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

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils stopped.

It's completely stopped.

It wasn't suppressed by any law. It wasn't interfered with by any higher-dimensional force. It stopped on its own.

Because he's watching.

Look at the ripped-open sky. Look at the buzzing, broken fluorescent tube. Look at the exposed, dusty wires on the walls. Look at the moldy takeout containers piled in the corner.

Look at that old life support pod, so old that you can't even tell its model number.

Look at those three hastily written characters in red marker on the hatch.

001.

Look at that emaciated body in the cabin.

His ribs bulged out one by one. His arms were so thin they didn't look like those of a living person. His whole body was covered with tubes of varying thicknesses, some transparent, some yellowish, and some discolored.

That face.

Prominent cheekbones. Sunken eye sockets. Lips covered in dry, cracked skin.

Su Yuan recognized that face.

That's his.

The wind rushed in through the cracks. Not the turbulent energy flow caused by the disordered laws of the void. It was real wind. It carried the smell of disinfectant, mixed with the sour stench of nutrient solution, and the warm, suffocating smell of machine oil emanating from old metal equipment running continuously.

Su Yuan clenched his teeth.

The newly grown fangs were painfully embedded in the jawbone.

He didn't speak.

Silence is more profound than any language.

His tricolored vertical pupils reflected the flickering fluorescent light outside the crack, the vortex deep within them remaining perfectly still. Dead. Dead, just like his expression at that moment.

What did he remember?

I thought of the rented room. I thought of the moldy corners. I thought of the monitor that was on 24/7 and the burnt smell emanating from its plastic casing. I thought of the days when a bowl of instant noodles could last for two meals.

It wasn't time travel after all.

It turns out that his body, which could sweep across star systems and crush the fingers of higher dimensions, was just a set of data running on some broken server.

And what's inside that cabin.

The dried-up corpse, drained dry, filled with tubes, and soaking in murky liquid.

That's who he is.

The real him.

"Owner……"

The sound of a small fire came from the driver's cab.

Very light. With a noticeable tremor.

He saw it too.

The Level 9 train's beyond-line-of-sight perception allows everyone inside the carriage to clearly see the scene outside the crack.

Xiao Huo knelt before the control panel, his golden vertical pupils staring intently at the dilapidated room beyond the sky. His lips moved, but he didn't know what to say.

His entire understanding was subjected to a logical nuclear explosion in that instant.

As the core of this train, as a being born within the laws of higher dimensions, he has witnessed the collapse of the universe, the stripping away of dimensions, and the pale fingers of the higher-dimensional harvesters.

But he had never seen this before.

A dilapidated house.

A broken machine.

A few pipes.

Beyond the universe, there is something like this?

All the stars, all the laws, all the dimensions and concepts, all operate on a life support device crammed into a dilapidated room?

Golden liquid began to seep from the surface of his core fruit. It wasn't an energy leak. It was an instinctive reaction, akin to "existential panic," that he himself couldn't understand.

Wang Hu lay prone on the carriage floor, the barbs on his newly regenerated mechanical arm all retracted.

His eyes were bulging out of their sockets, his mouth was wide open, and indistinct syllables were rolling in his throat, like a broken, broken tape recorder.

He was trying to understand something.

He failed.

The treasure-guarding spirit huddled in the deepest part of the treasure chest, its entire body curled into a ball. Its usually bright and lively eyes were now tightly closed, and it dared not open them.

It doesn't want to see.

Once you've seen it, you can't pretend you didn't know.

Outside the crack.

That dilapidated room.

changed.

The fluorescent light went out.

Instead, a blinding red light burst forth from the cracks in the ceiling.

It was bright red.

It was burning red.

A real alarm pierced through the crack. It wasn't a vibration of laws, nor was it high-dimensional signal encoding; it was the most primitive and piercing mechanical buzzing emitted by a metal horn in the physical world.

Beep—beep—beep beep beep—

The frequency is getting faster and faster.

Then comes the sound.

Human voices.

No, it's not a human voice. It's a synthesized broadcast voice. But unlike the previous standard Mandarin broadcast voice, this voice is rougher, more rapid, with the background noise and reverberation of real hardware, as if it were squeezed out of a tin speaker.

"Subject 001's brainwaves are overloaded!"

"Isolation chamber logic lock malfunctioned!"

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils suddenly focused.

"Immediately execute the physical disconnection procedure!"

The ceiling outside the crack split open with a "crack," and dust and debris rained down. Three thick mechanical arms shot out from a hidden compartment in the ceiling, each end of which was connected to a metal syringe about the thickness of a thumb.

The liquid in the syringe was dark green.

Under the illumination of the red warning lights, the green color appeared particularly glaring.

"Inject neurotoxin!"

"Execute the destruction!"

The three robotic arms moved simultaneously.

"No!!"

The small fire's scream tore through the air in the entire driver's cab.

Without a second thought, without waiting for Su Yuan's order, his body acted a hundred times faster than his mind.

His hands slammed onto the control panel, and his golden vertical pupils burned into two small stars in their sockets.

The Tier 9 train's main gun was fully charged in 0.01 seconds.

A three-colored beam of light, condensing all the firepower of the Emperor's Path Devourer, shot out from the front of the vehicle and headed straight for the crack in the sky.

The energy density of the beam of light is enough to penetrate a star.

But the instant it touched the edge of the crack—

"Sizzle sizzle—"

scattered.

It wasn't deflected. It wasn't neutralized. The beam of light itself transformed from a devastating torrent of energy into a string of meaningless gibberish, tumbling twice at the edge of the crack before dissipating into the air like a broken barrage of bullets.

invalid.

Completely ineffective.

Xiao Huo was stunned.

He doesn't understand.

He unleashed the full firepower of a Level 9 train. That beam of light contained the ultimate superposition of three laws: Dark Gold Order, Pure White Creation, and Pitch Black Negation. It had once reduced a Tier 12 Star Destroyer to ashes. It had once erased the flagship of the Arbitration Chamber from the universe.

But in the face of the cracks, in the face of the boundary between virtual and reality, it cannot even touch a speck of dust.

Because the other side of the crack doesn't follow the rules.

It doesn't explain concepts.

It doesn't consider dimensions.

That's the physics section.

It's made of steel.

It is true.

All the forces existing within this universe, no matter how powerful or extraordinary, are essentially just segments of program code running on a server.

No matter how sophisticated the code is, it can't burn through the screen.

Wang Hu's knee slammed into the carriage floor.

A muffled "bang" was heard.

He knelt down.

It wasn't because of anyone. It was because despair broke his leg.

That once-proud mechanical arm hung limply at its side. Its barbs, alloy, and law-patterned markings now seemed like a joke.

He finally understood something.

All their strength.

All evolution.

All the devouring and conquest.

If placed on the other side of the crack, it wouldn't even be able to stop a steel needle in a physical sense.

Outside the crack.

Three robotic arms precisely aligned with the life support hatch cover.

The tip of the needle gleamed coldly.

"Bang!"

The first needle from the robotic arm pierced the outer shell of the life support capsule.

The old metal canopy was as brittle as tin foil in front of the needle. The turbid nutrient solution seeped out from the puncture point, flowed down the canopy wall, and pooled on the ground.

The second one was also inserted.

The third probe was adjusting its angle, aiming at the only still-bulging blue vein on the withered arm of the skeleton.

The pale green toxin swayed slightly inside the syringe tube.

It was less than a centimeter away from that blood vessel.

Then--

Further out beyond the crack.

Inside a monitoring room separated by a heavy alloy door.

Four figures in white protective suits were watching the screen. Behind their masks were pairs of cold, emotionless eyes.

One of them had a slight upturn at the corner of his mouth.

"The EEG readings are still skyrocketing? Let them skyrocket."

"All electrical signals will be terminated within three seconds of the neurotoxin injection."

"Subject No. 001, scrapped."

When he said the word "scrap," his tone was no different from when he was throwing away a broken USB drive.

A slightly shorter researcher next to him pushed up his goggles, stared at a set of constantly fluctuating data waveforms in the corner of the screen, and muttered something under his breath.

"Speaking of which, this entity's performance in the virtual environment is quite interesting... It actually broke through the boundary wall of the Zero Project."

"It's no use being interesting." The leader's voice remained indifferent.

"No matter how powerful you are in the game, once you unplug the power, you're just a pile of scrap metal."

He even smiled.

That kind of laughter, separated by cracks, dimensions, and the barriers between virtual and reality, was invisible to Su Yuan.

But he heard it.

His ears picked up every frequency contained within that laugh.

Relaxed.

Disrespectful.

Looking down from a high position.

It's like watching a monkey locked in a cage, jumping high but unable to reach the lock.

Su Yuan's eye twitched.

Then he laughed.

It wasn't a sneer. It wasn't a mocking laugh.

It was a laugh that exposed a mouthful of fangs, making everyone in the carriage feel their scalp tingle.

"Does unplugging it make it scrap metal?"

His voice rolled out from his throat, carrying a low-frequency vibration that made the laws of the three colors resonate within him.

"Then why don't you pull it out?"

Su Yuan placed his left hand on his chest.

The core of the endogenous universe suddenly accelerated its operation.

The drop of true essence that was decomposed from the fingertip of the higher dimension—that transparent liquid that was more "real" than any law—was simultaneously enveloped by the three-colored laws deep within his core.

The Dark Gold Order provides a frequency framework for electromagnetic waves.

Pure white creation gives data streams the form of physical electrical signals.

The absolute negation erased the ironclad rule that "virtual signals cannot affect real-world hardware".

The concept-level virus completed its final compilation inside his chest cavity.

It is no longer a weapon of attack principles.

It is no longer a poison that erodes concepts.

It was recompiled into something entirely new—the absolute physical electromagnetic pulse.

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils locked onto the mechanical injection arm outside the crack, which was approaching the body's blood vessel.

He spoke.

I didn't tell Xiao Huo.

He didn't tell Wang Hu.

Facing the crack.

He looked at every wire, every pipe, and every still-functioning electronic component in that dilapidated room.

"Is the signal connected?"

Then he let go.

The tri-colored pulse burst forth from his chest, not through the void, not through the channels of laws, but flowing upstream along the data pipelines hanging from the edge of the crack in the sky, connecting the bottom layer of the virtual universe and the hardware of reality.

speed?

There is no speed.

Because this is signal transmission.

The signal doesn't need to "fly over".

It only needs to "arrive".

Outside the crack.

The real world.

Laboratory No. 001.

"Snapped!"

The first sound came from the servo motor on the mechanical injection arm that was about to pierce the blood vessel, which exploded.

It's not an overload.

It means that all the solder joints on the circuit board melt away at the same time.

Sparks flew from the joints of the robotic arm. Real sparks. The smell of burning plastic and the acrid metallic odor of melting copper wire.

The robotic arm was stuck in mid-air.

The needle was less than three millimeters from that shriveled, bluish vein.

The pale green toxin sloshed around inside the syringe tube.

I didn't go out.

The gears emitted a harsh, grinding sound. Metal against metal, grinding without lubrication, produced a high-pitched, shrill sound that echoed in the small room, making one's teeth ache.

"Sizzle sizzle—"

The other two robotic arms also stopped.

Electric sparks burst from every wire in the hidden compartment of the ceiling, like fairy wands on New Year's Eve, but a thousand times more dazzling.

Then, something truly chilling happened.

On the metal casing of the robotic arm.

Texture.

Dark gold.

densely packed.

Starting from the point where the circuit board burned out, the fire spread wildly along every cable, every screw, and every inch of the alloy surface of the metal arm.

Those patterns are not projections.

It's not about light and shadow.

It is the metal itself that is changing.

The atomic structure is being rewritten.

Driven by the dark golden pulse, the lattice arrangement of the alloy underwent a physical displacement, spontaneously forming law patterns on the metal surface that were exactly the same as those on the armor of the Emperor's Path Devourer.

Virtual data.

The physical hardware that alters reality.

In the monitoring room.

The image on the big screen switched from normal to a snowy screen, and then from a snowy screen to a full-screen dark gold.

The smile on the lead researcher's face froze.

First it solidifies.

Then it broke.

He ripped off his goggles, shoved them close to the screen, and practically shoved his nose into the monitor.

"What the hell—what the hell is going on?!"

The dark gold patterns on the screen had spread from the robotic arm to the outer shell of the life support capsule.

The infection then spread from the outer shell of the life support capsule to the walls of the room.

The problem then spread from the walls to the exposed electrical conduits on the ceiling.

The entire 001 laboratory is being covered by layers of eerie dark gold patterns at a visible speed.

The metal is changing.

Plastic is changing.

The cement is changing.

Patterns grew on their surfaces. Scales grew. And traces of the laws that should only exist in the virtual universe, belonging to the Emperor's Path Devourer.

The short researcher's goggles slipped off his nose and shattered on the ground.

He didn't pick it up.

His hands were shaking.

His mouth was open and he couldn't close it.

"Impossible...it's physically impossible..."

He was the lead hardware engineer for this project. He knew better than anyone how thick the isolation layer was between the virtual environment and the real-world hardware.

A seven-layer physical firewall.

Three layers of electromagnetic shielding.

Two independent power supply systems.

No signal in a virtual environment can have a reverse effect on physical devices in the real world.

This is basic common sense.

This is an axiom.

But justice shattered before his eyes.

It shattered into pieces, leaving not a single fragment.

"Manager!"

The lead researcher suddenly turned around and yelled at a middle-aged man in a black uniform in the corner of the monitoring room.

The man called "the steward" had already stood up from his chair.

His face was ashen.

The veins on his forehead were throbbing more violently than an electrocardiogram.

He stared at the dark gold patterns spreading wildly on the screen, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down three times.

Then he made a decision.

It was a decision that no one present had expected, and it was the most extreme one.

He rushed to the control panel and lifted a cover protected by a red plastic shell.

There is a button under the cover.

Red.

It has a white skull logo printed on it.

High-explosive self-destruct.

"Blow it up."

The steward's voice was very flat. Unnaturally flat.

"The entire Room 001, along with the life support equipment and the experimental subjects, was blown up."

"Steward! That's—"

"I said blow it up!"

The steward slammed his hand down.

The button was pressed all the way down.

"Click".

The detonation signal originates from the control panel and is transmitted at high speed along the blasting circuit pre-embedded in the wall of Laboratory No. 001.

The signal is fast.

But there is something faster than that.

On this side of the crack.

At Su Yuan's feet.

At the same moment, all the scales on the Emperor's Path Devourer stood up.

It's not a defensive stance.

It is the posture for eating.

The engine emitted a sound that the train had never made before.

It wasn't a roar.

It wasn't a roar.

It was a roar.

It is the primal howl released from the deepest part of the throat of an ancient behemoth that has been locked in a cage for eight hundred years, the moment the cage door is opened, shaking the underlying narrative of the entire universe.

Every wall, every conduit of law, and every scale inside the carriage resonates at the same frequency.

The core fruit of the little fire was so powerful that it almost bounced off the control panel.

Every screw on Zhen De Wang Hu's robotic arm is tightening itself.

Zhen De, the treasure-guarding spirit, poked its head out from the crack in the treasure chest, then withdrew it, and then poked it out again.

The obsidian armor on the front of the vehicle began to split apart amidst a howling sound.

It didn't shatter.

It is open.

Like the lower jaw.

The armor plates on both sides unfolded to the left and right, revealing the swallowing cavity inside, which spanned several galaxies and was covered with tri-colored teeth.

Dark gold law-inspired teeth. Pure white creative enamel. Jet black denial roots. The three colors alternate, and each tooth's surface is covered with a thin film of real source material visible to the naked eye.

That thin film is not virtual.

It is real.

It is a true physical existence that transcends the boundaries between virtual and reality.

The giant maw closed halfway, then opened again, carrying with it a thick, almost solidified vapor of real source matter, aimed at the crack in the sky.

It made it to the top.

It wasn't shooting.

It wasn't a charge.

It's crowded.

Hard squeeze.

The tri-colored teeth gripped the edge of the crack, and the dark gold bone teeth made physical contact with the data barrier at the crack's boundary. Sparks flew. Not sparks of energy. They were physical fragments erupting as real source matter rubbed against the molecular structure of the virtual barrier.

The crack is getting bigger.

It was forcibly pried open by the three-colored giant mouth.

Half a meter.

one meter.

three meters.

ten meters.

Gaa—gaa—gaa gaa gaa—

The sound of a crack being torn apart echoed throughout the universe. It wasn't the lament of the laws of nature. It was the sound of a screen being smashed. It was the sound of a monitor casing being snapped in two. It was the sound of the insurmountable chasm between the virtual and the real being forcibly pierced.

The front of the Emperor's Path Devourer—no, that enormous head covered in scales of law—truly squeezed into the crack.

They squeezed into the real world.

They squeezed into that dilapidated room.

Laboratory No. 001.

The ceiling exploded.

It wasn't a high explosive explosion. The detonation signal is still running in the circuit.

The ceiling was shattered by a monstrous skull that fell from the sky and was larger than the entire room in diameter.

A cement block came crashing down.

The pipe broke.

The murky nutrient solution gushed out from the broken pipe.

Then the red warning light also broke.

Then the only fluorescent tube that was still lit broke.

The entire room was plunged into darkness for two seconds.

Two seconds later, a brand new light source appeared.

It's dark gold, with patterns interwoven with pure white and jet black.

The three-colored maw glowed in the darkness. The patterns on its scales provided illumination. An eerie, physiologically terrifying light.

The giant jaws pressed against the floor of the room. The cement on the floor cracked outwards from the jaws, and fragments flew up. The upper jaws pierced through the ceiling and embedded themselves in the floor slab of the floor above. From the gaps between the teeth, mist of true essence was slowly seeping out.

The three mechanical injection arms, along with their needles inserted into the life support capsule, as well as all the tubing interfaces and frame supports on the life support capsule's outer shell, were all within the jaws of the giant mouth.

Click!

The three-color teeth come together.

A loud bang.

The sounds of the real world.

The sound of air being compressed. The sound of metal being snapped. The sound of high-pressure oil mist spraying out after a hydraulic line breaks. The sound of reinforced concrete crumbling like biscuits in front of the gear train.

Three robotic arms.

Gone.

The metal frame surrounding the life support capsule.

Gone.

High explosives and detonation circuits were pre-embedded in the ceiling.

It's all gone.

It was chewed up.

It was taken away in one bite.

The mist of true essence surged between his teeth. Dark golden blood of law dripped from his gums, hitting the cement floor of Laboratory 001 with a sizzling corrosion sound, burning small, smoking pits into the floor.

Monitoring room.

The big screen is gone.

All four screens went black at the same time.

It wasn't a signal interruption. It's that there aren't any working cameras left in Lab 001. They've all been eaten.

But one screen captured an image in the last 0.3 seconds before it went black.

Everyone saw it.

That image was burned into their retinas.

One mouth.

The entire screen is filled with the enormous, three-colored mouth of a monster.

The teeth were covered with a mixture of metal fragments and nutrient solution.

A severed section of a robotic arm was stuck between his teeth.

Saliva, composed of the three-color principle, dripped from the corners of his mouth.

The entire scene is filled with an indescribable sense of oppression that surpasses any horror film or Cthulhu aesthetic.

This is not virtual.

This is not a simulation.

This is the head of a colossal abyss beast from within the virtual universe, a creature that has devoured higher-dimensional deities, now truly and physically squeezed into their real world.

Then they chewed up their equipment.

The steward's legs went weak.

First, my knees bent.

Then he sat down on the ground with a "plop".

His hand was still in the position of pressing the button. His fingers were outstretched, suspended in the air.

But the button is gone.

The detonation circuit is gone.

Seventy percent of the physical structure of Laboratory 001 had been taken away by that one bite.

The short researcher's crotch was wet.

He didn't notice.

Or perhaps he noticed. But more than the fact that his crotch was wet, he was now concerned about whether he could leave the monitoring room alive.

"ghost……"

That was the only word he managed to utter.

I'm not swearing. I genuinely believe I've seen a ghost.

The tri-color electromagnetic pulse did not stop in laboratory 001.

It is spreading.

Following the power supply lines of Laboratory 001, the metal ducts in the ventilation system, and every fiber optic cable embedded in the walls—outwards.

Towards the depths of the entire research base.

The first to be affected was the neighboring laboratory number 002.

The status indicator light on the life support capsule changed from green to red.

Then it's number 003.

004 number.

005 number.

All the way to number 099 at the end of the corridor.

The indicator lights on each life support capsule switched to a glaring red at the same time.

Then comes the next layer.

Go down another floor.

Su Yuan didn't know how many floors the research base had.

But the three-color pulse knows.

It seeped into every corner of the base along the power grid. Each time it passed a piece of equipment, it left a dark gold pattern on the equipment's control chip.

The lights in the base began to flicker.

This is not normal flickering.

It is a pulsed flashing pattern that alternates between dark gold and pitch black, with a sense of rhythm and law.

One thousand life support pods.

Two thousand units.

Five thousand units.

The red lights on all the life support pods came on.

All of them.

Every corridor, every laboratory, and every storage area of ​​the underground fortress succumbed to this eerie, dark gold shimmer.

The broadcasting system has been taken over.

"Sizzle—"

All the loudspeakers in the base emitted a static noise simultaneously.

Then, a sound came from the speaker.

It's not that standard Mandarin broadcasting tone.

It's another voice.

A hoarse voice. A voice with chewing sounds. A voice with newly grown fangs that are too long, making the words a little unclear.

"New menu".

"We added another dish."

"This dish is quite crispy, but has a lot of meat."

In the monitoring room.

The steward heard it.

All the researchers heard it.

The sound poured into their ears and into their minds through the loudspeaker.

The steward finally collapsed.

It's not dizziness.

It's leaning back.

With a "bang," the back of his head hit the metal corner of the control panel.

His eyes were staring at the ceiling. The whites of his eyes were so white you could see every vein. His lips were trembling.

He built this base.

He devised a zeroing-out plan.

He locked tens of thousands of experimental subjects in life support pods, letting their consciousness fight, evolve, and devour each other in a virtual universe, and then extracted the data.

He never thought of it.

The creatures inside the cage can bite through it.

there has never been.

This unscientific.

This is not reasonable.

This is outside the scope of any contingency plan.

But it happened.

And that's how it happened.

On the other side of the crack.

Su Yuan stood on the roof of the car.

A mouthful of fangs.

His face was covered in the blood of laws.

The vortex within the tricolored vertical pupils finally began to spin again.

He glanced down at the broken life support capsule No. 001, which was now protected in the center by the three-colored giant mouth.

The hatch was broken.

Nutrient solution spilled all over the floor.

Most of the pipe was broken. A few sections were still connected, dripping a murky liquid.

That emaciated body lay in the wrecked hull.

It twitched.

Su Yuan saw it.

The vortex in his tricolored vertical pupils spun half a beat slower.

Then the body twitched again.

The finger moved.

The withered, chicken-claw-like fingers trembled in the broken glass and nutrient solution.

then.

His eyes opened.

Those eyes, belonging to a real human being and having been submerged in murky nutrient solution for who knows how many years, suddenly opened.

Suddenly, something moved within its socket—

The left eye is dark gold.

The right eye is pure white.

Right in the center of the pupil.

A vertical line.

pitch black.

The creature's lips were split open. Blood seeped from the dry, shriveled corners of its mouth. It was trying to make an expression.

laugh.

It's trying to laugh.

Su Yuan looked down at the pair of tri-colored vertical pupils that were exactly the same as his own.

He smiled too.

Two Su Yuan.

A figure stands atop the head of a colossal abyss beast, its mouth full of fangs and its body imbued with the laws of nature.

A person lay in a shattered life support pod, emaciated and covered in tubes.

Separated by the barrier between the virtual and the real.

They stared at each other for two seconds.

Then the room's alloy explosion-proof door was blown open.

"boom!!"

The door flew off and smashed into the opposite wall, embedding itself in the cement.

Smoke billowed in through the door frame.

A dozen infrared lasers pierced through the smoke, like a dozen blood-red snakes, precisely and without hesitation locking onto the forehead of the newly awakened body inside the life support pod.