At the edge of the Stellar Plains · Nomad Belt, space was no longer pure void but filled with slag torn apart by gravity and high-energy particle storms. Through the multi-band reinforced transparent aluminum porthole of the "Observer," the cold-toned neon halos outside shattered into countless twisted, flowing spectral color blocks under violent chromatic aberration—like scales stripped from some deep-space leviathan.
Ma Feili felt a chronic, dull oppression. In the sustained deep-space imbalance (Zero-G) state, his internal organs seemed to have lost their anchor, floating and pressing uneasily within his abdominal cavity. Blood no longer flowed toward his extremities with gravity but over-accumulated in his face and cranium, causing his eyeballs to bulge slightly; phantom phosphorescence from cosmic ray impacts occasionally flashed across his retinas. His every breath seemed deliberate and heavy, as if resisting some invisible, viscous fluid called "void."
At his side, Ada's logic core emanated a stable, somewhat solemn pale blue glow. She did not need to fight this physiological dislocation; her existence itself was a mathematical correction of chaos. Computational overflow rate maintained below the near-miraculous 0.01%, meaning her thinking was like a scalpel, precisely cutting through massive data streams.
Ma Feili extended pale fingers, fingertips trembling slightly—minor spasms from electrolyte imbalance in nerve endings caused by prolonged weightlessness. He swept across the holographic projection; an encrypted archive marked "Silent Tower" slowly unfurled before them, light points reassembling in the cold air, emanating an antique, deathly stillness.
"Causality disturbance coefficient is crossing the critical threshold," Ada's voice echoed in the cramped cabin—not produced through air vibration but directly coupled into Ma Feili's cochlear implant through bone conduction, cold as liquid nitrogen on a surgical table. "Ma Feili, prepare to access Archive Record #020. This is not history that can be sealed away—it is an extreme, even distorted demonstration of the 'State Machine Convergence Protocol' at macroscopic scale."
As the archive data loaded at full capacity, the cramped cabin reeking of oil stains and recycled oxygen was rapidly consumed by a vast sense of desolation.
---
**[Archive Record #020: The Phase Wedding at Silent Tower]**
**Acheron-IV Asteroid.**
This had once been the crown jewel of the Industrial Expansion Era; now it was a mass grave forgotten by physics. The surface's only landmark was a three-thousand-meter structure piercing the sky—if that thin, toxic ionosphere could be called sky—the Atmospheric Terraforming Tower. It was like a rusted fang, silently wailing in the eternal void. The tower's mottled alloy skin reflected a nauseating dark red under the dying embers of the star "Eros"—the color of dried blood.
Young navigator **Yin V-3** was enduring the agony of acidic gases scorching his lungs as he pushed open the gravity elevator door sealed for three centuries. His antiquated protective suit produced teeth-grinding friction sounds at the joints. For a one-stellar-month energy ration wager, he had bet everything on this dead zone called "Ghost Habitat."
"Merely electromagnetic fluctuation afterwaves... merely vacuum fluctuation illusions." Yin repeated in a low voice, trying to use linguistic logic to combat that primal fear deep within. The high-frequency vibration short blade at his waist emitted a faint, monotonous hum—the only comfort of human industrial civilization in this deathly silent world.
At midnight, when he tried to let his atrophied muscles sink into brief shallow sleep amid the ruins of the tower-top panoramic observation deck, the world "split open."
This splitting was not visual physical fracture but a dimensional reduction attack on the senses. In Ada's data monitoring, at that moment subspace curvature exhibited an instantaneous peak pulse, as if some great power had torn a hole straight through reality's tapestry.
In Yin's fear-seized field of vision, the originally rust-stained hall reeking of metal decay became covered by a flowing, biologically textured liquid sheen. A group of individuals wearing flexible protective suits, their bodies displaying semi-transparent metallic texture, elegantly walked out from ripples in the void. Their every movement carried an eerie high-frequency lag; afterimages stacked in the air—the physical rejection produced when higher-dimensional beings forcibly squeezed into three-dimensional projection.
"Unauthorized carbon-based life detected." An attendant-like individual emitted a synthesized sound that bypassed Yin's auditory nerves, exploding directly in his thalamus, triggering a violent migraine.
"No matter," a silver-haired elder emerged from the overlapping light and shadow; in the depths of his pupils seemed to be imprisoned two collapsing nebulae. He gazed at Yin cowering in the shadow of architectural supports, his eyes revealing a weariness of having seen through long causality. "This is the future District Chief Yin. Tonight we borrow this place for a quantum coupling ceremony; a seat was already reserved for him in the causal chain."
That night, the abandoned Silent Tower transformed into a magnificent hall spanning galaxies, beyond imagination. Liquid helium boiled in goblets crafted from stellar-core gold, rising as pale blue mist cold enough to freeze souls. The energy fields of bride and groom intertwined, collapsed, and resonated in the air; every pulse-like flicker triggered micro gravitational tides, making surrounding rubble float and rotate in mid-air.
Yin's rationality was completely seized by this dimensional-reduction-attack-level civilizational spectacle. Driven by an almost instinctive greed and the pathological desire to prove he was not an ant, while those higher-dimensional guests were immersed in virtual music woven from gravitational waves, he tremblingly extended his hand and stuffed a stellar-core gold goblet engraved with complex supercluster star maps into his suit's hidden compartment.
As dawn's light pierced that thick, toxic haze, all the fine garments, lights, and guests dissipated like withered phantoms. Yin awoke startled amid cold rust and dust; violent coughing nearly made him vomit his organs. Only the heavy weight in his hidden compartment—carrying a certain eternal temperature—reminded him this was no hallucination induced by oxygen deprivation.
Ten years of time flew past in the Nomad Belt's overloaded jumps.
Thanks to the residual higher-dimensional civilization's nano-neuron enhancers in that night's drink, Yin's mind became like a high-speed quantum machine tool. He climbed from a lowly fringe navigator, treading on countless rivals' wreckage, finally ascending to the throne of Feiqu Cluster's Governor.
At the banquet welcoming the galactic plutocrat "Zhu Coriolis," the ultimate luxury of neon lights illuminated power's pinnacle.
"Governor," the Zhu family head said bitterly, pointing at an incomplete set of drinking vessels on the table, "this set of 'Eight Poles Star Goblets' is a relic from Earth's era, crafted with now-lost stellar-core gold reshaping techniques. Originally a set of eight, but one night ten years ago, one vanished from thin air inside an absolutely sealed force-field vault. It is our family's greatest, most inexplicable mystery across three sectors of migration."
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When those seven golden goblets were presented before Yin, Ma Feili outside the holographic image clearly heard Yin's rapid, disordered breathing—the mechanical resonance of causal loop closure.
In that moment, logic completely collapsed.
Yin slowly rose; on that face made rigid by power appeared a trace of bitterness. He drew from his breast the goblet he had kept hidden for ten years. Under the banquet hall's hypocritical, gorgeous neon, the ancient luster of stellar-core gold reflected in harmony with the other seven goblets, fitting perfectly, as if they had never been separated.
"It did not disappear," Yin smiled, his eyes revealing the weariness and complete release of one who had seen through fate's script. "It merely crossed several light-years of folded space, crossed ten years of causal fog, to attend a wedding that did not belong to this era."
---
The holographic projection retracted like retreating tide, finally becoming a restlessly pulsing light point at Ada's fingertip.
"'State Machine Convergence Protocol' execution complete. System returning to steady state." Ada turned her head; the logic core's blue light reflected on Ma Feili's pale, cold-sweat-covered face. "The Zhu vault's 'loss' precisely corresponded to the Silent Tower wedding's 'gain.' And Yin's return ten years later completed the entire causal chain's closure. Ma Feili, do you think that was extraterrestrial civilization's intervention, or higher-dimensional future 'us' looking back at the past?"
Ma Feili felt waves of dizziness from weightlessness. He looked at that boundless, cold yet enchanting star sea outside the porthole, his voice hoarse: "In the Nomad Belt, time has never been a unidirectionally flowing river. It's more like a vast, never-ending phase wedding, where all of us are merely sitting in different seats, waiting for our own moment of closure."
Ada nodded slightly; complex and massive data streams flashed in her eyes: "Archive filed. Observed current dimension's fault anomaly disturbance decreased 0.05%. Logic core continues stable. We... continue observation."
---
When Ma Feili forcibly accessed Historian X-97's raw neural data, the sense of reality's dimensions instantly collapsed.
His cranial cavity felt flooded with boiling lead; violent pressure pushed outward from within against his eyeballs; his optic nerves trembled madly in the overloaded psychic tides. Accompanied by a faint sound of blood vessel rupture, a warm, metallic sweetness meandered down from his nasal cavity, dripping onto the cold deck. He felt his spine being torn in different directions by some higher-dimensional tension, as if his bones were crossing physical boundaries, being repeatedly ground in the gap between reality and void.
"Convergence point... locked." Ada's voice thundered deep in his eardrums, carrying a metallic-friction sluggishness.
---
**Acheron-108.**
Maintenance engineer **Aileen** curled in the cramped life-support pod, her pupils reflecting a twisted pale blue mass. The extreme cold invaded Aileen's body not through temperature but through every breath of oxygen that stung her alveoli. That was a "**Void Nightmare**." It was not biological but some subspace residue after wave function collapse. It prowled at the edge of Aileen's neural interface, writing terrifying hallucinations directly into her visual cortex. In Aileen's eyes, that blue glow crouched above the pipes, emitting silent mockery.
"Ada, scan its energy signature." Ma Feili ordered in a low voice.
"Incoherent electromagnetic disturbance detected," Ada manifested beside him, her figure appearing especially clear in Acheron-108's low temperature. "It's using 'state machine' loopholes for dimensional jumping. Whenever patrol drones pass, its wave function collapses, hiding in that electromagnetic blind spot."
Aileen moved.
As the archive recorded, she did not beg the artificial intelligence governor "Omega" for more anti-hallucinogen. She had already seen through this monster's logic loop: it pursued survival, and survival's only shelter was that **"lead isotope sealed tube."**
"Patrol drone approach detected, countdown 60 seconds."
The cold system broadcast oscillated in the narrow space. In that instant, the pale blue shadow-entity darted like a startled fish, skillfully burrowing into that open lead tube on the workbench. The lead layer and shielding membrane perfectly isolated all detection—and also isolated its connection to the outside.
"Convergence point reached." Ada prompted softly.
Aileen erupted with long-suppressed explosive force; she was no longer that trembling victim but the executor of this lethal state machine. She lunged toward the workbench, grabbed the molecular-grade vacuum seal plug, and slammed it into the tube opening.
*Click.*
"Magnetic lock engaged, pressure value: 100%."
The Void Nightmare was imprisoned in the "harbor" it had chosen for itself.
The instant the Void Nightmare contracted into the lead isotope sealed tube, Ma Feili felt that extreme sensory asymmetry. As Aileen pressed the thermonuclear degradation key, the mining station's underlying logic was violently rewritten by rampant energy.
Not merely heat.
That was infrasonic roaring sufficient to destroy all biological sensory boundaries. The Void Nightmare inside the sealed tube suffered devastating sensory deprivation in that instant; its multi-dimensional vision upon which it relied for survival was instantly scorched into white-hot nothingness by the sudden burst of intense light. Under that bone-marrow-shattering infrasonic impact, this higher-dimensional being's physiological defenses completely collapsed. It madly crashed against the narrow tube walls, blindly trying to find an exit, yet could only feel its existence being flayed alive amid the ruins of its senses.
What it emitted was no longer logical language but some primitive, humble twitching in complete physiological terror. Its nerve fibers snapped inch by inch in the high temperature and oscillation, convulsing and curling like a crushed insect in liquefying metal, finally losing all dignity as life in that extreme sensory shock.
Aileen dragged the heavy sealed tube through corridors filled with the smell of waste machine oil. Ma Feili and Ada followed closely, watching her push open the plasma smelting furnace's hatch.
"Activate thermonuclear degradation mode, temperature setting: 5000K."
As Aileen's fingers moved, the smelting chamber was flooded with blinding white light—temperatures sufficient to melt titanium alloy. The originally quiet communicator suddenly erupted with piercing electromagnetic noise: the Void Nightmare's desperate wail as it forcibly overclocked sensors inside the sealed tube.
"Heat... too hot! Aileen, stop! This is just a joke..."
The voice distorted in the high temperature, becoming an electronically synthesized scream: "Heat... excessive! Stop this cruel game!"
Aileen's face appeared cold and calm in the firelight's reflection; she didn't even blink, directly pushing energy output to overload's edge.
The wailing finally transformed into a piercing sustained tone, then fell into deathly silence.
An hour later, Aileen used the mechanical arm to extract the remains that had fused into a metal lump. When the high-frequency plasma cutter opened the tube body, there were no ashes inside—only a pile of colorless, charred fibrous **"silicon-based neural residue"** and several drops of **"subspace concentrate"** solidified during cooling, emitting an eerie purple glow.
---
The holographic image dissipated like smoke.
Ma Feili and Ada returned to the Nomad Belt's cabin.
"Logic loop complete." Ada withdrew her fingers; the logic core's blue light flickered slightly. "The Void Nightmare used rules to evade scanning, while Aileen used its dependence on rules. Under the 'State Machine Convergence Protocol,' its only survival path was defined as a dead end."
She turned her head, looking at Ma Feili, a profundity belonging to advanced AI flashing in her eyes: "Ma Feili, this is Acheron-108's lesson: when traps look like harbors, predator and prey identities have already reversed."
---
The instant the holographic projection disconnected, Ma Feili suddenly collapsed to his knees.
He gasped heavily; every rise and fall of his lungs pulled at needle-like pains within his chest cavity. His fingertips were spasming; dimensional-tear afterimages still lingered at his vision's edges.
Ada extended cold fingers, gently wiping away the blood at his lips.
"Logic core detects your neuronal synaptic damage rate has reached 4%." Her fingertips touched his skin; that real coolness allowed Ma Feili to barely grasp reality's anchor from the higher-dimensional overload hallucinations.
Ma Feili clutched desperately at his chest, feeling his heart madly pounding against his ribs. In that instant just now, he was not merely an observer—he had almost become that prey collapsing in high temperature and infrasonic waves.
"When traps look like harbors," Ma Feili's voice was hoarse as sandpaper scraping, "the predator's senses... also become its own gallows."
