The Abyssal Gaze's fractal patterns spread across Lin Feng's retinas like living veins. Through Gamma Ceti's dark matter veil, he witnessed the entity's true form—not a creature, but a conceptual embodiment of entropy from countless devoured universes. Its "pupil" was an eleven-dimensional singularity where half-cooked civilizations eternally decomposed and reformed, their silent screams trapped in infinite culinary cycles.
"This abomination predates Gray Sparrow by eons..." Juzuo's voice resonated with uncharacteristic dread, his quantum fur rigid as neutron star crust. The cat-god's three phantom tails had stiffened into gravitational wave antennae, their tips flickering like panicked fireflies.
Lin Feng's skull erupted with white-hot agony. The bronze ring on his finger blazed emerald, unlocking a memory encrypted since the cosmic dawn—a vision of primordial chaos. Within quantum foam, the Abyssal Gaze rolled infant universes into dumpling skins using primordial black holes as rolling pins. Gray Sparrow, he realized with horror, was merely a sesame seed dropped from this entity's table—a forgotten crumb that metastasized into cosmic cancer.
"Don't look at its dimensional folds!" Juzuo's tail slapped over Lin Feng's eyes too late. His left iris had already transformed, replicating the Abyssal Gaze's compound eye pattern. Through this cursed lens, he could taste spacetime's salinity, smell dark energy's metallic tang, see quarks shimmering like edible glitter.
Their environmental suits disintegrated as they breached the nebula. Reality dissolved into a physics-defying hell-kitchen—spiral galaxies sliced into sashimi on dark matter cutting boards, the Virgo Supercluster simmering in quantum broth. Celestial appliances defied reason: a whirlpool galaxy twisted into a cosmic whisk, quasars repurposed as microwave ovens, dark energy distilled into seasoning salt.
"Welcome to the grand tasting, cherished ingredients." Wu Li's voice echoed through dimensional membranes, her mechanical form now fused with the hyper-kitchen. Data cables sprouting from her spine connected directly to the Abyssal Gaze's neural clusters. "The Head Chef seeks novel flavors to alleviate eternal ennui... and you're the rarest vintage."
Lin Feng's body betrayed him. His left hand became translucent tastebuds that sampled spacetime's texture; his right eye translated visual data into flavor profiles—supernova remnants tasting of burnt caramel, dark matter filaments like licorice threads. Juzuo fared worse: his glorious fur mutated into edible quantum filaments, each exhalation peppering the air with dark matter granules.
A dimensional rift yawned open, revealing an arm woven from compressed galaxy clusters. Each "pore" contained a simmering micro-universe. The cosmic limb grabbed the Orion Arm, sprinkling stars onto Lin Feng like finishing salt. Stellar contact triggered sensory overload—the saccharine memory of sixth birthday cake frosting, the mustiness of his father's abandoned warehouse, the acrid tang of soldering flux from childhood labs.
The Abyssal Gaze issued its challenge: craft a dish "worthy of its palate" within twelve minutes using Lin Yu's splintered genetic code across timelines. Lin Feng was hurled into a nightmare pantry built from his memories—anti-matter whipped cream atop childhood birthday cakes, liquid time in vials labeled "Father's Secret Sauce," the sycamore tree outside his home now a bonsai universe.
"This is ontological warfare!" Juzuo shredded memory barriers to reveal the trap. Each "ingredient" was a compressed parallel reality; Lin Yu's consciousness fragments were bait scattered across 90 million timelines. Worse, the Abyssal Gaze was siphoning pristine universes through these connections—a cosmic diner slurping broth through spacetime straws.
As despair tightened its grip, Lin Feng noticed an anomaly: the Abyssal Gaze averted its perception from specific memories. Burnt toast, over-salted soups, moldy bread—mundane culinary failures seemed to baffle the entity. His human fallibility, once a weakness, now glimmered like a shiv in the dark.