Earth - Relic of the Human Era Cafe, Cosmic Era 1053, Autumn
Laila gently traced the patterns on the Scorch-mark Coaster with her fingertip, and her Mechanical Heart suddenly trembled. The coffee stains embedded in the metal began to recombine in a quantum state, projecting a holographic star map onto the control console. Every flickering point of light was tied to a flawed memory: the unhealed arrow-wound totem of a Primitive Tribe, the sparks flying as a Panda Star Engineer's gear jammed, half a line of poetry written in lightning by an Energy Entity. The gear-driven heart of Mobao No. 4 exuded silver mucus, sketching an entropy fluctuation curve on the ground that ended at an unfamiliar set of coordinates.
"Abnormal narrative frequency detected!" The mucus instantly solidified into a miniature espresso machine, and the coffee liquid pouring from the spout simultaneously displayed the greenish hue of raw beans and the scorched brown of roasted ones. "Cracks have appeared in the root system of the Symbiotic Tree within the cosmic coffee plantation, and those flawed specimens curated by the Balancer Omega... are awakening en masse. For every 1% drop in specimen integrity, the spread rate of Memory Rust increases by 3.7 times!"
Chapter 101