Entropy increase

When Qin‍⁠⁠‌⁠‍⁠​⁠⁠⁠‍‍⁠⁠‍‌⁠‍⁠⁠‌​⁠ Zhilu returned after dealing with the corpse, the lights in the room were already off. An Yu lay on the bed with his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling rhythmically.

He stood by the bedside for a moment, then sat down and reached out to cover An Yu’s head.

“No one expected such a simple and crude attack. It’s normal not to react in time. You haven’t really been training for dealing with sneak attacks before. This mission happened to make up for it.”

An Yu opened his eyes. Those golden eyes looked somewhat blank in the night, resembling how they had been when Qin Zhilu first met him.

“You discovered me,” he said in a low voice.

Qin Zhilu quirked his lips. “You pretended to be asleep very well, but your breathing was trembling. I couldn’t bear to pretend I hadn’t noticed.”

“Hearing you say ‘couldn’t bear’…” An Yu slowly sat up, hugging his knees on the bed. “Commander, I’m sorry. I’m still very afraid of dying.”

“Mhm.”

An Yu looked up. “Does being afraid of death make you disappointed in me?”

“I’ve never been disappointed in you.” Qin Zhilu’s gaze was peaceful. He raised his hand, tracing the shape of his ear down to the scar behind it, then went back and rubbed it repeatedly twice. “Do you remember the code phrase you asked me to give Ling Qiu on the Cloud Island?”

He didn’t wait for An Yu to recall, but whispered to himself, “He taught you that you must learn to whisper your troubles to the person closest to you—So I’ll teach you not to be afraid to expose your weaknesses to those you love.”

The pupils in those golden eyes shrank, seeming to brighten for an instant.

An Yu lowered his head again and murmured, “I understand, Commander.”

“Sleep well. Nothing else will happen tonight.”

Qin Zhilu stood up as he spoke. He had just taken two steps when a low voice suddenly came from behind him.

“I thought you’d hug me.”

Qin Zhilu’s steps abruptly halted.

He turned back, stunned. An Yu was still sitting on the bed, hugging his knees, looking up at him.

Since Qin Zhilu first met An Yu, every time An Yu frankly expressed his emotions, his eyes were this clean and honest. No shyness, nor tinged with desire.

Perhaps precisely because of this, even though he had seen his cunning calculations, seen him harbor hidden thoughts, seen him brutally kill, he still felt he was like a blank slate.

“Every time you were feeling down, I gave you a hug,” An Yu said matter-of-factly.

The low voice had an exceptionally strong presence in the quiet night.

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The faint smell of leather enveloped An Yu once again.

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“Sleep,” Qin Zhilu commanded. “No more being scared afterwards, and don’t hurt yourself.”

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Two minutes later, Jiang Xiao’s call woke Qin Zhilu.

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Jiang Xiao immediately replied, “Thank you for your concern. I just didn’t sleep well.”

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“What dream?”

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Qin Zhilu glanced at him. “Do you agree?”

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“Yes, you were very persistent…” Jiang Xiao’s voice trailed off abruptly. “Sorry for telling you these things, wasting your time.”

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“Did you dream?”

“No, I rarely dream.” An Yu paused. “Did you have a nightmare? A dream similar to Jiang Xiao’s?”

“Not really a nightmare.” Qin Zhilu’s voice sounded somewhat ethereal. “I hadn’t actually fallen asleep, but my consciousness was indeed blurry for a while. In the dream, I sensed a large mass of shattered, fluctuating red light. It seemed to have some kind of attraction, drawing me to touch it.”

An Yu’s steps abruptly halted.

Only Eye and Codex can see the shattered red light in the firmament. Eye had once said that whenever a severe Super-Aberrant phenomenon is pacified, the shattered red light in the sky would rapidly accumulate, as if chaos returned from the human world to the universe. But slowly, it would dissipate again, and the dissipated portion merged into Qin Zhilu.

“What shape?” An Yu asked.

“Difficult to describe. It was constantly fluctuating chaotically, without boundaries, seeming to occupy all of space-time…” Qin Zhilu’s gaze went through the window to the snowstorm outside, then fell back to the frost flowers condensing on the windowpane. “Perhaps what I saw was chaos itself.”

Kaos was called early in the morning by Qin Zhilu to transport the corpse. After a night, the blood-red branches and leaves inside the corpse’s chest and abdominal cavity had pushed out, wrapping around the limbs and neck. The flesh was constricted and burst open and the eyeballs bulged out. The dissection wounds seemed insignificant in comparison. The man looked instead as if he had been brutally killed by something growing out of his own body.

Kaos had never seen anything so terrifying. His face turned pale. Jiang Xiao also glanced away quickly. Only An Yu intently watched the corpse. He walked over, crouched down, and carefully took samples from the man’s facial features, fingernails, abdominal cavity, and even the branches and leaves, testing them one by one with his terminal.

“It’s really strange,” An Yu murmured. “The aberration signs developed rapidly at the time of death, but the genetic entropy still hasn’t changed. Even the genetic entropy of these branches and leaves is less than 10. It seems the plant and the person were just twisted together, with no gene fusion occurring.”

“When chaos transcends the genetic scope, genetic entropy becomes a useless indicator.” Qin Zhilu gave the corpse one last glance. “It means this person didn’t distort. He and this plant simply sunk into chaos. Perhaps all of District 99 is like this, but still in the early stages.”

“Sunk into chaos?” An Yu frowned, not understanding. “What does that mean?”

“Chaos has thousands upon thousands of manifestations. Genetic aberration is just one, and a very early one at that. As the calamity develops, the world will accelerate towards the essence of chaos—which is the fusion of all things.”

An Yu shook his head. Qin Zhilu continued to explain, “Imagine you live in a tidy, closed room. Initially, books are on the shelf, the blanket is on the bed, and the water cup is on the table. But as time passes, through your natural activities and use of these items, their positions gradually become disordered. They themselves will also suffer damage. For example, book pages will scatter everywhere, water from the cup will cling to the walls, and diffuse into the air. Unless you actively apply external force to organize them, the chaos will only continuously increase. This is an entropy increase. Entropy increase within a system will not reverse itself without external interference. Under extreme assumptions, the molecules within the books, blanket, and water cup will also begin to become disordered. When the chaos on the material level deepens to the molecular level, and then further down, everything will gradually mash together.”

“Science once deduced that the universe began with a Big Bang. Everything you see—the sky, land, sea, living beings, and matter—was highly differentiated, existing with clear boundaries. Order arose upon this. But the laws of thermodynamics also point out that the end of time is heat death. Without external interference, all things will gradually re-fuse through activity, returning to that initial clump.”

Qin Zhilu’s words paused. “For over twenty years, humanity thought it was enduring a great calamity. But actually, compared to the final end, these gene-level hybrid aberrants are nothing. At least these still have patterns. True chaos is completely irrational. Everything can simply and brutally sink.”

An Yu seemed to half-understand. “Is that the kind of end you saw in District 95?”

“Not yet, but it was already very close.” Qin Zhilu paused. “Let’s go. To the religious activity room in District 99. The files showed it happened to be in the apartment building where Sienna lived.”

Only then did Jiang Xiao pull himself back from Qin Zhilu’s explanation. “Religion?”

Qin Zhilu glanced at him. “This time’s Super-Aberrant should be highly skilled in mental control.”

An Yu took the terminal from Jiang Xiao’s hand and tapped open his mental strength. “We suspect that in your dream, it wasn’t the Commander soliciting your allegiance, but the Super-Aberrant.”

Jiang Xiao froze upon hearing this, then his pupils trembled—unbeknownst to him, the mental strength number on the screen had already dropped to the dangerous orange “72”.

Qin Zhilu’s tone was faint. “The fact that you didn’t submit to it in your dream has already surprised me. It seems the tempering in the Equality Zone has indeed been effective.”