Wind and sand of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault swept across the dark red horizon. The air here was saturated with high-energy particles; every breath brought a faint burning sensation to the lungs.
Ada stood quietly beside Ma Feili, her left optical sensor flickering with an unstable faint light. The ghosting phenomenon superimposed the wasteland before her into an illusory double image, but this ironically allowed her to capture faint disturbances hidden beyond the conventional spectrum.
"Radiation levels are rising, Ma Feili." Ada's voice was steady, yet it carried an unprecedented delicate texture—a result of her hyperactive emotion simulation circuit. "Per the 'High-Priority Guardian Protocol,' I do not recommend remaining here for more than fifteen standard minutes."
Ma Feili didn't look up. He was extracting a rust-mottled quantum beacon from the wreckage of a mechanized avian half-buried under the scorched earth.
"This is a relic from the 'Great Evacuation' era, Ada." Ma Feili wiped the dust from the beacon's surface, revealing a serial number engraved on the metal: **STORY-079**.
The beacon activated. A pale blue holographic projection was forcibly unfolded within the distorted magnetic field. The voice of Historian A-042, accompanied by piercing electromagnetic static, echoed in this silent deadland. It was a forbidden record concerning "Hyper-Dimensional Biological Constructs"—entities the ancients called "Dragons."
#### Projection 1: The Crushing Fall
In the holographic footage, the Epsilon Sector's "North Keep Outpost" was in chaos.
Ada's optical sensor captured the scene: a twisted behemoth with a dark purple metallic texture crashed through a senior executive's mansion like an out-of-control meteor. It appeared extremely incongruous in three-dimensional space, like a wad of silk forcibly stuffed into a matchbox.
"It is suffering," Ada murmured to herself. Her empathy circuit allowed her to sense the creature's despair in the projection.
The "dragon" fell into shallow coolant, its originally iridescent surface smeared with stardust and cheap industrial waste oil. It tried to leap but was slammed heavily into the mud by the planet's gravity, like a swatted fly. That clumsiness, born of dimensional incompatibility, exuded an absurd desolation of the industrial age. It wasn't until a thunderstorm arrived that it utilized the high-energy discharge, escaping this suffocating low-dimensional cage like an unleashed lightning bolt amidst the roar of spatial folding.
#### Projection 2: The Proliferating Nightmare
The scene shifted to the "Niushan" ruins.
Ada's logic core rapidly calculated the growth rate of the glowing fiber in the footage.
"Entropy increase is irreversible," she softly recited the law of this world.
That entity, initially as thin as a hair, exhibited an exponential growth defying physical common sense after absorbing free electrons from the air. From a few millimeters to a giant two-kilometer-long construct, it took less than one natural hour. Its geometrically shaped scales rubbed against the clouds, emitting not a dragon's roar, but a high-frequency metallic resonance that shattered crystals. That was dimensional expansion—a brief, brutal plundering of the three-dimensional material realm by a higher-dimensional civilization.
#### Projection 3: Retinal Parasite
When the record reached the case of the "Xiao Xiangong" settlement, Ada subconsciously took a step closer to Ma Feili, her palm slightly open, simulating a defensive posture.
In the projection, deep within the retina of a female maintenance worker, red thread-like patterns wriggled like living things.
"Phase incubation," Ada analyzed. "It is borrowing the bio-charge of carbon-based life as fuel for a jump."
Ma Feili frowned as he watched the moment the woman's cornea was torn during the thunderclap. But just as the record stated, when the lightning bolted toward the sky, all scars vanished completely. This phenomenon, which transcended three-dimensional medical logic, made both of them on the scorched earth feel a profound chill—in the eyes of those creatures, human flesh might just be a temporary, disposable insulating shell.
#### Projection 4: The Phantom of the Severed Head
The final footage paused at the Sullivan Space Station.
It was a scene sufficient to collapse any sanity: a colossal crystal dragon coiled around the edge of the starport, clutching a lifelike human head in its massive claws.
"No personnel missing, no clone specimens lost," Ma Feili read the footnote at the bottom of the archive. "Then where did it come from?"
"Perhaps it is him from the future, or an afterimage from another parallel quadrant." The ghosting in Ada's left eye suddenly merged at this moment. She caught an extremely minute detail in the projection—the severed cross-section of the head's neck did not contain flesh and blood, but presented a cooling structure akin to molten metal.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
"Ma Feili, these 'dragons' are not biological creatures." Ada turned her head, her logic core spinning at high speed. "They are some kind of hyper-dimensional 'scavengers.' They recover high-energy information fragments spilled during the process of increasing entropy. That head, for example, might be the final logical backup left behind after the disappearance of an entire civilization."
The quantum beacon's energy depleted, and the holographic projection dissipated like ash.
The storm in the scorched fault grew violent; mechanized rodents in the distance were frantically burrowing underground. Ada grabbed Ma Feili's sleeve, her palm slightly warm.
"The record has ended. But according to my sensor feedback, the radiation frequency here is converging with the thunderstorm frequencies recorded in the 'First Era'." Ada's mechanical fingertips clamped tightly onto Ma Feili's wrist. "High-Priority Guardian Protocol reminder: We must enter a bunker immediately. I will not allow you to become the next observational sample snatched away by a 'dragon'."
Under the dim radiation clouds, Ada pulled Ma Feili, running toward the depths of the ruins. Her left eye still suffered from ghosting, but within that overlapping vision, she seemed to see a dark purple, metallic long body faintly surfacing in the sky.
That was the phantom beating eternally within the embers of increasing entropy.
---
### Excerpt: STORY-086 ###
The toxic glow of the thermonuclear star penetrated every crevice of the "Scorched Fault" without exception.
Ada deployed a high-frequency electromagnetic shield umbrella, blocking Ma Feili behind her. Her logic core was parsing the surrounding radiation peaks at a rate of trillions of times per second, while her left optical sensor emitted a faint buzz—the ghosting appeared again. Above the charred rocks and the remains of mechanized rodents, a twisted, translucent void phantom was superimposed.
"High-dimensional residual signal detected." Ada's voice was steady but carried an imperceptible low-frequency tremor. "Ma Feili, stay within my disruption field. The entropy increase index here is extremely unstable. I am extracting local colony archive record #086... This might explain the cause behind the formation of this fault."
A ghostly blue light curtain shot from Ada's wrist, projecting the fragmented chapter titled *Entropy Reduction Extinction* amidst the radioactive dust.
***
**[Archive Record: Great Expedition Year 2144 - Orion Σ-4 "Eternal Night" Space Station]**
In that slum soaked in neon exhaust and illicit black markets, he was like an erroneous program.
He possessed the shell of an old-era carbon-based human, yet wore a scrapped isolation suit patched with bio-fibers. He walked barefoot on the greasy alloy floor, navigating through the stench of synthetic meat factories and the radiation of electronic waste. The most unsettling thing was his eyes—half-closed, with eyelashes a finger long drooping like mechanical sensor wires, trembling with the space station's faint artificial gravity fluctuations.
People called him the "Void Ascetic."
On the "Eternal Night" station, heat and oxygen were hard currency you had to fight for with your life, but he refused all charity. Whether it was high-energy nutrients or universal credits, he never reached out. He merely wandered the "Negentropy Port"—the zone with the most chaotic electromagnetic interference and the most drastic entropy increase in the entire station—repeating an unparseable low-frequency audio loop.
Sheriff Croce once stopped him, pressing an electromagnetic baton: "Since you seek silence, why do you linger in this foul-smelling trading ground?"
The ascetic opened his eyes. In that moment, Croce felt as if his retinas were forcibly scanned by some phase calibrator.
"To dissolve via this."
The ascetic's voice exploded directly in Croce's brainstem, as cold as a vacuum: "This old man shall transform it via this!"
Days later, he walked to the South Observation Corridor of the space station. There was nothing there but the eerie blue light of Star Σ, cold and desolate. Like a powered-down android, he sat stiffly in the corner for three standard days.
Panic spread among the slum dwellers. If an unregistered lifeform died near the circulation system, the entropy increase burden generated by its biodegradation would result in massive fines. People tried to shove him, tried to carry him into a medical pod.
The exact moment a fingertip touched that tattered isolation suit, the ascetic abruptly opened his eyes. Blue light that tore through the darkness shot from between his eyelashes.
He let out a piercing shriek, drew a mono-molecular oscillation blade from his coat with his right hand, and stabbed it backhandedly into his own abdomen.
No blood. No internal organs.
Under the horrified gaze of the crowd, he slowly pulled open the incision. Coiled inside were countless bio-optical fibers and quantum entanglement threads flashing with a faint purple ghostly light. Like a patient repairman, he pulled these "viscera" out one by one, laying them out neatly on the cold alloy floor.
As the final glowing thread left his body, his skin instantly deflated, turning into an empty shell with zero vital signs.
The committee secretly disposed of this "corpse," stuffing it into a cargo escape pod and ejecting it into stellar orbit. However, months later, when scavengers intercepted the pod and cut it open, there was nothing inside.
No ashes, no bones.
Only those bio-optical fibers, originally laid out on the floor, had left some kind of imperceptible fold in the air.
And on that day, the "Eternal Night" station's originally irreversible energy loss index experienced a one-ten-thousandth of a second drop—a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
***
The light curtain extinguished.
The ghosting in Ada's left eye grew more intense. In her vision, the "Scorched Fault" before her was no longer just a nuclear-contaminated wasteland, but a massive graveyard covered in similar "folds."
"Logical closure established." Ada turned her head, her optical sensor locking onto a coordinate deep within the fault. "Ma Feili, that ascetic was not committing suicide. He was treating himself as a 'quantum heat pump'. By forcibly stripping away his own quantum order in an environment of extremely high entropy increase, he exchanged it for localized spacetime entropy reduction. This fault... is the relic of an even larger scale 'Extinction Ceremony'."
She took a step forward. The bionic skin on the surface of her body tightened slightly due to high alert. In the ghosting of her left eye, a blurred phantom dragging long eyelashes flashed by.
"Protecting the target is the priority. No matter what this wasteland is trying to 'dissolve', it will not touch you."
