Stardust Coordinates: The Webweaver's Legacy

In 2147, the Stardust Coordinates project finally detected a series of regular pulses from the Alpha Centauri system, 4.3 light-years from Earth. The signal was an encoded sequence of 11 prime numbers. Once deciphered, it pointed to the remains of a giant space station hidden in the asteroid belt. When the interstellar exploration team aboard the Beacon arrived, they found tens of thousands of humanoid remains floating inside the wreckage, each with a glowing crystal embedded in its chest. In the main control room, Captain Lin Xia discovered a star map log describing how a civilization known as the Webweavers had used crystals to create an interstellar network of consciousness, only to be struck a century ago by the Memory-Eater Virus. Those infected gradually forgot who they were, eventually becoming mindless shells. As the team tried to bring back crystal samples, crew member Chen Mo suddenly began acting strangely. The crystals he had touched started resonating, and a memory that wasn't his surged into his mind: the Webweavers had tried to build a firewall with their collective consciousness, but differences in individual memories caused the network to collapse. More shockingly, the end of the log mentioned that fragments carrying the virus had drifted to every corner of the universe, and that the pulse received by Earth was actually a warning sent by the last surviving Webweaver at the cost of their life. At that moment, the Beacon's navigation System suddenly failed, and an invisible force dragged the ship deeper into the wreckage. Lin Xia realized that all the crystals were flashing in unison, as if reading the crew's memories. The lingering consciousness of the Webweavers was trying to use outsiders' memories to rebuild the network. It might be the only way to destroy the virus, but the price could be the permanent assimilation of human consciousness.