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

The sound disappeared the instant the scarlet progress bar reached 100%.

It's not quiet.

This means that the sound waves stop propagating in a physical sense.

Inside the carriage, Wang Hu was speaking, his mouth still open, his throat still vibrating, but the air no longer carried any vibration frequency. The data stream that was still jumping on the small fire control panel froze completely, and the pixels on the screen were fixed in place, even the refresh stopped.

Then comes water.

The few drops of water that splashed up when Su Yuan's boots crushed the stationmaster were originally falling down.

It is now hovering in mid-air.

It stopped moving.

Round, powdery water droplets hung in the air, seemingly beyond the reach of gravity.

This is not time frozen.

Su Yuan's tricolored vertical pupils captured something more fundamental—the physical constants themselves were malfunctioning. The gravitational constant, the speed of light, and Planck's constant—these fundamental values ​​that underpin the operation of the real world—had all shifted at the point when "000" was fully hatched.

It wasn't a drastic shift.

It is an extremely subtle offset, accurate to more than twenty decimal places.

However, such a precise alteration is enough to bring the entire operating logic of the physical world to a standstill.

The air has thickened.

This isn't a metaphor. It really did thicken. The van der Waals forces between nitrogen and oxygen molecules increased abruptly due to a shift in the constant, and the gas began to behave more like a liquid. With each breath, Su Yuan had to force that viscous air into his alveoli using his chest muscles.

Wang Hu's robotic arm emitted an extremely strange sound.

It's not gear meshing, and it's not hydraulically driven.

It is the metal itself that is crying out.

The robotic arm, which had been restored for less than five minutes, was now being forcibly polarized by an invisible magnetic field. The threads of the bolts were deforming at the microscopic level, and the welds of the connecting arms were cracking with gaps the thickness of a hair. Coolant was seeping out from the gaps and flowing down the metal shell.

Wang Hu knelt on the ground, his intact left hand gripping the seam of the floorboards tightly. His chest heaved violently, each breath drawn out and strained, emitting a muffled wheezing sound from his throat.

A small fire is worse.

Her data core's interaction with the physical world depends on the electromagnetic constant. Now that the electromagnetic constant is off, her core's operating frequency is directly detuned. Her golden pupils flashed wildly seven or eight times, then dimmed into an extremely morbid dark orange.

Its tail drooped beside the chair leg, its tip twitching slightly.

The holographic panel on the control panel was lit up with its last glimmer of light.

The pop-up notification box in the corner of the screen only had four words left, red and flashing.

"The constant has lost its anchor."

Only one person remained still in the entire carriage.

Su Yuan leaned back in the control chair.

The posture was exactly the same as thirty seconds ago. The left leg was crossed over the right, and the fingers of the right hand rested on the edge of the armrest. Each plate of the dark gold bone armor was subjected to microscopic distortions caused by the shifted physical constants. Occasionally, an extremely fine stress line would flash across the armor surface, but the overall structure remained completely unchanged.

He didn't even frown.

The three-colored vertical pupils stared at the direction of the carriage ceiling, piercing through the steel plates, through the building ruins above the ward, through the atmosphere, and "saw" all the way to the extremely distant deep space.

There's something moving there.

Su Yuan looked at it for three seconds.

Deep inside the chest cavity, the newly grown "physical stomach" started up on its own.

There was no warning whatsoever.

There was no overwhelming spread of the three-colored divine fire, nor the violent unfolding of the inner universe. The gravitational folds of the stomach quietly opened a tiny suction port, beginning to feed on the abnormal physical fluctuations permeating the interior of the carriage.

The process of devouring was completely silent.

It's all about eating.

The shifted physical constants in the air were peeled away bit by bit, rolled into Su Yuan's chest cavity through the airflow channels of his breathing, fell into the gravitational folds of his stomach, and were crushed and digested.

An extremely faint, dark golden glow emanated from the gaps in Su Yuan's chest armor. It flashed briefly and then disappeared.

The water droplets that had been suspended in mid-air fell to the ground with a patter.

The sound waves are back.

The viscous feeling in the air subsided. Gravity returned to normal.

Wang Hu suddenly sprang halfway up from the floor, gasping for breath. The exhilarating rush of air into his lungs made him tremble twice, almost losing his balance.

Xiao Huo's golden pupils lit up again, the data stream on the control panel resumed its activity, and the holographic panel flashed with a restart screen.

She lay on the table for several seconds to catch her breath, her voice strained.

"What... what was that just now?"

Su Yuan did not answer her.

He was looking at a holographic map.

A scarlet 100% progress bar occupied the very core of the map, pulsating with extremely regular light pulses. With each pulse, Su Yuan could sense something incredibly massive breathing somewhere in the far reaches of deep space.

Su Yuan stared at that number.

The corners of his mouth slowly stretched open.

It's not a laugh.

It was the kind of extremely cruel, sinister grin that only appeared before he made his move. His teeth were slightly misaligned, and the eerie light emanating from his dark gold bone armor illuminated his jawline, casting a deep shadow.

"The plates for the main course."

His voice was low and flat.

"It's finally served."

Wang Hu's neck suddenly tensed up.

He knew that expression all too well. Every time Su Yuan showed that smile, a lot of things were about to die.

The holographic map didn't give Su Yuan much time to savor this anticipation.

The edges of the map suddenly lit up.

A dense array of dark blue triangular cursors emerged from the upper right corner of the map, so numerous that the entire edge area became a dark blue patch. Each triangular cursor was accompanied by an extremely clear physical signal characteristic code.

Xiao Huo's fingers flew across the control panel.

"Fleet signal!"

Her voice rose half a tone.

"The main near-Earth orbit fleet of the Pan-Stellar Human Defense Line!"

The deep blue cursors on the holographic map broke into neat, independent formations, unfolding a standard encirclement and annihilation formation. The flagship was in the center, with destroyer squadrons flanking it on both sides, and a heavy orbital platform behind it.

The status bars for all cursors simultaneously turned scarlet red.

"Divine Punishment Order." Little Fire's golden pupils reflected the screen filled with red. "Highest level. Skipping all warning procedures and buffer periods, proceeding directly to the final strike process."

Su Yuan glanced at the dense array of fleet cursors on the map.

Just one glance.

Then he looked away and continued to stare at the scarlet 100% in the center.

The sky outside the train carriage has changed.

The wasteland planet's sickly purplish-red cloud layer was torn apart from the outside. This wasn't a meteorological cloud break; rather, an extremely powerful beam of directed energy pierced directly through the troposphere from near-Earth orbit.

Blinding light poured down from the cracks in the clouds.

Scarlet.

Dozens of laser sight lines, each five meters thick, pierced through the atmosphere, burning water molecules in the air to form white steam trails that converged precisely on the coordinates of the ruins of the first observation station.

The scorching sunlight cast shadows on the floor of the ruined ward, making the concrete crackle and pop. The temperature soared to over 100 degrees Celsius in a very short time.

The countdown numbers appeared in the corner of the holographic map.

10.

9.

8.

Wang Hu rushed to the car window and looked up through the cracked glass.

Above the sky, a massive metallic outline could be seen at the edge of a crack in the clouds. It was the hull of an orbital capital ship, reflecting starlight, its cold, industrial gray paint appearing and disappearing in the high atmosphere.

The gun barrels in the center of the ship's hull are open.

Not one.

There are dozens.

Each cannon muzzle was over thirty meters in diameter, and the confinement magnetic rings lining the inner walls were spinning rapidly, emitting an extremely dull, low-frequency resonance. The vibrations traveled through the atmosphere to the ground, making the rubble and debris beneath their feet tremble.

"Antimatter railgun".

Wang Hu's voice crackled.

"Purely physical mass-energy conversion. Not a conceptual weapon."

His scalp tingled. The hairs on his entire intact left arm stood on end.

He had withstood far too many attacks from higher dimensions. Causality annihilation, dimensional collapse, conceptual stripping. No matter how terrifying those things were, Su Yuan's three-color laws always had a way to resolve them.

But this time is different.

This is purely physical.

The annihilation reaction between antimatter and matter is a 100% mass-energy conversion, without any conceptual gimmicks. The energy release of one gram of antimatter is equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. Railguns are loaded with antimatter warheads measured in tons.

What rule can you use to deny something like this?

Physics is physics. E equals mc², which is the most indisputable ironclad law of the universe.

Around the ruins of the hospital ward.

The dozens of special mechs that had just been taken over by Su Yuan and were kneeling on the ground all crashed completely the moment the crimson sights were illuminated.

It wasn't breached by Su Yuan's overwritten code. The mech's own security protocol detected the antimatter weapon's lock signal, directly triggering the underlying escape mechanism. However, the ejection command conflicted with Su Yuan's overwritten "Loyalty 001" command; the two sets of code clashed on the motherboard, causing it to burn out.

Engine oil and coolant gushed from the joints of every mech. The dark gray steel behemoths convulsed and twitched wildly amidst shattered glass and debris. The hydraulic joints bent and stretched at completely disordered frequencies, emitting extremely eerie metallic screams.

Three mechs crashed to the ground, still twitching, their metal knees slamming into the concrete and creating dents.

7.

6.

5.

Xiao Huo's ten fingers were embedded in the edge of the control panel, and his fingertips were white.

"Master! Shield? Should we activate the shield?"

Su Yuan didn't look at her.

He leaned back in his chair and tapped the armrest with his right hand.

despair.

Just for a moment.

Extremely relaxed.

4.

3.

2.

On the track, the confinement magnetic rings inside dozens of antimatter cannons reached their critical rotation speed. The vacuum channels inside the cannons were stretched to their theoretical limit by the extreme magnetic field, and the antimatter warheads slid from the storage compartment into the acceleration track, maintaining a state of complete isolation from matter under the confinement of the magnetic field.

1.

0.

light.

Extremely pure, white, and colorless azure light poured down from the sky.

Dozens of beams of antimatter destruction.

Each channel is ten meters wide.

As the beam of light passed through the atmosphere, air molecules along its path were directly ionized, forming a plasma channel. The temperature instantly soared to millions of degrees. The air within a radius of hundreds of meters around the beam of light was evacuated—not pushed away, but directly converted into a plasma state, and the vacuum region expanded rapidly around the beam of light.

The ruins had already begun to melt a second before the beam of light hit.

Cement, steel bars, shattered glass, and mecha wreckage. The surfaces of all solid materials liquefied instantly under radiant preheating, turning into an extremely thin, orange-red molten film.

The ground was shaking.

It wasn't an earthquake.

It is the final groan of the Earth's crustal plates, which are about to be completely rewritten by the antimatter annihilation reaction.

The temperature inside the carriage rose sharply.

Beads of sweat appeared on Wang Hu's forehead.

The small fire control panel issued an overheat alarm.

Then Su Yuan stood up.

The movements were slow, even sluggish.

The dark gold body, over four meters tall, rose from the main control chair, the bone armor leaves emitting a dense, grinding sound as they did so.

He walked toward the car door.

Press the door handle with your right hand.

It was pushed open.

A wave of heat hit us.

The temperature sensor overloaded and burned out instantly. The sealing strips along the edges of the carriage door frame emitted pungent white smoke under the high temperature.

Su Yuan stepped out.

The dark gold boots stepped onto the semi-molten ground, leaving a deep dent in the soles. Orange-red lava was squeezed out from the edges of the dent, flowing onto the dark gold armor and hissing.

He stood directly beneath the beams of light.

look up.

Dozens of azure beams cast extremely dazzling reflections in his tricolored vertical pupils.

Su Yuan opened his arms.

The dark gold bone armor on his chest suddenly cracked open.

It didn't shatter. It opened up on its own.

The armor plates folded back from the midline to both sides, revealing the chest skin beneath, already covered with dark gold fire patterns. Beneath the skin, the gravitational folds of the physical stomach were clearly visible.

The gravitational folds opened up a gap.

It was thousands of times larger than the mouths that had deviated from the physical constants when they were eaten before.

The dark golden gravitational vortex expanded outward from the core of Su Yuan's chest cavity, growing from half a meter to three meters to ten meters to thirty meters in diameter, and expanding to nearly one hundred meters in just two seconds.

Physically enormous mouth.

An ingesting organ composed purely of gravitational folds and layers of physical energy compression.

It lacks the support of higher-dimensional laws and the conceptual rhetoric of the Three-Colored Divine Fire.

It's just a stomach.

A stomach capable of digesting real physical energy.

The first beam of antimatter light blasted into the gravitational vortex.

There was no explosion.

The moment the tip of the light beam touches the edge of the gravitational vortex, its trajectory is bent by the extreme gravitational field, and the straight light beam begins to spiral, rapidly spinning inward along the lines of the gravitational folds.

Antimatter is compressed, stretched, and crushed into the most basic quark-gluon plasma state in the gravitational field. Then, its energy is stripped away layer by layer by the gravitationally folded walls and poured into Su Yuan's physical stomach.

The second. The third. The fifth. The tenth.

Dozens of antimatter destruction beams, each ten meters thick, were all firmly sucked in by the dark golden gravitational vortex.

The speed at which energy was injected was terrifying.

Su Yuan's dark gold bone armor began to glow red. This wasn't a conceptual color change, but rather the physical heat radiation generated by the metal under extreme energy impact. The temperature of the armor surface soared to over two thousand degrees, and the edges began to emit a dark red visible light.

But the bone armor did not soften.

The enhanced patterns that regrowed after the terminal illness anchor was digested withstood the physical impact of the antimatter annihilation energy.

Su Yuan stood in the very center of the ruins.

The four-meter-tall dark gold body remained inexplicably stable right in the middle of dozens of destructive beams of light.

The ground beneath his feet had completely melted, and he stood in a pool of orange-red lava, which, under the edge effect of the gravitational vortex, had formed an extremely regular circular depression.

The beam of light continued to pour down.

The barrel temperature on the track had exceeded the safety limit, but the command system ordered "uninterrupted firing until the target coordinates physically disappear." The ammunition supply mechanism was operating at full capacity, and warheads from the antimatter storage compartment were being pushed into the acceleration track one after another.

Su Yuan ate them all.

Low Earth orbit.

Inside the command center of the first strike group of the Pan-Starfield Defense Line, the flagship "Iron Wall".

The commander-in-chief gripped the edge of the tactical platform tightly with both hands. His arms were taut and straight, and his knuckles were white.

Before him was a three-meter-wide main tactical screen. The screen displayed real-time physical monitoring data of the strike coordinates.

The energy feedback chart should present a standard annihilation characteristic curve—a gamma-ray burst generated by mass-energy conversion after antimatter collides with matter, followed by a shock wave diffusion model and a thermal radiation decay curve.

But the curve on the screen is flat from beginning to end.

It's not zero.

It means "completely absorbed".

Gamma-ray burst value: 0.

Shock wave detection: None.

Thermal radiation overflow: lower than ambient background noise.

The physical feedback of all the antimatter energy poured out upon reaching the target coordinates is—nothing.

It's like throwing a few pebbles into a black hole.

Not even a splash.

"What happened?"

The commander-in-chief's voice was extremely restrained, but his hands were trembling.

The adjutants sprang up from their posts and crowded in front of the strike assessment terminal, their fingers clattering across the keyboard.

"The data is correct." A young tactical officer stared at the numbers on the screen, his throat dry. "Cross-checking of the three physical monitoring radars, the results are consistent. The energy was completely absorbed. Repeat, completely absorbed."

"impossible."

An elderly staff officer with gray hair walked up to the screen, bent down, and leaned closer to look.

"Antimatter annihilation is a 100% mass-energy conversion. E equals mc². This is the most fundamental physical law of the universe. Energy cannot disappear into nothingness. The law of conservation does not allow this to happen."

He turned to look at his adjutants.

"Is the radar being jammed?"

The adjutant shook his head. "Simultaneous observations by the physical optics system yielded consistent results. No annihilation flash was detected in the target coordinate region as expected."

The old staff officer pushed up his reading glasses on the bridge of his nose, and his lips trembled slightly.

The weapons officer at the other terminal suddenly spoke. His voice was weak.

"Sir, the gun barrel temperature has exceeded the safe level by 300%. If we continue firing, the ship's structure will be damaged."

"Stop." The commander-in-chief finally uttered a single word.

"Cease fire."

He rested his hands on the tactical platform, his head bowed. His gray hair obscured half his face.

There was a three-second silence in the command room.

The only sound was the hum of the equipment's cooling fan.

The ruins of the hospital ward.

The moment the last beam of light was swallowed by the physical stomach, Su Yuan closed his eyes.

The gravitational vortex slowly contracted.

The temperature of the dark gold bone armor began to drop from over two thousand degrees, and the dark red heat radiation on the armor surface gradually faded, restoring its original dark gold color.

Inside the chest cavity, the physical stomach is efficiently digesting the antimatter annihilation energy. Gravitational folds repeatedly knead the high-temperature plasma like dough, purifying, compressing, and recoding the energy.

During the digestion process, Su Yuan's analytical vision of the One Who Unifies All Things automatically began a microscopic dissection of this batch of energy.

Then he saw something that shouldn't have been there.

Deep within those standard antimatter annihilation energies, there are extremely small amounts of anomalous frequency signals.

It does not belong to antimatter.

It does not belong to any known physical energy form.

Grayish-white.

It had almost the same high-dimensional code texture as the ones he had seen in the Earth's core servers, but it was rougher, more primitive, and more savage.

The 000 frequency band.

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils snapped open.

The pupils contracted to their limit.

"You're using someone else to do your dirty work?"

He whispered four words. The corners of his mouth changed from a straight line to an extremely dangerous curve.

Those 000 assimilation frequency bands mixed in with antimatter energy are extremely well hidden. If it weren't for the fact that Su Yuan's newly evolved physical stomach has microscopic-level digestive and filtering capabilities, these frequency bands would have been digested and absorbed along with the energy, and then slowly taken root and sprouted in his body.

To test the waters.

An extremely insidious test.

Number 000 used the antimatter cannon of the Pan-Starfield Defense Line as a transport vehicle, packed his assimilation seed into physical energy, and hitched a ride.

Su Yuan sneered.

The corner of his mouth was only pulled up halfway, and the dark golden light shining through the gap between his clenched teeth was extremely cold.

He separated those grayish-white assimilation bands from the digestive system and crushed them.

Then mix the crushed residue with the pure energy of the antimatter that has just been digested.

I mixed it up.

He added his own three-colored divine fire.

I mixed it again.

Finally, the nine-color original code was also incorporated.

An extremely concentrated mass of violent energy, transcending both physical dimensions and high-dimensional code systems, condensed and took shape in Su Yuan's right palm.

Su Yuan raised his head.

Looking at the still-smoking gun barrels in the sky.

He pulled his right hand back half a step.

The movements are extremely simple. It's just pulling hands and pushing hands.

It's similar to a chest pass in basketball.

But this push.

A beam of light, a mixture of dark gold and light, exploded from the palm of his hand.

Its thickness far exceeds that of the destructive beams of those antimatter railguns.

The colors were extremely bizarre. The dark gold base was swirled with patterns of three-colored divine fire and the flowing light of nine-colored original codes, as well as the remnants of the 000 assimilation frequency band that had been crushed and reassembled—those gray-white fragments rolled on the surface of the light pillar, giving the entire pillar an extremely turbulent and unstable texture.

A beam of light was emitted from the ground.

Against the force of gravity.

Passing through the plasma tunnel. Passing through the ionized atmosphere. Passing through the troposphere and stratosphere.

It moves so fast that even light has to give way.

The target coordinates are—all orbital warships that have fired their cannons.

In the command room of the flagship "Ironwall", the images on the optical observation screens were still in standby mode after the "cease fire" command was issued.

The weapons officer is performing the cooling procedure.

The old staff officer was still bent over, peering at the screen to study the energy feedback data.

The commander-in-chief's hands were still resting on the tactical platform.

Then the optical observation screen lit up.

It was so bright that everyone's pupils didn't even have time to contract.

An extremely brief period of white.

Then the screen disappeared.

It's not a black screen.

The physical crystal layer of the entire optical observation screen was directly burned through by the light radiation, exploding into dust from the inside out, with fragments and smoke flying all over the command room.

Immediately afterwards, there was a vibration.

It was not the slight swaying that occurs during normal ship operation.

It was a structural fracture and tremor caused by something piercing through the entire two-kilometer-long orbital flagship from beginning to end.

The dark gold beam of light passed through the "Iron Wall" in less than 0.01 seconds.

A large circular hole with a diameter of over two hundred meters was cut in the very center of the ship's hull.

The edges of the hole were extremely smooth. Metal armor, structural keel, ammunition storage compartments, personnel compartments—all the materials that came into contact with the beam of light vaporized instantly, leaving not even a trace.

The two sections of the Ironwall separated extremely slowly in space.

The air that rushed out from the fracture of the main structural keel rapidly expanded in the vacuum into a white cloud of ice crystals, mixed with yellow hydraulic oil mist and red fire extinguishing agent spray.

Someone was thrown out of the ship by the pressure difference through the breach in the cross section, tumbling in space and drifting further and further away.

But the Ironwall was not the worst off.

The beam of light wasn't fired once.

It precisely revisited the coordinates of each gun muzzle that had fired, following the physical trajectory of the previous shots fired by the railgun corps.

First-order orbital strike platform. 2,300 tons.

The moment the beam of light passed through the antimatter storage chamber, the remaining antimatter warheads came into contact with the orthoma wall after losing their confinement magnetic field.

exploded.

A standard antimatter sympathetic detonation.

The energy release is equivalent to the total annual power generation of a medium-sized city concentrated in 0.001 seconds.

The strike platform vanished completely in a flash. Not even a fragment was found. Only a rapidly expanding sphere of plasma remained, cooling and dissipating extremely slowly in the vacuum of near-Earth orbit.

Second platform. Third platform. Fifth. Eighth. Twelfth.

The interval between each flash should not exceed 0.3 seconds.

In near-Earth orbit, dozens of bright spots lit up and went out in a very short period of time.

Looking up from the ground—

It looked like someone was setting off fireworks in the sky.

Dazzling. Silent. Continuous.

Every "firework" is the funeral of an orbital warship.

Inside the rear half of the flagship "Ironwall".

The commander-in-chief slumped onto the tactical platform.

His chair had already overturned. He was thrown onto the tactical platform by the blast wave, his buttocks slamming against the metal frame, making him wince in pain.

All the lights in the command room went out, with only the emergency lights emitting a dim red glow.

The star chart on the tactical platform still had a sliver of light remaining.

He watched as the fleet formation cursors on the star map disappeared one by one.

First orbital platform – signal lost.

Second orbital platform – signal lost.

Third – signal loss.

Signal lost. Signal lost. Signal lost. Signal lost. Signal lost.

The organization cursor for half a fleet was cleared to zero in less than ten seconds.

The commander-in-chief's mouth was open.

All the instructions were stuck in his throat.

retreat.

He wanted to say retreat.

The lips are moving. The tongue is moving. The vocal cords are vibrating.

But my throat just can't produce a complete syllable.

The air was extremely quiet for about two seconds.

Then the communication channel exploded.

The communication channels of all the surviving ships were simultaneously flooded with a dense, mixed-up cacophony of screams and howls.

"Seventh Squadron completely wiped out! Completely wiped out! No survivor reports!"

"Oh my god—what is that—"

"U-turn! U-turn! U-turn! U-turn! Engine at full power!"

"The flagship phone is broken! The flagship phone is broken! The flagship phone is broken!"

The old staff officer lay on the ground.

Metal shards grazed his forehead, blood trickling down his nose and into his mouth, filling it with the taste of rust.

His reading glasses were missing a single temple hanging from his ear; the lenses were broken and had several cracks.

He looked through the shattered lens at the fleet cursor that was still disappearing.

His lips were trembling.

The adjutant crawled out from under the collapsed equipment, his face covered in blood, and rushed to the tactical platform clutching the communications terminal, his voice hoarse and distorted.

"Sir! Give the order! Give the order to retreat!"

The commander-in-chief finally slid down from the tactical platform.

My legs were wobbling, and I barely managed to stay upright by holding onto the edge of the table. Only one sentence kept playing in my mind on repeat.

It was completely absorbed.

It was completely absorbed.

It was completely absorbed.

Then it was completely spat back.

Wasteland planet, outside the atmosphere.

The dark gold mixed light beam only began to decay after completing the final round of precise revisit.

However, the traces left behind after the beam of light dissipated did not disappear.

In near-Earth orbit, the regions of space swept by the beams of light left behind extremely dense clouds of dark golden particles. These particles slowly diffused under the influence of the solar wind, but the direction of diffusion was extremely strange—not random, but orderly arranged along the magnetic field lines of the wasteland planet.

Then they connected.

Dark gold particles formed a complete halo around the outer edge of the atmosphere.

Extremely large.

Looking up from the ground, the halo's angular diameter covers nearly a quarter of the sky.

Dark gold.

It carries the afterglow of three-colored patterns and nine-colored original code.

Inside the halo, extremely violent electromagnetic waves broadcast across the entire hemisphere using the halo as an antenna. These electromagnetic waves produce visible-light-level interference effects within the atmosphere.

"001".

Three words.

It was projected onto the entire hemisphere.

Dark gold.

It is so large that you can see the poles from the equator.

On the streets of a wasteland city.

A homeless man rummaging through a pile of garbage looked up.

He was still clutching half a rusty can in his hand. His mouth was open, and juice from the can was dripping from the corner of his mouth.

He looked at the three characters in the sky that were bigger than the sky itself.

My knees buckled.

The can fell.

He knelt down.

On a street corner not far away, three heavily armed wasteland thugs leaned against a modified vehicle. Guns were still slung over their shoulders, and the scars on their faces still bore a menacing look.

They looked up for five seconds.

The first man's gun slipped from his shoulder and hit the ground.

The second person collapsed onto the vehicle's footrest.

The third person knelt down.

The wasteland city center.

The deepest part of the underground air-raid shelter is a top-level bunker made of reinforced concrete, designed to withstand a direct hit from a 500-ton nuclear bomb.

A group of well-dressed but pale-faced middle-aged people sat around a long conference table.

They are the core high-ranking members of the ruling class in the wasteland region.

The reinforced layer at the top of the bunker blocked out all sound waves and vibrations, but not electromagnetic waves. The communication terminal in the center of the conference table automatically received the forced broadcast signal sent by Su Yuan.

The terminal screen suddenly lit up, displaying real-time images of the atmosphere reflected back from the debris of an orbiting satellite.

Dark gold halo.

The letter "001" is displayed.

And in the corner of the screen, there are those still expanding plasma spheres representing the orbital fleet's self-destruction.

When the thin man with a monocle on the far left of the conference table stood up, his chair tipped backward, but he didn't catch it.

He took three steps along the conference table and then stopped.

Both knees bent.

He knelt on the cold cement floor.

The people around him were watching him.

Then the second one.

The third.

The sound of chairs being pushed over echoed throughout the room.

A dozen seconds later, all the chairs next to the long conference table inside the bunker were empty. Everyone was kneeling on the ground on either side of the table.

Further away.

The physical gravitational waves emitted by the halo spread outward at the speed of light.

The edge outpost of the first nearby galaxy received the gravitational wave signal 97 seconds later.

After decoding the signal, the officer on duty at the outpost stared at the screen for about ten seconds.

Then he sounded the highest level of alarm for the entire station.

Second nearest galaxy. Third nearest galaxy.

The spread of gravitational waves will not stop. The signals of submission will travel even further.

Inside the Desolate Wasteland train carriage.

Su Yuan walked back from outside the car.

The boots were covered with a layer of solidified orange-red lava, leaving a faint mark on the floor with each step.

He sat back in the control chair.

The dark gold bone armor on his chest slowly closed, the armor plates snapping together with a soft clicking sound.

His mouth was slightly open.

A breath of hot, grayish-red turbid air escaped from his mouth.

The stale air swirled in the air for a few moments before dissipating, carrying an extremely strong, hot, metallic smell.

It's digested.

Just then, the image on the holographic map changed.

The scarlet "000" coordinate point began to distort.

It's not a signal malfunction. It's that the coordinates themselves have deformed in physical space. The edge of the scarlet cursor looks like it's being pushed outwards from the inside by something, turning into an extremely irregular shape.

Then a crack appeared right in the center of the cursor.

A line extended from the gap.

It is not a holographic projection.

It is a real physical entity that transcends the projection plane.

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils suddenly locked on.

The line pierced through the holographic projection surface, hovered in the air of the carriage, and extended extremely slowly toward the window of the Devourer.

The background color is grayish-white.

The surface is covered with extremely dense high-dimensional code patterns.

But dark red liquid was flowing through the gaps in the patterns.

It's not a visual effect generated by code.

is blood.

Real, physically real blood with a rusty smell.

A phantom umbilical cord woven from a mixture of high-dimensional code and real flesh and blood.

It traversed deep space.

The coordinates of "000" extend directly to the outside of the Devourer's window at this moment.

Su Yuan did not interrupt it.

He stood up and walked to the car window.

He reached his right hand through the gap in the half-broken car window.

Spread your five fingers.

I grasped the illusory image of the umbilical cord.

The texture was extremely complex. The code part was slippery and cold, while the flesh part was warm and sticky. The two textures intertwined in Su Yuan's palm, as if something was struggling and relying on him.

Su Yuan originally thought he was going to hear something.

Arrogance. Declaration of war. Ridicule.

Any arrogant opening he anticipated from a newly born deity.

But what traveled through the umbilical cord to his mind was not those things.

It's a sound.

Extremely weak.

Mixed with a lot of electrical noise and microphone noise from data transmission, it was intermittent, and each word seemed to be retrieved from the bottom of extremely deep water, unclear and extremely difficult to understand.

But Su Yuan heard it clearly.

I heard every single word clearly.

"Run... don't worry about me..."

Su Yuan's fingers tightened suddenly.

The dark gold armor plates made a crisp cracking sound under extreme gripping force.

It wasn't a single piece broken; rather, the texture on the surface of the armor plate was pinched into a spiderweb-like pattern of cracks.

His breath hitched for a moment.

The emotions churning within the tricolored vertical pupils were extremely complex. Murderous intent, pain, coldness, and burning heat were all mixed together, compressed into a concentration that words could not describe.

That was the voice of his closest relative.

It wasn't a forgery by the chess player. It wasn't a copy of the system.

It was the true soul that he had searched for all the way, that had been used as fuel in the project of creating a god.

It did not dissipate.

still alive.

Living inside the newly hatched "000".

It was used as the deepest living power source.

The carriage was extremely quiet.

Wang Hu leaned against the wall, too afraid to move. He saw the new cracks on Su Yuan's fingers, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

Xiao Huo's golden pupils reflected Su Yuan's back, his lips were tightly pursed, and his ten fingers were gripping the edge of the control panel.

Then the holographic map flashed red.

It was blindingly bright.

After the red light faded, something new appeared on the holographic screen.

Beside that grayish-white umbilical cord phantom, a flight path appeared out of thin air.

The route icon is not a standard navigation path symbol.

It's a skeleton.

Countless miniature, white skeletal icons are linked end to end, forming a winding warp path. Starting from the current coordinates of the Devourer, it will traverse three standard star systems and arrive at coordinates "000".

Four words popped up at the end of the flight path.

Blood red.

It's flashing.

"The hunting grounds are open."

Su Yuan released his grip on the illusory umbilical cord.

The phantom dissipated extremely slowly after contact was lost, the grayish-white code fragments and dark red blood droplets mixed together and drifted into the air outside the car window.

Su Yuan turned around.

The tricolored vertical pupils moved away from the reflection in the car window and landed on Xiao Huo.

"Small fire."

"exist!"

"Promote the entire operation."

Su Yuan's voice was extremely low and flat.

Every word was filled with an extremely intense killing intent.

"Go and cut open that freak's stomach."

Xiao Huo's ten fingers slammed onto the control panel, and all the thrusters ignited simultaneously. The Devourer's nine-colored tail flames illuminated the entire ruins, and the dark golden behemoth, trailing a sky full of ashes, rose into the air and leaped into the end of the route paved with countless skeletal icons.

On the holographic map, the coordinate cursor of the Devourer moved at lightning speed, leaving a scorching dark gold trail behind it, piercing straight towards the four blood-red characters.