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

The Devourer passed through the last section of the tunnel of corpses.

The engine sound echoed through the extremely narrow rock wall, pounding against the embedded cosmic specimens on both sides, producing an extremely muffled hum.

Then, everything became clear.

It's not the kind of open space that makes you feel relaxed.

It's that kind of overwhelming, oppressive feeling that leaves you speechless instantly.

The Earth's core.

Su Yuan stood at the front of the car, his tricolor vertical pupils suddenly contracting.

There was no magma, no high temperature, and nothing that a normal planetary core should have.

All there is is...

Crystal.

Billions of law crystals float in this enclosed dome space, each one alternating between light and dark at an extremely regular frequency, like a heart, or like a ticking countdown timer.

Cold light.

Pure white and deep blue blended together, illuminating the entire Earth's core with a somber and translucent light.

There was an extremely subtle high-frequency electrical sound in the air. It wasn't harsh, but if you listened to it for a long time, it felt like something was scraping your brain inch by inch.

Xiao Huo's voice drifted from behind, already at a very low volume.

"Master, the shield is melting."

Su Yuan did not turn around.

He looked at the massive, sky-covering server master.

It was a massive structure built from billions of crystals, its depth beyond visual perception, its top disappearing into a cold, bluish light, with no visible boundaries.

At the core of the entire structure, there is a nine-colored light source that is brighter than all the crystals, pulsating at an extremely stable rhythm.

Su Yuan stared at that lump of something for a full three seconds.

Then he opened the car door.

"Wait for me to come back."

The leather boots made a crisp, resounding impact as they stepped onto the rocky strata of the Earth's core.

He just walked past.

There were no shields, no vines, and no defensive stance whatsoever.

With each step he took, the dark gold bone armor on his body trembled slightly, as if blown by some invisible wind.

That's not the wind.

The server sensed him.

The entire structure, composed of billions of crystals, suddenly stopped beating simultaneously.

There was a moment of silence, less than a fraction of a second.

Then, they all burst out with an extremely dazzling pure white light.

The mechanical voices of the broadcasters came from all directions, cold, hard, and devoid of any inflection.

"Experiment subject number 001 detected."

"The cumulative variable has exceeded the acceptable limit."

"Activate the highest taboo protocol."

"Cause-and-effect regression, in progress."

The entire space began to change color.

It's not a gradual change.

It's an extremely abrupt change in texture, jumping from one frame to the next.

The surrounding air changed from deep blue to grayish-white, like an old photograph being forcibly stretched to its highest contrast.

Then, time began to reverse.

Su Yuan sensed it.

It's not about physical time reversal.

It's a deeper, more ruthless kind.

That's because the chain of cause and effect itself was seized and violently pulled back.

The dark gold bone armor on his right arm began to crumble first.

It didn't explode; it just quietly peeled off piece by piece, like lines erased by an eraser. There was no sound, no debris; it simply disappeared.

Then the left arm.

Then it's the chest.

Su Yuan glanced down at it.

Beneath the bone armor, what was exposed was a withered forearm.

The veins were bulging, and the skin and flesh clung to the bone, so thin it was heartbreaking.

That's what he looked like when he was sixteen.

Inside the carriage, Wang Hu stared out the window, his intact left hand gripping the metal frame tightly, leaving five deep finger marks on the metal.

"Little Fire, what's going on?"

Xiao Huo's fingers were frozen on the control panel. The data on the screen was still jumping, but her eyes were already wide open.

"The backtracking protocol rewrites the owner's state."

"All acquired authority is being erased."

"The endogenous universe also exists..."

She didn't say the last few words.

But the readings on the screen are there for all to see.

shrink.

Su Yuan's endogenous universe is shrinking.

That enormous endogenous universe, which contained the energy of billions of star fields, is shrinking at a visible speed back to the primitive and fragile size of a sixteen-year-old boy.

Su Yuan didn't stop walking.

He continued walking, each step steady, but the distance was increasing because his legs were getting shorter.

His back was shrinking, his shoulders were narrowing, and all the remaining fragments of the dark gold bone armor on his body were scattered, leaving only a tattered lab coat covered with connectors, with tubes dragging on the ground, making a soft rubbing sound.

An outline appeared at the core of the server master.

It is not a physical entity.

It is a projection of the chess player's will, its outline blurred, but the chilling will that makes one's bones tremble is overwhelming.

"Number 001".

The chess player's voice seeped out from that outline, his tone extremely calm, carrying the leisure of a high-ranking person pardoning a criminal.

"In the end, it was just a factory error."

In the higher-dimensional dark web.

The remaining elders of the arbitration tribunal had gathered in front of the largest monitoring screen, where the holographic image magnified Su Yuan's thin figure, which was shrinking and whose pipes were dragging on the ground.

The chief arbitrator suddenly burst into laughter.

shameful.

He laughed so hard he almost kicked the chair over.

"ha!"

"Even the most powerful virus can't withstand a one-click system restore, don't you think!"

The gaunt elder in his silver robe clutched his stomach and laughed along, tears streaming down his face.

"I knew it! I knew the chess player had been holding back!"

"Let him be arrogant, let him jump around, in the end he'll just jump back to where he started!"

Someone has already gone to pick up the energy drinks.

They were all in high spirits and planned to hold a celebration banquet on the spot.

Earth's core.

"Formatting success rate... 99%"

When the server broadcast this message, the entire crystal architecture lit up with celebratory pulses.

Su Yuan's breathing began to quicken.

It's not because I'm afraid.

It's because the lungs are too small; those lungs of a sixteen-year-old haven't been able to breathe on their own for a long time.

The tubing was connected to his chest, with the other end connected to an extraction device dropped by the server. The last wisp of his soul essence was slowly but irresistibly seeping out.

The system has started loading.

A cold white progress bar appeared on the crystal of the server core, slender and precise, advancing to the right one bar at a time.

Su Yuan was standing three meters directly in front of the server master.

It stopped.

He kept his head down.

Look at the pipeline at your feet.

I watched it for a long time.

The elders who had reached the arbitration tribunal thought this was the final ceremony before being forced to accept their fate, and some had already raised their glasses.

then.

Su Yuan slowly raised his head.

His eyes opened.

The tricolor vertical pupils in those eyes had not faded at all, even though the body had shrunk back to the age of sixteen, even though the bone armor was gone, and even though the inner universe was reduced to a faint spark.

Those eyes are still very sharp.

His lips twitched slightly.

It's not a laugh.

It's that kind of extremely cruel arc that appears only before the attack is made.

Su Yuan did not resist the rewind.

He followed the cause-and-effect line and delved deeper.

He unearthed all the things that had been suppressed for the longest time in his inner universe.

The painful memories of billions of our ancestors.

Nine eras of unyielding obsession.

The last vestige of consciousness left before being formatted by the system.

The dying rage of every ordinary person who has struggled in a culture tank.

Su Yuan gathered these things together without using any higher-dimensional authority to package them or any laws to purify them; they were in their most primitive, raw, and authentic state.

Then he reversed the flow of this substance, flowing it back into the channel through which the server was drawing source matter from him.

Backtrack.

There are no tricks involved.

It means to fill it up.

Violent flooding.

The first piece of data the server received was from a 30-year-old worker in the last five minutes before formatting.

The second one was from a pregnant woman.

The third one is about a little child, very young, who is thinking about a toy whose name he can't even remember.

Billions of copies stacked together, all real, logically impossible to be formatted by the high-dimensional computing power of a system, the most fundamental sense of life's pain.

The server was silent for a fraction of a second.

then.

Click.

The system crashed.

It's not a graceful shutdown; it's a crash caused by direct hardware overload.

The entire crystal structure suddenly went out, billions of crystals stopped beating at the same time, the cold light disappeared, and the entire Earth's core was plunged into absolute darkness for a fraction of a second.

The progress bar is stuck at 99%.

It didn't advance even half a grid.

High-dimensional dark web monitoring room.

The screen was initially filled with static.

Then restart.

The chief judge had already raised his glass to his lips when, the moment the scene restarted, his eyes suddenly bulged forward, spilling wine all over his face.

on the screen.

That skinny boy covered in tubes, wearing a tattered lab coat.

They are walking towards the server core.

No way.

go.

They walked slowly and steadily.

The gaunt elder's celebratory wine glass slipped from his hand and fell to the ground, but he didn't even hear it.

"Why is he still moving?"

"It's still running after being 99% formatted?"

"His consciousness..."

Someone went to check the data.

My hands were trembling after I finished checking.

"His consciousness readings... haven't changed."

The server restarted in the darkness, and the crystals lit up one by one as the computing matrix began to urgently repair the collapsed logic layer.

Then it discovered a problem.

The experimental subject, number 001, was standing outside its core firewall.

Then, Subject 001 let out a roar.

It wasn't the angry roar of a high-dimensional deity, nor was it imbued with any authority; it was a pure, human scream, squeezed from the chest of a sixteen-year-old.

He crashed right into it.

He bumped into me with his shoulder.

That thin, emaciated boy's body, still connected to tubes and completely unprotected, crashed into the first layer of firewall on the server master.

The firewall is made of high-dimensional alloy.

In theory.

In theory, no physical impact could leave a mark on it.

However, in Su Yuan's inner universe, all the failed universe specimens that he had suppressed were activated by him as overflow channels in this instant.

Computing power.

The residual computing power of thousands of failed universes exploded out at the moment of the collision.

The first layer of the firewall is broken.

Su Yuan did not stop.

The second layer.

The third layer.

He kept crashing into the layers, like a rag thrown into a meat grinder, being tossed around. The tubes on his body had long since broken, and his lab coat was tattered to pieces.

But he didn't fall.

The seventh floor.

The eighteenth floor.

The thirty-fifth floor.

Each firewall, under the superposition of the failed computational power of his own internal universe, pushes inward layer by layer, and then layer by layer.

Wang Hu clung tightly to the car window, his eyes red and his breathing erratic.

"That madman."

"That guy is absolutely insane."

The seventy-second floor.

The final firewall.

Su Yuan's body was already bleeding from half of his body, the blood a dark gold color, dripping down his chin.

He stood in front of the seventy-second-floor firewall, looking up.

The server core is right in front of us.

That mass of nine-colored, mixed original code was so close, pulsating and radiating a heat that could scald one's soul.

Su Yuan spread his five fingers on his right hand, forming a claw.

He inserted it.

He reached directly into the server core, his five fingers gripping the nine-colored raw code tightly, the dark gold blood on his hand staining the thing in several places.

Pull.

"come out."

roar.

At that moment, the entire server master emitted a warning at its highest decibel level, and billions of crystals lit up simultaneously, piercing the entire Earth's core into a white expanse.

Su Yuan braced himself with his feet and forcefully pulled the nine-colored original code outwards inch by inch from the core of the server.

The sound of metal tearing.

The sound of architecture collapsing.

The sound of crystals shattering.

Everything was mixed together, causing the rock layers of the Earth's core to tremble.

Then, the source code was generated.

Su Yuan gripped it with one hand and glanced back.

The latter half of the server master has begun to collapse, crystals are falling like rain, and three-colored flames are shooting upwards along the crumbling structure.

He held the source code up in front of him and glanced at it.

Nine colors flowed in his hands, hot and scalding.

Su Yuan opened his mouth.

It's inside.

I chewed it twice.

Swallowed it.

I just swallowed it.

The whole process took about five seconds.

The endogenous universe expanded violently in those five seconds; it was not an orderly reorganization, but a completely uncontrolled, explosive surge.

Su Yuan's body began to change.

First came the sound of bones cracking, one bone after another pushing outwards.

Then came the skin. The withered skin of the boy burst open from the inside out, and a new bone armor, dark gold with tricolor patterns, grew out of the crack. It wasn't cast, it grew out, and it had an extremely vivid sense of life.

Straighten your back, broaden your shoulders, and stretch your body upwards until you are nearly four meters tall before stopping.

At this moment, a system notification popped up simultaneously on every high-dimensional terminal in every corner of the universe.

Blood red.

"Permission change".

Former top administrator: Chess player.

"Current highest administrator: Su Yuan."

"Authorization Level: Absolute".

High-dimensional dark web monitoring room.

The chief arbitrator stared at the screen in front of him for a full three seconds.

Then, his monitoring terminal permissions were forcibly revoked.

The screen went black.

He wasn't the only one.

All remaining terminals in the arbitration tribunal went black in the same second.

The causal backlash from the deprivation of his authority traveled in the reverse direction along the terminal link, and the gaunt elder in the silver robe was the first to fall, falling directly from his chair to the ground, never to rise again.

The chief arbitrator stood up and tried to run away.

My foot didn't step out.

He exploded without saying a word while he was in the monitoring room.

There was no sense of ceremony whatsoever.

It was just a muffled sound, and then nothing happened.

The server master page completely collapsed.

Billions of crystals shattered into dust, the structure crashing down and smashing into the rock layers of the Earth's core, stirring up a sky full of high-dimensional dust that churned in the cold light of the core.

Su Yuan stood in the very center of the ruins.

The figure was just over four meters tall, covered from the feet to the neck in dark gold bone armor. The three-colored divine fire was suppressed to a very low level, and the flames were almost invisible. Only the faint light emanating from the patterns on the bone armor could be seen.

This low-key demeanor is more imposing than anything else.

He glanced down at the ruins at his feet.

As the will expanded outward, signals from billions of star systems connected, and every connection point sensed the same thing.

An absolute sense of control.

The entire universe fell into an extremely peculiar silence.

The mechanical lifeform knelt down.

The ancient being retracted all its probe tentacles.

The remaining high-dimensional civilizations have shut down all armed signals targeting any star system.

No one gave the order, and no one communicated.

It's purely instinct.

Su Yuan bent down and rummaged through the ruins a few times.

His hand touched something different.

It is not a crystal, not an alloy, not any high-dimensional material.

It's paper.

The paper was real, a bit wrinkled, with yellowed edges, like it had been stored for many years.

He picked up the paper and stretched it out.

It's a photo.

It's in color and the image is clear.

On the left side of the photo is him at sixteen.

On the right side of the photo are his closest relatives.

The two of them squeezed into a cheap photo booth. The background was a tacky starry sky setting, and the lighting was uneven, with one corner being a bit dark.

Su Yuan stared at the photo.

Then he shifted his gaze to the corner of the photo, the part where most of it had been cropped out.

The photographer's hand is still at the edge of the frame.

There is an old scar on my wrist.

The sleeves are white, with a turn-down collar, made of high-quality cotton, and the cuffs are embroidered with a tiny red cross.

White coat.

Su Yuan flipped the entire photo over.

There is a line of very neat penmanship on the back, the ink has bled a little, but it is still clearly visible.

Happy birthday, 001.

Su Yuan held the old photograph with its yellowed edges, and the analytical vision of the One Who Reaches the Unity of All Things instantly penetrated the microscopic structure of the paper.

This is not a virtual prop generated by high-dimensional code at all; the paper fibers contain real lignin and chemical developing agents.

Su Yuan's fingertips slowly caressed the wrist with old scars and the red cross cuff on the edge of the photo, the coldness surging in his tricolor vertical pupils completely suppressing the remaining dark blue of the earth's core.

Su Yuan pressed the photo against the dark gold bone armor on his chest, and the photo was instantly and securely sealed by the inner universe.

He turned and strode back to the Devourer with his long legs, his over four-meter-tall dark gold body exuding a suffocating aura of authority.

The moment the car door opened, Wang Hu instinctively held his breath, his intact left hand pressed tightly against the seam of his pants, while Xiao Huo froze in front of the control panel, not even daring to wag its tail.

The two looked at the tyrant who had completely transformed, their eyes filled with pure awe.

Su Yuan sat imposingly in the control chair and threw a string of garbled coordinates, which did not belong to the current universe, onto the screen.

"Xiao Huo, add this to the navigation, full power ignition."

The moment Xiao Huo's fingers touched the keyboard, the lights in the entire carriage suddenly went completely white.

A blinding scarlet warning flashed on the main control screen. A "real physical pressure" that did not belong to any higher-dimensional laws ignored the train's shield and landed directly on the ceiling of the carriage. The distorted friction of metal traveled through the floor and into the bones of everyone.

Outside the car window, in the ruins of the Earth's core, a gray-white slit was forcibly torn open in the void.

A gigantic, phantom arm dressed in a white coat reached out, and the ugly old scar on its wrist transformed into a causal chain covered in rust, completely ignoring spatial distance and tightly binding the front of the Devourer.

The system's lingering mechanical announcements were replaced by a realistic male voice with a sense of breathing: "Number 001, your medical record isn't finished yet. Who gave you permission to be discharged?"

As the chains tightened, the "highest authority" panel that Su Yuan had just obtained began to flicker and turn gray.

The gravity inside the carriage surged a hundredfold, and Wang Hu let out a muffled thud as he knelt on one knee, sparks flying from the gears of the mechanical arm.

Xiao Huo's face was pressed tightly against the control panel, and he couldn't lift even a finger.

In the high-dimensional dark web, the ancient beings who had just knelt down saw this scene through the remaining physical optical detectors and collectively gasped in shock.

They were horrified to discover that behind the system that Su Yuan had crushed was actually a real creator who could arbitrarily alter the highest level of authority as if it were a "medical record".

Faced with this overwhelming force of reality that could crush the virtual universe into paper, Su Yuan did not get up. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and let out a cruel, cold laugh.

He raised his right hand, and the nine-colored primordial code that he had just devoured in his palm suddenly erupted, shining brightly.

Su Yuan, acting as the supreme administrator, broadcast an extremely domineering order to the entire universe: "My life doesn't need a doctor's signature."

The law of negation in his left eye merged with the nine-colored original code, transforming into a dark golden conceptual guillotine that slashed directly at the rusty chain along the front of the car.

The guillotine fell, but there was no earth-shattering explosion; only a crisp, cracking vibration that reverberated throughout the car body.

The rusty chain, representing the suppression of reality by its lower dimensions, was severed at the root.

Su Yuan suddenly stood up, his right hand forming a claw, and gripped the wrist of the white-coated phantom that was about to retract into the gap.

The dark golden flame of unity surged forward along the broken causal line, burning through the edges of the gray-white gap like a bone-deep infection, forcibly pulling the arm down thousands of meters.

The high-dimensional dark web was in complete uproar. Countless rulers of star systems felt their scalps tingle as they watched the "Creator's Hand" being dragged backward by Su Yuan on the monitoring screen.

They originally thought Su Yuan would be suppressed again, but they never expected that this tyrant would extend his reach to the real world beyond the screen.

The phantom figure in the white coat heaved violently, conveying extreme pain, as if attempting to sever its arm or tail to survive.

Su Yuan gave him no chance at all. His three-colored vertical pupils locked onto the depths of the rift, and his violent computing power followed the clues, directly shattering the defensive fog behind the rift.

As the fog dissipates, a real, sterile ward called "First Observatory" flashes by amidst the turbulent flow of data.

Su Yuan recognized the face of the hand's owner—it was the same attending physician who, when he was sixteen, had handed him a terminal diagnosis and pronounced his death sentence with utter regret.

Su Yuan's killing intent solidified into tangible frost at that moment. He exerted force with his right hand and crushed the phantom arm.

Amidst a rain of grayish-white blood, Su Yuan pressed the dark gold totem hard against the edge of the crack, forcibly welding and solidifying the interdimensional passage that was about to close, and branded a huge blood-red rune at the entrance that read "Number 001 has come to collect a debt."

Ancient beings and mechanical life forms throughout the universe, looking at the dark gold passage that had been forcibly solidified and led to the dimension of the true creator, dared not even let a wisp of energy emanate from it.

Subsequently, countless enormous galaxy-level behemoths and high-dimensional warships bowed their heads in perfect unison towards the Devourer.

They knew that this game was no longer confined to a virtual chessboard; Su Yuan had completely overturned the dimensional ceiling and brought the flames of war to the real "gods".

Having absorbed the energy of the Earth's core's remaining crystals, the Devourer underwent another transformation. Dark red fleshy membranes grew on its body to resist the constants of reality, transforming it into a true dimensional-breaking behemoth. Its engine spewed out nine-colored tail flames as it crashed into the interdimensional passage.

Spatial turbulence rushed past the car window, and when the Devourer crashed through the last layer of conceptual membrane and burst out of the tunnel, the scene before its eyes was not the high-tech reality of Earth.

The train hovered in mid-air, below which was a huge sterile ward floating in endless white light.

The "person" on the hospital bed, covered in tubes, turned his head and gave the Devouring Wasteland an extremely eerie smile with a face exactly like Su Yuan's.