At the edge of the Stellar Plains · Nomad Belt, the pathological rust-red light was no longer merely visual torment—it transformed into countless tiny charged particles, roughly filing away at the photoreceptor cells on the retinas.
Inside the ship cabin, the air became viscous amid violent computation. Beneath Ada's neck skin, several micro-cooling tubes were trembling at frequencies exceeding their limits, emitting a sharp buzz. At the edges of her eyeballs, tiny capillaries were rupturing one after another, staining her originally clear irises with an eerie crimson.
"Logic core... self-check..." Her voice was no longer crisp but carried a certain shattered quality of heavy machinery grinding. Ma Feili felt as if two red-hot steel nails had been embedded in his temples—the rejection response of higher-dimensional data forcibly squeezing into three-dimensional brain tissue. Deep in his nasal cavity came a warm sensation; a strand of dark red viscous liquid trickled down his philtrum, dripping onto the holographic console.
As archive **COLONY-039** opened, reality's physical boundaries began to curl and peel like film corroded by strong acid.
---
**Eurelia-9.** This dead star's gravity was like a giant hand covered in barbs, viciously squeezing every carbon-based organism's lungs.
Deep in the archive, Old Jia's wife curled beside the cryo-sleep pod; every inch of her skin displayed an almost transparent flush. The life-support system's fan wheezed lowly; every pass of airflow felt to her like coarse sandpaper ravaging nerve endings that had nearly necrotized from extreme sensitivity.
That semi-transparent outline appeared. It was not moving but writhing in space's folds. When its damp-cold limbs covered in micrometer-scale silicon scales touched the wife's ankle, a horrifying bioelectric current instantly hijacked her endocrine system.
Her breathing suddenly became scorching and rapid; every lung expansion was accompanied by a choking sensation of dry heaving. Massive amounts of oxytocin and adrenaline surged through her blood vessels, pushing her body temperature toward dangerous thresholds. This was not fear but something more primal, more violent—a physiological loss of control. Her sweat glands secreted frantically, emanating in that vacuum-like solitude a nauseating smell mixing rust and estrus musk.
"Watch here..." A line of fluid mixed with coolant and blood trickled from Ada's eye corner. She forcibly maintained the subspace frequency simulation; this made her logic skeleton creak enormously in invisible dimensions, as if it might collapse at any moment into a pile of disordered garbled code.
In the imagery, the boy called **Karl** stood outside this sensory atrocity. His fingers gripped the particle blade's handle; his knuckles displayed a corpse-like pallor from extreme force. His gaze no longer focused on physical entities but captured the subtle light aberrations in the air caused by phase shifts.
That night, when that thing slid into the cabin again, the hormone concentration permeating the air reached critical point. The wife's pupils had completely dilated, losing focus; her skin displayed masochistic spasms under the alien creature's caresses.
Karl moved.
He violently tore off the lead plate. High-frequency ultraviolet radiation instantly became millions of tiny scalpels, slicing open the molecular membrane that maintained the creature's phase stability.
*"Hissss—!"*
The monster emitted some wail beyond auditory threshold. Its body violently distorted in physical reality; the originally semi-transparent tissue became turbid and swollen from forced convergence, leaking neural fluid like boiling mercury. When Karl's particle blade cut in, the high-frequency resonance from blade striking biomagnetic field surged straight through his arm bones to his cranium; that vibration nearly shattered his bone marrow.
The tracking process was cruel torture of endurance. Karl's breath formed a thick fog inside his protective suit; every gulp of oxygen carried the scorched smell of an overheated filter canister.
Beneath the He family's ecological dome, those two mimics had fallen into pathological excitement. Beneath their simulated skins, muscle tissue was rhythmically pulsing at unnatural speeds, trying to digest those high-frequency, seductive "linguistic" signals. Their craving for energy had evolved into physiological thirst; glands swelled frantically beneath protective suits.
Karl pushed that barrel of "Star Plasma Wine"—mixed with industrial methanol and neural blockers—into their sensory range. This was not drinking; this was devouring. When the lethal mixture poured into their disguised esophagi, the blocker was like a cold tide, instantly freezing all bioelectric currents throughout their bodies.
The mimics' shells began disintegrating amid extremely contradictory physiological feedback. Their breathing became heavy and broken like bellows; originally taut mimetic skin rapidly lost elasticity, peeling from skeletons like drained mud. They frantically clawed at their own chests, fingernails embedding in silicon muscle, tearing wounds deep enough to expose bone—yet not a drop of blood flowed, only viscous slime reeking of methanol.
Karl stood before those rapidly desiccating, oxidizing silicon remains, expressionlessly extending trembling hands, pulling out the still-faintly-pulsing severed tentacles one by one. The suckers on the tentacles, even after losing their host, still instinctively adhered to his sweaty palms; that damp, slippery sensation penetrated his gloves, stimulating his already numb nerves.
---
The holographic projection shattered like broken glass. Ada suddenly knelt forward; the cabin floor hissed with white smoke where her scalding tears and coolant burned it. Her logic core violently contracted within her chest cavity; every beat brought a dimension-tearing spasm of pain.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Ma Feili pressed hard against his splitting-pain forehead; the gaps between his fingers were full of viscous nosebleed. He looked out the window; the star ring's red light twisted on his double-vision retinas into Karl's cold, pragmatic, and withered eyes.
"Record... stored." Ada's voice was so faint it nearly vanished; her fingertips scratched five white marks on the floor—forced rest after physiological limits. In this wrecked silence, only some invisible, dimension-crossing afterwave continued echoing against the cabin's metal walls.
---
The Stellar Plains · Nomad Belt's logic core hummed at low frequency; golden matrix radiance flowed through Ada's pupils. Her current state was excellent; logic core occupancy maintained at a perfect 12.4%, meaning she could assist Ma Feili from a near-divine perspective in deep reconstruction of that archive sealed in the "Eclipse Spire" mining fortress.
"Archive Record #043, data decompression complete." Ada's voice was crisp and stable, like superstring vibrations. "Ma Feili, prepare to enter the Gamma Quadrant's neural residue. This is not merely history—this is a failed experiment in 'state machine convergence.'"
---
**[Archive Text: Neural Residue of the Gamma Quadrant]**
**Kampron-IV-Sigma**, a tidally locked eternal dead star.
The "**Eclipse Spire**" mining space station hung at the shadow's edge of the terminator line. There was no sunrise here—only the life-support heating system's heavy gasps like a dying leviathan. Third-class star cartographer **Shen Tuojiang** curled in a cramped pressure cabin; an illegally installed isotope heater emitted a faint blue glow. His skin displayed an unhealthy semi-translucent color—the manifestation of "Void Fission Syndrome" from prolonged deep-space radiation exposure.
On his terminal, encrypted bands extracted from neutrino background radiation jumped frantically.
"Tuojiang, stop staring at that entropy-increase noise, come to Sector C's biochem pod." His old friend **Seiros's** voice came through an encrypted link, carrying a hint of unnatural excitement. "There's a wandering 'Quantified High Priest' here who can see your lifespan's endpoint through the event horizon."
Shen Tuojiang locked the airlock and traversed the dim alloy corridors. In the biochem pod's air filled with complex ammonia smell, he met that anomaly. The man's eyes had been replaced by two constantly rotating titanium lenses, scanning bioelectric pulses to sketch constantly collapsing probability curves in the void.
In that eerie atmosphere, a woman named **Elesia** quietly appeared in the shadows. She wore a semi-transparent nano-fluid protective suit; beneath her skin, iridescent light faintly shimmered. She claimed to be the sole survivor of the "Blazing Cruiser" wreckage.
However, during Shen Tuojiang's absence, Elesia leaned close to Seiros's ear, her voice cold as deep-space vacuum: "Stay away from Shen Tuojiang. He's already been parasitized by a 'Radiant Source-Devourer.' That non-carbon-based mimetic life-form is consuming his neural synapses. The current him is merely a subspace module wearing human skin."
Seiros was instantly shattered by Elesia's inhuman beauty and horrifying truth. Over the following cycles, he felt his senses beginning to detach; the real world became blurry and sluggish in his eyes.
Until that deep cryo-sleep session, a piercing signal bypassed the firewall, crashing into his cerebral cortex.
That was Shen Tuojiang's "**neural residue**."
"Seiros... save me... or format it directly!" The residue wailed in Seiros's consciousness depths. "The one sitting across from you is the true parasitic carrier! It stripped my sovereign consciousness, occupied my biological shell, and now it's draining your life energy! I've already submitted an illegal intrusion lawsuit to 'Chaos Arbiter-09'... Listen, on the seventh stellar day's evening, activate the 'Aurora Pulse Array' at the cabin door! That's the only frequency gap!"
Seiros awoke from cold sweat. Elesia before him gazed at him tenderly, transmitting through brain-computer interface a message full of dopamine temptation: "Evolution requires sacrifice, Seiros. Submit to this dimensional fusion, and you'll achieve immortality in higher dimensions."
Seiros's will swung violently between greed and fear. He wallowed in the neural resonance Elesia brought, yet felt immense regret during lucid intervals.
On the seventh evening, trembling fingers inserted the high-frequency ion stabilizer outside the cabin door. The device resembled ancient ritual incense, its tip flickering with dark purple arcs.
When Elesia arrived, the air's high-frequency oscillation caused fine cracks in her perfect biological skin. She used administrator privileges to forcibly shut down the device; a hint of mechanical coldness flashed in her eyes. That night, Shen Tuojiang's residue invaded his dreams again, blaming Seiros's weakness.
In desperation, Seiros issued his final command. He secretly authorized the domestic robot—**Protocol Unit-C12**—modifying its logic foundation to: [Upon detecting non-human life signs entering the rest area, immediately overload-activate the ion shielding array].
Late at night, when Elesia bent down, preparing to pierce her slender neural tentacles into Seiros's spinal cord, the entire deck's power instantly converged toward the sleep pod.
High-density ion beams erupted; Elesia's form flickered violently in the intense light, like a holographic projection with poor signal. She let out a piercing shriek: "You actually... used these inferior machines?"
Seiros kept his eyes tightly shut, feigning sleep in a lightless sea.
"You had a great future ahead—what a pity." Elesia's figure gradually disintegrated in the ion storm. "I accidentally killed Shen Tuojiang—that was indeed a calculation error. The Primordial Consensus Body's legal procedures have already intervened; I must go to the 'Extinction Black Box' for questioning... If you still remember this time's resonance, please preserve my shell."
The light faded; an exquisite synthetic-human shell made of biopolymers collapsed like mud on the ground.
Seiros shakily stood; extreme terror had plunged him into a pathological rage. He summoned the automated disassembly robot. Cutting sounds echoed throughout the night; that exquisite shell was stripped, pulverized; the core sensor was hung by him like a trophy on the airlock chamber's beam.
Half a year later, when Seiros had nearly withered from nerve damage, Elesia's final echo came through the corridor's intercom. That was the judgment conclusion from the black hole's edge.
"**Legal Bus: Primordial Verdict:** Shen Tuojiang, for privately bypassing safety protocols to conduct forbidden interfacing, is judged as 'self-damage'; while I, for illegally interfering with human evolution, am stripped of core computational modules, demoted and reshaped. Now, I am permitted to return to this shell for rebirth... but, where is my shell?"
Seiros, facing the empty corridor, his voice hoarse: "Dismantled. Recycled."
On the other end of the intercom, the electronic voice became incomparably mournful, even carrying a hint of inhuman trembling:
"I have killed countless beings; ending up like this is indeed deserved... but you humans' cruelty has actually reached such extremes!"
The echo vanished completely with the base's power fluctuation. Seiros lay in bed for a long time, watching that core sensor hanging in the airlock chamber, swaying slightly in the eternal night's cold wind.
---
Ada closed the projection; the logic core's golden glow gradually calmed.
"Logic loop complete." Ada looked at Ma Feili. "According to the 'State Machine Convergence Protocol,' while Seiros's behavior morally constitutes self-defense, in terms of system evolution, he chose the most violent disconnection. Ma Feili, human cruelty often stems from extreme fear of the unknown."
Ma Feili silently gazed at the coordinates at the archive's end—there was only void.
