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

"handsome".

The moment that word was revealed from the king's chest, the entire universe fell silent.

It's not a metaphor.

All laws, all causes and effects, all physical constants ceased to function before the black light emanating from this mark.

The stars no longer burn.

The void no longer expands.

Even time itself was frozen at that one second, like a wild beast with its neck being choked, unable to squeeze out a single sound.

Su Yuan stood in the very center of the three-colored stomach pouch, looking up at the black mark that was even larger than a star.

His tricolor vertical pupils contracted to their limit at that moment.

It's not because of fear.

It was because his visual system was physically overwhelmed by this mark.

too big.

too heavy.

I feel so hopeless.

That wasn't just simple energy. Su Yuan read the answer in the feedback from the One Who Unifies All Things. What was settled within it was the absolute dominion of nine eras. It was the long process of countless civilizations kneeling, annihilating, and being forgotten before it. It was the crystallized destruction formed after the concept of "King" was forged to its extreme.

Everyone who sees this mark will only have one thought in their mind.

Submission.

Or die.

There is no third option.

The king did not wield his weapon.

The broken, bladeless heavy sword in his hand had been retrieved into the dimensional interlayer.

He no longer needs weapons.

He simply took a step forward.

That's it.

From the "Handsome" mark inside his chest, a torrent of black water gushed forth.

That torrent doesn't travel through space.

It doesn't follow the passage of time.

It does not follow any physical transmission path.

It appeared directly in front of Su Yuan.

Appears on the surface of the tricolor stomach pouch.

It appeared inside every pore, every blood vessel, and every nerve fiber of Su Yuan.

Simultaneously.

Zero distance.

"boom!!!"

The surface of the three-colored stomach pouch suddenly swelled up in that instant.

A tumor.

two.

ten.

One hundred.

Countless twisted, grotesque, and dimly glowing tri-colored tumors sprouted wildly from the outer wall of the stomach.

Each tumor is filled with information that exceeds the limits of digestion.

That information is not data.

It is despair.

It is a conceptual level of despair that has settled over nine eras, enough to cause any consciousness to collapse on the spot.

Inside the Emperor's Path: Devouring Wasteland.

Xiao Huo's body bounced up from behind the control panel.

It was not a voluntary action.

It was a physical spasm caused by the impact of that information flood on his core.

"Aaaaaahh ...

His mouth was agape to its limit. Golden blood gushed from all seven orifices simultaneously. His pupils dilated and contracted uncontrollably, at a rate so fast they were practically flashing.

All the readings on the control panel are no longer showing red.

It simply disappeared.

The panel is not displaying.

The amount of information flooding into the train's core has exceeded the system's computing capacity.

It's not an overload.

It's an overflow.

Wang Hu lay face down on the floor of the carriage.

His robotic arm was making a sound he'd never heard before. Not a spark. Not an alarm. It was the hissing sound of metal before it liquefies at high temperatures.

He glanced down at his right arm.

Then his pupils contracted sharply.

The surface of the arm armor is bubbling.

Bubbles rose one after another, their color a dark reddish-brown. Then they burst. What flowed out wasn't coolant.

It's molten iron.

His robotic arm is melting.

Start with your fingertips.

It melted into molten metal piece by piece, dripping onto the floor with a hissing sound.

"Holy shit—"

Wang Hu roared and gripped his right shoulder joint tightly with his left hand.

I couldn't hold on to it.

That melting wasn't caused by external heating. It happened from the inside. It was the collapse of the quantum structure due to the overload of information flow.

His fingers disappeared in the molten iron.

Then comes the palm.

Then comes the forearm.

Within three seconds, the giant mechanical arm that had once devoured all metal turned into a steaming pool of silvery-gray liquid, slowly spreading across the floor.

The treasure chest of the guardian spirit bounced wildly in the corner.

"Bang bang bang bang bang——"

It locked itself inside, the lid pressed down tightly from the inside. But the newly grown dark golden law runes on the surface of the box were lighting up and exploding one by one.

Each time one is destroyed, the treasure chest shakes.

With each tremor, the guardian spirit inside screams.

"No, no, no, I don't want to be a spirit in this life, I'll be a salted fish in the next!"

Law conduit.

The dark gold pipes that run through the entire train are breaking apart inch by inch.

It started from the very tip. Then came the branches. Then the trunk. The point of fracture spewed out a liquid of tri-colored law energy, splashing onto the interior walls of the carriage and leaving large scorch marks.

The core temperature of the pitcher plant engine broke the sum of all previous records within three seconds.

The walls of the core chamber began to soften.

The inner walls of the engines, composed of dark gold skeletons and pure white flesh, are losing their structural integrity under the impact of the black information flow.

The entire Imperial Journey Devourer was screaming.

It wasn't the sound of an engine.

It's not the sound of metal rubbing together.

It was a biological, painful groan emanating from the deepest part of the ship's hull.

It's about to burst.

From the inside out.

Little by little.

It was completely overwhelmed and burst by that torrent of despair from nine eras.

In the void.

The "King" floats amidst the shattered remains of the chessboard.

His chest was open. A black torrent continued to pour out from the "Handsome" mark, flowing along the straight channel that ignored space and into Su Yuan's three-colored stomach.

There was no excitement on his face.

There was no cruelty involved.

There is only a kind of compassionate coldness.

Su Yuan had seen that expression on many people's faces.

It's not on the face of an evil person.

It's on the face of a veterinarian when they inject euthanasia drugs into a terminally ill animal.

"Stop struggling."

The king's will pierced through the torrent, infusing into Su Yuan's collapsing consciousness.

The voice was so gentle it was nauseating.

"Your stomach is amazing. The best stomach I've ever seen."

"But it's ultimately just a stomach."

"And what I give you is an entire sea."

Even the best stomach can't hold an ocean.

He slightly raised his right hand.

The injection intensity has been doubled.

The black torrent transformed from a physical waterfall into a physical tsunami.

The influx of people tripled in an instant.

The tumors on the three-colored stomach lining had grown larger and denser. Some had begun to rupture, spewing out a murky liquid mixed with fragments of the Three-Color Law.

Su Yuan's body convulsed violently in the very center of his stomach.

Thick blood gushed from his eyes.

It's not blood.

Thicker than blood. Darker. It is the residue of consciousness squeezed by an excessive flow of information, a product forcibly expelled from the body through the optic nerve pathway.

The dark gold color faded in his left eye.

The pure white color dimmed in his right eye.

Both colors are fading at the same time, like two lamps about to burn out.

The wick is still there.

But the oil is almost gone.

Three seconds left.

Maybe two seconds.

Maybe a second and a half.

The light will go out.

Billions of light-years away.

Arbitration Tribunal Headquarters.

The entire quantum monitoring interface was now completely red. This wasn't the previous localized, intermittent red warnings; the entire screen, from top to bottom and left to right, had every single pixel turned a glaring, blood-red.

The energy fluctuation curve is no longer a curve.

It is a straight line that goes vertically upwards to the top of the grid.

Then the line broke through the upper limit of the chart.

Then the chart exploded.

A piece of the light screen shattered.

Blue arcs of electricity appeared.

The Supreme Judge stood before the shattered light curtain.

The scepter rested on the ground.

He no longer held it in his hand.

Because I didn't have the strength to grab it anymore.

His arms hung limply at his sides. His shoulders were slumped. His back was bent. His entire posture resembled a building slowly collapsing.

"A snake swallowing an elephant." His lips moved twice.

The sound was so soft that only he could hear it.

"A snake swallowing an elephant in a frenzy..."

"There are limits, after all."

The elderly man in the third seat remained silent. He simply shook his head.

I shook it once and never shook it a second time.

Because he himself didn't want to watch it anymore.

The elderly man in the fifth seat closed his eyes. His hand rested on the armrest of the chair, his fingers tapping unconsciously twice before stopping.

There is no rhythm.

It's just a mechanical muscle response.

The seventh female elder shifted her gaze from the shattered light screen to the undecorated gray wall in the corner of the council chamber.

She stared at the wall.

I've been watching it for a long time.

It seems there's something less despairing than the surveillance footage that can be read from the gray walls.

She couldn't read it.

Deep within the dimensional rift.

Those ancient beings lurking in the deepest reaches of the universe emitted a unified wave of consciousness.

It wasn't a conversation.

It is mourning.

Premature mourning.

A requiem for a mortal creature that once filled them with fear and made them tremble.

"The principles of leadership are not to be desecrated."

"That is the ultimate concept that governs all things."

"Anything that tries to devour it will only be taken over from within."

"This paradox... has come to an end."

All fluctuations dissipated simultaneously.

I'm no longer paying attention to it.

Because the outcome was already predetermined.

Inside the Emperor's Path: Devouring Wasteland.

Xiao Huo's consciousness was fading.

His golden vertical pupils had lost their ability to focus. His field of vision was filled with shifting patches of color and light.

The control panel had long been blacked out.

He doesn't perceive the train's status through a panel.

He perceives with his core.

It senses things through that golden heart that grows beneath the driver's seat and is inextricably linked to the train.

My heart is contracting.

The core fruit, originally the size of a football, has now shrunk to the size of an apple.

It wasn't compressed.

Energy is being lost.

The space was being frantically squeezed out by that black torrent.

If it shrinks any further—the core will shatter.

The core shattered—and he was gone.

The train is gone too.

Everything is gone.

"Owner……"

Xiao Huo knelt in front of the control panel.

His ten fingers no longer had the strength to grasp anything.

He just knelt there.

Head held high.

With those golden eyes that had almost lost their luster, he looked towards the driver's cab.

Looking at the person inside that stomach.

He could no longer see Su Yuan.

The black flow of information completely obscured the view between the driver's cab and the front of the car. All that could be seen was surging blackness.

But he knew Su Yuan was still there.

It's still there.

still alive.

only--

I don't know how much longer I have to live.

"Owner……"

He called out again.

The sound was softer than the first time.

He spoke so softly that he could barely hear it himself.

What comes after that is giving up.

It should be called accepting one's fate.

He should just close his eyes and wait to die.

But Xiao Huo didn't close his eyes.

Because of the corners of his mouth—

It's sticking up.

It wasn't a bitter smile.

It's not sarcasm.

It was a kind of madness that came from the very core of his being, exactly the same as Su Yuan's.

Having been with this man for so long, she's bound to get a little tainted.

Tricolor stomach pouch interior.

Su Yuan's body is collapsing.

His skin was cracked. Not in one or two places. Every inch of his skin was covered in a dense network of fine cracks. The Tricolor Law Liquid seeped out from the cracks, mixing with real red blood, turning him into a broken doll submerged in the multicolored liquid.

The bones are cracking. Not the sound of breaking. It's the crisp sound of bone density being reduced to its limit by the flow of information. Like stepping on thin, frozen ice in winter.

The muscles are spasming. Uncontrollably. Every muscle fiber in the body is contracting, relaxing, and contracting again irregularly.

His mouth was open. His jawbone had been dislocated due to the pressure of the information flow.

His consciousness swung wildly on the edge of blur.

Like a blade of grass bent at a ninety-degree angle in a storm.

It will break if it bends any further.

90.5 degrees.

90.8 degrees.

90.9 degrees.

0.1 second.

That's all that's left.

then.

In this final 0.1 second.

Su Yuan smiled.

It's not just a slight upturn of the corners of the mouth.

His facial muscles were out of control.

The teeth are showing.

The gaping mouth was stretched even wider by the flow of information, revealing the white teeth inside, stained with tricolor blood.

Those teeth are still there.

It is the only part of this body that is still intact on the verge of collapse.

Because those teeth are not ordinary teeth.

Those were the serrated teeth of the law that had just shattered the king's bladeless greatsword.

They are still hungry.

The one to whom all things return to oneness.

Full power.

But this time it's not outwards.

It is not about resolving the chain inwards.

It means analyzing oneself from within.

Let's analyze this stomach.

Let's analyze the concept of "digestion" itself.

He grasped the crux of the problem in a fraction of a second.

It's not that his stomach isn't strong enough.

He's still using the logic of the "stomach" to deal with these things.

The stomach has a maximum capacity.

Even the biggest stomach can have one.

Wang is right. Even the best stomach can't hold an ocean.

but--

What about the universe?

Does the universe have an upper limit?

Su Yuan found the answer in the deepest part of his consciousness.

Creation and evolution.

It is not intended for attack.

It's not for defense.

Used to reinvent oneself.

Turn the stomach into a universe.

A miniature, endogenous, and uniquely his own prototype universe.

Since the black torrent was about to burst his stomach—

Then give it a space that won't burst.

A space that can expand infinitely.

A space that automatically expands its capacity by one unit for every unit of pressure injected.

The power of creation and evolution squeezed out the last wisp of white from the depths of the shattered three-colored imprints within Su Yuan's body.

This wisp of white was not released to the outside world.

It penetrated the core of the Su Yuan dynasty.

He plunged into the umbilical cord of the deepest law connecting him and the train.

Then--

Refactor.

The three-color laws ceased their resistance within Su Yuan's body.

Dark gold no longer rejects pure white. Pure white no longer devours pitch black. Pitch black no longer negates dark gold.

At this moment, the three colors connect end to end, forming a closed, self-consistent loop that operates without external input.

Like a snake that has bitten its own tail.

No.

Like something that has just exploded, just been born, and just begun to expand—

Embryonic Universe.

The black torrent is still pouring in.

But its destination has changed.

It is no longer a stomach with a capacity limit.

Instead, it is an endogenous space that is expanding at a geometric rate.

The more water is poured in, the more the space expands.

The more it expands, the more it can accommodate.

Endless.

There is no upper limit.

The stream of desperate information that should have burst the stomach lining transformed into something else at that moment.

It became the driving force for the expansion of this nascent universe.

It turned into chaotic energy.

It became the primordial fuel that created the world.

The rapidly swelling tumors on the three-colored stomach lining stopped.

There was no breakage.

It did not disappear.

They began to pulsate rhythmically.

"Bang!" "Bang!" "Bang!"

Like a heartbeat.

The heartbeat of a newborn.

The Emperor's Path Devourer has stopped screaming.

It emitted a completely new sound.

It wasn't the roar of an engine.

It wasn't a metal-on-metal collision.

It's not a biological roar.

It is a deep, resonant resonance emanating from the deepest part of the train's skeleton.

That sound only appeared in one scene.

The very first sound after the Big Bang – the echo.

Xiao Huo's pupils refocused in that instant.

His core fruit stopped shrinking.

No.

It is expanding.

It is slowly, millimeter by millimeter, re-expanding.

"Owner……"

His voice trembled.

But it wasn't a trembling of fear anymore.

It was a trembling of disbelief.

In the void.

The king stopped moving.

He didn't stop it on his own initiative.

His body gave an extremely faint, almost imperceptible feedback signal.

The meaning of that signal is—

resistance.

He sensed resistance.

wrong.

It is not an obstacle.

It was the essence of his "handsomeness" that he poured out, poured into that stomach—

There was no echo.

Previously, with each dose he ingested, he could clearly feel the feedback of his stomach being stretched, squeezed, and pushed close to collapse.

That feedback is the yardstick by which he judges progress.

But now—

The feedback disappeared.

His torrent is still pouring in.

But once it's poured in, it's like throwing yourself into a bottomless pit.

There was no feedback from the stretching.

There are no signs of impending collapse.

There was nothing there.

It was just swallowed up.

Quietly.

It was swallowed up.

The king's brow twitched slightly.

Extremely minute movements.

It's not frowning.

It was just that the muscles in the space between the eyebrows produced an involuntary contraction.

This reaction occurred no more than ten times in the total number of times he existed across the nine eras.

He increased the injection volume.

Double.

Double it again.

Double it again.

The torrent became a tsunami. The tsunami became an abyss. The abyss became a flood of laws powerful enough to fill a standard star field.

It was all poured in.

Feedback

zero.

There was nothing there.

Not even a splash.

Billions of light-years away.

Arbitration Tribunal Headquarters.

The elder in the fifth seat was the first to notice the anomaly.

He suddenly opened his eyes, which he had just closed.

It wasn't because anything new appeared on the surveillance footage.

Rather, it's because the energy fluctuation curve has changed.

The straight line that was just shooting vertically upwards has stopped.

There was no decline.

without crashing.

It did not continue to rise.

It's stable now.

It remained firmly stationary at that incredible height, motionless.

Then--

It began to bend at an extremely bizarre angle.

It doesn't bend downwards.

It bends outwards.

Like the curve on the surface of an inflating balloon.

The old man in the fifth seat stared at the curve.

I stared at it for three seconds.

Then his pupils contracted slightly.

"wrong."

His voice was very soft.

But everyone heard it.

Because the council chamber was so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat.

"This fluctuation pattern is incorrect."

He gestured with his finger in the air and brought up a set of comparative data.

"This is not a system's last struggle before it collapses."

His voice began to tremble.

"This is--"

"This is a new system—it is being born."

The chief arbitrator suddenly turned his head.

The old men looked at each other in bewilderment.

No one speaks.

Because they dare not speak up.

I'm not sure if I just heard that word.

Birth.

What is being created?

In the ruins of the chessboard.

The tumors on the three-colored stomach lining have all stopped swelling.

They are no longer lesions.

They turned into organs.

Each tumor rhythmically contracts and expands, drawing matter from the black torrent, then transforming, recombining, and rearranging it.

Like a factory operating at high speed.

The raw materials are the source of the "King's" despair.

The product is the foundational framework of the endogenous universe.

Su Yuan stood at the very center of this structure, which was transforming from a stomach into the embryonic form of the universe.

His injuries are still there.

The skin is still cracked.

The bones are still broken.

The blood is still flowing.

But his eyes lit up.

The dark gold in his left eye was rekindled from the dying embers into scorching lava.

The pure white light in his right eye, which had been fading, reformed into a sharp, frosty blade.

The dark crack in the center of the iris was throbbing wildly.

Three-color resonance.

The intensity was ten times that of any previous event.

The king sensed it.

He finally identified the source of the resistance.

It's not that my stomach has become stronger.

The stomach has disappeared.

What takes its place—he cannot define.

Because that goes beyond the scope of "organ".

It goes beyond the scope of "law-based constructs".

It even goes beyond the scope of "dimensional tools".

It is evolving toward something it is unwilling to acknowledge.

Evolving towards the "universe".

Something he alone accomplished nine eras ago—

To create an endogenous, complete, and self-consistent cosmological structure—

This human is doing the same thing right under his nose.

They were still using the same ingredients he fed them.

The first expression since the start of the game appeared in the king's pure black eyes.

frown.

A genuine frown.

His infusion continues.

But he discovered a horrifying truth.

The more he drank—the faster that stuff swelled up.

The more he poured it in, the more perfectly that thing evolved.

He is feeding them.

Feeding them again.

They are always feeding them.

"..."

The king pursed his lips.

The meaning of this action is not complicated.

bother.

Billions of light-years away.

Arbitration Tribunal Headquarters.

The elderly man in the fifth seat stood up twice and sat down twice within three seconds.

He didn't sit down the third time.

He moved right up to the remaining quantum monitoring light screen, his nose almost touching it.

He was looking at that set of data.

The energy fluctuations did not collapse.

It did not collapse.

It is multiplying.

It multiplies in an extremely bizarre, geometrically increasing pattern.

It's not rising upwards.

It's going outwards—

Swelling.

"This fluctuation pattern—"

His voice was unsteady.

It's completely unstable.

"I've seen it in academic documents from three thousand years ago."

I've only met him once.

"That document records—"

He turned his head.

Looking at the Supreme Court Chief Justice.

Looking at the old man holding the scepter, his face full of disbelief.

"It is the energy expansion curve 0.0001 seconds before the Big Bang."

The temperature in the council chamber dropped three degrees.

It's not a problem with the air conditioner.

All eleven supreme elders simultaneously experienced a chilling reaction on a physiological level.

In the ruins of the chessboard.

Su Yuan opened his eyes.

The three vertical pupils burned as they were swept away by the black torrent.

His body remains broken.

However, the internal space has already undergone its first round of reconstruction.

The three-color closed-loop system is operating stably.

The rudiments of an endogenous universe have already taken shape.

It's still very young.

It is still very fragile.

But it is expanding.

It is expanding constantly, greedily, and insatiably.

And its expanding fuel—

It is the source of "commander" that is constantly being poured in by "king".

Su Yuan felt the rapidly expanding new space within his body, and the process of the black torrent being accepted, decomposed, and transformed by this space without any hindrance.

He wiped the corner of his mouth.

The blood mixed with fragments of the Three Color Laws was wiped away.

Then he raised his head and looked through the torrent of black water and the shattered remains of the chessboard at the "King" in the distance, whose chest was wide open and who was pouring out the power of the "General's" mark.

The corners of his mouth turned up.

It curved into an arc that would make any observer feel nauseous.

Then he had no defense.

There was no dodge.

They did not use any force to stop the still-flowing torrent.

On the contrary—

He opened his mouth.

Zhang De is even bigger.

Zhang reached that bizarre angle that exceeded the limits of human physiology.

Between the upper and lower jaws, countless tiny, three-colored serrated teeth shimmered faintly.

He was taking a drag.

Actively inhale.

It wasn't something we passively endured.

He was actively, greedily, and impatiently sucking into his mouth.

Because he discovered something.

The essence of that "handsome" that was poured in—

It's very nourishing.

Damn, that's a real pain.

It's more nourishing than anything I've ever eaten before.

It's a groundbreaking tonic.

For every bit he takes in, his inner universe expands tenfold.

For every ten parts expanded, it can hold one hundred parts.

Positive cycle.

Infinite loop.

The more you eat, the bigger it gets.

The bigger they are, the more they can eat.

"Wang" has finally stopped.

The black torrent came to an abrupt halt in that instant.

He closed his chest. The black light on the "Handsome" mark dimmed slightly.

It's not that I'm out of energy.

He realized that if he continued to force-feed his opponent, he would not burst them, but rather fatten them up.

His pure black eyes were fixed on the human in the distance with its gaping, blood-red mouth.

I stared at it for three seconds.

Then he slowly lowered his eyes.

Is that a bitter smile?

No.

You can't tell their emotions.

But that gesture of lowering his eyes conveyed the same message to everyone present who could perceive it.

Not right.

Things started to go wrong.

Su Yuan gave him no time to catch his breath.

The nascent endogenous universe operates stably under the support of the three-color closed loop. All the "cool" essence that had just been poured in has been completely digested and transformed into the foundational laws that form the framework of the universe.

But not enough.

Far from enough.

That nascent universe was too small. Too thin. Too fragile.

It needs more higher-dimensional origins to support its growth.

And the largest, purest, and highest concentration of the source—

It was right inside the king's chest.

It's still there.

Su Yuan could see it.

I can feel it.

Although the "Handsome" mark had dimmed somewhat due to the massive amount of liquid released earlier, its total content was still terrifyingly large.

Su Yuan stared at the mark.

Deep within his tricolored vertical pupils, the vortex of laws constructed by the One Who Unifies All Things suddenly accelerated its rotation.

Then he discovered something.

A line.

Cause and effect line.

It extends out from his body.

During the process of "Wang" pouring the torrent into his body, the act of pouring itself established an extremely stable causal channel.

If you put something into my body, then a causal connection is established between us.

This connection was initiated by you.

I didn't ask you for anything.

You delivered yourself to my door.

Then I—

Following the road you opened—

Climb back—

That makes sense, doesn't it?

Creation and evolution.

The three-color closed loop purified a cluster of law flames without any color within Su Yuan's body.

colorless.

Tasteless.

invisible.

But it contains the order of dark gold, the creation of pure white, and the negation of pitch black.

The three forces merged into one.

It's no longer three types.

It is one type.

The Fire of Unity.

The flame leaped from Su Yuan's palm.

There was no outward attack.

It jumped into that causal channel.

Following the path that the "King" himself pioneered.

Going against the current.

It pierces back at the speed of light squared.

The King's pupils—

In those pure black eyes that should never have pupils—

The light flickered on briefly.

Bright.

He sensed it.

Chest.

The edge of the "Handsome" mark.

Something crawled in from the outside through the causal channel.

heat.

hot.

It was a temperature he hadn't felt in a very, very long time.

pain.

His hand instinctively went to his chest.

But it was too late.

In that instant, Su Yuan's body transformed into a violent afterimage of three colors mixed together.

It is not a physical movement.

It is a conceptual displacement along the causal path.

0.01 seconds.

The afterimage traveled a distance of three thousand kilometers.

We passed through the wreckage of the shattered chessboard.

We passed through the lingering aftershocks of the black torrent.

They passed through the overwhelming aura emanating from the "King," an aura so powerful it could make the entire arbitration court kneel in submission.

It appeared—

Directly in front of "王".

Zero distance.

Face to face.

Two identical faces.

A pair of tricolored vertical pupils.

A pair of pure black pupils.

They were separated by less than an arm's length.

Su Yuan opened his mouth.

The abyssal maw, covered with serrated edges of the three-colored laws, fully opened before the king's face.

The fire of unity burned along the serrated lines.

Deep inside the mouth, the suction of the nascent universe resembles a black hole in the process of forming.

Su Yuan's hands gripped the edge of the "King's" open chest.

The tips of all ten fingers were shattered.

The bone pierced through the skin and flesh.

White bone fragments mingled with tricolor blood, dripping onto the king's chest.

But he held onto it.

They held it firmly in place.

The inappropriate light in the "King's" eyes flickered again.

This time it's not confusion.

It is some kind of deeper, more ancient emotion.

There's no time to define it.

Su Yuan took a bite.

It bit into the enormous "Handsome" mark, as big as a star.

Those tri-color serrations penetrated the conceptual protective layer of the imprint's surface.

It penetrated the barriers of dominion that had been accumulated over nine eras.

It penetrated the very core of the "King's" fundamental laws.

Then--

tear.

Tear it apart forcefully.

It's not cutting.

It's not decomposition.

It's not digestion.

It is the most primitive, the most savage, and the most unreasonable—

They gnawed and bit at each other.

"Snap—!!"

That sound.

It didn't originate from the physical level.

It originates from the fundamental laws and structure of the universe.

It comes from the deepest part of the causal chain.

It comes from the very skeleton of the concept of "existence".

A crisp sound.

It resounded in every corner of the universe. In every dimension. Along every timeline.

Every life, regardless of its dimension, level, or time and space—

I felt it all in that one second.

I sensed a signal that was enough to shake the very foundations of my understanding.

Something broke.

Something that shouldn't have broken broke.

There's nothing that can't be broken that broke.

That enormous "Handsome" mark, as big as a star.

Su Yuan forcibly tore off a third of it.

A fragment of the mark, larger than a planet, was peeled from the king's chest.

Pure black blood of law gushed from the broken surface of the fragment.

That blood is not a liquid.

It is a condensation of the original essence of the ruling authority of nine eras.

Falling into the void, each drop is enough to destroy a civilization.

Su Yuan had the fragment in his mouth.

The tooth was deeply embedded in the surface of the fragment.

The three-color serrations and the black markings mesh together.

It hurts your teeth.

His laws were so sharp that even the jagged edges were bleeding.

But he didn't give in.

Instead, it bit even harder.

Then--

pharynx.

The moment Su Yuan tore off the shards, "Wang's" body suddenly took three steps back.

Every step.

They shattered a void fragment the size of a star field beneath their feet.

He took his first step back—the outline of his left shoulder became blurred.

His second step back—a beam of light cracked through his right ribcage.

The third step back—the skin on his face, exactly like Su Yuan's, split open with a deep crack extending from his forehead to his chin.

There was no blood in the crack.

There are no bones.

There are no muscles either.

Inside were countless faces, densely packed together.

Those faces belong to different creatures.

There are humans. There are non-humans. There are ancient races that have been extinct for hundreds of millions of years.

Every face wore the same expression.

despair.

The despair in the last moment before being swallowed up.

That is the true face of the "King".

Not an individual.

It is a complex formed by the stacking of countless devoured entities.

In Su Yuan's mind.

A crisp notification sound rang out.

【ding dong——】

Congratulations! Your train core has completed a paradigm shift!

Train Class: 9

Su Yuan chewed on the piece of the word "handsome" that was hard to chew.

He swallowed it.

The fragment pierced his throat. Passed through his esophagus of law. And fell into the newly born embryonic universe.

boom.

The expansion rate of the endogenous universe increased a hundredfold the instant the debris fell in.

The operating frequency of the three-color closed loop suddenly increased.

The three laws of dark gold, pure white, and pitch black accelerated wildly within the closed loop, stirring up a terrifying energy tide that even surprised Su Yuan himself.

His aura reached a whole new level in that instant.

A height that he himself hadn't even had time to get used to.

Billions of light-years away.

Arbitration Tribunal Headquarters.

The quantum monitoring light screen shattered the "Handsome" character mark in the very second—

Blasted.

It's not a black screen.

It's not a screen tearing issue.

It is a physical explosion.

All eleven light screens shattered into dust at the same instant.

Fragments flew through the council chamber. Several pieces grazed the cheek of the elderly man in the third seat. Blood dripped onto his white robe.

He didn't wipe it.

Nobody wiped it.

The eleven highest elders stood before the shattered light screen, their faces covered with tiny scratches from the quantum fragments.

No one moved.

No one speaks.

No one is breathing.

The elderly man in the third seat opened his mouth.

He said "It's over" three times.

The first two times, Su Yuan was judged to lose.

The third time was the same.

This is probably the fourth time he's said it now.

But he couldn't say it.

Because he didn't know what to say.

"it's over"?

has it ended?

Who ended it all?

He shut his mouth.

The elderly man in the fifth seat braced his hands on the table. His ten fingers had already dug ten deep grooves into the metal of the table.

His face was not pale.

It is gray.

It is the grayness that appears when a person's worldview is uprooted and their entire cognitive system enters a protective shutdown.

The seventh female elder slumped into her chair.

I'm not dizzy.

My legs are weak.

She stared at the ceiling of the council chamber.

His lips moved twice.

No sound.

But if someone could read lips, they would see that she silently uttered two words.

"That's insane."

The Supreme Court Chief Justice stood there.

The scepter finally fell from his hand.

With a loud crash, it slammed to the ground.

He didn't pick it up.

His arms hung down at his sides.

Like an empty tube from which the bones have been removed.

His lips trembled.

It shook for a long time.

Finally, he managed to squeeze out a sentence.

"The King's Mark..."

"It was bitten to pieces..."

The voice that uttered these words was softer than any of the highest judgments he had made in the past few eras.

It was so soft it was almost a whisper.

But every word seemed to proclaim some kind of irreversible judgment.

Deep within the dimensional rift.

Those ancient beings lurking in the deepest recesses of the universe.

The reaction at this moment was not shock.

It's not fear.

It's not even a fluctuation of consciousness.

It's a break in the flow of consciousness.

The literal meaning of "interruption of flow".

Their minds ceased functioning the instant the "handsome" mark shattered.

It didn't stop on its own.

The signal was forcibly severed by the shockwave of the laws released when it shattered.

Within their cognitive systems.

handsome.

It is unbreakable.

Just like "pi is an irrational number".

Just like "the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees".

That is an axiom.

It needs no proof. Nor can it be overturned.

But now.

The axioms have shattered.

Broken.

It was bitten to pieces by an ordinary creature.

Their cognitive systems collectively entered a blue screen state at this moment.

That silence.

It was quieter than the nothingness before the birth of the universe.

In the ruins of the chessboard.

Fragments, remains, fragments of laws, and the remnants of annihilated black soldiers—

It was swept away in the aftershocks of the shattered mark.

That aftershock was a substantial storm of laws.

Centered on the positions of Su Yuan and Wang.

It spreads outwards.

Radius – dozens of standard star systems.

Where the storm passed, everything was wiped out.

Those billions of black soldiers who were originally kneeling in the void—

The instant they touched the edge of the storm—

No more.

It wasn't destroyed.

It wasn't swallowed up.

It was directly removed from the "existing" list.

Not even ashes remained.

Not even a conceptual remnant remained.

The entire chessboard space turned into absolute nothingness after the storm.

Only two remain.

A dark gold train.

A "King" with a split chest and incomplete markings.

The fundamental physical laws of the universe were forcibly rewritten in that one second.

It is not a partial rewrite.

It's a global rewrite.

A new node was etched into the end of each causal chain.

The information carried by that node is very simple.

Only one sentence.

No translation is needed.

No interpretation is needed.

Because it has been directly burned into the core of every observer's consciousness.

—The king, who was high above all others, was actually treated as food.

Su Yuan stood in the void.

There was nothing underfoot.

The chessboard is broken.

The army was wiped out.

Only the "King" with his bruised chest and his train remain in the distance.

He chewed the last fragment of the word "handsome" in his mouth.

The fragments were harder than the pieces of the bladeless greatsword they had bitten off before.

It was so hard that two of the teeth on his three-color law saw broke.

But he swallowed it anyway.

After swallowing it, the nascent endogenous universe expanded once more.

The brightness of the three-color patterns on his body surface reached an unprecedented peak.

Level 9.

The train is now at level nine.

He could feel every cell in the Emperor's Path Devourer cheering.

That cheer wasn't a sound.

It is the resonance of laws.

It was the satisfied and greedy murmur of a predator after enjoying the most sumptuous meal of its life.

Su Yuan wiped away the three-colored bloodstains from his chin.

The blood of law, a mixture of dark gold, pure white, and pitch black, was wiped away by the back of his hand and drifted into the void.

He clenched his fist.

He felt the immense power surging within his body from absorbing the fragments of the character "帅" (handsome).

And the insatiable, greedy pull of hunger and dissatisfaction, yearning for more food, emanating from that nascent, already formed endogenous universe.

not enough.

Only one-third was torn off.

Two-thirds of it is still in that guy's chest.

Su Yuan's lips curled up.

He clenched his teeth twice.

He took a step.

Towards the direction of "King".

Prepare to launch a complete end.

Then he stopped.

It didn't stop on its own.

It was the king's expression that made him stop.

The "King" stood in the void.

His chest was wide open.

The mark of the character "帅" was one-third missing, with jagged edges, and was still seeping out pure black blood of law.

According to normal logic—

He should be in pain.

We should be angry.

We should be afraid.

At the very least, there should be some negative emotional reaction resulting from being hurt.

But on the face of the "King"—

There was nothing there.

It's not indifference.

It's not about forbearance.

There is nothing there.

This caused Su Yuan to stop in mid-air.

Three seconds later.

The king's expression changed.

From nothing—

It turned into an extremely eerie expression that made Su Yuan's hair stand on end.

laugh.

No.

It's not a laugh.

It's more terrifying than laughter.

It was a great relief.

The kind of liberation that comes from the deepest part of the soul when the burden that has weighed on us for nine epochs is finally lifted.

Deep within the broken chest cavity of the "King".

Behind those two-thirds of the "handsome" mark.

There is no flesh and blood.

It has no skeleton.

It has no internal organs.

All that's left is—

face.

A densely packed array of faces.

Countless faces of ancient gods from countless civilizations, countless eras, and countless dimensions that he had once devoured.

Those faces surged at the cracks in the mark.

Some were laughing. Some were crying. Some were screaming. Some were expressionless.

Each face was once the most powerful being in some universe.

Every face had once been swallowed by the "King" and become part of his power.

At this moment, they all appeared.

They were jostling and shoving inside the ruptured chest cavity.

They seemed to be vying to look at Su Yuan.

Look at the person who tore apart their cage.

The king lowered his head.

Looking at his own ravaged chest cavity.

Look at those faces churning in the cracks.

Then he looked up.

His pure black eyes met Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils.

Those eyes that should never have pupils.

now--

Something was ignited.

It wasn't murderous intent.

It wasn't anger.

It's a morbid fanaticism.

And liberation.

A mixture of things that make you instinctively want to take a step back, a kind of almost religious ecstasy.

The king spoke.

His voice was no longer the condescending gentleness it once had.

It's not indifference.

It wasn't anger.

It was trembling.

It is a genuine tremor that originates from the very foundation of existence.

"finally……"

"It has finally hatched."

Su Yuan's pupils contracted.

"I have waited for nine eras."

The corners of "Wang's" mouth curved wider and wider.

getting bigger.

It is so large that it exceeds the limits of human facial muscles.

It was as large as the gaping maw of the abyss that Su Yuan had just opened, a truly bizarre sight.

That's not a smile anymore.

It was a container—with a crack.

"Nine eras."

"It devoured 7,321 gods."

"Fourteen thousand civilizations were destroyed."

"Ninety-seven complete universes were destroyed."

"Just to do one thing."

The king raised his hand.

That pure black finger, so smooth it didn't look like flesh—

It pointed to Su Yuan.

"To nurture you."

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils froze in that instant.

The voice of "King" was like the echoes of nine eras superimposed together.

Each word was so heavy it could crush an entire star system into dust.

"From the second you were born."

"From the very second you were placed on that track."

"From the very first second you swallowed it."

"Every step."

"Every bite."

"Every moment you think you're evolving, getting stronger, reaching the pinnacle—"

"I've been the one nurturing you."

Su Yuan's feet stopped.

His expression remained unchanged.

It's still that arrogant smile that makes you want to punch him.

But his fingers—

I gripped it tightly.

The knuckles are turning white.

The "King's" smile widened, splitting open even more. The faces surging within his chest laughed along with him. Countless mouths opened simultaneously, emitting countless different laughs, converging into a chilling chorus.

"Because I need a container."

"A perfect vessel that can contain all the accumulation of my nine eras."

"Ordinary containers won't be able to hold it."

"The vessel of the gods cannot contain it."

"The universe's container cannot hold it all."

"Only one container can hold it—"

"An infinitely expanding container that can devour everything, digest everything, and transform everything into its own nutrients."

"You are that kind of container."

"I raised them myself."

I raised them myself.

"The perfect container."

Su Yuan stood in the void.

The light in the tricolored vertical pupils pulsated violently.

The nascent endogenous universe within him emitted a low-frequency vibration.

The resounding boom carried a faint trace of unease.

the first time.

This is the first time since its inception that I have felt this unease.

"You think you're rebelling against me?"

"Wang" tilted his head.

His face, identical to Su Yuan's, was etched with the patience of nine eras and the madness of nine eras.

"You're just following my script—"

"grow up."