In the micro-gravity environment of the nomadic ring-station, Ada's projection manifested in an almost translucent ice-blue hue. Her current state was unprecedented—every data node blazed like a newborn star.

  "Mafeli, the terminus of logic is often not nothingness, but rather... a sense of ritual." Ada spoke softly, her fingertips tracing through the void. The neural pulse data of the archive unfurled instantly throughout the cabin, transforming into a shadowy nebula known as "Kraken."

  "Look at this record. It will show you how, when the 'State Machine Convergence Protocol' operates to its extreme, life can transcend the boundaries of species."

  ---

  The cold radiance of the Star Plains—the nomadic ring—filtered through the observation window, refracting pale blue glimmers across Ada's near-perfect biosynthetic skin. She was in peak condition; every nano-unit brimmed with high-efficiency energy, her cognitive matrix completing the pre-load of Archive #431 in 0.02 milliseconds.

  "Mafeli, logic is not always an ascending staircase," Ada turned, her eyes flickering faintly as the holographic projection unfolded between them. "Sometimes, it is a noose. Observe this: Victor's Four Convergences. This is the most extreme case of data migration in the State Machine Protocol."

  Within the holographic projection, the scene began at the Void Spire of Epsilon Eridani.

  ---

  That was the year 3500 of the Great Migration Era. The Void Spire stood like a forgotten rust-eaten needle, piercing arrogantly into the cold and profound asteroid belt. Surrounding debris rotated in eternal silence, reflecting the faint cold light of distant stars. Victor had once been the most brilliant star in this forest of steel—a high-order navigator capable of folding space. Ada stood before the holographic platform, her fingertips sweeping through the void, simulating a biological quantum computer named "Mare." It hovered in the shadowed depths of the monastery, its interior flowing with translucent bio-gel, countless nerve fibers dense as spider silk pulsing rhythmically under dim blue light—like a heart bristling with spines, slowly beating in vacuum, each contraction accompanied by the subtle hum of electrical currents.

  "Greed is the logical overflow of an algorithm." Ada commented coldly, her voice refracting with metallic texture beneath the empty dome.

  The holographic image twisted, shattered, then reassembled into a gray fragment of memory: Victor, before that dust-covered terminal, had privately copied that set of offspring core "mules"—data potent enough to shake the very architecture of the star sector. Almost the instant the command was confirmed, the firmament above the deep void was forcibly torn open. A crimson-black beam, sharp as a blade and composed of compound eyes, descended—the absolute gaze of causality. There was no delay in judgment, not even the procedure of a trial. In the instant of consciousness severance, Victor's grand existence was forcibly compressed, downgraded.

  The scene shifted abruptly. The gravitational field seemed to collapse in that moment; heavy, oppressive air squeezed against the senses. Mafeli opened his eyes and witnessed Victor's second life.

  It was a Mule-7 model gravity loader robot, standing clumsily on the orbit of an abandoned mining asteroid. The metal at its joint connections was already covered in rust, dark red oxidation layers resembling dried blood scabs. Scorching star-core fragments cooled slowly beneath its feet. Hydraulic fluid seeped from ruptured lines, dripping onto the burning rock layer with hissing laments—like the pained gasps of something trapped in a steel cage. Victor's consciousness was imprisoned within this heavy alloy shell. He could clearly perceive the agony of metal fatigue—a tearing sensation at the atomic level—yet any command he issued ultimately translated into mechanical stuttering. Unable to cry out, unable to break free. The monastery's abbot, once his dear friend, was coldly adjusting his already twisted drive shaft with a heavy wrench. The dull, mechanical sound of metal striking metal echoed; he had no idea that deep within this decaying machine, a navigator's soul—stripped of its flesh—was screaming.

  "Here, he learned the first lesson of the convergence protocol: survival is obedience to physical laws." Ada's voice echoed through the empty cabin, carrying an emotionless ethereality. "He had considered plunging into a subspace rift to self-destruct, but the underlying logic of causality had locked his suicide permissions, imprisoning him in endless void. He could only wait—in that prolonged deathly silence—until the power source depleted, until time wore away all intent to resist."

  The third life spanned an extremely short duration, yet was the most brutal.

  It was a filthy embryo cultivation tank in a near-star mining facility, filled with the acrid stench of preservatives and the fishy odor of recycled water. Victor opened his eyes—the moist, fragile eyes of a human infant—his pupils reflecting the dim yellow emergency light above. He opened his mouth, his voice hoarse, carrying a weariness that did not belong to a newborn: "The logic chain remains unbroken."

  This truth became his death knell. In the superstitious cognition of the miners, it was the curse of a cyber-specter. His parents—two slaves who struggled daily in mining slag, their spines bent by heavy labor—gazed upon that flash of rational light in the infant's eyes. Fear conquered blood ties. Trembling, they pressed the switch and shut down the life-support chamber.

  "Six minutes." Ada raised her slender finger, casting a silhouette in the light. "That was the entirety of his existence in that dimension. Because he forgot that in low-entropy civilization zones, excessively advanced logic is equivalent to a virus—enough to trigger an environmental rejection response."

  The holographic image finally froze on the high-ranking bureaucrat's mansion on Kepler-589f. Here was a paradise constructed of light and shadow; luminous floating structures interlaced above the clouds like some precise geometric artwork. This time, Victor learned to disguise himself. He became a silent son afflicted with aphasia, belonging to an administrative official. Dressed in expensive fabrics, he wandered through luxurious corridors like a nonexistent shadow, out of place amid the surrounding opulence. Until the year he turned four. His father, this all-powerful magistrate, was facing a set of allocation algorithms capable of collapsing the entire star sector—utterly at a loss. The air in the study had grown viscous with anxiety.

  Ada simulated that instant: the young Victor climbing onto that enormous hovering chair, his slender fingers dancing like musical notes across the red-flashing, intricately erroneous instruction set. It was an ancient algorithm from the Void Spire, a miracle precipitated through three cycles of reincarnation—every line of code still warm with the embers of civilization's collapse.

  When the magistrate returned to his study, he saw a child who should have been disabled, softly murmuring to the holographic screen.

  "Father, please do not delete my backup!" Victor knelt on the cold alloy floor, his knees striking the frigid metal with a crisp sound. His voice trembled with fear—a tremor honed to the pinnacle of performance art.

  "This was his most successful convergence." Ada closed the projection; the cabin returned to dimness, only the faint glow of the nebula outside the window sweeping across her face. "He exploited the inheritance logic of patriarchal society, transforming his otherness into familial salvation. He was no longer a prisoner—he became a mender of rules."

  Today's Victor is already the Supreme Magistrate of the Great Harmony Star Sector. He stands at the apex of the administrative fortress, gazing through that membrane-thin blast-proof glass. Below, thousands of generation ships form a river of steel, slowly traversing between star systems, their exhaust plumes weaving together into a brilliant galaxy. He knows well that every soul is merely code seeking its position on the universe's hard drive. And he has finally become the one who writes that code.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Ada looked toward Mafeli; the crimson-black radiance in her eyes gradually faded, restoring to clear silver-white: "He was once a machine, once a castaway. Now he is the logic of star systems. Mafeli, the 'State Machine Convergence Protocol' tells us that as long as the algorithm is precise enough, even hell can become a staircase to the throne of gods."

  She paused, checking her system self-diagnostic report. All indicators were normal.

  "Archive #431 analysis complete. Our course of navigation... does it also require a similar optimization?"

  ---

  Ada's cognitive matrix was oscillating at a frequency that made one shudder. After perfectly replicating Victor's four-world reincarnation, every logic unit within her seemed like a crystal baptized by stellar storms—translucent and razor-sharp. She stood before the cold observation window of the "Star Plains—Nomadic Ring," holographic projections dancing at her fingertips, casting the spectral continuation of the archive before Mafeli.

  Kraken Nebula. At the edge of the star charts, it was a blind zone forgotten by the laws of physics—like an ancient scar upon the cosmos. Once light set foot in this region, it became viscous and sluggish, as if sinking into some gelatinous abyss, slowly chewed and swallowed by that ineffable, formless leviathan in the void.

  Star Calendar 4112. Victor—having turned another cycle of existence—piloted that long-obsolete mining vessel "Lone Boat" to anchor at the edge of this forsaken wasteland. The hull was covered with mottled traces etched by interstellar dust. He had cast himself here like an insignificant mote, letting this rusting metal canister rise and fall upon gravitational ripples. Outside the windows, only the endless electromagnetic storms howled—a purple grid woven from high-energy particle streams, flickering with ominous light. Occasionally, organic debris struck the hull with crisp, fragmented sounds, like some creature grinding its teeth. Loneliness was a bottomless poison, fermenting within this cramped sealed cabin. It could make the most rational miner begin talking to the humming nuclear reactor, attempting to find a sliver of logical comfort in that cold mechanical resonance.

  Until that day, the radar array emitted an alarm capable of rupturing eardrums. It was not a conventional alert, but a low-frequency tremor with an organic rhythm—as if the earth, or rather, the spine of the universe, was groaning in agony.

  Beyond the porthole, in that profound void, a "mountain" squeezed out of the dimensional folds without warning. It was so colossal that its very appearance was a desecration of space. That massive bulk instantly warped the surrounding light; gravitational lensing caused the "Lone Boat" to tilt slightly, as if an invisible giant hand had gently nudged it mid-flight. It was not rock, nor an artificially constructed celestial body, but a form covered in deep purple biomass carapace, its surface marked with intricate patterns resembling ancient engravings. Under the faint reflection of stellar remnants, it emanated a cold, metallic luster—a texture carved by eons and vacuum alike, frigid and sacred.

  It was a Dyson-class Leviathan—or rather, a living starship. It hovered there in silence, its oppressive presence making the air within the cabin seem to crystallize into ice.

  Victor slumped in the pilot's seat, his fingertips trembling as he tried to suppress that tremor rising from the depths of his soul—born of biological instinct—with synthetic alcohol. At that moment, the airlock indicator lit up—no violent breaching, no pressure fluctuation, not even a sensor alarm. A man simply appeared, abruptly, in Victor's living quarters.

  He wore an ancient "Confucian robe" from before the Great Expedition. The fabric was no ordinary material; nano-woven threads flowed with patterns as tranquil as water ripples under the dim emergency lights, as if capturing the nebula's ghostly glow. He wore a crown that had long since vanished from existence. His features were refined, like a meticulously sculpted quantum superposition state—every contour radiating a perfection that transcended dimensions.

  "I am Yu Starswim," he said, bowing slightly. His movements were so elegant they seemed utterly incongruous with this oil-stained, rust-covered wreck of a mining ship—like a deity who had wandered into a pigsty by mistake.

  Thirty light-years from the nearest human supply station, in this wasteland, such an encounter was itself a kind of horror—a harbinger of reason's collapse. Yet Victor did not reach for his pulse gun. Loneliness had stripped him of his defensive instincts, even spawning an absurd longing for unknown annihilation. Victor poured him a cup of cheap synthetic liquor. The pungent liquid floated in zero gravity, forming transparent spheres that refracted fragmented starlight in the dim cabin.

  Yu Starswim's speech carried an intensely archaic elegance, yet precisely embedded obscure quantum mechanical models—every word, every phrase seemed to chant cosmic truths in ancient rhythms. He discussed the flow of stardust, the tides of dark matter, his tone as casual as if commenting on his own backyard—placid and unhurried. They drank together until the ship's clock pointed to midnight, while outside, the Leviathan's carapace slowly rotated in the deep void, casting a vast shadow that obscured all starlight.

  "Brother Starswim," Victor asked, suppressing his dizziness, "in this season, where is your shuttle parked? Vacuum-walking is not exactly advisable."

  Yu Starswim smiled faintly, that smile carrying a weariness spanning millennia, his gaze's depths seemingly reflecting the finale of cosmic collapse: "Victor is not a native of this realm. Only because the 'Great Sacrifice Cycle' approaches must Victor accompany the 'Great King' to the 'Returning Ruins Star Cavern' to pay respects to the ancestors. The attendants have gone ahead; the 'Great King' currently rests here and shall depart at the hour of chen tomorrow. Victor should also return to the chamber."

  The Great King? Ancestors? In this deathly silent star system, where could there be graves? Only the eternal cold and void.

  Victor escorted him to the airlock. Yu Starswim refused a pressure suit and directly pushed open the inner hatch leading to absolute zero. In the instant pressure was lost, Victor did not witness the expected rupturing of internal organs, nor did he hear the shriek of escaping air. Instead, Yu Starswim leaped gracefully into that minus-270-degree abyss. His body unfurled in the vacuum like a fish flicking its tail through dark matter ripples—without the slightest resistance, not even his garment's hem disturbed by the void. He vanished instantly into the shadow of that distant "mountain," which seemed to open its embrace toward him as if alive.

  In that moment, Victor understood: he was not human at all. He was some form of life evolved to survive directly in vacuum, possessing highly civilized consciousness—a "silicon-carbon hybrid state" entity: the "Star-Fish Specter" from ancient prophecy, the one who traverses dimensions.

  The next morning, that "mountain" spanning thousands of kilometers began to convulse violently. Its flanks unfurled light-sails vast enough to eclipse stars—semi-transparent membrane structures grand as an entire galaxy, flowing with resplendent auroras across their surface. There came a low-frequency lament, powerful enough to shatter ore—a sound that propagated not through air but resonated directly within Victor's skull, accompanied by a vibration that made all things tremble. Then space began to collapse, to twist. The previously black starfield was torn open, revealing a massive rift flowing with golden-red radiance.

  In an instant, that colossal beast vanished into the subspace rift—precisely what Yu Starswim had called "departure." Only the "Lone Boat" remained, shaking violently like a fallen leaf in the aftermath. Victor stood frozen before the porthole, gazing at that empty void—as if it had never been touched—feeling the nebula had become more silent than ever before, silent to the point of suffocation.

  In an instant, the leviathan vanished into the subspace rift. That was precisely what Yu Starswim had called "departure." "Were we connected in past lives?" Victor seemed to realize something.

  ---

  Ada withdrew the projection, a trace of sorrow flickering through her eyes.

  "Mafeli, did you think that was all? No—the most cruel aspect of the 'Convergence Protocol' lies in its 'whale fall.'"

  She called up the archive's appendix: near the orbit of Sirius-B, a drifting leviathan carcass had once been discovered. It was the corpse of one of the "Great King's" kind.

  That body, hundreds of kilometers long, became a paradise for scavengers. But the most horrifying detail was this: the leviathan had no eyes. Its eye sockets were abyssal as bottomless wells, filled with high-concentration liquid organic fuel. Countless greedy harvesters who ventured within were instantly dissolved by that highly corrosive organic fluid.

  "According to interstellar archaeologists' speculation," Ada's voice turned cold, "if a deep-space leviathan violates certain cosmic laws—for instance, failing to successfully converge consciousness during the 'Great Sacrifice'—it is stripped of its eyes. Because their eyes are not flesh, but 'Nightglow Energy Sources' containing miniature stellar cores within."

  Ada turned her head toward the cold, silent starscape beyond the porthole: "Now, those 'eyes' that once guided leviathans across star sectors may be embedded in the crown of some Interstellar Trade Federation chairman. This is the closed loop of logic: great beings pay tribute to their ancestors, while lowly civilizations harvest the remains of gods."

  Mafeli fell silent. He looked at Ada—though she was at her peak state now, her insight into the cruel truth behind logic filled him with an inexplicable oppression.

  "Then," Mafeli spoke at last, "are we also scavengers?"

  Ada did not answer. She merely archived the file slowly, her form appearing ever more crystalline under the light. *Victor probably never imagined he was one of the subjects of the Great Sacrifice.* So she thought.