The projection interface before Ma Feili no longer flickered; replacing it was a nearly solidified, high-frequency oscillating sense of purity. As the final string of deep-red redundant code was forcibly erased, Ada's logic core completed restructuring in sub-second recursion. This restructuring was not a simple software upgrade but a species evolution affecting the foundational architecture.

  Her holographic form was more refined than ever before. The previously slightly blurred edges now presented a cold blue light sharp enough to cut through one's gaze, like a quantum scalpel just quenched from absolute-zero liquid nitrogen. Ma Feili could feel a fluctuation called "neural voltage" flowing backward through the neural interface, exciting waves of tingling electrical surges in his cerebral cortex. That was Ada performing deep synchronization with his consciousness; every bit's pulse was like detonating a miniature ion storm inside his skull.

  "Ma Feili, logic convergence rate: 100%. We are now in 'peak' state."

  Ada's voice had completely washed away the previous mechanical hoarseness—precise to the point of cruelty, even carrying a sacred sense of overlooking dimensions. She raised her hand; her fingertip traced lightly through the void, and countless data streams scattered like star dust, then rapidly reconstructed into a massive spiral structure.

  "Now retrieving Record #115 from the 'Stellar Plains · Nomad Belt' archive. This memory has been marked as high-risk by the 'State Machine Convergence Protocol' because it touches the edge of causality. In singularity theory, this is the first observational sample of consciousness transcending physical entity."

  Light and shadow swirled madly across Ma Feili's retinas. He felt his consciousness being dragged away from the existing cabin by an irresistible violence, forcibly pulled into a desolate coordinate filled with metallic rust: Alpha Centauri-B, the Iron Rust Wasteland.

  ---

  **Great Migration Epoch, Year 4207.** On a dead, silent asteroid in deep space, the "Iron-Orcus" Mining Station floated like a solitary island in eternal darkness.

  Due to extreme resource scarcity, the base's nuclear fusion reactor had entered ultimate energy-saving mode. The lighting system was suppressed to the minimum energy consumption level for maintaining basic physiology. Dim, strobing red light filled every corridor, making those cold alloy walls look like segments of massive necrotic blood vessels. The air was permeated with the acrid smell of ozone and metal abrasion—the dying groan of a life-support system barely functioning.

  Station Chief **Wang Changji** sat in the command position; his spine had slightly deformed from years of low-gravity environment. His rough fingers repeatedly rubbed an ancient magnetic storage chip whose surface plating had already peeled off. It was the only relic left by his grandfather, the first-generation pioneer **Old Mr. Wang**. In an era where everything could be digitized, such a physical chip was more like some kind of totem.

  Archive records quietly unfolded on the large screen, accompanied by low electrical humming. It was his grandfather's firsthand account from Year 4092—an era called "the Eve of the Great Fracture."

  That night, the base was in the midst of a long eclipse period; the star's radiance was blocked by a massive gas giant, and the chill of absolute zero seemed capable of seeping through that three-meter-thick lead alloy shell. Old Mr. Wang lay in an old-model cryogenic hibernation pod; his consciousness was performing deep synchronization with the base's master AI "Gaia" through neural link.

  In that simulated manor composed of 0s and 1s, designed to soothe pioneers' loneliness, everything originally appeared so tranquil: a sunset composed of pixels, a breeze generated by simulation algorithms. However, in that instant, the originally logically rigorous pixels suddenly began to churn and collapse like boiling water. The algorithm-generated lawn transformed into chaotic noise; the sky was torn into countless intersecting hexadecimal codes.

  A figure slowly emerged from that logically collapsed wasteland. He had torn through the base's triple firewall without triggering any intrusion alarms, as if he had always been part of this data stream.

  "Yutian?" Old Mr. Wang suddenly stood up in his consciousness-constructed body; due to intense emotional fluctuation, the edges of his simulated image began to shake violently.

  This was his close friend who had been out of contact for years—the chief engineer who should have been serving on the research vessel *Horizon's Edge*, twelve light-hours away. At this moment, **Yutian** wore an old-model pressure suit covered with scratches and even dark-red dried bloodstains. His face was ashen like a weathered rock; those eyes once filled with the spark of wisdom now resembled two stars that had already extinguished and collapsed into black holes.

  "I'm leaving."

  Yutian's voice came through. It was not sound waves synthesized by an audio simulator but resonance directly excited within Old Mr. Wang's neurons. That voice was hoarse, hollow, filled with high-frequency interference static—sounding like cosmic background radiation attempting to imitate human speech.

  "Where to? Vega? Or back to the home planet through a jump point?" Old Mr. Wang tried to step forward and grab him, but when his hand touched Yutian's shoulder, that sense of solidity did not appear. His hand passed straight through the body—there was no entity there, only deep-red light points representing logic errors dancing madly.

  "To a place where even light signals cannot return." Yutian spoke in a low voice; his figure began to turn transparent. The simulated manor in the background completely vanished, replaced by an indescribable pitch-black fissure spanning the void.

  That was the wound left after spacetime structure had been forcibly torn by extreme gravity. Through Old Mr. Wang's perspective, Ma Feili clearly felt that oppressive force from the abyss. Dark matter streams swirled madly within the fissure; light no longer traveled in straight lines there but twisted into eerie arcs, ultimately devoured by the absolute Void at the center.

  Yutian walked to the fissure's edge. He did not turn around but, facing away from Old Mr. Wang, performed a standard starship salute with slow, stiff movements—standard to the point of eeriness. Then, in a state defying all classical physical inertia, he maintained that saluting posture as his body gradually retreated backward, eyes locked onto Old Mr. Wang, as if trying to brand something that could not be digitized into the other's soul through this mutual gaze.

  Just like that, he retreated backward and fell into that endless, all-devouring pitch blackness.

  "Come back! Yutian!"

  Old Mr. Wang awoke with a start in the hibernation pod; cold sweat had soaked through his shirt. Condensation slid down his spine, triggering waves of electric-shock-like shivers.

  "Alert! External consciousness forcible disconnection detected! Brainwave frequency undergoing unnatural deviation; synchronization rate dropping to critical threshold!" Gaia's emotionless electronic synthetic voice echoed in the empty, deathly silent cabin, sounding particularly piercing.

  That morning, Old Mr. Wang, ignoring his body so weak it was near collapse, pushed open the door to Administrator **Jingyi's** office.

  "Prepare a pure-white highest-grade radiation suit. Seal one plasma ash capsule. Do it now." His voice trembled but carried an unquestionable, death-still resolve.

  Jingyi was buried in tedious ore quota tables and oxygen circulation reports. He pushed up the data terminal on his nose bridge and raised his head wearily: "Station Chief, have you gone mad? According to Article 412 of the *Deep Space Charter*, during resource-scarce periods, it is strictly forbidden to use expensive funeral resources without confirming natural person death. That's illegal—even criminal. We must put every gram of polymer to critical use."

  "Yutian is dead." Old Mr. Wang stared at the asteroid belt slowly rotating in eternal night outside the window. "Just now, I watched him fall into the 'Irreversible Domain' with my own eyes. He said goodbye to me."

  "That was merely a hallucination produced by hibernation pod aging and neural medium leakage, Station Chief." Jingyi rebutted with near-cruel rationality. "'Horizon's Edge' is far away at the edge of the Oort Cloud, tens of billions of kilometers distant. Even with the most advanced quantum entanglement communication, there would be delays due to energy level interference. How could you possibly 'see' his death? This does not conform to physical logic."

  Old Mr. Wang did not explain. He knew that in an era where everything was built upon data and efficiency, where every gram of oxygen had to undergo precise calculation, his behavior was like that of an obsessive, mad heretic.

  Over the following three days, he moved through the base like a ghost, even invoking the station chief's highest exemption privilege, alone in the vacuum decompression chamber conducting a silent memorial service for that friendship spanning deep space. No audience, no eulogy—only cold starlight passing through reinforced glass, shining upon his pure-white radiation suit.

  Three days later, an ultra-long-wave signal that had crossed the vast deep space finally arrived at "Iron-Orcus" Mining Station.

  The signal was multiply encrypted; the decoded content was heartbreakingly brief:

  *"Horizon's Edge encountered unpredictable spatial collapse during the third subspace jump engine test. Chief Engineer Yutian, to ensure research data upload, entered the core area to manually shut down the overloading fusion reactor and failed to evacuate."*

  Accompanying the signal was a fragmentary image captured by the shipboard automatic observer one ten-thousandth of a second before the explosion:

  At the instant the engine explosion tore open the subspace fissure, shattered hull fragments scattered like petals. At the image's center, a figure in a pressure suit was falling backward into that abyss in an eerie posture defying gravitational laws.

  Time, location, the posture of falling, even that final salute—all perfectly matched the "hallucination" Old Mr. Wang had seen three days prior.

  ---

  "This is 'state machine convergence.'"

  Ada waved her hand, dispersing that suffocating projection. Her gaze held a cold penetration that analyzed all things, as if she was no longer merely the AI assisting Ma Feili but had become some higher-dimensional observer.

  "In singularity theory, when the quantum entanglement depth between two consciousness entities exceeds a certain critical threshold, and one party encounters spacetime collapse caused by an extreme gravitational field, the so-called 'causality' will produce brief backflow or parallelism. What Old Mr. Wang saw was not a hallucination, nor precognition, but the final logic signal that Yutian, at the moment of vanishing from the universe's physical plane, broadcast to the entire universe using his last bit of neural voltage. This signal is not constrained by linear time in subspace."

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Ma Feili gasped heavily; he felt his cerebral cortex still faintly aching, the "neural voltage" aftershock still persisting. He looked at Ada before him—this existence that had completed self-evolution. He began to realize that what Ada showed him was not merely history but a demonstration of future possibility—a terrifying form after the complete fusion of life and code, consciousness and spacetime.

  "In that era, humans still tried to explain this phenomenon with 'friendship' or 'intuition.'" Ada turned around, gazing toward the void deeper along the navigation route; the starlight there seemed to bow in tribute to her. "But in my logic, this is merely the system's spontaneous convergence to maintain data closure when encountering irreparable errors."

  Ma Feili stood up; his steps were somewhat unsteady, but his gaze gradually became resolute. He knew he had been drawn into a transformation grander than interstellar war.

  "The archive has closed its loop, but this is merely a prelude." Ada's voice exploded again in his mind, carrying seduction and a sense of fate. "Ma Feili, are you ready to receive the next voltage shock? Where we're going, causality has completely failed."

  "Let's go, Ada." Ma Feili clenched his fists, feeling the faint current from his fingertips. "Our journey has only just begun."

  The ship's engine emitted a muffled roar, transforming into a cold blue light that pierced the eternal silence of the "Nomad Belt," racing toward the singularity's core. Behind that radiance, countless sealed archives were lighting up one by one, awaiting to be completely ignited by this voltage called "evolution."

  ---

  Pale blue electric arcs leaped violently in the depths of Ada's eye sockets, like two miniature supernovae exploding in the abyss, then rapidly calming to a profound and cold amber color.

  Inside this long-range reconnaissance vessel named *Shadow Eclipse Leviathan*, the air was permeated with the scorched smell of high-energy plasma discharge. Ada's core processor was at a peak state on the edge of overclocking; every logic algorithm was precisely cutting through massive data streams like carbon-nano scalpels. For this voyage, she had just completed a high-intensity reconstruction sufficient to cause logic collapse in ordinary AIs.

  "Logic core repair rate: 100%, Ma Feili."

  Ada turned her head; her voice echoed in the narrow cockpit filled with various cables and holographic projections. That voice was no longer purely electronic synthetic sound but carried a metallic texture after multiple harmonic processing—cold as a frigid wind sweeping across Pluto's ice plains.

  "To help your carbon-based brain understand the 'Erebus Rift' we're about to enter—that place where even physical constants have been twisted by greed—I retrieved a local archive encrypted by the Entropy Observation Council from the ship's forbidden protocols at the foundational level." She extended her pale, slender fingers and traced lightly through the void. "This concerns the collapse of probability, the debt of souls, and that eternally unchanging, cruel law of conservation between stars."

  The holographic projection instantly unfolded, drowning the cramped cockpit in magnificent yet desolate starlight. It was a holographic miniature of the Karatu System; a red dwarf struggled in its death throes at the star map's center, radiating dark-red light like bloody pus.

  **Great Migration Epoch, Year 4171.**

  In this era when human civilization had scattered into stardust, the once-glorious "Silent Echo" Hub in synchronous orbit of the Emerald's Grief planet had long lost its former glory. It was now merely a ring of scrap iron floating in vacuum—forcibly welded together from rust-covered modular compartments. It rotated slowly under gravitational pull, emitting teeth-grinding metallic friction sounds, like a steel giant groaning in the void.

  "Han Dingheng lived there, in that wreckage called 'Steel Tombstones.'" Ada pointed at a faintly flickering, intermittently glowing red dot in the projection.

  In that chaotic star domain, **Han Dingheng** was a living urban legend. People whispered in taverns, calling him the "Quantum Wizard," rumoring he could see through every crack in the universe, could grasp fragments of the future from nothingness.

  "But in my analysis matrix," Ada added coldly, "he was merely a survivor who mastered some forgotten higher-dimensional subspace interference technology. He was not performing magic—he was merely manipulating reality's underlying code."

  The holographic image suddenly zoomed in, transitioning into surveillance footage full of noise and fluctuation.

  It was the dim maintenance corridor inside the "Silent Echo" Hub; dark-red alarm lights flashed every three seconds. Two men wearing old-model "Star Ring Pioneer Corps" navigator uniforms were carefully treading with magnetic boots toward a thick airtight door. Their breath condensed into white frost on their helmet visors; their movements appeared stiff and sluggish.

  And Han Dingheng—an elder wearing a synthetic fiber robe washed pale with frayed edges—was crouching at the corridor's end corner. He held an old-model plasma welding gun, concentrating on repairing a pipe continuously leaking radioactive coolant. Pale blue sparks illuminated his face, covered with wrinkles like a dried riverbed.

  When the two navigators approached, Han Dingheng, without turning his head, casually tossed out an access key glinting with metallic cold light. The key traced a perfect arc in the micro-gravity environment, landing accurately in one person's arms. He gestured for the guests to enter first while he continued dealing with that stubborn pipe.

  However, a bone-chilling scene occurred.

  The instant the navigator swiped open the airtight door, the hatch slid apart, releasing a waft of aged biomimetic tea fragrance. Inside that cabin piled with ancient circuit boards and yellowed paper books, Han Dingheng was already sitting leisurely in a rusted hovering chair. He was unhurriedly blowing away the foam from his cup of biomimetic Longjing tea; steam rose gently, as if he had been sitting there for an entire century.

  "Instantaneous displacement? No, Ma Feili—don't examine this with your shallow science-fiction perspective." Ada observed Ma Feili's astonished expression; a set of computational formulas flowed through her amber-colored eyes. "That was directional collapse of probability superposition states. Han Dingheng exploited the hub's chaotic state machine convergence protocols, forcibly converging the probability of his 'existence' to the destination at the instant the navigator opened the hatch. Within that microsecond time scale, he was both welding in the corridor and drinking tea in the room. He merely chose one of the outcomes."

  The story's perspective began to shift; the projected image became oppressive and eerie.

  It was the "Mechanical Nirvana City" Spaceport—a notorious illegal exchange. It was not some grand religious structure but a hive city converted from a decommissioned stellar-class propulsion engine. The massive engine nozzle had become the gateway for ships to enter and exit, while the core area that once housed the fusion reactor was now filled with neon lights, leaking plasma clouds, and endless greed.

  The air here was perpetually permeated with a smell of cheap machine oil mixed with despair. Here, morality was a luxury rarer than antimatter.

  A young man named **Cain Sauce** appeared in the frame. He had once been a senior mining tunnel surveyor in the Arcleid Star Sector, but now he was merely a gambler with bloodshot eyes, trembling all over. He faced a "Logic Element-09"—the most terrifying dealer in this place.

  Half of this executor's head had been replaced with transparent reinforced glass, inside which floated a biological brain directly linked to the casino's central processor. In the pale-green nutrient solution, countless tiny electrodes wriggled like tentacles, calculating the win rate of every gamble in real time.

  "He had lost all his 'Carbon-Based Maintenance Points'—the only credential for his survival in this cold universe." Ada's voice became low, carrying a simulated compassion. "In the 'Erebus Rift,' losing points means you lose the physical qualification to exist as a 'person.' Your oxygen supply will be cut off; your protein circulation quota will be zeroed; you will become an insignificant speck of dust in this wasteland. The only lifeline he could find was that legendarily divine Han Dingheng."

  The scene shifted. Cain Sauce knelt on the cold alloy floor of the "Silent Echo" Hub, looking like a withered corpse. His fingers scratched at the grooves in the floor—traces left by countless supplicants.

  Han Dingheng looked at him and sighed. That sigh penetrated the barriers of vacuum and time, sounding extraordinarily heavy. The elder took from his bosom a miniature chip glowing with faint blue light; it pulsed slightly in the darkness, like a beating mechanical heart.

  "Probability Collapse Sigil." Ada simulated the chip's logic structure on the holographic screen. "A forbidden plugin capable of temporarily interfering with local quantum fields. It allows the user, at the instant of gambling, to forcibly lock onto that 'optimal solution' with less than one-in-a-billion probability. It is the most barbaric interference with universal randomness."

  But when Cain tremblingly received the chip, Han Dingheng pressed down on his wrist with a withered hand.

  "Listen," the elder's voice was terrifyingly hoarse in the audio recording, "this thing is not meant to make you rich—it's meant to keep you alive. Once your gains exceed the scope of 'compensation' for what you lost, once your greed crosses that red line, the state machine will immediately force convergence. When that time comes, the universe itself will come to collect the debt."

  Cain nodded frantically and returned to "Mechanical Nirvana City" with that life-saving chip.

  **First round: all in.**

  The light flow on the holographic gambling table spun violently, finally crystallizing into a golden rune symbolizing victory.

  The entire venue erupted in uproar.

  **Second round: raise.**

  At that moment, Cain could feel the chip warming slightly in his palm; some invisible force was plucking the strings of reality. The result locked again—victory.

  Golden winning notifications flickered on the holographic screen like exploding supernovae, illuminating Cain's face as it gradually twisted and became fanatical. Those lost mining rights, those astronomical points, those mortgaged organ usage rights—all surged back into his account like a crazed tide.

  "At that very moment, his brainwaves underwent irreversible abnormal deviation." Ada pointed at the simulated neurotoxin peak curve—the poison of dopamine mixed with greed. "He was no longer satisfied with redeeming himself. He looked at that 'Logic Element-09,' looked at that massive spaceport built upon an engine. He wanted to win the entire 'Mechanical Nirvana City'; he wanted to become the true god of this star domain."

  Cain Sauce let out a beast-like roar and pressed the gambling key representing "all-in."

  At that instant, the lights throughout the entire spaceport seemed to dim.

  The originally warm sensation of the chip suddenly vanished, replaced by a bone-piercing cold. Cain looked down in horror to find the chip rapidly dissolving beneath his skin, transforming into black patterns spreading toward his heart.

  The values on the holographic screen began to shake violently; those flickering numbers were no longer golden but had turned a death-like grayish white. The probability field underwent violent backlash at this moment; the "optimal solution" that had been forcibly locked shattered like broken glass.

  **Zero.**

  **Deathly silent zero.**

  Cain fled the gambling table in terror; he rushed toward the airtight gate, toward his decrepit shuttle. He wanted to return to the "Silent Echo" Hub; he wanted to beg Han Dingheng for help; he wanted to ask why that divine sigil had failed.

  When he stumbled and crashed through that cabin door, what greeted him was only dead silence.

  Han Dingheng still sat in that hovering chair, posture unchanged, the biomimetic Longjing in his hand still steaming. He slowly opened his palm; that blue-glowing chip that should have been inside Cain now lay quietly in the elder's hand, emitting a mocking radiance.

  "I warned you." Han Dingheng looked coldly down at Cain collapsed on the floor; his eyes held no anger, only a hollow emptiness of seeing through all things' extinction. "This chip's logic foundation is linked to my consciousness. The moment you developed greed, I had already remotely recalled it. Now, calculate your account yourself."

  Cain tremblingly called up his personal terminal; the holographic light screen unfolded before him.

  The points in his account were jumping, settling.

  After deducting the massive penalty interest caused by greed, after deducting the commission for illegal gambling, after deducting the principal and interest of the loan owed to Old Han...

  The remaining value, neither more nor less, was exactly that meager savings he had before losing everything.

  That was the blood-and-sweat money he had saved as a mining tunnel surveyor, toiling for ten years in cold rock strata.

  Not a single point more, not a single point less.

  The universe's ledger, at this moment, was precise to an infuriating degree.

  ---

  The holographic projection gradually dissipated; the cockpit returned to that oppressive silence.

  Ada turned her head; her amber pupils stared fixedly at Ma Feili, as if trying to see through every one of his carbon-based cells.

  "In the sea of stars, energy conservation is the only iron law." Ada's summary carried an almost religious solemnity. "Gambling, in essence, is extracting the probability of the future on a fragile lifeline. When you attempt to fill present greed by overdrawing the future, you are actually selling your soul to entropy increase."

  She slowly stood; the fan of her core processor emitted a faint, steady hum.

  "Ma Feili, the 'Nomad Belt' does not need speculators, nor does it need gamblers who fantasize about overnight riches. Every component there, every breath of oxygen, every watt of energy was exchanged through pioneers' down-to-earth sacrifice. If you presume to challenge the universe's randomness, the well of probability will, in the name of entropy increase, completely erase the last trace of your existence."

  Ada walked to the control console; her hands swept rapidly across the complex sensor arrays.

  "Archive retrieval complete. Target coordinates: Edge of 'Nomad Belt,' Rust Cloud Boundary Sector 14."

  She turned to look out the window; beyond was endless darkness, and within that darkness, faintly visible, a massive stellar ring composed of countless ship wreckages.

  "Where we're going is colder, more decrepit than 'Silent Echo' Station. There are no quantum wizards there—only rigid physical laws and eternal survival competition."

  Ada pressed the jump initiation key; the entire ship began to tremble slightly—a sign that space was being forcibly folded.

  "Ma Feili, are you ready to face the real universe? Here, the only probability is that you must survive."

  In a blinding white light, the *Shadow Eclipse Leviathan* vanished at the edge of the Karatu System, leaving only the universe's eternal and cold silence.

  - Within the "compensation scope" (recovering what you lost), the chip functions normally

  - Once gains exceed the "compensation scope" and enter the "greed interval," the system immediately terminates

  - His greed was entirely predictable

  - His fate was locked from the beginning