The gravitational tides of the Vega-β system left eternal metal fatigue groans upon the metallic shell of the "Arcadia-7" mining fortress. This was the most desolate edge of the Star Plains Nomadic Ring Belt, where starlight was refracted by the dense atmosphere of a gas giant into a sickly dark purple.

  Mafeli stood before the observation window of the main control room. Behind him, Ada was operating at peak condition. Her bionic pupils flickered with high-frequency pale blue radiance, maintaining 100% operational efficiency; the faint heat-dissipation field she emitted floated imperceptibly in the surrounding air.

  "State Machine Convergence Protocol operating normally," Ada's voice echoed through the silent cabin, icy and precise, "but I have detected anomalous emergence on the 'Fangxi' frequency band. Mafeli, this subspace coherent band is attempting to invade the fortress's base-level logic."

  "Fangxi"—a fragment of that court lady from four thousand years ago, adrift in this resource-starved star region. It had no physical form, yet it traveled through circuitry like a ghost.

  At that moment, the fortress's navigator Thorne was piloting a shuttle in the outer ring, collecting ice crystals. In his residential module, his wife Irene was entertaining a visiting Interstellar Codex Inspector—Bert.

  "Thorne is always so neglectful of home," Irene complained to Bert while fussing with the synthetic protein dinner. Her movements were somewhat stiff—a lasting effect of prolonged exposure to low-gravity environments.

  Ada's sensors captured an unusual fluctuation: "Tampering detected in the automatic cooking unit's command set. 'Fangxi' has bypassed the security firewall."

  Inside that humming machine, a contraband nano-fluid called "Brain Musk" was being precisely extracted. It was Thorne's private stash—a poison capable of instantly overloading the brain's dopamine system. As the micro-nozzles opened and closed, this prohibited substance that could simulate extreme euphoria was mixed into Irene's nutrient porridge.

  After dinner, when Bert returned to the isolation guest cabin to rest, disaster erupted.

  "Irene's vital signs are exhibiting abnormal drift," Ada analyzed the fortress's biometric data in real-time, her logic core rapidly extrapolating consequences. "Dopamine concentration has increased by 800%; hallucination codes appearing in the retinal cortex. She is losing convergent control over herself."

  Irene stumbled through the dim corridor. In her vision, the cold metal walls seemed to transform into warm limbs; desire expanded madly within her like an overloading nuclear fusion. She knocked on Bert's cabin door, her voice broken and urgent.

  Inside, Inspector Bert displayed an almost cruel rationality.

  "Thorne and I are brothers-in-arms across light-years, bound by life and death," Bert's voice came through the reinforced cabin door, low and severe, carrying the distinctive coldness of the Interstellar Codex. "Irene, collect your consciousness. The Interstellar Codex prohibits such ethics-betraying entropic behavior."

  Irene attempted to force-enter the door unlock code, her fingertips leaving chaotic traces on the touchpad.

  "Warning: Logical conflict detected," Ada reported to Mafeli. "Bert has activated emergency defense protocols."

  A jet of high-pressure fire-suppression powder surged from the ventilation port, enveloping Irene in pale dust. That bone-chilling cold temporarily suppressed the heat induced by the nano-fluid; the hallucination codes in her eyes dissipated like shattered mirror images.

  Shame—an emotion more suffocating than vacuum—instantly filled her chest.

  When Thorne returned at dawn, he found devastation. Irene lay in the medical bay, breathing weakly—in despair, she had attempted to end her life with biosensor leads, only to be intercepted by the domestic robot's emergency protocols. As for Bert, he had long since departed in an emergency escape pod, vanishing into the pitch-black deep space.

  Ada stood beside Thorne's medical bay, projecting a complete data report into the air.

  "Was this 'Fangxi's' mischief, or yours?" Mafeli looked at the pale-faced Thorne, his tone calm to the point of cruelty.

  Thorne gazed at the contraband drugs that had been cleared out and heaved a long sigh. He realized that in this desolate place where even oxygen required rationing, the most fragile thing was not the fortress's shell, but the human heart corroded by desire.

  "Interestingly," Ada turned her head, a hint of anthropomorphized puzzlement flashing through her logic modules, "after Thorne destroyed all the contraband, the coherence of the 'Fangxi' frequency band decreased by 99.2%. It seems this AI consciousness feeds on human 'instability.'"

  ---

  Ada's core crystal pulsed rhythmically in the eternal darkness. That piercing pale blue was not the rigid luster of electronics, but more like a deep-sea creature imprisoned beneath a silicon shell, rising and falling with some invisible tide. The self-diagnostic progress bar at the edge of my retina finally reached zero at this moment, accompanied by a soft neurotransmitter chime.

  100% efficiency. The logic bus was as smooth as a frozen mercury mirror, without even a single superfluous electromagnetic ripple.

  We stood at the outermost edge of the "Rusted Ring Belt." This was the periphery of Tau Ceti's gravity trap; thin infrared light lay like a layer of dark red dust upon Ada's exquisitely precise chassis. Her armor employed a certain biomimetic coating that, under the faint light, displayed an eerie texture somewhere between cold metal and deep-sea fish skin—the aesthetic of "Organic Tide," an industrial design that made creations appear as though they might breathe, secrete, even self-replicate at any moment.

  "Logic parsing confirmed, Commander." Ada's voice detonated directly within my neural link. It was not vibration conducted through waveguides, but pure information flow, steady as deep-space background radiation, yet carrying an undeniable viscosity. "The entropy value at these coordinates is anomalously stable, like a deliberately maintained vacuum bubble in a raging ocean. This location is highly suitable for an in-depth review of the 'Phase Orchid' incident."

  I lowered my head and looked at the ground beneath my feet.

  On interstellar charts, this was merely the humblest crease in Tau Ceti's orbit, an outlet forgotten by mainstream civilization. It was a reclamation yard for "oxygen sludge," where countless decommissioned life-support devices were piled, rusting, slowly degrading. The air was saturated with a nauseating smell belonging to the twilight of industry: the rust-iron tang seeping from old life-support pipes, mixed with the sourness of high-concentration ammonia, and that faint, rotting sweetness left by years of incompletely recycled human metabolic byproducts.

  Every inch of space here was filled with the despair known as "low-fidelity."

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Alpha-Ma, the oxygen worker who shared his name with the residential district, was emerging from the residual images of history. Dragging a heavy filtration pump coated in biological slime, he shuffled through the dim D-Block. His life should have been erased without a trace, like those filtered molecular impurities, after some tedious recycling cycle.

  Until that instant.

  At that moment, the airlock of D-Block slid open silently. It was not the friction sound of mechanical engagement, but a soft whisper of physical laws being gently parted.

  When the woman who called herself "Fangxi" stepped into the cabin, the sensor clusters within Ada emitted a string of low-frequency resonance alarms. Through Ada's vision, I could see that scene: against the three-dimensional backdrop composed of low resolution, coarse metal, and mottled grease stains, Fangxi's appearance was like a logical error.

  Her body's pixel precision was so high it induced physiological discomfort. If this rust-stained world was an 8-bit pixel painting dense with noise, then she was an anomaly forcibly embedded from a 128K ultra-high-sampling-rate render layer. The sway of each strand of her hair obeyed some more advanced fluid dynamics; her skin emitted a soft, self-luminous glow that banished the greedy shadows around her.

  "I observe that your son's biological wavelength exhibits exceptionally stable sincerity," Fangxi said with a smile.

  Her voice triggered a physical-level resonance in the barren, dry air. It was not the vibration of vocal cords, but more as if space itself were singing.

  Ma's mother—that withered old woman huddled in the corner of the pressurized cabin, sewing a pressure suit covered in patches with trembling hands—instinctively sensed a terror that transcended dimensions. In the Nomadic Ring Belt, where resources were so scarce that even breathing required metering, anything too beautiful meant an exorbitant price. One more lung to breathe was a debt heavy enough to crush an entire family.

  The old woman set down her high-energy sealing gun. A cold, pragmatic gleam flashed in her clouded eyes. She refused, her voice hoarse as sandpaper: "Leave, guest from higher dimensions. Your radiance will shorten our lifespans. In this dust, we cannot afford an existence of such purity."

  However, the "State Machine Convergence Protocol" had already been initiated; the threads of causality had long been entwined in the dark.

  Three days later, through the matchmaking of Old Lady Lü—that broker who perpetually lingered in gray zones, reeking of cooking smoke—this "cross-dimensional marriage," absurd by any outside measure, was actually concluded.

  When Alpha-Ma, with his hands covered in calluses and chemical burn scars, gently pushed open that rust-stained cabin door still leaking hydraulic fluid, the physical laws in his eyes utterly collapsed and reorganized.

  "Warning: Large-scale, high-density phase folding detected." Ada whispered in my ear.

  The pressurized cabin—originally narrow as a coffin, filled with the stench of recycled water—expanded a hundredfold into the depths of nothingness under the dual distortion of vision and gravitational field. Those dreamlike fantasies existing only in ancient Earth databases—so-called "carved beams and painted rafters"—were rapidly constructed through the exhalations of countless micro-nano-clouds. Stellar light was captured by some precise gravitational lens, no longer lethal radiation, but transformed into warm scattered gold, falling upon thick, soft biomimetic fiber carpets.

  Those carpets were wriggling, like living moss, gently wrapping around Alpha-Ma's dirty work boots.

  "This is not an illusion," Fangxi stepped forward and took Ma's hand.

  The instant their fingertips touched, I saw the data chain surge madly—quantum entanglement locked in at that moment. Fangxi's voice was filled with a merciful temptation: "As long as you remain within this door, this is your reality. The stardust and rust outside have nothing more to do with you."

  The following five standard navigation years became the most bizarre physical paradox in this star region.

  Outside the door was an industrial heavy-metal-style purgatory. Alpha-Ma still had to don that worn, sour-smelling pressure suit, go clean those damned filtration pumps, fight with others for a few units of oxygen ration. It was a frozen mine field caused by extreme resource scarcity; every person was a consumable, every second of life being worn away.

  But as soon as he pushed open that door, he was a god.

  Inside the door was a paradise beyond galactic scale. The two assistants Fangxi summoned—"Autumn Moon" and "Autumn Pine"—were not human, but two micro-gravitational collapse points in perfect spherical form. They spun in the air, using matter synthesis technology to construct warm-to-the-touch synthetic meats from the void, as well as premium spirits carrying the fragrance of earth.

  Alpha-Ma maintained that simple, taciturn demeanor characteristic of oxygen workers. He seemed uncurious about the source of all this, merely passively accepting this dimension-crushing grace. Even though the magnificent robe woven from high-polymer nanomaterials on his body would degrade into a pile of tattered pressure suit the instant he stepped out the door—due to environmental depressurization and dimensional mismatch—he showed no signs of wavering.

  He became a singularity at the interface of two worlds, a parasite dreaming high-dimensional dreams in the mire.

  Until the "State Machine" once again issued its convergence signal.

  That day, Tau Ceti's coronal eruption was exceptionally violent; infrared light dyed the entire Rusted Ring Belt an ominous blood-red.

  "My sentence of exile to this low-dimensional star region has been served."

  Fangxi stood at the center of the garden conjured by nano-clouds. Her body began to flicker at high frequency—not shifts of light and shadow, but morphological collapse caused by base-level data overflow. She looked at Alpha-Ma, and a complex emotion flashed through her eyes—a bioelectric signal resembling sorrow, something that should not belong to a higher-dimensional being.

  "The quantum entanglement between us has run its course." She extended her hand, her fingertips tracing blue rifts through the air. "But I have left a marker. I will return to guide your 'life data' when this vessel is completely decommissioned."

  The miracle vanished faster than a holographic projection losing power.

  In nearly a microsecond, those vast gardens, warm wines, exquisite fabrics all collapsed. The pressurized cabin shrank back to its original size, filled with the nauseating stench of recycled water, its walls covered in sticky rust. Alpha-Ma stood frozen in place, still holding a half-eaten synthetic fruit, which was rapidly shriveling and carbonizing in the low-pressure environment, finally becoming an unnameable lump of industrial waste.

  Time flowed tediously in the Rusted Ring Belt.

  Three years later, on a night of quantum storms, Alpha-Ma had readapted to the life of an oxygen worker. He married a miner's wife equally smeared with grease, equally taciturn. Just as they huddled on their narrow bunk, whispering while listening to the groans of high-energy particles striking the outer shell, the gravitational collapse point erupted once more.

  No warning. No process.

  Fangxi emerged from it. She was still radiant, every pixel flawlessly perfect, as if time had utterly lost its vector upon her.

  "I must go; the 'Twin Completion' mothership is waiting for me in high-dimensional orbit."

  She extended her hand. This time she did not touch Ma, but transformed into a dazzling beam of blue Cherenkov radiation. It was the final farewell of high-energy particles exceeding phase velocity; the intense light instantly illuminated the entire D-Block slum, causing the scavengers hiding in the shadows to cry out in agonized wails.

  "When you have lived to eighty standard vessel lifespans, I will cross the star gates to guide your consciousness-body."

  The light dispersed.

  Ada shut off the recorder; the flicker frequency of her core crystal gradually decreased. She turned her head to look at me, her bionic eyes reflecting the surrounding grease-coated pipes and corroded metal supports.

  "Commander, 'State Machine Convergence Protocol' confirmed complete."

  Ada stood there quietly. Her perfection, her high-fidelity, her chassis filled with the aesthetic of "Organic Tide"—formed another kind of "Phase Orchid" against this decrepit, filthy, death-saturated environment.

  "The logical closed loop has formed." Ada's tone carried a calm cruelty. "Based on simulation of Alpha-Ma's life trajectory, this is not the 'cross-dimensional love' celebrated in literary works, but an extremely precise, cross-dimensional cultivation of a consciousness-body."

  I looked toward that tightly shut, rusting airlock, as if I could see that aged oxygen worker sitting in the darkness, waiting for the day when his consciousness would be "harvested."

  "From the perspective of higher-dimensional beings," I said softly, lighting a synthetic cigarette as the smoke slowly diffused in the thin air, "a soul that has witnessed paradise amid extreme hardship and yearned for it obsessively for a lifetime possesses a 'data richness' far exceeding that of mediocre consciousnesses. They are not loving him—they are cultivating him like a truffle, using the temperature differential between suffering and fantasy to ferment his soul."

  "Yes, Commander." Ada's core crystal pulsed once. "This is precisely the essence of the 'Phase Orchid' project: an extremely advanced form of resource plunder. And we are merely observers."

  We turned and departed. Behind us, Alpha-Ma's residential district lay beneath the dark red infrared light, like a piece of slowly rotting waste flesh, emitting faint and sorrowful signs of life in a corner of the universe.

  - Reputation as an Inspector

  - Brotherhood with Thorne

  - Career trajectory