The residual heat of the thermonuclear scorched fault twisted into translucent ripples in the air.

  Ma Feili’s eyes snapped open. The residual neural pulses on his retinas dissipated like a receding tide. His breathing was heavy and chaotic; with every expansion of his lungs, he could taste the metallic rust unique to high-intensity radiation zones.

  “Cognitive consistency check: 98.7%. Welcome back to three-dimensional reality, Ma Feili.”

  Ada’s voice carried that familiar cold, metallic texture, but her hand was firmly pressed against Ma Feili’s spinal hub. To drag him back from that abyssal consciousness trap, her right arm casing had overloaded, turning a dull, scorched purple. Frost from evaporated neural coolant still clung to her fingertips. She was not just his physical support, but his only logical anchor in this ruin of increasing entropy.

  “I saw it…” Ma Feili wiped cold sweat from his face and looked around.

  They were inside the ruins of the abandoned “Longshan” Orbital Colony Relay Station. Once a frontier outpost of the Ophiuchus RS System, it was now nothing but fractured super-alloy struts and mechanical rodents mutated by radiation. A few cyber-falcons watched them coldly from blackened beams, hunger flickering red in their optical sensors.

  “What you saw were afterimages of a ‘dimensional fissure’.” Ada retracted her hand. Her mechanical eyes rotated rapidly, scanning the unstable spatial curvature around them. “The subspace anchors here have rotted. The law of irreversible entropy is tearing the boundaries of reality apart. You didn’t access a database just now; you accessed the ‘redundancy’ being excreted by this spacetime.”

  Just then, Ma Feili’s gaze was drawn to an object nearby.

  Beside a power conduit thick with radioactive dust, a flesh-red bench had abruptly appeared. Its texture was alien to this cold, metallic world—smooth, rounded, even pulsing faintly, like some kind of skinned living tissue. Ma Feili instinctively reached out, wanting to verify if this was another neural deviation.

  “Do not touch it,” Ada warned, but it was too late.

  Ma Feili’s fingertips brushed against the warm “epidermis.” Instantly, the bench writhed violently like a startled mollusk. Its four short, arthropod-like legs alternated rapidly, emitting a teeth-gritting, sticky friction sound as it scurried into a microscopic molecular crack in the bulkhead, vanishing without a trace.

  “That was a ‘Subspace Spillover Entity’,” Ada recorded the data calmly. “A distortion product of ancient biotechnology under dimensional compression.”

  The anomalies followed one after another. A long pole, white as jade, leaned against a niche in the corridor, emitting a chilling sheen under the dim simulated light. When Ma Feili attempted to approach, the pole slithered down like a dehydrated snake, disappearing into the shadows of a ventilation duct.

  “The station’s neural network is collapsing. It is ‘vomiting’,” Ma Feili whispered.

  As the artificial lighting switched to dim mode, the ambient radiation noise suddenly dropped to a critical point. Ada immediately entered combat alert, her force field generator deploying a faint, ghostly blue arc around them.

  On the deck where magnetic boots had just tread, a three-inch-tall humanoid materialized from thin air. Its movements were incredibly agile. After circling the ruins, it carried out two impossibly intricate carbon nanotube benches from the void.

  “Dimensional overlap,” Ada lowered her voice. Her monitors showed the surrounding subspace curvature taking on an eerie geometric symmetry.

  On the miniature benches, two tiny organisms slowly carried in a four-inch-long “sarcophagus.” The coffin was forged from unknown ore, emitting a faint, sacred luminescence. Immediately after, a group of tiny figures appeared beside the coffin, dressed in white anti-radiation suits cut in the style of old-era mourning robes. The leading female figure, waist bound with hemp fiber cables and head wrapped in protective cloth, wept towards the coffin.

  The crying was high-pitched and thin, like the buzzing of fly wings or high-frequency current oscillating in the air.

  Ma Feili felt a profound chill spread from his spinal cord. On this desolate, dead thermonuclear scorched earth, amidst the ruins of irreversible entropy, this miniature civilization was borrowing their physical coordinates to hold a cross-dimensional funeral.

  “They are using our reality as a graveyard,” Ma Feili murmured.

  Suddenly, the station’s gravity sensors let out a piercing boom due to energy fluctuations. The dimensional balance shattered.

  A “scream”—not from the miniature people, but from Ma Feili’s damaged neurons. He felt his brain being torn open by some high-dimensional force, his body convulsing as he slammed onto the cold deck.

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  “Ma Feili!” Ada intervened instantly. Her core reactor emitted a dull roar as she forcibly released a neutralizing pulse.

  When the blinding light faded, silence returned.

  The miniature coffin, the mourning woman, the flesh-red bench… all anomalies vanished with the transient dimensional intersection. The deck was empty, save for a few mechanical rodents gnawing on rusted cables, making sharp clicking sounds.

  Ada helped Ma Feili up. Her left hand sensors trembled slightly from the pulse interference.

  “The funeral is over.” She looked at the curvature values returning to zero on her monitor, her tone remaining calm. “At the end of entropy, even mourning is a luxurious redundancy.”

  Ma Feili stood, looking out at the barren scorched fault. He knew the funeral was no hallucination, but a final testament projected into the three-dimensional world by this star system before its total collapse.

  ***

  Thermonuclear radiation-induced auroras exploded silently outside the dome of the “Neo-Iron Law” Dyson Sphere.

  Ma Feili curled inside his heavy lead-sealed protective suit, every breath feeling like swallowing scorching grit. His nervous system, having just recovered cognitive function, was hypersensitive. The scent of ionized ozone in the air and the dull, low-frequency vibration of the Dyson Sphere’s internal circulation system were amplified in his mind into a deafening industrial heavy metal variation.

  Beside him, Ada’s right arm casing looked scorched and melted from the previous overload, exposed composite fiber bundles occasionally arcing with weak electric sparks. Although her right arm’s tactile sensors were completely offline, she maintained absolute calm, her left hand tightly gripping a heavy lead-lined cryo-box.

  “Logical calibration complete,” Ada’s voice sounded in Ma Feili’s private channel, vibrating with metallic texture. “The entropy value here is critically high. Ma Feili, if we do not obtain a resource quota within thirty minutes, your carbon-based tissues will undergo irreversible collapse in this high-radiation environment.”

  They passed through Vacuum Hall 19, surrounded by silicon-based citizens of various forms. The air here was heavy enough to coagulate. On the high platform, four Star Alliance Archons looked down like dark red idols, their synthetic bodies pulsating gently within energy fields.

  “Display your illegal technology, or be cast into the fission reactor.” The Archon’s command transmitted through the amplifier array, shaking Ma Feili’s eardrums.

  Ma Feili forced himself to stand straight. He patted the cryo-box, his voice hoarse but carrying a gambler’s arrogance. “I can demonstrate the highest form of ‘Matter Reconstruction’—retrieving life that has been completely erased by entropy increase from a non-existent time point.”

  “Arrogant carbon-based lifeform,” one Archon responded coldly. “The Dyson Sphere is currently in a deep winter cycle. If you can reconstruct an organic fruit from the ‘Proto-Earth’ era—a peach—we will grant you a Level 3 Credit Quota.”

  Ma Feili looked at Ada. In a split second, the two completed a non-verbal logical synchronization.

  “In this barren cluster, the signal of spring has not yet arrived.” Ma Feili sighed deeply, pulling a ball of quantum-entangled monofilament from the cryo-box. “The only possibility lies in the legendary ‘Progenitor Ark’. It simulates Earth’s four seasons in a subspace orbit. Ada, it’s up to you.”

  Ada did not hesitate. She took the bundle of ghostly blue fiber. The filament glinted coldly amidst the radioactive dust. She hurled one end of the fiber violently toward the void folds at the top of the hall.

  A miracle occurred. The fiber did not fall but pierced into the shadows of subspace like a needle stitching reality.

  “Go. Climb the dimensional anchor,” Ma Feili whispered. “Watch out for the Subspace Guardians.”

  Ada gripped the fiber. With her damaged right arm magnetically locked to her torso, she relied solely on her left hand and mechanical leg drives, moving as agilely as a bionic spider traversing gravitational waves. Her figure quickly vanished into the refractive layer rippling like water on the ceiling.

  The hall fell into dead silence, save for the glimmer of falling radioactive dust.

  Approximately half a stellar hour later, the void ripples fluctuated violently. A round object, emitting an alien fragrance, fell from the fissure and was caught steadily by Ma Feili. It was a massive, dew-covered biological peach. In the gray city of the Dyson Sphere, that splash of pink was a miracle violating physical laws.

  The Archons were shaken by the data feedback from their spectrometers. However, just as they prepared to issue the reward command, the blue fiber suddenly trembled violently, then crumpled to the floor like a broken zither string.

  “No!” Ma Feili let out a heart-wrenching scream. “The Guardians detected the intruder!”

  A heavy metal object fell from the void fissure, smashing onto the steps with a loud *bang*. It was Ada’s head casing—scorched, shattered, the light in the electronic eyes extinguished. Immediately after, severed bionic limbs and broken sensor components rained down, splashing sparks across the hall floor.

  Ma Feili threw himself forward, cradling the “head,” sobbing uncontrollably. “This is the price of stealing genetic samples… my only partner!”

  The Archons’ logic circuits experienced a micro-lag. This visually shocking sacrifice, belonging to the old era, triggered the assessment compensation mechanism for “loss of rare assets” in their base protocols. To quell the emotional fluctuations that might cause unrest, a massive amount of Universal Credits was swiftly transferred to Ma Feili’s account.

  “Take these remains away,” the Archon’s voice betrayed a hint of logical fatigue. “Do not let this low-entropy garbage contaminate the hall.”

  Ma Feili sorrowfully gathered all the “severed limbs” into the cryo-box and, under everyone’s gaze, stumbled out of the hall.

  It wasn’t until they turned into a dark alley in the station’s slums that Ma Feili let out a long breath. He flicked the metal lid of the box. “Ada, stop pretending. The sugar content in this peach is enough to keep me going for a month.”

  With a *click*, the cryo-box lid popped open.

  Ada sat up, unscathed. Her damaged right arm still hung at her chest, but the “head” that had been missing was merely a visual decoy she had assembled from spare casings and scrap circuit boards.

  “Logical loop achieved,” Ada commented coldly. “Exploiting the Archons’ cognitive blind spot regarding carbon-based emotions for fraud is 400% more efficient than direct scavenging. However, Ma Feili, the frequency of your crying was too high. I suggest lowering it by 3 decibels next time to remain within the physiological limits of carbon-based organisms.”

  Ma Feili looked at Ada’s grim bionic face, then at the fully loaded credit chip at his waist. In this dead silence of the scorched fault, for the first time, he felt that perhaps even “irreversible entropy” could be teased by a con artist.