The "Polaris" shuttle tumbled and ricocheted through the cataclysmic ice storm like an iron bead dropped into boiling steel. The outer armor emitted agonizing metallic groans, as if it would be torn apart by an invisible giant hand at any second.
"Steady! Damn it, steady!" Li Chenyuan's growl was forced through clenched teeth, his hands welded to the control stick, the veins standing out on the backs of his hands. Relying on intuition and experience that surpassed instrument limits, he searched for that almost non-existent path to survival within the destructive turbulence. Every violent jolt was like the hammer of death falling, barely avoided by a hair's breadth.
"Structural stress critical! Fatigue fracture on left wing reinforcement plate number three!" Wang Jing's voice was slightly distorted by the piercing alarms and shaking. Strapped tightly into the co-pilot's seat, his hands still flew across the panel, trying to restore communications and boost scans. "Comms are completely down! Scan radius compressed to less than five hundred meters—we're navigating in ink!"
In the back, Lei Hao made no sound. The silent soldier had secured himself in an almost brutal manner, his arms locked like vices around a backup power unit, using his body as a final buffer to prevent the critical equipment from being destroyed on impact. A particularly violent hit made blood seep from the corner of his mouth; he didn't even raise a hand to wipe it away.
Just as everyone thought the shuttle was about to break apart, it slammed through an invisible barrier!
The tearing forces around them abruptly lessened. The turbulence remained, but the difficulty dropped from hellish to merely extremely dangerous. They had briefly broken into a relatively calm area at the edge of the storm's eye.
"We're… at the eye's edge!" Wang Jing stared at the suddenly clear readings, incredulous; then his face turned paler. "But the navigation beacons are all gone! We've lost the last known position of Corona Borealis!"
Before despair could fully set in, the scanner suddenly picked up an extremely faint, yet familiar energy frequency—
"Wait! A signal! Corona Borealis's specific distress frequency!" Wang Jing's voice was full of confusion and alarm. "It's highly unstable… the intensity is fluctuating wildly, like a dying heart still struggling to beat."
Hope was ignited, casting an even darker shadow of ominous foreboding.
—
Inside Zero Station, time felt like congealed glue.
The light representing the "Polaris" had long vanished from the main screen, leaving only the rampaging storm model. Lu Xingze paced before the control console like a caged animal, his fingers hammering through various emergency contact protocols; the only response was the monotonous repetition of cosmic static from the speakers.
"Damn it, damn it… Useless! Did they just—" His curse stopped abruptly because he saw Su Xiaolan.
In stark contrast to everyone else's agitation, she in the medical pod exhibited an unsettling "calm." She had refused sedatives, her eyes tightly shut, her face pale and almost translucent, a fine cold sweat constantly beading on her forehead as if she were bearing some immense, invisible pain. Her breathing was shallow and rapid.
"Xiaolan?" Lu Xingze called to her, tentative.
"…Don't be noisy…" she murmured like someone in a dream, her voice a faint thread. "I hear it…"
"Hear what?!" Lu Xingze and the technician tensed simultaneously.
"Crying… so much, so much crying… Not heard with ears, felt directly… full of fear… and despair…" She frowned, her body trembling slightly.
"People? People from Corona Borealis?" A chill rose from the soles of Lu Xingze's feet.
Su Xiaolan shook her head in pain, her nails unconsciously digging into her palms. "Can't tell… Some sound like howling wind, some like screeching electricity… and another, more terrifying, icy—'chewing' sound… Like something is gnawing on metal… and light."
"Chewing sound?!" Everyone in the control room felt their hair stand on end. The overly concrete and terrifying metaphor made the distant threat instantly real and imminent.
At that moment, the nearly faded data patterns on her arm lit up again without warning! This time, it wasn't a gentle pulse, but like a faulty lightbulb, flickering madly, blinking on and off, highly unstable.
"Ah—!" She let out a short cry of pain, her entire body suddenly tensing. "Chenyuan—!"
—
Inside the "Polaris," within the storm's eye.
A burst of extremely sharp, distorted, inhuman noise suddenly erupted from Li Chenyuan's helmet comms, its intensity almost instantly piercing through the ear protection.
"Ugh!" He grunted, his temples feeling like they were splitting.
But beneath that maddening noise, an extremely faint yet crystal-clear call pierced through everything like a steel wire, stabbing directly into his mind—it was Su Xiaolan's voice! Not through the comm channel, but a call of his name sounding deep within his consciousness.
At almost the same millisecond, Wang Jing's scanner screamed a frantic alarm.
"No—Impossible! This defies all laws of physics!" His voice was warped by shock. "The fluctuation frequency of that faint Corona Borealis signal and Xiaolan's vital-sign brainwaves—they just experienced a 0.3-second period of complete synchronous resonance?! How is that possible? Unless—the 'Cradle' was abnormally activated on their end! It's become some kind of… consciousness amplifier, or—a bridge!"
This brief, bizarre synchronization was like a flash of lightning cutting through the abyss, allowing people on both ends to glimpse a corner of the horror simultaneously.
Inside Zero Station, Su Xiaolan's eyes flew open, her pupils contracting violently with extreme fear. She seemed to see something incomprehensible, screaming: "I see it! Grey—like fog, like thick liquid… flowing! It's 'eating'! Eating the walls! Eating the light! Everything it touches… just disappears!"
And on Li Chenyuan's helmet display, at the peak of the noise, an extremely blurry, distorted, trembling image flashed—silver-white metal walls melted and collapsed silently like wax meeting heat; a mass of grey substance, seemingly alive and exhibiting non-Newtonian fluid properties, slowly and relentlessly devoured everything. Deep within the flowing grey shadows, countless tiny, twisted, agonized human-like faces seemed to flicker past, screaming silently before being swallowed by a new layer of grey.
This glimpse sent a chill down the spine of the veteran who had seen life and death. It wasn't a weapon, nor a monster—it was a phenomenon, a pure and icy "annihilation."
The synchronization vanished like a severed kite string.
But for Wang Jing, 0.3 seconds was enough—"Got it! Signal source locked!" he almost shouted, his voice cracking with excitement and fear. "The source isn't the general frequency band; it's coming from a specific shielded zone deep within Corona Borealis's power core! The intensity signature—it's the 'Cradle'! It's still operational. It's… calling out? Or… struggling?"
He looked up sharply at the pilot's seat, his face pale but his eyes fever-bright. "We have an absolutely precise navigation point! But… sir, that path leads straight to the—the very center of that 'thing.'"
Li Chenyuan withdrew his gaze from the terrifying afterimage in his helmet. Without any hesitation, without even asking another question. His eyes held only absolute coldness and resolve.
He shoved the control stick to its limit.
The Polaris's engines roared with a sound bordering on disintegration. The battered shuttle, like a moth diving into flame, charged relentlessly toward the newly locked, precise coordinates that seemed like the throat leading straight to hell.
—
Inside Zero Station, people only saw the final transmission from Wang Jing—a suicidally brief course update.Then, communications were utterly severed once more.
Su Xiaolan collapsed, unconscious in the medical pod, her face still etched with ultimate terror.Lu Xingze stood dumbly before the screen, staring at the resolute course, his face showing, for the first time, an expression that transcended calculation and ambition—pure, unbelievable fear.
Silence swallowed everything once again.Only the storm continued its eternal, furious howl.