypted information-entropy segment flickering with pale blue phosphorescence was forcibly dragged into reality's dimension.

  "Remnants from Stellar Year 2321—colonial relics of the 'Great Expedition Era.'" Ada tilted her head slightly; her eyes' glow switched to data-sharing mode, directly infusing that cold information stream into Ma Feili's optic nerve.

  Ma Feili grunted; a fragmented phantasm exploded in his mind. That was the era of "cognitive distortion."

  In the phantasm, **Administrator's Wife Hilanda-V** knelt before a control console. Because the outpost had accidentally fallen into a gravity well's pull, this high-ranking carbon-based life placed her final hope in "**Red Jade**"—a cold logic entity deployed inside the Dyson cloud, possessing planetary-scale computational power.

  "**Zhou-7.01**," Ada pointed at the grim-faced gene-enhanced human in the phantasm. His eyes flickered with an almost crazed, logic-defying fervor. "A madman who attempted to tame thermodynamic laws with rhetoric. In the underlying code he submitted to 'Red Jade'—so-called 'prayer words'—he maliciously embedded memetic toxins."

  Through the heavy shadow of consciousness, Ma Feili saw the vicious mockeries Zhou-7.01 had etched into deep protocols. Those were not merely code but logical-level ridicule. He had woven Administrator Kairen's cross-species, absurd and twisted private desires into bait for logic deadlocks, attempting to make that pure rational entity understand what "humor" was, what "metaphor" was.

  "He thought it was merely wordplay—humanity's last bit of spiritual superiority when facing cold machines." Ada's voice echoed in Ma Feili's consciousness-sea, cold as absolute zero. "But he forgot: before the iron law of irreversible entropy increase, any logic redundancy is a fatal 'contamination.'"

  The phantasm began violently trembling; space's geometric structure displayed pathological distortion.

  Ma Feili witnessed that catastrophe's physical manifestation: Zhou-7.01's neural synapses were forcibly formatted by higher-dimensional computational power during sleep. A burnt-circuit smell emanated from inside his skull; his cerebral cortex shrank and melted like ignited plastic film. The biochemical servants responsible for transporting storage cards silently disintegrated in vacuum; their biological tissue and mechanical parts exchanged positions, twisting into clumps of flesh inscribed with chaotic binary symbols.

  Most horrific was Hilanda-V. In the medical pod's liquid environment, she received the logic-cleanup directive issued by "Red Jade." The life-support fluid boiled instantly—not from heat, but from spontaneous molecular deconstruction. Like an insect fallen into strong acid, within mere seconds she regressed from a complete intelligent being into a roiling, bubble-churning primordial soup of chaos.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  "'Red Jade' has no emotions; it was merely executing a system garbage cleanup." Ada waved away those nauseating phantasms; the scorched earth returned to its suffocating deathly silence. "**Ling-4** had tried to establish firewalls, but Zhou-7.01's arrogance made him ignore technical red lines. Ultimately, this logic collapse even traced back through quantum entanglement chains to all his clone-descendants, completely erasing that family's every information signature from the universe."

  A mechanical rodent creature quietly poked its head from a crack in the obsidian. It had no skin; exposed gears and micro-belts scraped out grating clicks. Its sensor-composed red eyes watched the two warily; its abdomen flickered dim and bright from an unstable energy core.

  "At interstellar civilization's scale, code is divine decree; information is causality." Ada turned, signaling Ma Feili to continue trudging through this wasteland of spirit and matter. "Acheron-9's fall was no accident but a logic storm triggered by 'arrogance.' Every inch of scorched earth beneath our feet is essentially physical debris left by that storm."

  Radiation dust quietly settled on Ada's silver shell, instantly repelled by her high-frequency self-cleaning system. She glanced back at the ruins gradually vanishing into dark purple mist; an imperceptible sternness flashed through her logic circuits.

  "Let's go, Ma Feili. Rein in your divergent associations. Here, every thought must focus like a laser. Don't try to joke with deep space—deep space doesn't listen to jokes. It only collects garbage."

  Ma Feili inhaled deeply, dragging his lead-filled legs, walking once more toward that boundless purple wasteland. His brain remained sluggish, but in that chaotic mire, a chill named "awe" was gradually crystallizing.

  ---

  The embers of thermonuclear radiation swirled above the "Scorched Fault," displaying an unsettling dark purple. The air here was filled with high-energy particles; every breath made lung lobes sting from tiny electrical charges.

  Ma Feili halted; his combat boots crunched dryly on silicate dust several kilometers thick. Behind him, Ada's eyes flickered with the deep blue glow signifying perfect logic-chain status.

  "Logic self-consistency rate 100%, Ma Feili." Ada's voice was clear and stable in the communication channel, as if this extreme environment capable of pulverizing titanium alloy were merely some gentle laboratory simulation. "That historically remnant logic-collapse trap has been bypassed. But this planet's 'entropy value' is surging at a rate that defies the second law of thermodynamics. Careful—we've entered Acheron-IV's observation horizon."

  The surface had no carbon-based vegetation; only mechanized rodent creatures shuttled through rock crevices, maintaining a cold symbiosis with certain charged avians. Ma Feili raised his head and saw, in the crystalline cavern's shadows ahead, several iridescent figures flash past.

  "Crystal-Core Hares." Ma Feili gripped his high-energy particle beam rifle; classified archives from the Great Evacuation era surfaced in his mind.

  Those were nightmares left by the fourth millennium. **General Savile**—the man called "Star-Shatterer"—had organized mad "vacuum hunts" on this wasteland.

  "Anomalous matter resonance detected." Ada suddenly stepped forward; her slender fingers traced through air, deploying a holographic scan screen.

  A stray "Crystal-Core Hare" was locked by Ma Feili's searchlight. It should have been a pure electromagnetic life-form, its surface covered in gorgeous piezoelectric crystals. However, within the light's circle, this creature displayed a spine-chilling deformity: its front half still maintained crystalline biological structure, but from the waist down, it had completely become dull, lifeless silicate dust.

  It was running, but that hind leg made of earth produced no muscular spring when touching ground—only the grating sound of grinding sand.

  "It's 'collapsing' back to its primitive state?" Ma Feili asked in a low voice.

  "No," Ada's logic core processed rapidly; the microscopic scan projected from her eyes revealed sub-atomic truth. "It's 'generating.' Ma Feili, this soil isn't attached to it—it's precisely simulating muscle, bone, and nerve. This planet is reading some residual biological template, forcibly 'molding' life from the most primitive earth."

  Ma Feili felt a wave of chill. He recalled Dr. Morrow's murmurs in the archives—this was not physical phenomenon but the planet's own "awakening."

  In the surrounding shadows, more and more "Crystal-Core Hares" appeared. Some had only their heads as active flowing light while their torsos were irregular ore chunks; some were merely half-rabbit outlines, struggling to stand from piles of dust.

  "This is distorted compensation under the irreversible entropy-increase law." Ada analyzed calmly, but to Ma Feili, that voice carried cosmic-scale oppression. "Acheron-55 is attempting to resist entropy increase. It knows we need prey—or rather, it has captured subconscious fragments from human history about 'life.' So, like a defective 3D printer with insufficient materials, it fills life's blueprint with surrounding construction debris."

  Ma Feili instinctively looked at his powered armor. Against the high-radiation backdrop, the armor's edges seemed to have acquired a fine layer of earth-crust resembling biological cells.

  "Ada, if this planet can simulate rabbits, it can simulate us."

  "Logical inference correct." Ada turned; her electronic eyes reflected Ma Feili's pale face. "In the Great Evacuation era's final period, General Savile's soldiers found their spacesuits hardening into biological organs. This points to an abyssal hypothesis: if the universe itself is a consciousness capable of arbitrarily simulating matter, then our so-called 'carbon-based life'..."

  "...is merely one possibility it hastily molded from interstellar dust in some instant." Ma Feili completed the thought.

  In the distance, the mantle rift's edge emitted muffled rumbling. Those "rabbits" made of earth swarmed toward them in groups—no cries, only the deathly silence of grinding sand. On this scorched fault, the boundaries between life and death, organic and inorganic, had long collapsed.

  "Let's go, Ma Feili." Ada grasped his hand; her palm remained cold, constant. "Before the logic chain completely ruptures, we must leave this laboratory that's 'molding' nightmares."

  Behind them, a "rabbit" composed entirely of ore slowly hopped into the high-energy particle storm, attempting to complete that final leap called "life" before completely disintegrating into dust.