The "Survival on the Train" game has bugs, it's really laggy!

The image on the observation instrument was shaking violently.

The shadow that obscured the newborn star was slowly emerging from the folds of space in a higher dimension.

First, the outline.

A spine, pieced together from countless withered star remains devoid of nuclear fusion, stretches across the entire field of view of the observation instrument. Those stars, which once burned for billions of years, are now nothing but grayish-white shells, clinging tightly to that spine like withered fruit strung on a rope.

Then comes the torso.

Twisted fragments of laws, defying any normal cosmic geometry, wove a translucent "skin" around the spine. Through that skin, one could see a slowly flowing, viscous, tar-like high-dimensional dissolution liquid, and the remnants of an entire planet buried deep within, being digested.

Finally, there's the head.

If that thing can be called a "head".

It has no facial features.

There was only a colossal, infinitely deep abyss, large enough to contain an entire medium-sized star. Around the edge of the maw were hundreds of whisker-like structures made of solidified gravitational lines, each dragging fragments of nebula debris, swaying slowly in the void.

The monster was so large it was absurd.

It doesn't appear in the universe; rather, after it appears, the surrounding space actively bends outward to make room for it. Visually, a distinct gravitational fault forms around its body, forcibly bending and distorting all starlight passing through that region into eerie arcs.

"Star Devourer".

A high-dimensional scavenger that feeds exclusively on newly formed galaxies.

The primordial aura created by Su Yuan was like a sumptuous feast laid out on the table for it, so delicious that it crawled out of its high-dimensional nest, which had been dormant for countless epochs.

in the carriage.

Wang Hu's legs completely lost their strength.

His robotic arm, which had just regained some feeling, slammed heavily onto the floor, and he slid down the side of the vehicle, collapsing to his knees. His pupils contracted sharply, his lips trembled, and he couldn't utter a single word.

The giant black hole eye we just saw was at least abstract.

It is a fear at the conceptual level.

But what's in front of me...

It is a real, tangible entity, where you can clearly see every crack on the star's remains.

That kind of biological, instinctive sense of oppression is a million times more terrifying than the abstract law of decay.

Xiao Huo was trembling all over.

He gripped the edge of the control panel so tightly that his ten long, slender fingers were almost embedded in the metal, and golden blood seeped from his fingertips. His golden, vertical pupils were unfocused, and his teeth chattered uncontrollably, making a dense "clucking" sound.

He wasn't afraid of death.

He was afraid that thing would "look over here".

But that thing didn't have eyes at all.

This is the most frustrating part.

You know it's watching you, but you can't pinpoint where its gaze is coming from. The feeling of being scrutinized, measured, and evaluated is like being stripped naked from head to toe and thrown onto a chopping board by an invisible hand.

Su Yuan leaned back in the driver's seat, his left eye a dark gold and his right eye pure white.

He stared at the enormous, absurd figure in the observation instrument, the curve of his lips remaining unchanged.

It even tilted slightly upwards.

"Hey," he said softly, his tone as casual as if he were commenting on a dish, "it's big enough."

The voice just fell.

The Star Destroyer moved.

There were no warning signs whatsoever.

The abyssal maw, large enough to swallow a planet, suddenly opened to its limit. Inside, there was no conventional structure, but countless overlapping, folded, and nested spatial faults. Each fault was rotating at a different speed and in a different direction, forming an infinitely swirling vortex of devouring energy.

It started eating.

But it doesn't eat physical food.

Su Yuan clearly sensed the essence of that suction force. What the monster was sucking was the "Law of Creation" itself, which he had just injected into this star field using "Creation and Evolution." Every primordial star embryo that was condensing in the newborn star system, every strand of gravitational line that was being woven, and every newly born fundamental physical constant was being drawn away, evaporated, and swallowed into that abyssal maw at a speed visible to the naked eye.

The entire nascent nebula is shrinking rapidly.

The star that had just ignited nuclear fusion was losing luminosity at a rate of three percent per second.

And a chain reaction followed.

The vehicle of the Emperor's Journey Devourer suddenly stopped.

An invisible force of gravity, a hundred times more brutal than the decay law of the black hole eye, gripped the very foundation of the train's existence, pulling it relentlessly toward the gaping maw of the abyss.

"Snap—!"

The obsidian scale armor on the outside of the carriage emitted a chilling cracking sound.

It's not a physical breakage.

It is the very concept of "hardness" that constitutes the armor that is being torn apart little by little by that law of gravity.

Then, the barrier of the "sole territory" also malfunctioned.

The invisible shield that was originally completely isolated from external laws now appeared, in Su Yuan's perception, with dense cracks on its surface, resembling those of parched earth.

From every crack, a faint, dark golden glow was leaking out.

The shield is leaking air.

"It's absorbing the very foundation of our laws." Su Yuan narrowed his eyes, his right fingertips unconsciously tapping the armrest. "Interesting. Even the 'Sole Territory' couldn't hold out for long."

His tone was excessively calm.

But everyone understood the subtext of those words.

It can't hold out for long.

This means that in the "not too long" they will be like those stellar corpses, drained of all their fundamental laws, becoming just another withered fruit hanging on that spine.

at the same time.

Beyond countless dimensions.

In the council hall of the Interstellar Council's High-Dimensional Arbitration Tribunal headquarters, the remaining observation equipment was operating at overcapacity, projecting everything happening in distant star regions onto a holographic sand table with a resolution of 0.3%.

The picture is blurry and the signal is intermittent.

But it was enough for all the elders present to see the scene clearly.

A star-devourer is feeding on a newly born star system.

And that train, that viral entity they marked "VSE-0," was being dragged by the laws of gravity, sliding towards the abyss's gaping maw.

"It's over." An elder, emaciated and covered in translucent scales, shook his head, his tone carrying a detached indifference, as if a death sentence had been handed down. "The Star Destroyer's law level is at least twelfth level. Its digestive system can degrade any known law into the most basic cosmic background radiation. No matter how outrageous that virus was, it was nothing more than a level seven train."

"The difference in social class is too great."

"Five ranks," another female elder with a full head of silver hair and an unnaturally youthful face added. "Let alone five ranks, even a difference of just two ranks is an absolutely insurmountable gap in terms of the laws. He couldn't possibly survive."

"In the end, it was just a flash in the pan." The Supreme Judge bent down to pick up the scepter that had fallen earlier, sat back down on his floating judge's seat, and his expression returned to its indifferent state. "A low-dimensional, accidental mutation is ultimately nothing more than—"

He didn't finish his sentence.

Because the images on the holographic sand table suddenly changed.

Inside the carriage of the Emperor's Path Devourer.

"Master! The armor peeling speed is accelerating!" Little Fire roared these words with all his might, his voice already trembling with tears. "At this rate, 'The Only Territory'... will completely fail in thirty seconds!"

"In thirty seconds, the car's structure will be exposed to the laws of gravity! We'll be torn to shreds!"

The money-guarding spirit had somehow crawled out of the treasure chest.

It wasn't because of courage.

It's because when fear reaches a critical point, it triggers a kind of madness of giving up entirely.

Its chubby face was covered with tears and snot, its hands trembling as it hugged a blank scroll almost as big as itself, and a quill pen that it had somehow found in its mouth was dangling from its mouth as it wrote while crying.

"My...my benefactor! I don't have much of an inheritance...but I have to leave behind the coordinates of the 372 treasure chests I've hidden all my life! In case...in case someone can find them...at least don't let them rot in the void...waaaaah..."

He wrote while wiping away tears, his snot smearing half the scroll.

Wang Hu slumped in the corner, his face ashen. His robotic arm had completely stopped working, dangling at his side like an industrial waste pipe without electricity.

He looked out the window at the ever-approaching gaping maw of the abyss, then turned to look at Su Yuan, who sat motionless in the driver's seat.

His lips moved, as if he wanted to say something.

But it felt like my throat was blocked.

Thirty seconds.

What else can it do?

Run? Where to run? The laws of gravity have locked down space, making jumps impossible.

Fight? The rules don't forbid fighting, but what are we fighting? That thing is bigger than a standard galaxy, and this train is less than one ten-thousandth the size of one of its whiskers.

This isn't a difference in strength; it's a crushing defeat on a dimensional level.

Like an ant trying to fight the sun.

"Boss..." Wang Hu finally managed to squeeze out a voice, hoarse and desperate, "Can't we escape?"

Twenty-three seconds.

Su Yuan did not answer.

He sat in the driver's seat, his eyes never leaving the observation instrument.

In the dark golden left eye, the enormous, sky-covering figure was constantly growing larger.

He's watching.

They weren't looking with fear, but rather scrutinizing.

Like a seasoned gourmet walking into a market, carefully selecting ingredients for tonight's meal.

Nineteen seconds.

The cracks on the surface of the "Unique Territory" are becoming increasingly dense. Large swaths of dark golden fluorescent light leak out from the cracks, and the entire shield is crumbling at a visible speed.

Fifteen seconds.

Nearly a third of the outer armor had peeled off. The obsidian scales, which had lost their "hardness," turned into grayish-white powder and silently dissipated in the gravitational tides.

Xiao Huo's voice had turned into a scream:

"Fifteen seconds! Master, please! Do something!"

Twelve seconds.

Su Yuan made a move.

But it's not the kind of "movement" that everyone is expecting.

He did not initiate a spatial jump.

No defense systems were activated.

He licked his lips.

Then, he let out a low laugh, squeezed out from deep within his chest.

The laughter echoed through the crumbling carriage, short, hoarse, and with a chilling fervor.

"I was just worried that I ate too much vegetarian food earlier."

He said.

There was no fear in his tone.

There is no despair.

There is only one kind—naked, undisguised—

hunger.

Su Yuan suddenly raised his hand and gripped the blood-red master control lever on the left side of the dashboard tightly.

"Little Fire, listen to my command."

"Close the 'sole territory'."

"Deactivate all outer shields."

"Disable the Obsidian Armor's self-repair function."

Xiao Huo's mind went blank for a moment.

"Owner?!"

"Pour all the energy saved into the pitcher plant engine."

Su Yuan pushed down the push rod.

"Instant ramming mode, activated."

"Target--"

He raised his chin, and his golden left eye and pure white right eye shone brightly at the same time.

"That mouth."

"ah?!?!"

Three different screams rang out from inside the carriage.

Wang Hu's voice was the gruffest: "Boss, are you fucking crazy?! You're going to charge in?! That's something that eats planets!"

The money-guarding spirit dropped the quill pen, leaned back, and fainted. Then, it was jolted awake by fear, fainted again, and regained consciousness, jumping back and forth repeatedly.

But keep it low on fire.

Xiao Huo's hand hovered over the console for less than two seconds.

Then he gritted his teeth, tears still clinging to his eyelashes, while his hands performed a series of operations on the panel with absolute precision.

"The only territory... is now closed!"

"Outer shield... deactivated!"

"Armor self-repair... now disabled!"

"Nepenthes engine energy infusion... 100%!"

"Collision Mode - Activated!"

His voice was trembling, but he enunciated each word clearly.

All defenses on the Emperor's Path Devourer were removed in that instant.

Without its shields and armor, the train was now like a peeled egg—soft, fragile, and completely defenseless.

However, its speed, driven by the full power of the pitcher plant engine, skyrocketed to an unbelievable value.

A dark golden light enveloped the entire train, transforming it into a straight, unwavering ribbon of light—not escaping the gravity of the Star Destroyer, but rather moving in the direction of gravity itself.

accelerate.

accelerate.

Speed ​​up again.

Straight and without hesitation, it charged towards that abyssal maw large enough to swallow a planet.

This is not like a moth drawn to a flame.

At least a moth will flap its wings.

Su Yuan didn't even bother to flap his wings. He stripped himself naked and willingly jumped into that bottomless abyss.

High-dimensional arbitration tribunal.

Inside the council chamber.

Although the images on the holographic sand table were blurry, the trajectory of the dark green dot was crystal clear.

It is accelerating.

It accelerated toward the giant maw of the Star Destroyer.

The emaciated, scaled elder stood up.

His expression wasn't one of shock, but rather confusion.

Pure confusion.

"What is he...doing?"

The silver-haired female elder also stood up, approached the holographic sand table, and her eyes, which had witnessed fifty million years of vicissitudes, were filled with disbelief.

"suicide?"

"No, that's not right." The Supreme Judge's hand gripped the scepter tightly once more, his knuckles turning white. "He's...feeding himself?"

No one can understand.

nobody.

But Su Yuan doesn't need anyone's understanding at all.

As the Emperor's Path Devourer charged toward the giant maw with no defenses whatsoever, his hands simultaneously pressed down on the center console.

Left hand.

The dark gold patterns of the imperial scepter spread from his fingertips, seeping along the metal panels and into the underlying structure of the entire train.

Right hand.

The cracked "elephant" mark on his palm suddenly heated up, and pure white light seeped out from the crack.

Su Yuan did not activate the concept of "nothingness".

What he activated was the mythical authority he had just acquired.

Creation and evolution.

A thin, extremely precise membrane of laws, invisible to the naked eye, enveloped the entire train's exterior in less than a second.

The essence of that thin film is the exact same law frequency that Su Yuan extracted from the "Creation Law Stream" that the Star Destroyer was absorbing, using the analytical ability of the One Who Unifies All Things.

in other words.

He disguised himself as a "law of creation".

The Star Destroyer is guzzling down the laws of creation of the newborn galaxy.

Su Yuan enveloped himself in the same scent and blended into that torrent of laws.

Like a shark covered in fish skin, it blended into the school of fish.

The train crashed into the core area of ​​the law of gravity.

That invisible force, powerful enough to tear everything apart, contacted the camouflage film on the train's surface the instant—

It slid open.

It's like water flowing around a pebble with an oiled surface.

There was no collision.

There was no tearing.

Following the flow of the laws of gravity, the Emperor's Path Devourer slid into the abyssal maw of the Star Destroyer unharmed, like a drop of water merging into the ocean.

Inside the train carriage.

Wang Hu kept his eyes tightly shut, his hands covering his head, all his muscles tensed to the limit, waiting for the moment his body would be torn apart.

one second.

two seconds.

three seconds.

There is no pain.

He cautiously opened one eye.

Then both of their eyes widened in surprise.

The view outside the car window was completely beyond his comprehension.

There is no flesh and blood.

It has no skeleton.

It has none of the internal organs of a typical living organism.

Instead, there was a boundless, viscous, high-dimensional dissolving liquid emitting a dark blue light. The liquid's texture was between liquid and gas, with countless fragments of nebulae suspended inside and planetary fragments being slowly digested.

Occasionally, an empty star shell, drained of all its energy, would slowly float past from the depths of the dissolving liquid, only a few dozen meters from the car window. The surface of that star was covered with dense, shriveled, and grayish marks, like a raisin that had been drained of all its juice.

This is inside the Star Destroyer.

A stomach that is digesting the entire galaxy.

"We...we got in?" Wang Hu's voice trembled. "We fucking...got in alive?!"

Su Yuan did not answer him.

He stood up.

The dark golden light in his left eye surged to its peak, while the pure white halo in his right eye simultaneously converged into an extremely fine point of light.

His eyes have all their special abilities activated.

The analytical vision of the One Who Unifies All Things unfolded in that instant, revealing the laws governing every drop of high-dimensional dissolving fluid within the behemoth's body, the residual energy density of every star's remains, and the weak points of every spatial fold—all were laid bare in his perception.

"Small fire."

"exist!"

"Release all the vines."

Su Yuan's voice turned cold.

"Switch mode - Golden Plague"

The bottom of the train.

Upon receiving the command, the dark golden vines that had been entrenched deep within the train's structure burst forth wildly from every crevice.

Hundreds of thick, main vines burst through the vehicle's floorboards, plunging into the surrounding high-dimensional dissolving liquid like giant deep-sea serpents. Following closely behind were thousands upon thousands of branches, each ending in a dark golden plague spore sac.

Their target is the celestial corpses that make up the walls of the behemoths.

When the first batch of vines came into contact with the nearest empty star shell, their tips pierced directly through the withered outer shell and penetrated into the interior.

Su Yuan sensed the internal structure of those empty shells.

It's not empty inside.

Inside the remains of each star, there remain extremely small amounts of "primordial starlight," but with an absurdly high concentration of laws. This is the last nuclear fusion residue of the star before it was devoured, the ultimate energy source upon which this behemoth relied to sustain its life activities.

It consumes more than just the planet's matter.

What it truly consumes is the "laws" of the planet.

And those remnants of laws condensed and stored inside the corpses—for Su Yuan—

It's basically a table full of fancy dishes.

"Genesis and evolution, initiated."

Su Yuan snorted softly.

He extended his left hand, and the dark gold imperial scepter pattern spread from his palm to his entire arm, then through the central control panel to all the vines that had already pierced into the Hengxing corpse.

The essence of creation and evolution is to reverse the "end of death" into the "beginning of new life".

What Su Yuan needs to do now is very simple.

He wanted to seize these withered, dead stellar laws—

Rekindle.

Inside the first star's corpse, the dark golden plague spores at the tips of the vines suddenly multiplied under the catalysis of the power of creation.

Spores are no longer just parasites and absorbers.

They are rewriting the rules.

The depleted remnants of nuclear fusion were forcibly injected with the concept of "beginning," and those law chains that had originally collapsed into inanimate objects began to recombine in reverse under the forceful intervention of creation and evolution.

then.

boom--

Inside the Hengxing corpse, a faint but real light shone again.

It's not the light from nuclear fusion.

It was a dark golden light, belonging to the Golden Plague, a predatory light driven by extreme greed.

The corpse of that star did not come back to life.

It has been tampered with.

Its fundamental laws were rewritten from "the dead star" to "the petri dish of dark golden plague". All the remaining high-dimensional energy no longer belonged to the digestive system of the Star Destroyer, but was instead absorbed by the plague spores and flowed back along the vines to the pitcher plant engine of the Emperor's Path Devourer.

One is not enough.

Su Yuan wanted everything.

"diffusion."

He only said one word.

Catalyzed by generative evolution, the golden plague exhibited an astonishing rate of reproduction.

After the first star remnant was completely altered, the dark golden spores that burst out from its interior, like supernova ejecta, radiated and spread into the surrounding dissolving liquid, precisely penetrating the second, third, and tenth star remnants nearby.

Each altered corpse becomes a new spore launcher, spreading to corpses further afield.

Exponential growth.

Chain reaction.

Within ten seconds, all the stellar corpses within a 300-kilometer radius of the Emperor's Path Devourer were pierced by dark golden vines. Those originally grayish-white empty shells now glowed with an eerie dark golden light, like countless lit lanterns suspended in a viscous high-dimensional dissolving liquid.

The organs that the Star Destroyer originally used to digest its prey are being reverse-engineered in a way that it cannot comprehend at all.

Its "stomach wall" no longer digests.

Its stomach wall is being parasitized.

Meanwhile, the massive amount of high-dimensional life essence that originally belonged to it was surging and pouring into the pitcher plant engine of the Emperor's Path Devourer along the dark golden vine network.

Inside the train carriage.

The numbers on the energy panel started to jump.

slow.

Then accelerate.

Then it skyrocketed.

Flesh and Blood Energy: 287,000……312,000……354,000……

Metal energy: 178,000...203,000...

Core fragments: 45,000...62,000...

Numbers are flying.

Xiao Huo stared blankly at the data that seemed to be burning through the screen, his eyes widening as the ever-flowing stream of numbers was reflected in his golden vertical pupils.

"This..." His mouth opened and he couldn't close it.

In the void.

The colossal, star-devouring behemoth that blotted out the sky suddenly stopped feeding on the newborn star system.

It sensed something was wrong.

The signals coming from a certain area of ​​the body are incorrect.

The efficiency of digestion there is not increasing, but plummeting. Instead, it is experiencing a sensation it has never felt in its billions of years of existence.

pain.

A kind of intense pain that feels like being burned, rewritten, and forcibly hollowed out from the inside.

It tried to contract its body wall and squeeze that abnormal area.

But the dark golden plague had already spread to more than five percent of its tissues. The altered stellar remains were embedded in its body walls like rivets, impossible to expel no matter how hard it was squeezed.

It attempts to secrete a higher concentration of solvent to digest the invaders.

However, the power of creation and evolution directly rewrote the concept of "digestion" in the solution as "cultivation," and more of the solution became nutrients to nourish the growth of the plague.

The more it is ingested, the faster the plague grows.

Dead end.

"Awooo!!!"

A sound.

The high-frequency wail that erupted from the deepest part of the void shattered three newly formed dwarf planets on the edge of the nascent star system.

Sound waves should not propagate in a vacuum.

But this wailing sound is not a sound in the physical sense.

It is a law-shaking tremor that acts directly on existence itself. Any being with the ability to perceive, no matter how far away, can hear that painful scream that pierces through the dimensional barrier.

Followed by.

The first dark golden vine suddenly shot out from the surface of the Star Destroyer's enormous body, which covered half of the star field.

That vine was as thick as an asteroid.

It burst forth from within the giant beast's body, its tip blooming with a dazzlingly brilliant dark golden spore flower that swayed wildly in the void.

Then comes the second one.

The third one.

The hundredth one.

The thousandth one.

In less than ten seconds, thousands upon thousands of massive, dark golden vines pierced through the Star Destroyer's body walls from all over, extending wildly outwards. The total length of those vines was enough to wrap around a star hundreds of times. They stretched wildly in the void, forming a dark golden network covering the entire surface of the behemoth's body.

Looking from afar.

The colossal beast, originally gray-white and pieced together from the remains of stars, was now covered in dark gold spikes.

Like an ancient whale pierced by a thousand arrows.

High-dimensional arbitration tribunal.

Inside the council chamber.

The images on the holographic sand table no longer need high resolution.

Because the scene was so large that it could be seen clearly even at low resolution.

The scepter in the Supreme Judge's hand fell to the ground with a thud.

He didn't pick it up.

His hands were shaking.

It's not fear.

It is a cognitive collapse that goes far beyond fear and is enough to overturn one's entire worldview.

"impossible……"

The elder with the scales spoke haltingly, as if being choked, as if squeezed out of his throat: "Star Destroyer... a high-dimensional behemoth of rank 12 or higher... was..."

He couldn't continue.

The silver-haired female elder finished speaking for him.

Her face was deathly pale, her lips parted slightly, and her voice was so soft it was almost inaudible:

"It was parasitized from the inside..."

The entire room fell silent.

The eleven supreme elders, who had lived for fifty million years, had the exact same expression as Wang Hu in the carriage.

sluggish.

blank.

It swings back and forth between "How the hell is this possible?" and "But it really happened."

A high-dimensional behemoth capable of devouring galaxies.

It was penetrated by a level 7 train.

Then it was hollowed out from the inside.

This is not a battle.

This is eating.

Inside the carriage of the Emperor's Path Devourer.

Su Yuan climbed out of the cabin door on the roof of the vehicle, stepping on the dark golden vines.

He stood atop the train, surrounded by surging high-dimensional dissolving liquid and a network of dark gold vines spreading in all directions.

His dark golden left eye looked down at the massive body being drained of its life force, while the pure white halo of his right eye had receded, leaving only a faint ring of light.

"Don't leave a single drop."

His voice wasn't loud.

In this space, the human voice is ridiculously small.

But every word traveled along the dark golden vine network to every corner of the behemoth's body.

"Drain him completely."

The vine network received instructions.

The absorption rate surged again.

Inside the carriage, Xiao Huo watched the numbers on the energy panel jump faster and faster, his expression completely blank.

It's not because of numbness.

It's because those numbers have become so large that his cognitive system has started to malfunction.

Flesh and Blood Energy: 1,247,000.

Metal energy: 893,000.

Core fragments: 312,000.

Then the number display boxes on the panel were not enough.

The last two digits were squeezed off the screen.

Xiao Huo reached out and patted the screen, as if he were patting a TV that had stopped working.

Useless.

The numbers are still rising.

In the void.

The Star Destroyer's body withered away at a visible speed under the strangulation and extraction of the dark golden vines.

One by one, the stellar remains that formed its spine shattered and collapsed, turning into grayish-white powder after the vines drained the last trace of its laws. Its translucent skin of laws, having lost the support of its internal energy, began to collapse, wrinkle, and shatter in large areas.

The entire behemoth shrank dramatically from a colossal cosmic creature that blotted out the sky.

The area that once required winding space to accommodate it is now mostly empty.

It is still struggling.

Those whisker-like things lashed wildly at the void, and gravitational lines flew wildly around them, stirring up countless fragments of stone and dust.

But every struggle only accelerates the loss of energy.

The more it moves, the deeper the dark golden vines penetrate.

finally.

The mournful cry that transcended dimensions gradually faded away.

After one last violent spasm, the behemoth's body ceased all movement.

then.

disintegrate.

A silent collapse.

There was no explosion, no shockwave.

The entire massive body collapsed from the top down like a tower of building blocks that had lost all its support. Fragments of the celestial corpse, remnants of the skin of the law, and evaporation residues of the high-dimensional dissolving liquid all turned into an extremely fine crystalline dust in the void, refracting seven-colored high-dimensional frequencies.

A sky full of crystal dust of laws.

Like a dark golden blizzard that spanned the entire star field.

The Emperor's Path Devourer burst through the wall at the center of the disintegrating body of the behemoth, its entire body bathed in that magnificent, unreal torrent of crystalline dust.

Dark golden vines stretched out around the train, greedily devouring every grain of law-based dust that drifted by.

Each of those crystal dust particles contains a fragment of mythical law with energy far exceeding that of ordinary beings.

It is the essence of the bones and blood of a twelfth-order high-dimensional behemoth.

It is the legacy of the predators at the top of the food chain in the entire universe.

The train roared deafeningly as it was infused with this terrifying energy.

The obsidian scales no longer fall off.

They are being reborn.

The newly grown scales are thicker and denser than before, covered with a dark gold glaze with patterns of high-dimensional laws. The outline of the car body is constantly reshaped in the crystal dust, gradually evolving from the original streamlined shape into a more robust, more ferocious, and more primal and violently beautiful form.

At the joints between the carriages, golden skeletal joints expanded, split, and reassembled, growing dense barbs and supporting ribs. The entire train's structural framework was traversing towards an indescribable form that far surpassed the concept of a "train."

The system panel was flashing wildly.

Su Yuan stood on the roof of the car, dust swirling around his face, and shards of dark gold light dancing on his hair and skin.

He lowered his head and looked at his palm.

The numbers on the energy panel have exploded.

It literally exploded.

Xiao Huo poked his head out of the carriage, looked up at him, and shouted:

"Master! The panel is broken! It can't display enough! I... I need to reprogram a counting system!"

Su Yuan ignored him.

He looked up and took a deep breath.

The crystalline dust flooded my lungs, carrying an indescribable spiciness and sweetness that only fragments of higher-dimensional laws possess.

"Hiccups."

He actually burped.

Then he grinned.

In that dark golden blizzard formed from the remains of a cosmic behemoth, the train emitted a deep, satisfied hum as it frantically raced towards the threshold of level 8.

This scene.

It spread uncontrollably in all directions of the universe in the form of gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves do not require a medium.

Gravitational waves cannot be shielded.

Gravitational waves faithfully recorded every frame, every frequency, and every detail of this process.

The Interstellar Council's Third Starfield Defense Line.

Inside an automated monitoring station of an advanced civilization.

The Level 3 AI on duty suddenly detected an unusually strong signal while routinely scanning the background noise of gravitational waves.

It was decoded according to the standard procedure.

Then its seventeen parallel processing cores simultaneously crashed for three seconds.

Restart in three seconds.

It hesitated for 0.02 seconds, wondering whether to delete it as a data error.

Ultimately, it wasn't deleted.

It encrypts the decoded image with the highest priority and transmits it to the upstream node.

After the higher-level node has reviewed it, it passes it on to the next higher-level node.

After the higher-ups reviewed it, they forwarded it to the Starfield Headquarters.

After reviewing the document, the supervisor at Starfield Headquarters broke out in a cold sweat.

He forwarded it to the High Dimension Arbitration Tribunal.

Within half a standard galactic day.

This gravitational wave record was disseminated in various encrypted and unencrypted forms across the thirty-seven standard star systems under the jurisdiction of the Interstellar Council.

Thousands of advanced civilization monitoring stations simultaneously intercepted the data.

Millions of intelligent species witnessed that scene through their respective gravitational wave receivers.

A Star Destroyer—one of the top predators in the cosmic food chain—was swallowed by a train of unknown origin.

Then it was eaten alive from inside.

This is not a legend.

This is not a misconception.

Gravitational waves do not lie.

Everyone who sees this record is asking the same question:

What exactly is that train?

In numerous emergency reports from monitoring stations, the same codename began appearing with unprecedented frequency on the highest priority lists of intelligence networks at all levels.

VSE-0.

Virus code name.

Su Yuan.

Threat level.

All the analysts who tried to fill in specific levels eventually deleted the characters they typed.

Because they couldn't find a suitable word.

Inside the carriage of the Emperor's Path Devourer.

The dark golden crystalline dust blizzard gradually subsided.

The last remnant of that Star Destroyer was also completely devoured by the vines.

The void returned to silence.

The nascent nebula is still rotating in the distance. Although a large chunk has been eaten away, the core star is still burning, and the nascent form of the galaxy is still there.

Su Yuan climbed back onto the driver's seat from the roof and plopped back down in his chair.

He closed his eyes, savoring the intensely satisfying feeling that followed his binge eating.

Every cell is cheering.

Every nerve ending is singing.

Level 8.

The Emperor's Path Devourer is rapidly advancing towards its eighth-level form. The reshaping of its body structure continues, with a deep rumble emanating from the depths of the train's skeleton, like an ancient behemoth undergoing a metamorphosis.

Su Yuan slightly curled the corners of his mouth, his right hand unconsciously stroking the armrest.

I'm enjoying it.

suddenly.

A tearing pain shot through my palm.

Su Yuan suddenly lowered his head.

He saw the cracked "elephant" brand on his right palm trembling violently in an extremely distorted way.

The crack is widening.

What seeped from the crack was neither dark golden blood nor pure white light.

Instead, it was a bizarre liquid that was pure black and so viscous that it was almost solidified.

The liquid did not drip after it seeped out of the palm.

It floats in mid-air.

It begins to condense on its own.

Spin.

Fold.

Reorganization.

Three seconds later.

A three-dimensional chessboard, slightly larger than the palm of a hand, floated in front of Su Yuan, silently taking shape in the air.

The chessboard is a standard 8x8 chessboard, but each square is not flat. They are three-dimensional miniature spaces, each operating under its own independent microcosmic laws. Stars collapse in the black squares, new stars are born in the white squares, and the alternation of light and shadow emits a rhythmic pulse that makes one's scalp tingle.

Su Yuan's smile froze.

He stared at the chessboard.

On the opposite side of the chessboard, the air underwent extremely subtle ripples.

It was as if something was slowly squeezing out from a crack in another dimension.

First, there was a hand.

That hand was exactly the same as Su Yuan's right hand.

The same long, slender fingers, the same distinct knuckles, and even the same palm lines.

But the skin tone of that hand was two shades lighter than Su Yuan's.

So white it's almost transparent.

You can see the faint, jet-black blood vessels flowing beneath the skin.

Then the arms.

Shoulder.

Neck.

Finally, there's the face.

A face exactly like Su Yuan's.

The same facial features, the same jawline, the same hairline curve.

However, there are two differences.

First: those eyes.

Pure black.

Not dark brown, not dark gray, but an absolute pure black, so black that the boundaries between the pupil and iris are indistinguishable. Like two miniature black holes embedded in their eye sockets, swallowing all the light that falls into them.

The second instance: that smile.

Su Yuan's smile always carried a wild, aggressive quality. Even when he was smiling, his eyes concealed a sharp dagger.

But the smile of the "Su Yuan" in front of me was gentle.

Genuine, heartfelt gentleness.

Like a well-mannered young talent, he smiled politely and elegantly at the guests at a tea party on a spring afternoon.

The gentler it is, the more eerie it becomes.

The phantom sat on a chair that appeared out of thin air opposite the chessboard, with its legs crossed and one hand casually resting on the edge of the chessboard.

He tilted his head and, using Su Yuan's voice but with a completely different tone and rhythm, said softly:

"Did you enjoy your meal, my 'Shiro'ko?"

Su Yuan stared at him without moving.

The left eye is dark gold, and the right eye is pure white.

His pure black eyes met his gaze calmly, the gentle smile on his lips undiminished.

"But that big one you just ate."

The phantom raised its hand, its slender fingers lightly tapping the chessboard.

In the Black square, the position where the "Rook" (Castle) piece should have been placed is now empty.

"But where is my 'car'?"

That gentle smile, reflected in his pure black eyes, made the temperature in the entire carriage drop by ten degrees.

The carriage fell into absolute silence once again.

Wang Hu, Xiao Huo, and Shou Cai Ling, the three of them with six wide eyes, scanned back and forth between Su Yuan and "Su Yuan," their faces all bearing the same expression:

It's like seeing a ghost.

Su Yuan remained silent.

His gaze slowly shifted from the face opposite him that looked exactly like his own to the empty "chariot" position on the chessboard.

Then he laughed.

It wasn't a gentle smile.

It was his own laughter.

He revealed neat, white teeth.

"Your 'car'?"

He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and looked at the illusory figure opposite him with a mocking expression.

"The taste is not bad."

The real game of chess.

At this moment, all pretense was torn away.