The atmosphere inside the Iron Dragonfly was thick with a heavy silence following the incident with the Steel Leech. Ember gripped the controls tightly, Teron silently ran system checks, and Celeste hugged her knees, as if consoling a deep emptiness.
The group then boarded the Iron Dragonfly – the name they used for their hunting vehicle, though its real name, The Odesy (inspired by "Ode" and "Odyssey"), had long faded from its hull. The Black Storm crew usually called it "The Trouble" or "The Beggar Machine."
During the long journey to the hunting ground, Celeste's "candies" were her only solace against boredom. The silence after giving away her last Nebula candy only deepened her sadness. She sat listlessly in her "Stargazing Nook," her hand touching her throat.
The emptiness wasn't just from giving the candy away; it was also because her mouth felt bored with nothing to chew. At times like this, tasting a new, unfamiliar energy flavor was the only way to soothe her young soul.
As if answering her longing, a strange new sensation brushed against her senses. It wasn't the freshness of stars or the sweetness of meteor dust. It was something acrid, pungent, and mocking, like the smell of oxidized metal mixed with betrayal.
"Sister Ember..." Celeste whispered, gazing out the broken viewport. "Some mean energy 'friends' are flying towards us. They're laughing at everything."
Ember glanced at the radar screen but saw only asteroids. "Where?"
"There," Celeste pointed into seemingly empty space. "They're little grey clouds, like scowling faces. They carry the Essence of Soul-Corrosion and Despair."
Before Ember could stop her, Celeste reached out her hand. A strange pulling force emanated from her palm, not from muscle but from willpower. The celestial bodies carrying the malicious energy clouds were suddenly yanked towards her, hissing shrill sounds as they flew.
When they touched Celeste's hand, they shrank, twisted, and were compressed into small, dull "candies" emitting a lingering chill.
Without hesitation, Celeste popped one into her mouth. She grimaced. "Sour. And bitter." But at least it relieved her boredom. She continued chasing these "sour candies," her body floating weightlessly in the cabin like a child chasing butterflies.
Suddenly, the entire ship shuddered. A sea of luminous mist – a massive swarm of Stardust Wisps – flooded space, turning everything into a shimmering, chaotic milky haze. Radar failed. Visibility zero.
"Dammit! I've lost orientation!" Ember roared, wrestling with the controls in vain. "Teron, find something to navigate by! A guide star, a signal, anything!"
Teron, clinging to the ceiling, emitted a frantic series of anxious beeps. The pressure from Ember and the immediate danger triggered his deepest instinct: to fix what was "broken." His face screen flickered wildly, lines of blue code cascading like a waterfall.
QUERY: SPATIAL_COORDINATES... RESULT: CORRUPTED_BY_ENTROPY_SWARM.
ANALYSIS: CURRENT_SITUATION = ERROR.
INITIATING_REALITY_PATCH...
He wasn't trying to hack. Simply, in his universal database, the situation "trapped in Wisps" was flagged STATUS: CRITICAL_ERROR. And he was trying to "patch" it.
Before their eyes, the chaotic Stardust Wisps jerked to a halt, like a video paused. Then, they didn't dissipate naturally, but were forcibly "translated" aside stiffly, as if a MOVE_ENTITY (Stardust_Wisp_Group, -50_units_X) command was executed. A perfectly straight, unnaturally precise path opened up.
As the Iron Dragonfly shot into this path, Ember felt the controls go light. Gravity inside the ship vanished for a moment, then returned to normal. A candy floating near Celeste dropped to the floor with a plop. This was because Teron had inadvertently disabled GRAVITY_IN_LOCAL_AREA to save power for the engines.
At the end of the path, space tore open in a mechanical manner. It wasn't a natural wormhole, but more like a forced TELEPORT_TO (X,Y,Z) execution. Beyond the tear was the chaotic energy scene they had seen: Mini-Tornadoes, Gravity Weavers, Plasma Storms... All looked incompletely "rendered," with jagged geometric edges.
"Teron... what did you just do?" Ember exclaimed, utterly stunned. She didn't feel lucky. She felt something was wrong, as if the laws of the universe itself had just been bent.
Teron only emitted a weak, tired beep. His face screen displayed:
PATCH_SUCCESSFUL. REALITY_STABILIZING...
WARNING: SYSTEM_STRESS_LEVEL: 85%. CORE_DATA_INTEGRITY: -2%.
He had succeeded, but at a cost: he felt emptier, as if a small fragment of his memory from this morning had been erased to make room for that code.
Celeste, with her cosmic sensitivity, hugged her chest. "Ember... I feel... the universe's cry. It's like a thread being stretched tight and then snapping."
They had escaped the sea of mist. But what they entered wasn't merely an energy hotspot. It was a "patched area" of reality, a direct consequence of the "headache" Teron had caused the universe. The creatures and phenomena here were rich with Essence, but they also seemed confused and disoriented, as if haphazardly "reset."
The Essence hunt was no longer about harvesting nature. It had become an act of scavenging fragments from an incident they themselves had caused. And somewhere in the depths of the cosmos, a "Versatile Carver" – a perfect geometric entity whose form could not be directly perceived, the existence that had inscribed part of this reality – perhaps blinked and wondered, "Where did that error come from?" Then, it opened its eyes, began tracing the source of this anomaly, inadvertently smiled and whispered, "Quite a talented little creature, indeed," and started repairing the flaw in the universe's source code.