Pale blue luminous flow jumped violently at the edges of Ada's irises—not mere color, but Cherenkov radiation induced by high-energy electrons in the optic nerve substrate. She tilted her head slightly; the hydraulic bearings at her cervical vertebrae emitted an extremely soft hum, like a prayer.
"Logic core has completed anchoring at minimum entropy-increase state, Ma Feili." Her voice penetrated the congealed cold fragrance within the command cabin, carrying a texture of metal cutting through silk. "In the dust of the 'Stellar Plains · Nomad Belt,' the entanglement of bloodlines is often more tenacious than the strong nuclear force. Archive 071 has been reconstructed—a record concerning thermodynamic resistance."
---
### Archive 071: Chain of Heat Death
Far end of Ophiuchus, Ember-7 depleted mining planet.
This planet's breath was bitter. In this refining fortress called the "Heat Death Furnace," neon tubes emitted dying screams from the irregular spasms of voltage. Oxygen here was not authority but benediction; every breath of recycled air drawn into alveoli bore work-points sufficient to make souls tremble.
**Lin Kexiu** sank into that command chair saturated with grease and metal fragments; his left eye was a cheap crystalline implant that constantly dropped frames. The "Fracture Epoch" that had torn the star sector apart years ago took his first wife and exiled him to this wasteland where even light appeared anemic. He later married a mechanic named **Sophia Ang**—a woman who regarded heat distribution as sacred law.
In Sophia's logical calculus, the eldest son **Du Heng** was a redundant variable. He was silent, coarse, like an old mining machine with a scratched casing, capable only of slow oxidation in a corner.
"Today's molecular sieve quota has touched the red line." Sophia's slender, icy fingers swept across the holographic interface, raising a chill-inducing static charge. "Disconnect the pressurization pump to Du Heng's quarters. In the wilderness of absolute zero, there is no need for waste that neither breathes nor produces."
Du Heng donned that hydraulic exoskeleton covered in red rust. When the airlock opened, the minus-two-hundred-degree vacuum instantly gnawed away the faint residual warmth from his skin like a hungry beast. He stepped into the dark-side rift valley—a place of not only gravity-warping fault lines but electromagnetic storms capable of instantly carbonizing carbon-based nerves.
The second son **Abel** hid in the shadow of the pressure door, watching his elder brother's stumbling, trembling silhouette disappear into the darkness. Abel was the only temperature-control source in this frozen domain; he had received higher education at the "Pioneer Monastery," and sympathy for order flowed in his veins. Whenever Du Heng returned covered in high-energy radiation dust, locked outside the decompression chamber by Sophia to await heat stripping, Abel would always use his clearance to steal a wisp of backup oxygen, or stuff his own high-energy nutrient blocks into that cold metal shell.
"Elder brother, your telomere sequences are collapsing." Abel's voice through the heavy lead glass was as faint as deep-space background radiation. "Don't go to the subspace fissures in the depths anymore—causality there is extremely unstable."
"As long as you can put on that commander's uniform and leave this god-forsaken dead star," Du Heng's voice rasped through the communication channel like two pieces of ore grinding against each other, "even if I collapse into a grain of ash in this furnace, it will count as completing my power consumption."
The upheaval occurred during a strong magnetic storm sufficient to interfere with atomic arrangement. Due to phase deviation in the navigation matrix, Du Heng missed an extremely precious resupply window. Sophia used this as grounds to sever all of Du Heng's energy interfaces. Du Heng collapsed on the absolute-zero alloy floor, his lungs desperately convulsing in air so thin it approached vacuum.
The next day, Abel took action that violated family law. He donned a decommissioned pressure suit, carried a high-frequency molecular saw, evaded the sensors' patrol, and infiltrated that all-consuming rift valley.
"Get back! Your heat shouldn't be squandered here!" Du Heng discovered that clumsy figure in the depths of the dim valley; anger made his biological pump beat violently.
"I've come to share your heat expenditure." Abel's voice trembled but carried a hard will. "Two people side by side—the system collapse rate will slow."
At that very moment, the valley's shadow underwent physical collapse. A predator lurking in higher-dimensional fissures appeared—it had no fixed form; its semi-transparent body resembled a crumpled mass of spacetime. The neural shriek it emitted exploded directly beneath both their cortices. In an extreme distortion of light, the monster seized Abel in its jaws; the biological thrusters on its back instantly overloaded, tearing through reality's membrane and plunging with him into an unstable abyss.
Du Heng let out an inhuman roar in that moment. He swung the molecular saw to cleave the monster's residual afterimage but captured only the vacuum of nothing.
After returning to the fortress, Du Heng completely fractured under Sophia's cold accusations. He tore off his own oxygen tube with his own hands, letting consciousness fall toward the abyss of heat death.
But at the critical point of physiological shutdown, his consciousness did not dissipate—instead, it entered a quantum-superposition state of dying. In that nonlinear spacetime, he saw a massive ring-belt city spanning galaxies, brilliantly luminous, resisting the universe's desolation. A youth wearing a black commander's cloak, riding a gravity-driven war-horse, saluted him on streets overflowing with light.
"Elder brother, the shutdown command has not yet been issued."
That was Abel.
The truth was unveiled in quantum entanglement's fluctuations: that day, Abel had not been annihilated but captured by a "Superconducting Fluid Council" escort cruiser patrolling nearby. That majestic captain, "**Lin Poxiao**," while scanning the rift valley, not only rescued Abel but confirmed an astonishing fact through genetic comparison.
Lin Poxiao was none other than Lin Kexiu's eldest son, lost during the war with his first wife.
The wife who had been abducted survived in the slavers' camp through sheer survival obsession and raised this child in the cold star sea. Now, he had become a top dignitary in the Council, commanding stellar energy distribution rights.
Stellar Year 112.4, a golden fleet of sufficient scale to eclipse Ember-7's stellar light pierced through the void.
When Du Heng awakened from the high-energy isothermal fluid in the medical bay, what he saw was no longer a rust-spotted cabin ceiling, but his father whom he had not seen for years, Abel radiant with vigor, and that elder brother whose gaze was as profound as stars.
As for Sophia Ang—in a recent power reactor accident, a logical inevitability caused by her pursuit of ultimate thermal efficiency—she had become elementary particles in the void.
Ember-7 was purchased by the Council and transformed into a hub sanctuary connecting galaxies. The Lin family, on the grand scale of the star sea, finally completed their ultimate convergence from disorder to order.
---
Ada extinguished the blue light at the base of her eyes; the temperature in the command cabin seemed to rise by several degrees. She turned and spoke softly to Ma Feili:
"In a universe where all things will ultimately cool, civilizations often trend toward isolated heat death. But that blood-entanglement transcending physical links is the only singularity capable of reversing entropy increase and reshaping star charts. Ma Feili, logic verification indicates this is a perfect algorithm concerning 'the journey home.'"
---
In the eternal and oppressive dim halo of the "Stellar Plains · Nomad Belt" (Nomad Annulus of Astro-Prime), **Ada's** ocular sensors flickered with pale blue light in a rhythm approaching death. This blue was not pure but mixed with a certain irritable hue produced by excessive algorithmic iteration. She had just completed a deep self-diagnostic of her logic core; although the convergence curve performed exceptionally perfectly in mathematical terms, that underlying shadow called "Entropy Fatigue" clung like rust to every inch of her nanofibers.
This was the universe's edge—the terminal landfill for all civilizational information. Countless decommissioned starships, shattered Dyson ring fragments, and forgotten digital souls slowly rotated and collided here, ultimately becoming meaningless cosmic dust.
"Ma Feili, the archive's logic collapse has been halted. Repair progress: 100%." Ada's voice sounded like two worn superconducting plates grinding together—dry and cold. Her fingertips swept across the holographic projection in the void; wherever she pointed, originally chaotic binary noise rapidly reconstructed, weaving into a desolate yet grand image.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
"This is *Colonial Archive #083: The Mirage of the Iron Nebula*. It records an epic of how 'Manic Greed,' under the inducement of higher-dimensional hackers, led an entire logic state machine toward annihilation. Ma Feili, look at these carbon-based organisms—in an apocalypse of extreme material scarcity, they still attempted to establish immortal empires within illusions."
She pushed that data stream flickering with dangerous red light toward Ma Feili. As the data link connected, within the cold vacuum cabin, a sinful past buried on the dark side of Proxima B slowly unfolded before them like a rotting flesh-flower in gradual bloom.
---
**Proxima B**—a purgatory locked dead by tidal forces.
In the private banquet hall at the topmost level of "Oppenheimer" dome city, the air was saturated with a nauseating fragrance mixing liquid helium synthetic wine and premium oxytocin. This was an expensive perfume called "Dominator," designed to make everyone who breathed it feel the illusion of controlling all things.
"Deep-space mining tycoon" **Han Lin** reclined on his throne carved from an entire piece of heavy-nucleus stellar remnant. He swirled the crystal glass in his hand; within it refracted the magnificent yet terrifying view outside the window—gamma-ray bursts were madly bombarding the magnetic energy shields, exciting wave after wave of aurora-like pale blue arcs.
"In this epoch where breathing every mouthful of oxygen requires paying carbon tax to the 'Sovereign Extraction Group,' only you, Director Han, can transform this tedious survival into heroic mythology from the Great Expedition Era." The speaker was **Xu Wei**, a black-market merchant infamous in the "Black-Reef Sector." The illegal neuron implant plugged into the back of his skull was slightly heating from excessive load, emitting a burnt-circuit-board stench. In his eyes flickered a pathological, manic greed—the aftermath of prolonged indulgence in digital drugs and virtual power expansion.
Suddenly, the airlock's warning alarm shrilly tore through the heavy metal percussion music being performed. That music was meant to mask the roar of stellar storms outside the dome; now it seemed pale and powerless.
A man wearing a tattered electromagnetic shielding cloak appeared outside the vacuum chamber. His skin displayed an unnatural gray-purple, covered with red patches from long-term cosmic ray exposure, like a piece of scrap iron repeatedly forged in vacuum then carelessly discarded. In his hand he held a rust-spotted energy collection bowl, striking the high-strength transparent aluminum viewport in an eerie, highly penetrating rhythm.
That sound did not propagate through air but acted directly on the building skeleton's physical vibration; each strike precisely impacted the cochlear bones of everyone in the banquet hall.
"Let him in." Han Lin waved his hand; a glint of curious interest flashed in his cybernetically modified eyes. For someone like him who already possessed galaxy-level wealth, conventional entertainment could no longer relieve that bone-deep emptiness; only this grotesquerie colored by "The Other" could produce a ripple in his dried-up neurotransmitters.
The **Wanderer** stepped into the hall. He emanated that scorched metallic oxidation smell unique to vacuum, as if he himself were a ghoul crawling out of some decommissioned nuclear reactor. He refused the high-energy nutrient paste offered by domestic robots, instead staring directly at Han Lin, his voice echoing as if from an abyss's depths:
"I've heard the lord here possesses the most generous fuel reserves in the entire galaxy. I wish to beg for a drink... something that can make my soul-engine burn again."
Xu Wei sneered from the side, his fleshy face piled with contempt: "Old vagabond, your voice box like a broken bellows and your rusted innards—do you deserve this concentration of power-grade ethanol? Roll back to your scrap heap."
But Han Lin laughed loudly; that manic heroic spirit resonated in his chest. He ordered a barrel of extremely high-purity power-grade fuel liquor sufficient to be directly poured into a small shuttle's engine. The Wanderer did not hesitate; he tilted his head back and drank deeply. A full twenty gallons of hard liquor went down, and on that weathered face like dead wood, a metallic flush actually appeared; in his eyes lit a faint, self-diagnostic glow.
He nodded slightly, left no words of thanks, and disappeared again into the sky-obscuring red sandstorm outside the dome.
In the months that followed, the Wanderer arrived on schedule, like a punctual energy parasite, or like a recorder observing samples of human greed. Until one day, Xu Wei, in a manic outburst after drinking, violently overturned the table and pointed at the Wanderer's nose with caustic provocation:
"You damned parasitic spirit! Leeching our bandwidth every day, consuming our bio-energy and fuel—doesn't your shabby 'server' contain anything worth harvesting? Or is your so-called 'distant place' merely a garbage-filled sewer?"
The Wanderer stopped what he was doing. In that moment, his originally clouded eyes suddenly lit with the cold light of a high-energy scanner calibrating. In that moment, he was no longer a vagrant but more like a "state machine" executing some higher-dimensional protocol.
"Since Mr. Xu has such refined interest," the Wanderer's voice became extremely solemn, taking on a polyphonic accent of multiple overlapping frequencies, as if countless versions of him were speaking simultaneously across different dimensions, "then tomorrow at noon, please pilot the 'Golden Eagle' and jump to 'Relic Sector Z-9.' I await you both at my 'Eastern Observatory' research station there."
The next day, Han Lin's private shuttle tore through the chaotic magnetic field edge of the Iron Nebula.
The Z-9 sector was originally synonymous with dead silence on star charts—a graveyard of decommissioned satellites and asteroids left from the Second Interstellar War. However, when the "Golden Eagle" approached that coordinate point called "Eastern Observatory," the sight before them instantly overloaded Han Lin's and Xu Wei's neural links, triggering shrill alarms.
How could this be ruins?
A partial Dyson sphere structure of massive scale, far exceeding current human engineering limits, was slowly rotating. Radiant energy conduits pulsed violently against the pitch-black cosmic backdrop like a dragon's blood vessels; each contraction ejected plasma streams spanning tens of thousands of kilometers. Countless shuttles emitting sacred white light traversed between dockyards—a scene as if humanity's golden dream from the Great Expedition Era had resurrected amid the ruins.
"Recently completed; still somewhat crude."
The Wanderer's voice sounded directly in both their brain-machine interfaces. He appeared at the docking hatch; now he had shed that tattered shielding suit, replaced by flowing garments of some unknown nanofluid, every fiber folding space with his breathing.
The luxury inside the research station utterly shattered the upper limit of Han Lin's imagination. There were no heavy metal walls; instead, dynamic star charts composed of holographic gravitational fields. The floor was transparent neutron star degenerate matter; stepping on it, one could feel the residual warmth of stellar cores. Antimatter crystals were carved into various indescribable artworks, emitting mesmerizing hues that warped light.
"Please have the 'Stone Sisters' come out to greet the guests." The Wanderer issued a soft command.
Two women glided elegantly into the hall. The elder sister moved like a graceful gravitational wave, every motion drawing surrounding light and shadow; the younger sister was like a newborn star, so bright one could not look directly at her. In Xu Wei's neural scanner, already descended into madness, these two women's vital signs displayed as some extremely high-purity, near-perfect human consciousness entities—their gene sequences were masterworks of the Creator.
"This is my 'server.'" The Wanderer raised a glass of fluid flickering with rainbow light. "Here, desire is not something to be suppressed but fuel driving the universe's operation."
After several rounds of drinks, before this dimension-transcending hedonism, Han Lin's and Xu Wei's "Manic Greed" was amplified to the limit. They felt they were no longer pitiful wretches huddled in dome cities but gods about to rule this star region. The Wanderer seemed to have fallen asleep from energy overload, lying on a couch made of superconducting materials, the Stone Sisters on either side performing some form of high-frequency electrical massage.
The greed in Xu Wei's heart finally erupted completely under the catalysis of alcohol and sensory illusions: "Resources of this level... flesh and energy of this level... shouldn't be monopolized by a vagrant! Director Han, look at all this—this is the empire we want!"
He lunged at the petite younger sister, while Han Lin was also drawn by the gravitational waves the elder sister emitted—waves capable of inducing blood resonance—unconsciously pulling her tightly into his embrace. In their perception, it was skin warm as jade, fragrance like stardust.
...
The next day, the cold and primitive red light of Proxima pierced through the broken, leaking cabin walls.
Han Lin was awakened by bone-piercing cold. He tried in horror to turn over, only to discover his arms were tightly embracing something cold, hard, and covered with dried coolant. He struggled to rub his swollen eyes; his vision gradually cleared—what he was holding was not some peerless beauty but a one-meter-diameter, rust-spotted titanium alloy high-pressure support column. The column's seals had long deteriorated, leaking chemical agents emitting a pungent stench.
"Xu Wei! Wake up! Xu Wei!" He screamed; his voice in the near-vacuum chamber sounded extremely faint.
Xu Wei opened his eyes amid violent gasping that nearly coughed out his organs. He discovered in horror that he was lying naked in an abandoned excrement recycling treatment tank, his head pillowed on a heavy, cold lead brick of nuclear waste emitting faint green glow. That supposed "warmth" was actually the illusion of corrosive biochemical slime coating his face.
Around them was no Dyson sphere, no fine wine, no sacred research station.
Only a radiation-dust-filled observation cabin on the verge of disintegration. Severed wires hung from the ceiling like rotting entrails, swaying weakly in the cold wind. That so-called "Eastern Observatory" station was merely a derelict satellite named "Coffin" drifting in the depths of the Iron Nebula.
In the distance, the Iron Nebula continued its cold and silent rotation. That so-called "Wanderer" had never been any vagrant, nor any god. He was a higher-dimensional "logic trap"—a subspace psionic organism wandering this star region, specifically hunting greedy souls.
He had exploited the mania and greed in Han Lin's and Xu Wei's hearts, implanting massive false signals in their neural links. In that illusion called "state machine convergence," he made them embrace the filthiest ruins and perceive them as paradise.
Due to excessive exposure to nuclear waste radiation, Xu Wei's skin had already begun large-scale ulceration; he let out a desperate wail, then fell unconscious in the slime-filled treatment tank. Han Lin collapsed on the floor, staring at the cold metal column in his hands, and suddenly erupted in shrill, manic laughter.
In this universe, the most terrifying thing was not poverty or death, but when your soul had been completely hacked, you could not even distinguish whether you were kissing a lover's face or a lethal lead brick.
---
The cold light of the "Stellar Plains · Nomad Belt" remained unchanged.
Ada closed the holographic projection and turned to look at Ma Feili beside her. Her logic core had calmed, but that "Entropy Fatigue" grew ever heavier.
"Logical conclusion: The human sensory system is the most easily tampered underlying code in this universe." Ada's tone carried a trace of worry imperceptible to most—a concern belonging to mechanical life. "Ma Feili, this story is classified as 'satire' in the archives. But if I tell you that, according to my underlying scan, this refuge cabin we currently occupy also has a 0.03% probability in logic convergence's distribution of being an ongoing 'Mirage'..."
She paused. In the depths of those pale blue eyes, something seemed to flash—a cold and vast light identical to that Wanderer's.
"...would you feel afraid?"
Ma Feili did not answer. In the soundless darkness, only the fragments of the Nomad Belt continued colliding, emitting the faint sounds of extinction—like some vast existence chewing on reality.
