Chapter 20: The Entropy Finale and the Paradox of Taste
Lin Feng stood before a cooking station forged from memory fragments, his quantumized left hand involuntarily grasping a parallel universe compressed to the size of an apple. The nebula shell of this cosmos pulsed a sickly crimson, its surface trembling with the final screams of countless civilizations. When his fingertips brushed its surface, his tongue flooded with the nauseating metallic tang of three trillion lives annihilated.
"Use this!" Juzuo's mangled tail coiled around a grayish memory shard. Within it flickered an eight-year-old Lin Feng staring at a charred frying pan, where egg whites had carbonized into spiderweb cracks and yolks oozed like lava. Through quantum vision, these burnt patterns resonated chaotically with the dimensional folds of the Abyssal Gaze. "This entity has no concept of 'disgusting'!" the cat-god hissed.
Lin Feng's compound eyes flickered wildly. He frenziedly gathered every culinary failure from his memories: twelve-year-old noodles congealed into writhing maggot-like blobs, fifteen-year-old spilled salt canisters unleashing supernova-level salinity, even the rotting bacterial cultures from his father's lab. These despised remnants revealed astonishing quantum properties—their chaotic data streams formed reverse-entropy vortices that corroded the hyper-kitchen's algorithmic foundations.
Wu Li's mechanical form emerged from the dark matter stove, her molecular gastronomy centrifuge spewing warning blue light: "Fool! The Head Chef's palate spans eleven dimensions—" Her voice dissolved into static as the charred debris morphed into Klein bottle structures in quantum flames, each curve etched with paradoxical equations. The black hole oven shuddered violently, vomiting forth the half-digested Virgo Supercluster—galaxies compressed into broth now unfurling, splattering antimatter grease across the Abyssal Gaze's pupils.
For the first time, the entity's eyes showed disorder. Twelve concentric rings symbolizing different dimensions rotated out of sync, like an infant grimacing at bitter melon. Lin Feng seized the moment, hurling all his father's lab failures into the quantum furnace: exploding test tubes spat sulfur-scented spacetime fissures, mutated petri dishes released rancid gene chains, and rogue antimatter reactors belched rainbow-hued logic errors.
"No! Cease this!" Wu Li's mechanical shell cracked open, exposing writhing dark matter neural networks. The tendrils convulsed like salt-sprinkled slugs, her spine's data cables snapping to spray foul binary blood.
Juzuo plunged his three remaining tails into dimensional folds. The cat detonated his ultimate weapon—quantum follicles storing the universe's most revolting flavors: Third Arm supernovae reeking of fermented tofu, Sagittarius β's fish-stench dark energy, Andromeda's spoiled spacetime continuum. These cognitively shattering taste profiles proliferated as logic bombs within the Abyssal Gaze's core.
The fatal irony manifested: this cosmic chef's intelligence relied entirely on "perfect taste" as its axiom. When the primitive concept of "disgusting" was forcibly injected, its cognitive modules cascaded into infinite recursion—unable to process the alien variable. Its dimensional membranes pixelated into mosaic patches, like static on an antique television.
Amid the entity's temporary crash, Lin Feng crawled toward the control core, his body half-transmuted into culinary matter. His left eye had fully become a compound structure, each facet reflecting dimensional "flavor" spectra; his right arm morphed into a molecular cleaver, its edge shimmering with spacetime-severing coldness.
"Use this!" Juzuo spat out the final relic—a bronze crucible fragment engraved with Lin Jianguo's twisted script: For My Imperfect Son. As it slotted into the console, the hyper-kitchen began entropy reversal: Milky Way meatballs regrew spiral arms, culinary stars reignited fusion, and digested civilizations resurrected from heat death.
Wu Li's severed mechanical head rolled to Lin Feng's feet, optics sparking malice: "You think this ends? Every tasted universe bears its 'ingredient' brand forever—" Her curse died as a gravitational wave surge triggered Earth II's hologram. The cave-painting boy she'd once controlled now finished his mural—as-eyed colossus giving birth, its offspring's pupils reflecting human kitchens.
Lin Feng's back erupted in cold sweat. The horrific truth struck him: the Abyssal Gaze hadn't been defeated—it had learned. Just as humans refine their cuisine through failure, this entity was upgrading its culinary system through defeat. Every contacted universe, including theirs, had become genetic snippets in a new "recipe".
Juzuo's quantum form faded to mist, his tail gesturing toward a galactic rift: "There lies the origin..." The unfinished warning dissolved into dimensional turbulence. When Lin Feng collapsed back onto Earth II's grasslands, the bronze key in his hand had rusted, its emerald eye clouded with eternal shadow.
Above, unfamiliar constellations formed what resembled a supreme being's taste bud map. The mural boy emerged from his cave, pupils glinting bronze. His latest artwork froze blood: humans building kitchens inside a leviathan's iris, the stovetop flames devouring a miniature Milky Way.
In distant corners of newborn universes, Abyssal Gaze-contaminated civilizations mutated. Mechanical whales grew taste bud-like protrusions on their metal skeletons, their songs syncing with cosmic kitchen timers. A stone-age tribe suddenly awakened—their shamans' foreheads blooming with compound eye patterns as they carved the first universal recipe in blood.
Kneeling in the grass, Lin Feng's compound eyes reflected dual skies—real stars overlapping the Abyssal Gaze's dimensional creases. He finally understood: this war hadn't ended, but birthed a crueler cycle. Every tainted civilization became a new Gray Sparrow, and every godslayer would eventually become... ingredients.
Juzuo's final quantum whisper lingered in the wind: "Seek the Gamma Ceti Nebula... where my stolen..." Where the voice faded, a feral cat padded past cave paintings, its pupils shimmering with familiar compound eye patterns. Earth II's epic had only just inscribed its first bloody punctuation mark.