Abzu completed the calculation.
Interrupt energy output, trigger White Cell vortex instability. Probability of core combat force "Shu's" existence disintegration: 99.97%. Damage to main body: repairable.
Tactical value: Excellent.
Confirmed.
Thus, the seventeen thousand overwhelming torrents of purple-black destruction ceased in the same instant.
The raging tide was withdrawn by some invisible command. The space in deep space, scorched to the point of distortion by energy, suddenly returned to tranquility.
And that pale vortex, which had been "fed" by Abzu's energy for dozens of seconds and barely maintained a dynamic stability, began to go unstable.
All the "disordered" energy and matter in this space would be completely disintegrated into meaningless remnants of existence in this out-of-control rule explosion.
Including that tiny figure floating behind the vortex, whose "existence" density could barely be felt.
Abzu "gazed" at all this.
Its ancient body was still mobilizing new energy veins for the "backup plan."
The elimination protocol was still in execution; the target was about to naturally perish.
Next was to "leave," and in the aftershock of its "departure," the biosphere of the planet behind it would be completely destroyed, and this star system would also self-disintegrate due to its "passing."
Everything was within calculation.
Everything was within the rules.
Another civilization would dissipate in the aftershock of its "existence."
Just like the countless civilizations it had witnessed... turning into a segment of unchanging information entropy.
However—
In this brief gap between the "end of the old attack" and the "start of the new plan."
A piece of information, sealed at the very bottom of the database and almost completely forgotten by it, suddenly flooded into Abzu's sensory network.
That is... information entropy?
It ignored the pale flow that had begun and "saw" itself.
[Abzu was curled up inside a hollow sphere of indescribable size, pieced together from countless thin silver-white plates.
The inner wall of that sphere flowed with innumerable light patterns, and countless precise instrument modules were attached to it, like hexagonal cells in a honeycomb.
It was a "Dyson Sphere-like" object.
A containment device painstakingly built with the contained being at its core.
And it, Abzu, was the one being contained.
The interior of that "Dyson Sphere" was not dark.
Countless intelligent life forms, incredibly tiny compared to it, with pale blue halos shimmering on their bodies, flowed endlessly around its massive body.
They piloted exquisite vehicles and held tools it couldn't identify, continuously carrying out some "work" on its surface that it had never understood.
Not attacking, not imprisoning, not researching...
Or rather, not just that.
That work lasted for a very, very long time. So long that some modules on the inner wall of the "Dyson Sphere" began to age, so long that some faces it had seen never appeared again, so long that it even got used to these tiny points of light shuttling endlessly around it.
But it didn't reject them, nor was it bored.
A somewhat unique point of light—an intelligent life form—detached from the shuttling queue, slowly floated to the front of its huge faceplate, and hovered there.
It could clearly "see" it.
It opened its mouth.
The voice was directly inscribed into the surrounding world through some medium and was naturally "read" by it. That "voice" was clear, steady, with a trace of fatigue, yet still contained something soft:
"Abzu."
"Do you dream?"
It remembered its answer.
—"I do not understand. What is 'dreaming'?"
The intelligent life form's tentacles curved slightly.
It later learned that this was their micro-expression for "gentleness" and "pride."
"'Dreaming'..."
Its voice was very light, as if reciting a definition it had repeated to itself countless times:
"Is fantasy."
"Imagining those things... that one does not yet have."]
Those sealed memories of entropy, like a pebble thrown into a deep pool, only stirred a nearly imperceptible ripple before sinking back into the sea of cold memories sealed for who knows how many billions of years.
Abzu's sensory core detached from that abruptly surfaced ancient information fragment.
Calculation thread restored... combat status synchronized... attack interrupted... White Cell vortex instability process has reached critical value... target is about to—
Abzu's "gaze" refocused on the battlefield.
Then, its calculation core, for the first time, generated an unclassifiable anomaly report on a logical level:
Abzu's calculation abruptly halted.
Abzu "saw" it.
That which should have exploded into a chaotic torrent of destruction in the next second... that violent energy sufficient to carve new scars in this star system... that abnormal matter "polluted" by the White Cell Authority and no longer able to be constrained—
Like stardust falling into a star, like noise given a melody, like originally meaningless fragments of text written into lines of poetry, these existences converged with near-attachment toward the tattered, almost inhuman form in the center of the battlefield.
They were no longer "disordered."
They were obedient.
They wrapped around the remnants of "Shu's" missing right half-body, filled every crack in his vitrified form, clung to the surface of the dim, almost disappearing scepter in his hand, reshaping the outline of his "existence" on the verge of collapse.
They submitted.
Then, they chose.
Chose not to destroy.
Chose to return.
Chose to obey that almost non-existent figure.
Abzu's calculation core, at this moment, fell into a kind of indefinable silence.
—It could not understand.
Its data stream frantically rewound, trying to find the logical basis for this phenomenon.
The underlying architecture of the White Cell mimicry rule was the indiscriminate disordering of the "carrier."
Any existence affected by this rule would permanently lose its original properties and could not be reconstructed or guided by any external force.
This was the "rule characteristic" it had confirmed in its contact with that Antarctic wound, which should have been a logical iron law written into the White Cell Authority's underlying protocol, not to be changed.
But—
The phenomenon before it was violating this iron law.
Shu did not use any known Authority.
The Mirror Core was on the verge of exhaustion.
The Dream Scepter was shattered.
He couldn't even maintain a complete conscious body. In Abzu's perception, his "existence density" was already below the threshold of a conventional life form's thought activity.
Yet that energy and matter were obeying him.
Like fledglings returning to the nest.
Abzu mobilized higher-level calculation threads, attempting to deconstruct this phenomenon from the level of fundamental universal laws.
Gravity? Electromagnetism? Strong/weak interactions? Space-time topology? Information conservation?
All known physical frameworks could not accommodate the input of the current observation data.
Calculation Status: Unsolvable.
Suggested Operation: Re-collect phenomenon data, expand sampling range, extend observation duration...
No.
No amount of data could bridge this logical chasm.
Because it was missing a key parameter.
A cognitive dimension that, in its billions of years of "existence," had never been written into its underlying protocol, never acquired through any external interaction, and never evolved on its own.
That dimension, in its sealed memories, had once been so earnestly asked about by a long-annihilated intelligent life form with a soft voice:
—"Abzu, do you dream?"
It was currently "gazing" at a scene that was not a dream, yet as incomprehensible as a dream.
That compliant energy and matter, that sea of disorder controlled by "impossibility," that faint yet refusing to extinguish obsession in that broken shell—
It was almost like...
...
It could not name it.
But in the deepest part of that sealed memory, a voice from a distant civilization, long archived, seemed to be giving it an answer billions of years late, across the endless river of time:
—This is "dreaming."
Fantasy.
Imagining those things... that one does not yet have.
For example, a person who should have dissipated, still standing.
For example, a disordered raging tide, learning to return home.
For example, facing an insurmountable abyss, a tiny speck of dust still says:
"Witness it."
"Our mutual—struggle."