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

The Devourer hovered in mid-air.

The engine's nine-colored exhaust flames became unusually quiet at this moment, and even the usual low-frequency roar disappeared.

Instead, there was an extremely uncomfortable silence.

It's not the kind of stillness filled with killing intent found on a high-dimensional battlefield.

It's the kind of corridor in a hospital.

It smells like disinfectant.

The kind of quiet that makes you want to vomit.

The lights inside the carriage were all switched to a stark white. The holographic panel on the main control panel was still lit, but all high-dimensional data streams had stopped, and gray notification boxes saying "Physical constants are being calibrated" kept popping up in the corners of the screen.

Wang Hu leaned against the wall, his chest heaving violently.

He had previously endured salvos of high-energy particle cannons in the lower city, the crushing force of dimensional collapse, and the stripping away of causal annihilation.

No matter how terrifying those things are, they are still enemies that can be seen and touched.

But the "gravity" pressing down on him now is not gravity at all.

It is an extremely everyday, extremely real, and most fundamental physical law belonging to this dimension.

His breathing became heavy. With each breath, his chest had to exert all its strength to expand.

The robotic arm's cooling fan was running at a low speed, emitting a very faint hum.

Little Fire lay motionless on the control panel, its tail drooping limply beside the chair leg. Its golden eyes, devoid of their former liveliness, were half-closed, like a rag doll whose batteries had been removed.

Su Yuan leaned back in the control chair.

His dark gold body, which was over four meters tall, was cramped by the chair, but he did not change his posture.

Through the car window, the three-colored vertical pupils quietly observed the sterile ward below.

White.

It's excessively clean.

The ward wasn't large, a standard single room. The floor was the kind of non-slip plastic flooring used in hospitals, grayish-white, with worn edges. Two rows of long, rectangular fluorescent tubes were embedded in the ceiling; one of them flickered a few times, making a hissing sound, the light was a bit unstable.

There was a glass of water on the bedside table.

A plastic cup, transparent, with a calm surface of water.

Next to it was an open folder, A4 paper, covered with densely packed tables, with the header of the top page reading "First Observatory - Hospice Care Department".

There was a person lying in the hospital bed.

To be precise, it was someone who looked exactly like Su Yuan.

A thin white sheet covered her body, revealing an extremely thin frame beneath. An IV catheter was inserted into the back of her hand, the needle secured to her bulging veins with transparent tape. A thick tube was inserted into her nasal cavity, connecting to a bulky, old-fashioned ventilator beside the bed.

The electrocardiogram monitor was dripping steadily.

drop.

drop.

drop.

An extremely regular electronic pulse, belonging to the most common electronic pulse in the real world.

This person's face is exactly the same as Su Yuan's.

But their temperaments are completely different.

His face held an extremely leisurely, condescending composure. A smile played on his lips, not the aggressive sneer of Su Yuan, but an appreciative curve like that of a master watching his pet finally learn to do a somersault.

Su Yuan stared at that face.

Looked for a long time.

No one in the carriage dared to speak.

The person in the hospital bed moved first.

He raised his left hand and casually ripped the breathing tube out of his mouth. A trickle of liquid came out with the tube as it came out of his nasal cavity; he wiped it with the corner of the blanket, frowned, and looked disgusted.

Then he spoke.

"He can run pretty fast."

His voice was dry and hoarse.

It wasn't the kind of high-pitched voice with reverberation and imposing presence; it was just the most ordinary texture of vocal cord friction. A little husky, a little hoarse, like someone who hadn't had water in a long time.

Su Yuan propped himself up on the hospital bed, leaning against the folded pillows. The movement was slow, and he had to use his elbows twice to support himself.

He glanced down at the IV line on the back of his hand, then at the ECG monitor beside the bed, before finally turning his gaze slowly to the Devourer hovering in mid-air.

"Wow, this is huge."

He flicked his fingernails.

An extremely casual action.

The dark red membrane that had just grown on the front of the Devourer began to change color in that instant.

It wasn't an attack.

It is oxidation.

The most common chemical reaction is between oxygen molecules in the air and organic tissues.

The dark red flesh membrane quickly turned dark brown, with the edges curling up, cracking, and peeling off.

It's like the sliced ​​surface of an apple that's been sitting out for three days.

Xiao Huo suddenly raised his head, his pupils shrinking sharply.

"Master! The front of the vehicle is withering!"

Her fingers swiped frantically across the control panel, trying to launch a repair program. A cold, gray dialog box popped up on the screen.

"The current environment does not support high-dimensional repair commands."

"Please switch to physical dimension operation."

Outside the car window.

The person in the hospital bed tilted their head.

"You see, all your fancy stuff doesn't work well with me."

He reached for the plastic water glass on the bedside table and took a sip.

A little water leaked from the corner of his mouth, trickled down his chin, and dripped onto the collar of his hospital gown, leaving a small dark stain.

Put down the cup.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, a very casual gesture.

Do you know what a virtual machine is?

His gaze pierced through the car window and precisely met Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils.

"You've been causing trouble in there for so long, talking about devouring everything, being the supreme administrator, being a chess player, and being the king."

He smiled.

The laugh was utterly genuine. It was the kind of contempt that comes from seeing through everything, tinged with a sense of superiority.

"It was all a placebo program that we ran for you."

The air inside the carriage suddenly turned cold.

"The 'Hospice Care Department' at the First Observatory is specifically responsible for handling experimental subjects in the terminal stage of illness."

He took another sip of water.

"Do you know what the brain does when a person is about to die? It releases dopamine like crazy. The more desperate the person is, the more dopamine it releases. And the higher the dopamine concentration, the purer the essence of the soul that we can extract from the brain."

He flicked the IV tubing.

"So we designed this system. We throw you into a virtual universe, making you think you're omnipotent. We let you devour, evolve, and even overturn tables and smash chessboards."

He spoke at a moderate pace.

"Dopamine spikes occur at two points. One is when you feel like you've won. The other is when you feel like you're about to lose and then you make a miraculous comeback."

He pointed at Su Yuan with his index finger.

"Your entire life script is designed around these two points. Ups and downs, climaxes and climaxes. The dopamine production is extremely high."

The sleeves of the hospital gown had been pulled up, revealing withered arms.

"I am the only truth."

He patted his chest.

"You're just the last string of numerical remnants that weren't cleaned up before the script was about to end."

The words fell.

The endless white light outside the ward moved.

It's not flickering.

It is solidification.

The originally boundless, soft white light instantly solidified into a substantial physical wall the moment those words were spoken.

The extremely thick, cubic walls, emitting a cold white fluorescent light, silently closed in on the Devourer from all directions.

Unhappy.

Not slow.

It's a kind of uniform, unstoppable pressure, full of the rhythm of an industrial assembly line.

This is not some kind of crushing force from higher-dimensional laws.

This is the most basic three-dimensional space compression in the real world.

Each white wall exudes an incredibly realistic physical texture. The surface has fine frosted particles, and you can even see the extremely fine parting lines left from the mold assembly. Industrial products. Standardized industrial products.

Wang Hu's robotic arm gave out first.

Pure, real gravity surged in from all directions, causing the oil temperature within the hydraulic system to spike instantly. The meshing precision of the gear set deteriorated rapidly under this indiscriminate physical pressure.

ga-

An extremely piercing metallic scream erupted from the shoulder joint of the robotic arm.

The main control chip crashed and displayed a blue screen.

Wang Hu knelt on one knee. His intact left hand gripped the floor tightly, his knuckles white and veins bulging. His jaw was clenched to its limit, and a muffled growl escaped from deep in his throat.

Small fires are even worse.

Her data core isn't physical hardware. In a higher-dimensional universe, this is an advantage. But in the realm of pure, realistic physical constants, this becomes her biggest weakness.

The control panel screen started displaying pop-up windows like crazy.

The screen is full of garbled text.

Red, green, and white, stacked dozens of times.

Little Fire's golden pupils flickered violently a few times, then dimmed.

Her fingers slipped off the control panel, and she slumped into the chair.

His mouth was open, but he couldn't make a sound.

The lights in the carriage began to go out one by one.

The first row to be destroyed was the one at the end of the corridor.

Then there's the middle section of the carriage.

Then, directly above your head.

In the end, only a small area in front of the main control panel remained lit, a pale white light illuminating the two half-dead companions and a dark golden figure leaning motionless against the back of a chair.

The white walls are still being closed.

The distance between them has been reduced from several hundred meters to less than fifty meters.

If the pressure continues, the hull structure of the Devourer will be the first to give way.

Then there are the people inside.

Su Yuan, lying on the hospital bed, leisurely crossed his legs.

The sheet slipped down to his waist. He was wearing blue cotton slippers issued by the hospital, one of which had a crooked heel, revealing a gray sock underneath.

"How are you feeling?"

He tilted his head toward the direction of the Devouring Wasteland, his tone extremely calm.

"Isn't the feeling of being weighed down by the gravity of reality much more unbearable than your ideas about the annihilation of causality or the collapse of dimensions?"

He shook his head.

"There's no way around it. In my dimension, your conceptual weapons are just a string of gibberish without an execution environment. They won't run."

The white walls continued to shrink.

Thirty meters.

Twenty meters.

The front of the Devourer emitted its first metallic groan as it underwent physical deformation.

Wang Hu caught a glimpse of Su Yuan's profile out of the corner of his eye.

His heart leaped into his throat.

Because of that face.

There was no anger.

No anxiety.

They didn't even think about it.

Su Yuan leaned back in his chair, in the exact same posture as ten seconds ago.

The left leg is crossed over the right leg.

The fingers of his right hand tapped idly on the edge of the control panel.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The pace is extremely slow.

He was so relaxed that he didn't seem like someone being squeezed by the physical walls of reality.

Then he laughed.

It wasn't a sneer.

It's that kind of pure, low-pitched mockery squeezed out from the nose when you see something utterly ridiculous.

A sound.

Extremely short.

But the chuckle sounded unusually abrupt in the extremely oppressive carriage.

It's as inappropriate as someone burping at a funeral.

The closing speed of the white wall showed an extremely slight pause.

Almost imperceptible.

But Su Yuan caught it.

Wang Hu also caught it.

Wang Hu's mind raced. He had followed Su Yuan from the lower city all the way to the ends of the universe; he knew this man all too well.

Su Yuan's smile wasn't because she was happy.

It's because he already saw the answer.

Hospital bed.

The person with the same face as Su Yuan frowned slightly.

His leisurely posture remained unchanged, but he put his legs back in place.

Su Yuan finally made a move.

He did not stand up.

They didn't even straighten their backs.

He merely turned his head slightly, his tricolored vertical pupils casually glancing at the person on the hospital bed through the nearly distorted car window.

"Is the performance over?"

Two words.

The tone was so soft it sounded like asking what we were having for lunch.

The person in the hospital bed frowned slightly.

Without any warning, Su Yuan's left eye lit up with the law of negation.

It's not the kind of explosive activation that's overwhelming in a higher-dimensional universe. It's an extremely restrained, surgically precise scan.

The analytical perspective of the One Who Unifies All Things unfolds simultaneously.

It runs just as smoothly in the real world.

Because the essence of parsing is not high-dimensional authority.

It is cognition.

It's an eye.

Su Yuan's gaze began from the top of the person's head on the hospital bed and slowly moved downwards.

Hair.

Forehead.

Eyebrow arch.

Bridge of the nose.

Lips.

jaw.

Adam's apple.

clavicle.

All the way down to the vein on the back of his hand where the IV needle was inserted.

Then there's the transparent tubing that extends from the needle and connects to the IV stand next to the bed.

Su Yuan's gaze lingered on the flexible tube for three seconds.

Three seconds later, the corners of his mouth curved into an even wider smile.

"A placebo scenario?"

Su Yuan tapped his fingers on the control panel twice more.

Tap. Tap.

"End-of-life care?"

despair.

"Dopamine extraction?"

He tucked his leg back in and leaned his upper body slightly forward. The dark gold bone armor emitted a very faint rustling sound as he moved.

"Then let me ask you something."

Su Yuan's tricolored vertical pupils were fixed on the transparent tube.

"Real, real human beings."

He spoke each word carefully.

"Will we need to use high-dimensional waste as a nutrient solution for intravenous drips?"

The air inside the carriage seemed to freeze.

The person on the hospital bed stiffened for a moment.

The movements were extremely subtle, but they couldn't hide them from Su Yuan.

Su Yuan didn't give him time to react.

"I just scanned the stuff coming out of your tubes."

Su Yuan extended his index finger and pointed towards the transparent tube.

"It's not glucose. It's not saline solution. It's not the actual medicine you're talking about."

He leaned back in his chair.

"It's a gray-area rule code."

These five words struck the face of the person on the hospital bed, causing the muscle in the corner of his right eye to twitch uncontrollably.

"Those that escaped when the Earth's core collapsed. My analytical skills have marked tracking signals among them."

Su Yuan raised his right hand and drew a line in the air.

"The needle goes in through the back of your hand, along the tubing, and connects to the IV bag. The base of the IV bag is connected to a concealed tube under the bed. The tube runs through the floor and all the way to the foundation of this ward."

His finger stopped in mid-air.

"The thing buried in the foundation is from the same batch as the crystal on that core server."

Su Yuan spoke at a consistently moderate pace.

"Every tube in your body is continuously injecting high-dimensional code from the outside to maintain your 'real human' body."

His tricolor vertical pupils narrowed slightly.

"Does a real, physical human need to extend their life through virtual code?"

Su Yuan tilted his head, his tone revealing the boredom that comes from seeing through the magic trick.

"You are not the real me at all."

"You are the last clump of logic remnants that the chess player didn't clean up, crawling into this clone to eke out a living."

The white light emanating from the high walls above the hospital bed suddenly stopped.

It's not slowing down.

It was stopped immediately.

Immediately afterwards, the solidified white walls began to crack from the edges.

It was not a physical collapse.

It's a breakdown in the visual appeal.

It's like the bulb in an old projector is about to burn out.

Pixels began to appear on the surface of the white wall.

Rough.

Inferior quality.

Holographic projection afterimages with shockingly low resolution.

All the "real physical walls" collapsed into countless white pixel fragments three seconds after Su Yuan finished speaking the last word.

The fragments floated in mid-air, weightless, as light as foam plastic blown away by the wind.

The gravity inside the carriage suddenly returned to normal.

Wang Hu suddenly sprang up from the floor, gasping for breath. He almost choked as the air rushed into his lungs.

The small fire's data core lit up again, the garbled text on the screen disappeared, and the system restart screen appeared.

She leaned on the control panel for several seconds before she could find her voice again.

"Wh...what is that?"

Wang Hu leaned against the wall and turned to look out the car window.

His pupils suddenly contracted.

The person on the hospital bed who looks just like Su Yuan.

His complexion was already off.

It's extremely ugly.

Bluish-gray.

The relaxed, fake smile still lingered at the corner of his mouth, but it could no longer hold on. His lips were trembling very slightly, and the muscles along his jawline were taut.

He looked down at the IV catheter on the back of his hand.

The liquid flowing in the tube became extremely clear at that moment.

Gray.

It has an extremely subtle sheen of high-dimensional code.

It's exactly the same as what Su Yuan said.

"you--"

The person in the hospital bed suddenly looked up, all composure vanishing from their face.

Instead, there was an extremely twisted anger and resentment.

"Shut up!"

He sprang up from the hospital bed.

The sheet was thrown back. A plastic water glass was swept away by an elbow, hit the corner of the bedside table, bounced to the floor, and rolled twice. Water spilled onto the gray-white plastic floor, spreading quickly.

He stood barefoot on the floor, his body swaying slightly.

The back of the hospital gown was not fastened properly, leaving it open and revealing a thin back and pale skin covered with several cardiac electrode pads.

"You think exposing these things will make a difference?"

He took a step back.

He abruptly ripped the IV needle off the back of his hand with his right hand, a trickle of blood appearing from the needle tip. He then tapped the hidden compartment of the bedside table.

The hidden compartment popped open.

Inside is a black panel about the size of a palm, with densely packed physical buttons embedded in its surface. It has an extremely outdated design; the plastic casing is yellowed, and the letters on several buttons are worn away.

"Real-world physical overwrite device".

His fingers pressed against the panel. His voice was hoarse, filled with intense hysteria.

"No matter how many layers you dismantle, within this dimension, I control the real physical hardware!"

He frantically turned the knobs on the panel.

swoosh-

Extremely bright blue-white arcs of electricity burst out from the light tubes on the hospital room ceiling.

It's not an energy beam condensed from some higher-dimensional law; it's just the most primitive and violent high-voltage discharge.

Hundreds of thousands of volts of real electricity converged into three thick, blue-white bolts of lightning, piercing through the ceiling of the ward and striking the Devourer hovering in mid-air.

The moment the electric arc touched the front of the car, the dark red flesh membrane, which had already withered most of its length, was instantly burned to a crisp.

The smell of burning seeped into the carriage through the cracks in the windows.

It smells bad.

The smell of burning is extremely realistic.

Wang Hu's robotic arm hadn't finished restarting yet. Xiao Huo's control panel had just resumed operation.

The two of them didn't even have time to react.

Su Yuan stood up.

The movements are slow.

Even very slow.

He rose from the control chair, each plate of his dark gold bone armor emitting an extremely dense, fine chewing sound as he stood up.

His height of just over four meters made him appear extremely imposing in the train carriage.

He walked to the car window, which was charred black by the blue and white electric arcs.

Raise your right hand.

The nine-colored original code in the palm of his hand merged with the Earth totem at this moment, bursting out with an extremely dazzling mixed halo.

Su Yuan snapped his fingers.

Extremely crisp.

despair.

Just that one sound.

Three-colored divine fire burst forth from his fingertips.

There was no overwhelming pomp and circumstance, no grand scale covering the entire star field.

It's just a wisp of fire.

But this wisp of fire, following the blue and white arc of electricity that was striking the Devourer, went upstream.

A real electric arc is composed of a physical flow of electrons.

Electron flow has direction. It has carriers. It has conductive paths.

The Three-Colored Divine Fire does not require higher-dimensional laws as its execution environment.

Because Su Yuan's permissions were obtained at the source code level.

Source code is at a lower level than the laws of physics.

Here, he is still the highest administrator.

The three-colored divine fire rapidly flowed back along the path of the blue and white electric arc, flashing from the ceiling light tube interface into the electrical wiring inside the ward.

Extremely fast.

The person in the hospital bed didn't even have time to pull their hand away.

The overwrite device exploded first.

The palm-sized black panel split open in the middle, and the yellowish plastic casing exploded into fragments. The chips and capacitors inside turned into a wisp of extremely thin black smoke in the tri-colored flames.

Then there are the pipelines.

All the tubes inserted into the back of his hand, chest, and nasal cavity were ignited along the inner walls of the tubes by the three-colored divine fire.

The flames spread rapidly inside the transparent tube, melting and twisting the tube walls. The gray, high-dimensional code liquid vaporized and evaporated at high temperatures, emitting an extremely pungent chemical odor.

The person on the hospital bed let out a piercing scream.

It's not the kind of conceptual collapse that occurs when a higher-dimensional deity is defeated.

It is the most real, physical pain.

The intense heat from the burning pipeline directly burned his skin. Gray liquid spurted from the pipe opening, instantly causing several blisters to form on his arm.

He fell backward, his back hitting the stainless steel guardrail at the head of the bed, and the entire hospital bed was pushed half a meter by his impact.

The bed wheels scraped against the plastic floor with an extremely harsh screeching sound.

then.

A breathtaking scene unfolded.

The skin on his face began to peel off.

It wasn't caused by burns.

It means "it can't be sustained anymore".

Without the continuous infusion of gray code fluid, that meticulously crafted "realistic human" shell lost the support of underlying data.

First, it was on the forehead.

A whole patch of skin rolled down from the hairline, as if something had pushed it open from the inside. The rolled-up skin wasn't underneath the dermis.

It is a grayish-white, deformed structure with extremely regular woven patterns.

Code condensation.

Then the cheeks.

A large patch of skin beneath his left eye collapsed, revealing a grayish-white substance underneath. That substance was still wriggling, each wriggling accompanied by an extremely faint flicker of high-dimensional code.

The facial features that were originally identical to Su Yuan's are rapidly collapsing and deforming.

My jaw is crooked.

The bridge of his nose collapsed.

His entire face transformed into a mutant that was half human and half code.

The screams changed from normal human voices to hissing and crackling sounds mixed with electrical noise.

This is the true face of the chess player's remaining logic.

The last clump of obsolete code parasitizing the clone.

It doesn't even have the ability to support a complete human face.

Somewhere above the ward, in an extremely secluded location.

The red indicator lights of several miniature cameras were still flashing.

Behind the camera, somewhere far away.

In a monitoring room at the first observation station.

Seven or eight senior researchers in blue overalls were huddled in front of a row of low-profile monitoring screens. The screens displayed live footage of the ward.

The middle-aged woman leading the group was wearing goggles and had her mouth wide open.

The data tablet in her hand fell to the ground with a thud.

"The overwrite device burned out."

A bald male researcher next to me was speaking in a trembling voice.

"The physical overwrite device was burned out by virtual code."

He repeated it.

"That's impossible."

Another young researcher held his head in his hands.

"Virtual code lacks the ability to interact at the physical level. This is a fundamental axiom. There can be no exceptions to fundamental axioms."

The middle-aged woman bent down to pick up the data tablet, her hands trembling.

The image of the burner on the screen was magnified to its maximum.

The spectral analysis results of the flame were displayed on the auxiliary screen next to it.

That's not a normal chemical combustion spectrum.

Three energy bands that do not belong to any known physical system are interspersed in the standard flame spectrum, making them extremely prominent.

"It's burning the physical motherboard with code."

The bald researcher's voice was completely off-key.

"Our physical motherboard was burned out by a piece of virtual code."

The monitoring room fell into a deathly silence.

Then someone ran away.

He pushed open the door and rushed into the hallway.

The soles of the shoes made a rapid thumping sound on the plastic floor.

In the ward.

Su Yuan kicked and shattered the sterile glass.

The entire floor-to-ceiling window shattered into dust under his dark gold combat boots, shards of glass flying out and tracing countless fine arcs under the light.

The four-meter-tall, dark gold body fell from mid-air, its feet landing firmly on the plastic floor of the ward.

Bang.

A very dull sound.

The floor showed clear dents under his weight.

It's not a conceptual dent.

It's not a code dent.

It's physical. Real, tangible dents left by a four-meter-tall, pure, dark gold body.

Su Yuan's leather boots trod across the plastic floor, crunching over the broken pieces of the bedside table and the spilled water, as he walked toward the hospital bed.

Every step was extremely steady.

When I got to the bedside, the deformed body that had lost half of its face was still wriggling.

The grayish-white code core was exposed to the air, its writhing frequency decreasing. Large fragments of detached "human skin" were scattered all around, mixed with melted and deformed pipe remnants and charred plastic debris.

Su Yuan glanced down at it.

Without any emotional fluctuation.

It's like looking at a pile of leftover food that has been accidentally spilled on the ground.

He lifted his foot.

The dark gold soles of the combat boots fell cleanly to the ground.

Click.

The still-wriggling, grayish-white core was crushed.

It was crushed into powder.

Grayish-white powder seeped from the sole of the boot and drifted down extremely slowly under the light.

that's it.

The last vestige of logic remaining in the chess player.

It vanished completely amidst the utterly silent crushing sound.

There was no explosion. There was no shockwave. There was no overwhelming vibration of the laws of nature.

It was crushed.

It's about the same as stepping on a cockroach.

The silence lasted for about two seconds.

Then, the siren on the Devourer went off.

It's not the alarm inside the car.

It was an intrusion signal emitted by the Devourer, spreading throughout the building at a plague-like speed along the physical network ports, power lines, and data fiber optic cables of the ward.

Su Yuan stood in the center of the ward, his boots crunching through the gray-white powder, quietly listening to the piercing alarms that blared in the distance.

First, there's the corridor outside this ward.

Then there's the connecting corridor at the end of the main corridor.

Then there's the connecting corridor leading to the main building.

One floor. Two floors. Five floors. Twelve floors.

When the alarm lights on each floor came on, you could hear very clear human screams.

Footsteps.

The sound of running footsteps.

The clanging sound of metal tools falling to the ground.

The emergency broadcast system activated automatically, and a cold female voice looped throughout the building: "Entire station on high alert. Entire station on high alert. All personnel evacuate Zone B. Repeat, all personnel evacuate Zone B."

The broadcast echoed through the empty corridor, mingling with the sounds of hurried footsteps and shouts.

Blood-red warning lights lit up from the far end of the corridor, one after another, spreading rapidly in this direction.

The entire first observation station.

This is a massive reality research facility hidden in a dimensional mezzanine.

At this moment, they were plunged into unprecedented and complete chaos.

Su Yuan stood amidst the shattered glass and debris scattered on the ground.

The unsteady fluorescent light tube overhead was still hissing.

The lights flickered, illuminating the outline of his dark gold bone armor and casting a shadow of varying lengths on the plastic floor.

He glanced down at the grayish-white powder on the soles of his boots, then rubbed the soles of his boots against the metal railing of the hospital bed.

Then he heard footsteps.

It wasn't the kind of panicked escape.

It was an extremely smooth, even, clattering sound of hard leather shoes stepping on a plastic surface.

It came from behind that incredibly heavy, explosion-proof metal door at the far end of the ward.

The dull sound of gears meshing rang out extremely slowly.

Click. Click. Click.

One lap. Two laps. Three laps.

The door lock is released.

The door was pushed open very gently.

The corridor light shining through the crack in the door was blood red, casting a dark red hue on the person who entered, giving his well-tailored white coat a dark red hue.

The man was thin, with narrow shoulders and a ramrod-straight back. His white lab coat was faded but wrinkle-free, and every button was neatly fastened. A reflective metal nameplate with engravings was pinned to his chest.

"Chief of the First Observatory"

He walked into the ward, his leather shoes making a very faint crunching sound as they stepped on the broken glass.

His gaze swept over the wreckage scattered on the ground.

Scanned over the burnt-out overprinter.

Sweep over the melted and deformed pipe debris.

The light swept across the four-meter-tall, dark gold tyrant whose boots were covered in grayish-white powder.

His expression remained unchanged.

He pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses, the lenses reflecting the light from the blood-red corridor lamps.

"001".

His tone was so flat it sent chills down your spine.

"Now that we've taken over that clone..."

He tilted his head slightly, looking at Su Yuan from above his glasses.

"Have you ever felt... that something that doesn't belong to you has appeared in your mind?"