107: The other side of the exchange

On the top floor of Hanhai Trade's headquarters, the conference room still held the lingering air of yesterday's grim determination, but today's data analysis room had already become a battlefield without gunpowder smoke.

"No! The model is wrong!" Su Li's voice was sharp, carrying a hint of hoarseness from staying up all night. She pointed at the writhing mass of flesh on the screen, her eyes behind her glasses bloodshot. "You can't calculate this solely from the perspective of material disintegration! This is first and foremost a complete collapse of informational integrity! Its existential entropy was... reversed in an instant!"

"Information? Bullshit information!" Lao Mo slammed the table, his newly installed mechanical arm letting out a dull metallic thud. "The material foundation determines everything! Director Su, I respect your expertise, but in the face of physical laws, all information is merely an appearance attached to a medium! Look here, its molecular bonds are breaking and reorganizing without warning—this violates the conservation of energy! This is a rewriting of the underlying physical logic!"

"You mechanical brain! You don't understand at all..."

"You're the one with your head in the clouds! Just clinging to your data..."

The argument came to an abrupt halt.

Chen Feng appeared silently at the door. His calm gaze swept over the two of them, finally landing on that horrific image.

"You're both wrong," he spoke. His voice wasn't loud, yet it caused the temperature in the room to drop sharply. "This isn't a math problem, nor is it a physics problem."

He turned and walked into his office, leaving them with one final sentence as his back was turned.

"This is a distress signal."

The office door closed silently, isolating him from everything outside.

Chen Feng didn't turn on the lights, allowing the darkness to swallow him. He sat in his chair, his body sinking deep into the soft material, his eyes staring fixedly into the void.

He slowly raised his hand and opened the interface of the Interstellar Exchange.

That familiar virtual market, composed of countless flows of light, gave him a bone-chilling coldness for the first time. In the past, this was his gold mine, his armory, and the ladder by which he defied heaven to change his fate.

But today, this was a tribunal.

He bypassed the dazzling list of commodities, his finger swiping through the void, clicking directly into the deepest section of the system interface—one he had never seriously examined: [Knowledge and Information].

He took a deep breath, as if about to dive into a cold sea. Into the search bar, he typed the two words that made his soul tremble, one character at a time.

"Law Contamination."

The results that popped up on the screen made Chen Feng's heart tighten suddenly, as if gripped by an invisible hand.

Row upon row of entries appeared, the vast majority of them in a striking blood-red.

[Systematic Research Report on High-Dimensional Law Contamination - Omni-Dimensional Trade Alliance Internal Edition] - Price: Incalculable - Purchase Authority: Dimensional-level Oligarch

[On the Fifteen Controllable Mutations of Law Contamination] - Price: 9,800,000,000 Credits - Purchase Authority: Star Sector-level Concern (Grade A+ Credit Rating)

[Dimensional Guardian Observation Notes #345: A Case of Failed Law Self-Healing] - Price: ??? - Purchase Authority: ???

...The remaining few purchasable entries all bore gray labels like "Incomplete," "Unverified," or "Personal Notes," with prices ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands of credits, like a pile of musty old papers.

"There's no other choice..." Chen Feng whispered to himself, his voice raspy. "Even if it's trash, I have to pan for gold in it."

Without the slightest hesitation, he spent nearly thirty thousand credits to purchase over a dozen fragments of data that seemed most relevant.

The data stream instantly flooded into his personal terminal.

Chen Feng closed his eyes, letting that chaotic, contradictory, and even delusional information wash over his mind.

"...It is a curse from forgotten ancient gods; any who touch it shall return to chaos..."

"...Nonsense! This is the labor pain of evolution! It is the necessary path for low-dimensional life to leap to a higher level! Embrace it, and you shall become a god!"

"...Use a stronger Law to 'overwrite' it, like using a new patch to cover an old hole, but no one knows if the new patch will bring an even more terrible collapse..."

Amidst the countless ravings where truth and falsehood were hard to distinguish, a set of notes sold by an anonymous seller named "Star Gazer" caught Chen Feng's full attention.

It was the most expensive, and also the briefest.

"...The process of contamination is not constant. I have observed over a hundred samples and found that the speed of their collapse varies significantly. I attribute this to an undefined characteristic—'Law Affinity.' Certain life forms from specific cosmic environments seem to have a lower rejection rate toward high-dimensional laws..."

"Law Affinity..." Chen Feng snapped his eyes open, as if seeing a glimmer of light in the darkness. "Tolerance... it's not about a cure, it's about tolerance!"

Just then, a piercing alarm blared within the base! It was the lowest-level external approach alarm!

"Boss!" The office door was slammed open, and Reno's burly figure rushed in, his face full of tension. "An unidentified ship is approaching Ashen Earth Star! Judging by the trajectory, it's headed straight for us!"

Before his voice could fade, Su Li's calm voice rang out over the internal comms: "Alarm cleared. It's a scavenger ship registered as 'Dorn Scrap Recovery.' Their course deviated by 2.3 percent. I've already sent a course correction warning, and they are turning away."

Reno breathed a sigh of relief, then cursed, "Damn it! I feel like a fool holding a torch in a dark forest right now. The slightest rustle in the grass nearly scares the soul out of me!"

"Reno, you're right," Chen Feng's voice came from behind him, exceptionally calm. "We are the torch in the dark forest. Therefore, we must find our own armor before the hunters find us."

He quickly shared the concept of 'Law Affinity' and all the data with Su Li and Lao Mo via an encrypted channel.

"Su Li, abandon the current model. Use 'Law Affinity' as the core variable and build a new survival probability model."

"Yes, Boss!"

"Lao Mo, your line of thinking might be correct." Chen Feng's voice held a hint of approval. "If the problem lies with the 'medium,' then can we modify the 'medium' to make it more compatible with the characteristics of the 'cargo'?"

"Modify the body... to adapt to the Law?" On the other end of the line, Lao Mo's breath hitched, followed by the excitement of a technical fanatic. "I see! I see! I need data! More cross-referenced data!"

Chen Feng hung up the communication and looked at the Exchange interface once more.

This time, his search logic was crystal clear.

He entered three keywords simultaneously: "Law Affinity," "Environmental Modification," and "Life Stabilization."

After a long search bar finished loading, only one new entry popped up on the screen.

It came from an organization called "Touch of the Veil," a notorious group of cosmic terrorists.

It was an incomplete star map, marking several special cosmic regions where "Law Stability Fields" existed.

And in the supplementary notes of the star map, a strange substance was mentioned.

—— "Stasis Marrow."

The description was simple: A bizarre mineral produced only within specific "Law Stability Fields," capable of temporarily "freezing" the process of Law Contamination.

Chen Feng's gaze locked onto this star map. Its price was staggeringly high.

But what he cared about more was the marked point on the map closest to Ashen Earth Star.

That asteroid belt known as the "Abyss of Oblivion" was located right on the map... at the edge of the Tartarus Free Port.

Chen Feng leaned back slowly in his chair, a flash of disbelief in his eyes, which was then replaced by a cold, frenzied determination.

He spoke into the communicator with an unquestionable tone: "Su Li, Reno, Lao Mo, come to my office. Immediately."

"We've found hope."

"Or rather, we've found another path leading to a deeper hell."