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

The engine's roar had changed from deafening to an extremely muffled, low-frequency hum that could only be heard through several layers of blankets. The view outside the car window was also off; it was all gray and white.

An overwhelming expanse of gray and white.

The holographic projector was still working, but the image was completely out of sync with the normal flight path's display logic. The gray-white expanse outside the window wasn't emptiness; it was something real, with physical density. The Devourer wasn't flying; it was swimming.

It was like a giant beast plunging into a deep sea piled up with corpses.

Xiao Huo's ten fingers were gripping the control panel, his teeth grinding together. Flight data was flashing wildly on the screen, every physical parameter displaying alarmingly abnormal values.

"Master, the density of external space is 46,000 times that of standard vacuum." Her golden pupils stared at the numbers, her voice squeezed out from between her teeth. "The physical constant delay rate is as high as 73%. The power output of all thrusters is severely attenuated."

Wang Hu crouched in the corner of the carriage. The robotic arm kept spewing sparks in this extremely suppressed magnetic field environment, and orange-red light spots fell onto the floor with a hissing sound, burning a row of tiny scorch marks.

He pressed his good left hand firmly against the shoulder joint of the robotic arm, and three veins bulged out on his forehead.

"What the hell is this place..." he said in a low voice, his eyes fixed on the thick, grayish-white world outside the car window.

The little fire gave him the answer.

"The remnants of a dead universe." She swallowed hard. "We're traversing the graveyard of countless destroyed universes."

Su Yuan was not in the carriage.

He stood at the very front of the vehicle. From the gaps in the dark gold bone armor plates, scorching, turbid air was being inhaled and exhaled extremely slowly and rhythmically. One breath in, one breath out. When it went in, the armor plates slightly opened; when it went out, the armor plates snapped shut and tightened.

The entire process was extremely quiet.

His three-colored vertical pupils stared straight ahead. His expression was blank. His jawline was taut, but not tense.

It's about enduring.

The grayish-white "Deep Sea" was violently cleaved open from both sides of the front of the vehicle. The sticky cosmic debris scraped against the body and left grayish-white scratches on the dark gold scales, which were then instantly dried and evaporated by the high-temperature exhaust flames of the engine.

The Devourer pushed forward for about seventeen minutes.

Something began to emerge from the grayish-white debris on both sides of the flight path.

At first, there were scattered metal fragments, twisted pipe sections, and broken alloy beams. All were covered in grayish-white rust, making it impossible to discern their original structure.

Then the fragments got bigger and bigger.

It's becoming more and more complete.

Something's getting increasingly wrong.

That wasn't ordinary wreckage.

A nearly 300-meter-tall "landmark" emerged from the greyish-white depths to the left of the course. The material was indistinguishable, somewhere between metal and organic. Its surface was covered with an extremely dense, writhing network of dark red blood vessels.

Something is flowing in the blood vessels.

It wasn't blood. It was some kind of thick liquid that emitted a faint grayish-white light.

The top of the road sign was split open, like a vertical mouth. The inside of the lips was covered with backward-pointing spikes. The mouth was breathing very slowly, opening and closing.

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils swept over it for two seconds.

The high-dimensional pressure emanating from the road sign's surface produced an extremely piercing interference noise when it touched the Devourer's dark gold scales.

Not one.

More road signs gradually appeared on both sides of the flight path. They varied in size and shape. Some resembled pillars, some arms, and some a huge vertebra, but they were all covered by that network of writhing blood vessels and emanated the same kind of oppressive energy.

The aura of number 000.

Little Fire's tail was taut in a straight line beneath the control panel, not daring to tremble even at its tip. Her golden pupils reflected the navigation icons on the holographic map. They were densely packed. The deeper they went along the flight path, the more numerous they became.

"Those things are releasing assimilation signals," she said in a low voice. "But they're being suppressed by the Devourer's domain field, so there's no real threat for now."

Further away.

Beneath the surface of the wasteland lies the deepest layer of that nuclear-resistant bunker.

The rulers, who had been kneeling on either side of the conference table, had been helped up from the ground by their subordinates. Some of their legs were still trembling.

The only operational optical satellite relay terminal inside the bunker was receiving weak signal reflections from the skeletal remains's flight path. The image was extremely blurry, but a dark golden dot of light could be seen steadily advancing through the grayish-white graveyard.

A middle-aged man in a gray military uniform leaned on the terminal table, his knuckles white. He was the only remaining supreme military commander in the western hemisphere of the wasteland.

"It really went in." His throat was parched. "Hunting Ground 000. It really went in headfirst."

No one responded to him.

Everyone stared at the dark golden dot on the screen, not daring to breathe too loudly.

Another coordinate.

Inside the remnants of the Pan-Starfield Defense Third Strike Group, in the operations command room of a light cruiser that retained its complete communication system, the duty officer amplified the signal to maximum magnification, sweat trickling down his forehead and into his eyes.

"The tracking signal has reached the instrument's limit." His voice was weak. "Deep within that route, physical constants are almost stagnant. Go any further, and even photons can't outrun a snail."

A retired officer with three stars on his epaulets took a sip of his now-cold instant coffee. The paper cup trembled slightly in his hand.

"Don't follow us." His voice was extremely tired. "We'll just be easy prey if we go in. That's a matter between gods and monsters."

Deep within the skeletal route.

The speed of the Devourer suddenly slowed down at the thirty-second minute.

It's not that there's not enough power. It's that the space in front of us suddenly contracted.

The width of the flight path was narrowing at a visible rate. The passageway, which was originally wide enough for three vehicles to pass side by side, was compressed to the point where only one vehicle could pass in just a few seconds. Grayish-white cosmic debris squeezed in from both sides, sticking to the windows and making an extremely dull squeezing sound.

The carriage creaked and groaned.

Then the flight path was completely blocked.

A colossal barrier appeared out of nowhere, blocking the way. It was blood-red, fleshy, and covered with an extremely dense network of tumor-like protrusions.

Each tumor is the size of a human head.

Each tumor has a face on it.

The same face.

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils suddenly contracted for half a second, and then returned to normal in a very short time.

That face belonged to his closest relative.

Countless. Thousands upon thousands. Covering every inch of the blood wall. Some with eyes closed, some with mouths agape, some with contorted faces. The expression on each face is frozen in a moment of extreme agony.

Then all the faces opened their eyes at the same time.

Screams erupted.

It wasn't the voice of one person. It was the simultaneous, identical, piercing howls of thousands of mouths. The sound waves penetrated the physical soundproofing of the Devourer and poured into the carriages without any attenuation.

Wang Hu jumped up.

His tiger-like eyes instantly turned bloodshot, veins bursting from the corners of his eyes. He had seen that face before. More than once. He had seen that face in the fragments of images that leaked out when Su Yuan was processing the memory drops of his closest relatives.

"——————!!" Wang Hu squeezed out an indistinct syllable. Under the extreme emotional impact, one of the hydraulic pipes of the robotic arm burst, and coolant sprayed onto the control panel.

He couldn't bear to watch.

Xiao Huo's fingers twitched on the control panel.

The screams continued. The frequency of the sound waves changed in a very short time, transforming from simple howls of pain into intermittent, extremely clear sentences.

"Help me..."

"it hurts……"

"Why didn't you come...?"

Why didn't you save me...?

Every word was spoken in the same voice. Every emotion conveyed was utterly genuine. Pain, despair, and questioning—the emotional impact pierced Su Yuan's very nerve endings with deadly precision.

As the screams echoed, extremely dense, dark red chains grew between the lumps on the blood wall.

The chains were not meant for Su Yuan.

It was driven directly at the front of the Devourer.

Causal gravitational chain.

Physical bindings with concept-locking properties.

The moment the chain's tip touched the engine of the Devourer, an extremely piercing metallic scraping sound emanated from the dark gold scales. The train's forward speed dropped to zero. It wasn't blocked; it was locked. The chain forcibly bound the train's causal path to the existence of all the "closest faces" on the blood wall—moving the train would cause the faces on the blood wall to suffer an equal amount of damage.

The mechanical voice broadcast by the system echoed along the flight path.

Extremely cold.

"Smash her, or kneel down."

in the carriage.

Wang Hu knelt on the ground, his intact left hand covering his face. Residual fluid from the robotic arm was still seeping out. His tiger-like eyes peered through his fingers at the densely packed faces of his loved ones on the holographic screen, his lips trembling several times, unable to utter a single word.

Xiao Huo's right hand hovered near the push bar. Her instincts drove her to reach for the deceleration push bar. Her fingers trembled. Her golden pupils reflected the gaping, howling faces on the blood-soaked walls.

She glanced at Su Yuan's back as he walked towards the front of the car.

I glanced at the push rod again.

The ten fingers moved three inches toward the push rod.

Separated by half a star field.

Inside the wasteland bunker, everyone stared intently at the stagnant dark gold dot on the terminal screen.

The highest-ranking commander in the gray military uniform unconsciously raised the corners of his mouth slightly. It wasn't a smile. It was the relief of surviving a disaster.

"Blood Wall." His voice was extremely low. "Number 000's causal binding trap."

A bespectacled staff officer behind him leaned over to glance at the video data and adjusted his glasses.

"This is an open conspiracy," the strategist said softly. "If we crash into it, the causal backlash will eradicate that monster from its very existence. If we stop there, the assimilation signal will penetrate the train's exterior within six minutes."

The commander's eyes darted around twice. He swallowed hard.

"So it's doomed."

The staff officer nodded.

Within the remaining monitoring nodes of the high-dimensional dark web, the few remaining low-level elders who hadn't been killed by Su Yuan's authority backlash were crammed into a makeshift observation space barely constructed from fragments of laws.

An elderly elder with a white beard stared at the blood-red wall on the screen, his withered fingers stroking his beard, tugging at the end.

"Even the wildest dog has a weakness." His lips were very thin, and he barely moved them when he spoke.

The young elder next to him chimed in.

"If it crashes into it, the causal backlash will grind it to dust. If it stops—" He pointed a finger at the steadily rising assimilation progress bar in the corner of the screen. "Six minutes."

The old elder closed his eyes and tucked his hands into his sleeves.

"Number 000's defenses are flawless."

Front of the car.

Su Yuan stood there.

The scratches on the dark gold bone armor, worn smooth by grayish-white debris, gleamed dimly under the red light of the blood wall. His tricolored vertical pupils were fixed on the densely packed faces before him.

Thousands upon thousands of his loved ones' faces.

Its mouth opened and closed, screams and cries for help mingling together, piercing through the physical barrier and reaching deep into the eardrum.

"Help me—"

"it hurts--"

"Why did you come—"

Su Yuan stared at it expressionlessly for seven seconds.

At the eighth second, the corner of his mouth twitched.

Not downwards.

It's upwards.

The arc was extremely small. So small that you needed to magnify the image tenfold to see it clearly. But the intensity of the mockery carried by that arc was enough to send chills down the spine of anyone standing face to face with him.

He turned around.

The dark gold combat boots scraped against the front armor of the vehicle with a dull thud, and the four-meter-tall figure strode back into the carriage.

Xiao Huo's finger was still hovering three inches above the deceleration lever.

Su Yuan walked to her side.

A large, dark golden hand descended from above.

His palm landed directly on the back of Xiao Huo's hand, which was preparing to slow down.

Xiao Huo froze.

Su Yuan didn't look at her. His palm, along with his fingers that were glowing with fire, gripped the pusher's head.

Push forward.

It's not about pushing it to full capacity.

It has been pushed past the maximum level.

The push rod was violently bent past the physical limiter marked with a red warning line, and the metal limit block made a piercing cracking sound under the brute force of the dark gold finger. The push rod was stuck at the 120% overload position.

The engines of the Devourer emitted a low-frequency roar unlike anything they had ever heard before, and the metal of the hull resonated horribly under the overload thrust, causing the entire cabin to tremble.

Xiao Huo raised her head. Her golden eyes were filled with complex emotions.

Su Yuan's tricolored vertical pupils were lowered as he met her gaze.

There was no wavering.

Not even a fraction.

Deep within his pupils surged a pure, cruel mockery that seeped into his very bones.

"A poor-quality specimen made from a few spilled strands of painful memories."

Su Yuan's voice wasn't loud.

"You dare use that to disgust me?"

As he finished speaking, a deep, muffled rumble resounded from his chest. It wasn't the bone armor shattering. It was his physical stomach activating on its own. The vibration of the gravitational folds opening traveled from his chest to his feet, then from his feet into the carriage floor, causing the entire train to shudder.

Su Yuansong loosened his hand from the small fire.

Turn around.

Walk towards the front of the car.

His steps were extremely steady. Each step left a faint, dark gold footprint.

He walked to the very front of the train. He raised his hands. His ten fingers came together and then spread apart in the air, the dark gold bone armor plates opening at the points where his fingers met, and the flowing light of the nine-colored original code overflowed from the gaps.

Then he suddenly pulled his hands to the sides.

The movements were extremely fierce, as if they were trying to tear something in half.

True essence surged forth from within his body. A vast amount. Refined to the extreme.

The source energy condensed and took shape along the trajectory of Su Yuan's outstretched hands. One in his left hand. One in his right hand. Two identical dark gold longswords stretched from his palms to the farthest reaches of his vision.

10,000 meters long.

Each blade is so thin it's down to the molecular level.

The surface of the blade has no superfluous light effects. It does not emit light. It does not smoke. It is devoid of any rhetorical embellishment based on conceptual rules.

It's just two knives.

But at the physical edge of the blade, the law of negation is compressed into a thin film invisible to the naked eye. That thin film serves only one purpose—to define the "cutting" with precision down to the atomic level.

It can strip away any foreign properties attached to the surface of a material.

Causal lock? That's an addendum.

Painful memories? Those are just an added bonus.

Any conceptual parasite that has been artificially welded on is nothing more than dead skin that can be cleanly and neatly sliced ​​off in front of these two knives.

The Devourer accelerated suddenly under 120% overload thrust.

The greyish-white deep sea was violently torn apart, and thick cosmic debris was pushed into massive greyish-white walls of waves from both sides of the train. The train crashed into the blood-red wall at a speed far exceeding the previous cruising speed.

The frequency of screams from the faces on the blood wall suddenly increased.

"don't want--"

Are you going to kill me?

"If you run me over, I'll die—"

The emotional impact of the sound waves was amplified more than tenfold. Each syllable precisely corresponded to the most basic human protective instinct, attempting to break the driver's will in the final seconds before contact.

Inside the carriage, Wang Hu's tiger-like eyes snapped shut. He couldn't bear to watch that face be shattered. His fingernails dug into the flesh of his palms, drawing blood.

Xiao Huo bit her lip tightly, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the control panel, her golden pupils never leaving the screen.

She trusted her master.

The Devourer crashed into the blood wall.

There was no explosion.

There was no shockwave.

Su Yuan clasped his hands together just before they made contact, then suddenly crossed them and swept them out.

Two dark gold blades, each ten thousand meters long, simultaneously sliced ​​through the entire cross-section of the blood wall.

The speed is so fast that air friction at the physical level does not have time to generate heat.

Along the path the blade traced, an extremely precise cutting line, less than an atom's diameter wide, unfolded on the surface of the blood wall. The cutting line did not harm the physical structure of the blood wall. It did not touch the surface structure of those faces.

It cuts the "causal lock" attached between the face and the blood wall.

As the blade swept across, the dark red conceptual chains snapped one by one at their points. The sounds of breaking were extremely subtle, so numerous that they formed a continuous chorus, sounding like someone tearing apart an extremely thick bolt of coarse cotton cloth.

hiss-

Then came the second cut.

The second cut targets the "painful memories" that are welded onto faces.

The blade precisely peeled away the emotional codes loaded onto each face at a microscopic level. The seams connecting those codes to the original structure of the face were extremely small, so small that ordinary forces could not distinguish what was real from what was fake.

But Su Yuan could tell the difference.

He swallowed the essence of the souls of his true relatives.

He nurtured that drop of memory within his own inner universe.

He knew the soul frequencies of his closest relatives by heart.

These things on the blood wall?

No. None of it is right. The frequency is off by a fraction of a percent. The color is off by half a shade. There are three instances where the muscle contraction patterns in the facial expressions don't match the facial habits of a close relative.

Counterfeit.

It's a fake from beginning to end.

Two knives crossed.

The causal chain has been broken.

The painful memory attribute has been stripped away.

Without the causal lock and the blood wall of the concept parasite, it was just a pile of ordinary biomass with no defense capabilities. The front of the Devourer crashed head-on into it under 120% overload thrust.

The blood vessel walls couldn't withstand it.

Starting from the point of impact, radial cracks spread rapidly across the entire wall surface. Those causally disconnected tumors on the face detached one by one in the shockwave, like rotten persimmons blown down by the autumn wind.

The blood barrier shattered.

The massive wall collapsed from the center outwards, with dark red tissue fragments and grayish-white chain remnants tumbling and spreading within the flight path.

Su Yuan's chest opened completely at that moment.

The plates of the dark gold bone armor folded from the center line to both sides, and the gravitational folds of the physical stomach opened up a dark gold vortex with a diameter of more than fifty meters.

Those fabricated painful memories that were stripped away—a large amount of raw material from higher-dimensional concepts—were instantly swept into the gravitational vortex.

boom.

Within the physical stomach, the walls of gravity-bound folds crush these fabricated conceptual raw materials, refining, compressing, and transforming them.

The output end is connected to the propulsion system of the Devourer.

The converted energy was directly injected into the engine.

The train's speed suddenly increased dramatically.

The things used to disgust Su Yuan were eaten by him and then turned into fuel.

Inside the wasteland shelter.

The commander in the gray military uniform stared at the speed value of the dark gold light spots that suddenly increased on the terminal screen, and the corners of his mouth that had just turned up finally froze in an extremely absurd position.

The staff officer behind him pushed up his glasses.

I wiped my glasses.

Put it back on.

I watched it again.

The data hasn't changed.

"...It ate the blood wall." The staff officer's voice was hoarse. "The causal lock didn't work. It took two knives and peeled the trap off its face. Stripped it naked." He swallowed hard. "Then it burned the peeled-off trap as fuel."

No one spoke.

There was silence inside the bunker for four seconds.

A temporary observation space for the high-dimensional dark web.

The old elder's hand, which was stroking his beard, stopped on half of it.

The young elder's mouth was agape, his chin almost dropping to his chest.

"...Perfect?" The young elder turned to look at the old elder, his voice so dry it could grind powder. "The perfect one you were referring to?"

The old elder didn't answer. His withered fingers gripped half a beard tightly for several seconds before letting go.

A few strands of white beard fell down.

"I misjudged you."

Deep within the skeletal route.

The long silence lasted less than three seconds after the blood barrier dissipated.

The fourth second.

The tens of thousands of flesh-and-blood road signs on both sides of the flight path convulsed simultaneously.

Simultaneously, the undulating network of veins on the surface of each road sign burst. Thick, dark red liquid gushed out, forming countless rapidly spreading red clouds in the greyish-white deep sea.

Then the road sign started to collapse.

It wasn't a collapse. It was an implosion.

Each signpost contained a massive amount of dead cosmic debris compressed within it—grayish-white matter previously bound by a network of blood vessels. When the signpost's outer shell exploded, the constraint vanished. The debris's mass was released instantaneously, and gravitational effects compounded.

The greyish-white deep sea on both sides of the shipping route suddenly accelerated and surged into the center of the channel.

The space ahead of the flight path was compressed into a single point in a very short time.

Then that point starts to rotate.

A horizon line has been formed.

The light cone deflected.

A black hole millstone with a diameter measured in light-years appeared out of thin air directly in front of the Devourer.

It didn't grow slowly. It exploded from a single point to a scale spanning light-years in a fraction of a second. The edge of the horizon emitted an extremely eerie gray-white halo—the physical radiation released in the final moments by the crushed remnants of the dead universe.

Changes in the gravitational field are instantaneous.

The Devourer has been captured.

It's not slowing down. It's like the front of the car is being gripped tightly by an invisible giant hand and pulled towards the center of the black hole.

The direction of the engine's thrust and the direction of motion are completely decoupled. No matter which direction the thruster sprays, the train only moves in one direction.

inside.

The gravity inside the carriage increased sixfold in half a second. Wang Hu was slammed to the floor, the metal casing of the robotic arm cracking continuously under the extreme gravity. Xiao Huo was thrown out of the control chair and slammed against the wall at the rear of the carriage, his face half-squeezed out.

The Devourer's dark gold scales began to deform under the tidal forces at the edge of its field of vision. The scales at the front of the vehicle were stretched and twisted, while those at the rear were compressed and folded.

This is not a conceptual attack.

It is the most violent, the most uncompromising, purely physical gravitational collapse.

E equals mc².

Gravity is equal to GMm divided by r².

Inside the event horizon of a black hole, not even photons can escape.

The Devourer was dragged into the horizon.

All external observation signals disappeared at this moment.

The terminal screen inside the wasteland bunker froze. The final state of the dark gold dot was a rapidly elongating elliptical trail, before the signal was lost.

"Signal lost."

The staff officer's voice was extremely dry.

"The target has crossed the line of sight."

His hands slid off the terminal table and hung down at his sides.

The commander in the gray military uniform closed his eyes. His smile vanished forever.

"That's the ironclad law of physics." His voice was extremely weary. "No matter how much you can eat, falling into a black hole is the end."

Inside the remaining naval formation of the Pan-Starfield Defense Line, a veteran officer with three stars placed an empty paper cup on the table, the bottom of the cup making a dull thud against the surface.

"It's over." He squinted at the signal loss notification on the communication screen. "What monster? In front of a black hole, it's all food."

He sat down, leaned back in his chair, and let out a long sigh.

Inside a black hole.

There is no light.

There is no up, down, left, or right.

There is no time or direction.

Su Yuan's tricolored vertical pupils shone in the absolute darkness. The three colors were particularly striking against the pure black background, as if someone had lit three lamps at the end of the world.

Under extreme tidal forces, the dark gold bone armor constantly deformed and was repeatedly pulled back to its original shape by the internal reinforcing patterns. The entire process was extremely painful, with a continuous, ear-piercing metallic scraping sound emanating from the meshing of the metal armor plates.

A place where even light cannot escape.

A place where space is infinitely curved.

A place where time loses its meaning.

Su Yuan smiled.

His mouth was wide open.

The teeth gleamed with a dark golden light in the darkness.

That wasn't a bitter smile. It wasn't helplessness. It wasn't madness.

It's hunger.

Hunger that is utterly pure, devoid of any superfluous emotion.

"This is just a pot of thick soup."

His voice was stretched into an extremely eerie, distorted long note in the warped space, but every word was extremely clear.

Physical stomach pouch.

Gravitational wrinkles.

Fully open.

This wasn't the previous tactical, controlled opening. The gate was dismantled. The limiters burned out. All the safety restraints were kicked away by Su Yuan.

The capacity of the physical stomach has exploded from finite to theoretical infinity, directly connected to the endogenous universe.

Su Yuan's dark gold bone armor exploded. All the armor plates folded outwards to their limit, revealing a dark gold, gravity-enhancing maw that had swelled to a diameter of three hundred meters.

The gravitationally folded walls of the colossal maw were covered with fangs formed from the condensation of the three-colored laws. These were not conceptual fangs; they were real materials that had been enhanced by the three-colored divine fire, possessing the hardness of physical entities.

Each fang is harder than neutron star matter.

The outer walls of the Devourer also deformed synchronously under Su Yuan's will. Dark gold scales converged forward from the sides and top of the vehicle, and the outline of the front of the vehicle completely disappeared, replaced by a gigantic abyssal maw ten times larger than the one on Su Yuan's chest.

The train's entrance.

Su Yuan's mouth.

Two mouths were put together.

Towards the center of the black hole.

He took a bite.

The first bite.

The edge of the gravitational vortex was torn apart by the fangs of the giant mouth.

What was torn off wasn't matter. It was the very structure of spacetime compressed to its limit by the black hole's gravity. It was scalding hot. Its density was so great that a single cubic centimeter contained billions of tons. When it fell into the physical stomach, the gravitationally folded walls emitted an extremely terrifying crushing sound.

It's digested.

Crunchy.

The second bite. Even bigger. The teeth left a bite mark more than fifty kilometers long on the visual material.

The third bite. The fourth bite. The fifth bite.

Su Yuan gripped the spacetime folds on the inner wall of the black hole with both hands, his whole body lying on it, desperately stuffing food into his mouth in an extremely primitive, extremely savage posture, no different from an ancient beast tearing apart its prey.

The stomach was working frantically. The digestion rate was pushed to its limit. Every piece of matter swallowed released terrifying mass-energy conversion energy under the crushing force of gravity, which poured into the Devourer's propulsion system and Su Yuan's dark gold fire patterns.

The fangs shattered.

Three of them were broken apart by the density of the black hole's matter.

Su Yuan didn't even pause. His tongue rolled the broken tooth root into his mouth and swallowed it, and new fangs grew back from where his gums were.

The ones that grew out were harder, bigger, and sharper than the ones that broke off.

Two more broke. Three more grew.

The Devourer's abyssal maw is also evolving in tandem. The material of its scales is constantly rewritten and strengthened as it devours the black hole's matter. With each shattered piece, a harder new scale grows from the break. Out with the old, in with the new. The more it gnaws, the harder it grows. The more it bites, the more ferocious it becomes.

A road.

A road forged purely by gnawing with one's teeth.

Extending from the event horizon of the black hole all the way to deeper structural layers, the dark gold body of the Devourer left a strange yet clear dark gold cavity in the pure black absolute gravitational field.

The inner walls of the cavity were marked with the scratches of fangs.

Rows upon rows. Neatly arranged.

It looked as if some ancient behemoth had dug out a rectum from inside the black hole.

Time has no meaning inside a black hole. Su Yuan didn't know how long he had been gnawing away. It could be a few seconds. It could be a few hours. It could be several days in the outer universe.

He doesn't care.

He just kept eating.

After digesting a massive amount of black hole matter, the gravitational folds of the physical stomach began to undergo a qualitative change. The dark gold patterns on the walls became deeper and denser, and the gravitational compression efficiency increased by dozens of times. The volume of each swallow increased.

Initially, it was 50 kilometers per sip.

Later it was 500 kilometers per minute.

Then it was five thousand kilometers.

The diameter of the dark gold cavity left inside the black hole by the Devourer is rapidly expanding. From hundreds of meters to thousands of meters to tens of thousands of meters to hundreds of thousands of kilometers—

Then the darkness ahead thinned out.

The strength of the gravitational field is dropping sharply.

The curvature of space is returning to normal.

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils caught a faint grayish-white light in the darkness ahead.

exit.

The Devourer let out a supreme roar erupting from the depths of its engines. Full power propulsion. Its dark gold trail was compressed into a violent pillar of light tens of thousands of kilometers long within the black hole's interior.

The giant beast charged out.

The space behind the black hole was violently torn apart the moment the Devourer burst forth. The massive, dark gold vehicle broke through the pure black horizon, its surface covered with a large amount of black hole matter residue that was still evaporating and radiating.

Tail.

The Devourer's thrusters did not stop operating at full power after it burst out of the black hole. The engine nozzles no longer emitted standard propulsive exhaust plumes.

It is digested black hole matter.

Dark gold in color. With tri-colored patterns. So dense that each ejected particle could crush the core of a planet.

Excrement.

Su Yuan swallowed one-tenth of a black hole several light-years in diameter, and then spat out the digested waste from his rear end.

These waste materials expanded and diffused rapidly in the vacuum behind them, and the dark golden particles mixed with the remaining black hole radiation to form a dark golden ribbon-like nebula that was more than a dozen astronomical units long.

Brilliant.

Terrifying.

From a distance, it looks as if an ancient behemoth has emerged from the darkest abyss of the void, leaving behind a dark gold trail paved with the remnants of a black hole.

The physical signal of this wake is spreading.

At the speed of light.

To all directions.

Inside the wasteland shelter.

The terminal screen suddenly came back online after an unknown period of signal interruption.

The image is not from an optical satellite. Optical satellites were shattered into molecular-level dust by gravitational waves the moment the black hole formed.

The footage is from a gravitational wave detector. It was forcibly activated by the violent gravitational shockwaves released when Su Yuan burst out of the black hole.

The image lacks color. Gravitational wave imaging only shows the signal intensity distribution at grayscale levels.

But this grayscale image is enough.

At the very center of the image. An extremely bright, high-density signal source. Its shape perfectly matches the outer contour of the Devourer.

Behind the signal source. An extremely dense, high-density trail, stretching for over ten astronomical units.

In front of the signal source. A black void spanning several light-years—the black hole is still there, but the density values ​​of the signal distribution map show that its total mass is about ten percent less than when it formed.

The missing part is the dark gold trail behind the signal source.

The staff officer's glasses slipped off his nose.

He didn't catch it.

The glasses fell onto the terminal table and cracked.

He didn't bend down to pick it up.

His legs were no longer under his control.

The commander in the grey military uniform stared wide-eyed. His mouth had been open for a long time. A slight clicking sound came from his jaw joint, which was stretched to its extreme angle.

"it……"

His voice sounded like it was squeezed out from the deepest part of his throat with the last bit of strength.

"It gnawed through the black hole?"

No one answered him.

Because everyone behind him was already sitting on the ground.

Some were leaning against the wall. Others were slumped next to chairs.

A middle-aged female official lay face down on the conference table, her face pressed against the cold metal surface, her shoulders trembling.

It's not crying.

My body is shaking uncontrollably.

In the deepest corner of the bunker, a young communications soldier crouched on the ground, his hands covering his head, his lips moving incessantly. No sound came out. Only his lips moved.

The same phrase is repeated over and over.

"Appetizer".

"That's an appetizer."

"Everything is an appetizer."

Within the remaining fleet of the Pan-Starfield.

The three-star veteran officer's chair overturned.

The chair he had just leaned back in, letting out a long sigh and saying "It's over," was now lying upside down on the floor. The old officer himself was hunched over the communications terminal, his hands gripping the screen frame, his knuckles white.

The gravitational wave data on the screen was scrolling wildly.

The gravitational shockwave released when the Devourer burst out of the black hole exceeded the terminal's display limit. All data columns displayed the same symbol—an upward arrow, indicating "out of range".

"What do you mean it's over?" the old officer's voice broke. "What do you mean by 'a black hole surrounded by food'?"

He suddenly turned around and looked at the pale-faced young officers behind him.

"Black holes themselves are its food!"

There was a three-second silence in the operations command center.

Then a young officer suddenly vomited. With a "whoosh," his entire breakfast was spilled on the floor next to the control panel.

Temporary observation space for the high-dimensional dark web.

The old elder had already plucked out half of his beard.

The remaining half was still hanging on his chin, soaked with cold sweat, clinging in strands to his withered neck skin.

The young elder was no longer standing. He was sitting on the ground.

His two legs stretched straight out in front of him, his back against the lawful wall of the observation space. His eyes stared blankly ahead, his pupils unfocused.

"It ate the black hole." His voice was flat and monotone. "In a physical sense. Purely. It gnawed its way through a black hole. Then it emerged from the other side."

His eyes finally moved. They rolled upwards.

"What is an upper limit?" he muttered to himself. "Is there an upper limit to this?"

No one answered him.

Because the old elder has already passed away.

Literally, he passed away peacefully in meditation—the old man's consciousness was severed by the collapse of his cognition. His body remained in a cross-legged position, but his eyes were empty, and his breathing was extremely weak.

The path of the Devourer after breaking through the black hole has finally become clear.

The greyish-white deep sea gradually thins out outside the gravitational influence of the black hole, eventually being replaced by the normal interstellar vacuum.

The skeletal route has come to an end.

Ahead lay a vast expanse of stars.

There are no stars. There are no planets. There is no stardust.

Dead silence. Utter emptiness. An extremely vast expanse of nothingness.

Then Su Yuan saw that thing.

It is not a petri dish.

It's a door.

A colossal structure stretching across the very center of the star field.

The advanced detection system couldn't provide precise figures. It couldn't provide the width either. This was because the surface of that object was constantly creeping and deforming, making its dimensions different every second.

Its material is not metal. It is not an alloy. It is not any known man-made material.

It is a neuron.

Real, vibrant, pulsating biological neurons, flashing with electrical signals. They are densely interwoven, forming the shape of a door.

Live.

The "door frames" on either side of the door are extremely thick nerve bundles. Each nerve bundle is over one hundred kilometers in diameter. The myelin sheaths on the bundle surfaces gleam with a dark, lipid sheen under the starlight.

A huge core of flesh and blood hung above the door.

Su Yuan estimated the diameter of the core.

It's roughly the size of a dwarf planet.

The core is covered by an extremely thin, transparent membrane. Beneath this membrane lies a dense network of blood vessels and nerve synapses. The entire core contracts and relaxes at an extremely slow frequency.

One contraction. One relaxation.

It is perfectly in sync with the rhythm of the heartbeat.

Then the flesh and blood on the core surface began to move.

Blood vessels rearrange. Muscle fibers re-weave. Synapses break and reconnect.

A face emerges from the front of the core.

Su Yuan's face.

Identical facial features. Identical cheekbone lines. Identical jawline.

But the eyes are different.

Grayish-white pupils. No pupils at all. Just a uniform, emotionless grayish-white.

The face opened its eyes extremely slowly.

His greyish-white gaze pierced through the vacuum, through the dark gold exterior of the Devourer, and met Su Yuan's tricolored vertical pupils inside the carriage.

Then it laughed.

The angle at which the corners of the mouth are raised, the position of the teeth when the lips are open, and even the muscle on the cheekbone that is pulled—all of them are replicas of Su Yuan's own smile.

It spoke in Su Yuan's voice.

Every syllable is exactly the same as Su Yuan's own voice.

"Welcome to..."

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils suddenly contracted under the gaze of the gray-white pupils.

Deep within the pupils, the three colors of dark gold, pure white, and pitch black shone brightly to an uncontrollable degree.

That face uttered the last two words.

"In my stomach."