Lin Feng's palm was pressed tightly against the rock wall, and the dark matter moss oozed a fishy-sweet mucus between his fingers. A regular humming sound came from the depths of the tribal cave, each sound like a rusty gear grinding over the nerves. When he used a flint to ignite the last section of fluorescent fern, the sight in front of him made his pupils constrict suddenly—tens of thousands of bronze incubation chambers were embedded in the fleshy rock layers, and in each chamber floated a curled-up fetus. Miniature compound eye chips were embedded in the foreheads of these fetuses, and their umbilical cords were connected to nutrient tubes that flowed with starlight.
"This is the incubation site of the New Spark Plan." The wild cat's tail swept across the nearest incubation chamber, and the chamber cover suddenly became transparent, revealing the terrifying growth process inside—the spines of the fetuses were mutating into molecular cooking knives, and dark energy seasonings were seeping from their fingertips. "They are using your genes to cultivate taste weapons."
Suddenly, the cave trembled violently, and countless cracks appeared on the fleshy dome. The mechanical body of the young observer seeped out from the cracks, and data cables wrapped around Lin Feng's limbs like spider webs: "The 10,002nd taste test begins." His chest split open, revealing a beating bronze cauldron, and what was boiling inside was actually the star core magma of Earth III.
Lin Feng struggled to reach for the entropy-reversing spark at his waist. It was the fluorescent code injected into his body by Orangey before its death. The moment the blue light touched the incubation chamber, all the fetuses suddenly opened their eyes, and 100,000 pairs of compound eyes were filled with the same spectrum of despair. Their cries formed a resonant wave in the quantum frequency band, and the fleshy bacteria on the rock wall began to proliferate wildly.
"Error! Error!" For the first time, panic appeared in the mechanical tone of the observer. The data cables retracted as if they had been electrocuted, and the nutrient solution in the incubation chambers flowed backwards into a scarlet blood waterfall. Lin Feng took the opportunity to press the entropy-reversing spark into the cauldron, and the bronze surface immediately cracked into a web-like pattern: "You will never learn—true delicacy doesn't require sacrifice!"
The shock wave from the explosion of the cauldron threw Lin Feng into a dimensional rift. He landed in an endless bronze corridor, and billions of recipes floated on the walls on both sides. The Mayan corn festival was decomposed into calorie values, the stable eras of the Three-Body System were marked with cooking time parameters, and even the murals on Earth II were encoded into molecular formulas.
"Welcome to the Taste Archive." The observer's head was suspended in the middle of the corridor, and the broken data cables danced like the tentacles of a jellyfish. "All the taste memories of the cooked civilizations are stored here..." Suddenly, his single eye bulged out, and holographic chains shot out from his pupil, "And you will forever become specimen No. 10,002!"
Lin Feng rolled over to avoid the chains, and his compound eyes were reactivated under stress. In the quantum field of vision, the corridor revealed its true form—it was the taste nerve synapses of the Eye of the Abyss, and each recipe was a memory node on the synapses. When he touched the recipe labeled "Earth", the street scene of the food street in the twenty-first century suddenly unfolded: The quantum butter in the hot pot restaurant was evaporating into dark matter, and the tapioca pearls in the milk tea shop were actually miniature black holes.
"Found it!" The afterimage of the wild cat suddenly materialized, and its sharp claws tore open a section of the synapse. Here were stored Lin Feng's most primitive taste memories: the burnt cake on his sixth birthday, the moldy instant noodles in the warehouse, and even the canned herring that Orangey had stolen. These memories, judged as "failures" by the New Spark Plan, were now corroding the algorithmic structure of the synapses.
The mechanical body of the observer seeped out from the recipes but stepped into the taste trap set by Lin Feng—those corrupt memories turned into sticky asphalt, trapping him in the laboratory scene of 1998. The phantom of the young Lin Jianguo was holding up the Golden Sui Ling reagent, and the liquid dripping from the needle tip burned scorch marks on the space-time membrane.
"Father... Is this what you wanted?" Lin Feng threw the entropy-reversing spark at the phantom. The moment the blue light touched the reagent, the entire taste corridor began to undergo topological inversion. The Mayan recipes turned into curse runes, the parameters of the Three-Body System became chaotic equations, and even the neon lights on the food street of Earth were distorted into warning signs.
When Lin Feng woke up in the real dimension, the tribal bonfire had burned into a soaring pillar of light. The wild cat crouched beside a bronze vessel, and the fluorescence at the tip of its tail was rewriting the bullfinch code on the vessel. The compound eye chips on the foreheads of each primitive man were falling off, replaced by pure amber pupils.
"The authority of taste returns to life itself." The wild cat's voice carried the resonance of Orangey. The moment it leaped into the bonfire, the entire atmosphere of Earth II began to undergo a quantum jump. The dark matter bacteria contaminated by the New Spark Plan danced a purification dance in the primitive flames.
The remains of the observer crawled out from the cracks in the ground, and for the first time, fear appeared in his mechanical eyes: "You have activated the entropy-reversing protocol..." His data cables stabbed madly at the sky, trying to summon the dimensional tentacles of the Eye of the Abyss. But all that responded to him was the silent starry sky—those compound eye constellations that had once twinkled were now going out one by one.
Lin Feng raised the burning totem pole, which was engraved with the totems of the rescued civilizations: "It's time to end this eternal feast." When the tip of the pole pierced the observer's bronze cauldron, the fetuses in 100,000 incubation chambers cried out simultaneously. Their sound waves converged into a creation-level frequency in the quantum domain, and the star core magma of Earth III began to flow back to its primordial soup state.
Amid the roar of the dimensional collapse, Lin Feng saw the ultimate form of the Eye of the Abyss—it was a neural network woven by countless bronze kitchen knives, and each node was pulsating with the imprisoned sparks of civilizations. When the entropy-reversing frequency penetrated the network, the kitchen knives suddenly turned around and stabbed into their own taste centers.
"No!!" The observer's screams resonated with the wailing of the Eye of the Abyss. The recipes that made up his body began to dissolve. The Mayan corn returned to the fertile soil, the stars of the Three-Body System returned to their orbits, and the butter in the hot pot restaurants on Earth solidified again. Those universes that had been transformed into ingredients now stretched out their nebulae like butterflies breaking out of their cocoons.
The wild cat's body was completely quantized in the bonfire, and Orangey's fluorescent patterns flowed among the sparks: "The true meaning of taste is not conquest..." Its afterimage swept across the purified tribal children, "but that every life has the right to define delicacy."
When the last strand of mechanical data cable turned to ashes, Lin Feng found something astonishing in the embers of the bronze vessel—half a chip engraved with Lin Jianguo's handwriting. In the holographic projection, a laboratory video of his father when he was young emerged: The real Lin Jianguo had already discovered the truth about the bullfinch. Before being replaced, he hid the entropy-reversing spark code in his son's gene chain.
The dawn of Earth II pierced through the darkness, and the primitive people danced around the reignited bonfire. Their pupils reflected the pure starry sky, and there were no longer compound eye patterns on their foreheads. Lin Feng clenched the chip and looked to the east, where a new star was twinkling—and the outline of Orangey could be vaguely seen in the light.
In the ruins on the edge of the Milky Way, the mechanical fingers of the young observer suddenly twitched. The data screen on him lit up with the last message: "The New Spark Protocol... has switched to the hidden mode..." The remaining dark matter bacteria quietly seeped into a wandering planet and condensed into amber-colored eggs deep in the glacier.