A red nebula gently enveloped the "Venom" like a ball of molten syrup. Lin Xia leaned against the window, watching the lavender stardust swirl around the spacecraft. When those tiny particles hit the glass, they left fleeting specks of light, like countless blinking eyes. The dashboards in the main control cabin suddenly began to buzz, and all the needles pointed to zero, as if time had lost its meaning there.

"The curvature of spacetime has exceeded the critical value." Chen Ye's fingers danced across the virtual keyboard. Beads of sweat dripped down his jawline, splashing small stains on the console. "The navigation system has completely failed. We're like wandering in a cosmic maze."

Lin Xia fished out the metal box. The blue light of the memory crystal seeped through the velvet, casting distorted shadows on the cabin wall. As she brought the crystal close to the main console, the previously chaotic data flow suddenly became orderly. A string of green coordinates slowly scrolled across the screen—the destination was marked "New Home," and a countdown next to it showed 96 hours left. "This crystal resonates with the nebula." Su Rui's gold-rimmed glasses reflected the blue light. She carefully tweezed a sample of stardust and placed it under a microscope. "It contains minerals from the lunar bedrock, and the composition matches perfectly with the memory alloy."

On the microscope's screen, the stardust grains stretched into spirals in the blue light, resembling the metal filaments in the memory crystal. Lin Xia suddenly remembered the petri dishes in her mother's laboratory. The soil samples brought back from the moon also exhibited similar structures under certain wavelengths of light. "Are they alive?" Her fingertips lightly tapped the screen, and the stardust grains suddenly vibrated violently, as if disturbed by something.