Chapter 591: The Riemann Surface of Fuel Infiltration

The moment the starship "Tianqiong" broke into the Riemann surface, countless non-Euclidean geometric hells exploded across Lin Jin's retinas. The three-dimensional coordinate system on the navigation screen twisted like crumpled tin foil, the fuel gauge began to display imaginary values, and the truly fatal mutation occurred the moment Su Yaoji touched the cabin wall—her fingerprints sprouted bronze-colored rust spots on the titanium alloy surface, and the rust spread toward the fuel tank in the form of a Fibonacci sequence.

"This isn't a curvature jump; someone is tying a topological dead knot in the universe." Ao Li's mechanical right arm ejected a hexagonal prism-shaped phase probe, and the Gaussian curvature of the Riemann surface on the holographic screen suddenly went off the charts. Before she could finish, a crisp sound like a glacier cracking came from the fuel pipes, and dark purple crystals proliferated wildly along the lines, dyeing the quantum engine into eerie amethyst clusters.

Lin Jin's black blood splashed ripples in the shape of a Klein bottle on the control console. When his fingertips touched the surface of the crystals, those prisms suddenly bloomed with Udumbara textures: "Su Yaoji! Your roots..." The warning was drowned out by the ear-piercing alarm, and the entire starship suddenly unfolded into a four-dimensional hypercube structure, with the three of them appearing simultaneously in eight different engine rooms.

In the mirror image of the seventh engine room, Su Yaoji witnessed her own reflection mutating. The reflection's spine pierced through its skin, growing into bronze vines, but hanging from the vines were not flower buds, but bells made of miniature black holes. When she tried to sever the vines, the real pain came from her legs in reality—the bronze rust on the fuel tank wall had turned into solid roots, riveting her ankles to the starship as a symbiont.

"Cognitive filter efficiency is down to 37%!" Ao Li's quantum core overloaded, emitting a burnt smell, and her mechanical pupils split into Riemann sphere projections. "Lin Jin, curvature anomaly at nine o'clock—something is sucking on the dimensional membrane!"

Lin Jin's black blood blade cleaved through the folds of space, but what poured out of the rift was not the void, but a viscous torrent of dark matter. Floating within that asphalt-like liquid were half-mechanical, half-biological monsters; their compound eyes were made of Klein bottles, and their arthropod-like mouthparts were gnawing on the starship's dimensional shields. Even more terrifying, every monster had an Udumbara flower-shaped reactor embedded in its chest cavity.

"Space-time worms..." Su Yaoji's roots suddenly went berserk, piercing through three collapsing engine rooms. "They feed on the entropy increase of civilizations, but how could they carry the Udumbara's..." Her voice stopped abruptly; the abdominal cavity of one of the worms suddenly became transparent, revealing a half-digested Mechanical Buddha inside—it was the very same civilization cleaner they had encountered in the virtual number space three months ago.

Ao Li's phase mirror image brought even worse news: the main engine of the Tianqiong was turning into wood. The carbon fiber casing was mutating into annual ring-like textures, aerial roots of a banyan tree were growing out of the ion thrusters, and what flowed in the fuel lines was no longer Helium-3, but amber-colored resin exuding the fragrance of Udumbara flowers.

"Infiltration rate 89%, we have six minutes and twenty seconds before we turn completely into potted plants." Ao Li used her mechanical arm to tear off the newly sprouted branches at her neck, the pale gold coolant mixing with plant sap into rainbow-colored mucus. "Su Yaoji, I need your roots to perform inverse-phase resonance!"

Lin Jin suddenly injected black blood into the navigation core. The starship let out a wail like a dying giant beast, and all the screens simultaneously erupted with countless unverified equations of the Riemann hypothesis. In this mathematical purgatory, he saw the truth of the infiltration—the entire Riemann surface passage was actually a trap woven by some existence using Udumbara roots, and those bronze-colored patterns were the leaf vein network formed by hyper-dimensional photosynthesis.

"The dark matter worms are the gardeners," Lin Jin's black blood drew a Poincaré recurrence model in the void, "they are fertilizing this plant universe." As if to verify his speculation, a worm suddenly crashed through the cabin wall, spraying not acid but black pollen from its mouthparts. The moment Su Yaoji's roots touched the pollen, eerie mandalas suddenly bloomed, and the stamens of every flower were broadcasting scenes of the starship's disintegration in different timelines.

Ao Li's mechanical arm suddenly folded backward and pierced into her own chest cavity, tearing out the quantum core and throwing it toward the fuel tank: "Use this to initiate a phase self-destruct!" The moment the core cracked, the three of them were thrown into time slices—they existed simultaneously in the second before the starship crashed and the moment of the fuel crystals' origin.

In the time rift, Su Yaoji grasped the root of the infiltration: in some bronze-colored laboratory, a wrinkled version of herself was implanting Udumbara seeds into the starship's blueprint. And Lin Jin witnessed an even crueler truth—Ao Li's initial prototype machine was pierced through by roots, acting as a living battery to drive the entire Riemann surface trap.

"Time to prune the branches." The Lin Jin in reality whispered gently, his black blood blade piercing into Su Yaoji's chest. But before the blade could touch her heart, his wrist was locked simultaneously by Ao Li's mechanical arm and Su Yaoji's roots. The three engine rooms collapsed into a singularity at this moment, and the starship completed an impossible posture amidst the intense light of a supernova explosion—using its wooden engine to perform a Riemann flip.

When the light faded, the Tianqiong floated quietly in conventional space. The crystals in the fuel tank had vanished without a trace, as if the nightmare just now had been a collective hallucination. But the bronze tattoo on Su Yaoji's collarbone, the annual ring marks on the inside of Ao Li's mechanical arm, and the Udumbara spectrum flashing within Lin Jin's black blood all silently spoke of some pruning protocol that transcended dimensions.

"Next time we jump," Lin Jin wiped the pollen that had appeared out of thin air on the navigation screen, "remind me not to trust any geometric structure." Behind him, a collapsing galaxy outside the porthole happened to present the silhouette of an Udumbara flower in full bloom. ===== CHAPTER 592 =====