Chapter 26: The Entropy Reverser and the Taste Ark

Lin Feng's palm glowed with an eerie fluorescence under the illumination of the campfire. The miniature recipes floating beneath his skin were like living tattoos. The night sky of Earth II suddenly witnessed a light golden rain. Each raindrop exploded on the ground into taste memories—the searing pain when a certain clone was transformed into an ingredient, Orangey's final roar in the quantum storm, and even the pleasurable tremor when the Eye of the Abyss first tasted despair.

"This isn't rain!" The orange cat bristled and leaped onto the rock wall. Its damaged quantum tail traced a warning path in the air. "It's the spores of taste genes!" It swiped a paw and shattered a "raindrop" that had landed on Lin Feng's shoulder. In the burst of golden mist, a compressed parallel universe emerged—in one timeline, Earth was being transformed into a living cake, and the last lament of humans drowning in an ocean of cream turned into a sickly sweet fragrance.

The scar of the compound eye on Lin Feng suddenly burned as if it were being roasted by fire. He instinctively covered his eyes with his hand, but the stinging pain grew even stronger. Unable to help himself, he let out a groan and was then astonished to find that his vision had penetrated through the earth's strata and he could see the core of Earth II!

There, where there should have been boiling magma and hard rocks, it had now been transformed into a gigantic taste fermentation tank. Inside the tank, the magma was churning, and among the magma floated countless cloned embryos of Lin Feng himself!

The umbilical cords of these embryos were connected to a fragment of a huge bronze cauldron. The body of the cauldron was covered with dense cracks, and from those cracks constantly seeped a dark golden liquid, which was the Godslayer's Tears!

"They're using your genes as a primer..." The orange cat's voice rang in Lin Feng's ear. Lin Feng suddenly turned his head and saw the orange cat standing behind him, looking at him with a solemn expression.

Suddenly, the orange cat stretched out its paw and tore open a gash in the rock wall, revealing a wriggling flesh factory inside. Lin Feng took a closer look and saw that on the assembly line, humans from Earth II were being implanted with a strange taste bud chip.

As the chips were implanted, the pupils of these humans gradually changed. Their original black eyeballs began to transform into the compound eye structure of food ingredients, just like Lin Feng's own eyes!

"The whole planet has become a culture medium for taste bombs!" The orange cat's voice was filled with shock and horror.

Under the guidance of the orange cat, Lin Feng sneaked into an abandoned starship in the synchronous orbit of Earth II. The bridge console was covered with dust, and the holographic log showed that this was the "Taste Ark" left by the first-generation observer—an interstellar spacecraft carrying an unpolluted original gene bank. But when the cryogenic chamber was opened, both of their pupils constricted: One hundred thousand clones of Lin Yu were sleeping in liquid nitrogen, and the cooking barcodes of the bullfinch were engraved on their foreheads.

"This isn't salvation... It's a more elaborate trap." The orange cat's quantum tail suddenly grew longer and stabbed into the back of the neck of the nearest clone. Gene codes flowed like a waterfall in the void, revealing that these clones had all been implanted with taste converters—biochemical organs that could convert any emotional fluctuation into a specific flavor.

Suddenly, the starship trembled violently, and the sealed door of the kitchen area opened automatically. Wu Li's mechanical remains fused with the dark matter stove to form a deformed monster. The taste bud embryos hatched in her chest had grown into a giant tree, and its branches were hung with fermenting cosmic bubbles.

"Welcome to the Ultimate Tasting Session 2.0." The monster's vocal cords vibrated with a nauseating reverberation. Twelve molecular cooking knives emerged from the void. "The chef is looking forward to the... bitter-sweetness of pain that you bring."

Lin Feng found that his right hand began to transform into a quantum cooking state, and his fingertips could directly decompose the starship's armor. When he touched Wu Li's mechanical body, he actually tasted the flavor of instant noodles in his father's laboratory—it was the last warm memory before Lin Jianguo was replaced.

The battle evolved into a bizarre cooking duel. Wu Li's cooking knives cut the starship's bulkhead into slices of the Milky Way sashimi. Lin Feng fought back by using memories as ingredients: He tore off the white hair of the clones and wove it into salt crystals, extracted liquid nitrogen from the cryogenic chamber to condense it into childhood ice creams, and even brewed the quantum afterimage of the orange cat into absinthe.

"This dish is called 'Forever Lost My Love'." Lin Feng dropped the Godslayer's Tears into the antimatter wok. In the energy wave that erupted, the phantoms of all the lost comrades emerged. The compound eyes of the Eye of the Abyss suddenly opened in the void, and a look of unprecedented panic appeared in the pupils—it couldn't analyze this complex taste intertwined with regret and hope.

Wu Li's mechanical body began to disintegrate, and the dark matter stove spewed out a black fog with a bloody smell. The giant taste bud tree convulsed wildly, and the mature cosmic bubbles on its branches burst one after another. Each broken bubble released the imprisoned civilizations, and the entropy-reversing codes carried by these civilizations intertwined in the air to form a protective net.

The orange cat took the opportunity to leap into the core of the giant tree, and its damaged tail detonated the engine of the Taste Ark: "It's time to end this eternal feast!" Supernova-level energy flowed back along the genetic links of the clones, and the core of the fermentation tank on Earth II began to overload.

In the intense light of the ark's explosion, Lin Feng hugged the last unpolluted clone and leaped into the escape pod. Through the observation window, he saw Earth II being restructured in an emerald-green energy wave—the magma cooled into chocolate lava, the atmosphere condensed into meringue, and the whole planet turned into a cosmic cake, forever sealing the tentacles of the Eye of the Abyss beneath the frosting layer of the earth's strata.

Three months later, Lin Feng woke up on a wandering planet on the edge of the Milky Way. The scar of the compound eye had healed, but the recipe patterns on his palm had become a permanent cooking guide. The orange cat crouched in front of the newly built Taste Monument, and the inscription on the monument, engraved with the Godslayer's Tears, listed the names of all the swallowed civilizations.

The clone suddenly opened her eyes, her pupils clear like those of a newborn baby: "Brother, I dreamed that the Milky Way was swimming in a hot pot..." Lin Feng was shocked to find that the barcode on her forehead was mutating, and the bullfinch logo was gradually distorting into the shape of a bronze key.

In the deep space, the fork formed by twelve stars began to rotate slowly. In the depths of the core of a newly born universe, dark matter cells divided to give birth to primitive life with a compound eye structure. The orange cat's tail suddenly pointed to the edge of the star map: "It's time to set off, shit shoveler. The invitation to the next feast..." It licked its paw. "Is in the Gamma Ceti Nebula."

When the escape pod took off, Lin Feng saw his reflection on the porthole—it was no longer that of a human or a Godslayer, but a walking taste tombstone. His genes roared silently, both a cursed recipe and the cradle of a new spark.