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

Su Yuan could see the line of text clearly.

"No. 000 Divine Core Power Supply Module: Su Yuan's closest relative, soul is being permanently sealed."

The temperature inside the tricolor vertical pupils plummeted to rock bottom in that instant.

It's not anger.

The anger phase is over.

It is something extremely pure, something that remains after all emotions have been burned away.

cold.

It's colder than a causal collapse wave.

Su Yuan looked down at the ten-thousand-meter-diameter hole beneath his feet. Smooth pipe walls. A perfectly cylindrical passage left after the nine layers of biomass barriers had been removed. Indicator lights on the server racks at the bottom flashed, and coolant gurgled through the pipes.

The chip is right there.

The size of a walnut.

Warm-colored light.

Intermittent.

Su Yuan did not hesitate.

The dark gold combat boots stomped on the front armor of the Devourer. Spiderweb-like cracks erupted from the point of impact, scales lifting and falling back.

He jumped.

The tattered dark gold bone armor, encasing a body over four meters long, plummeted straight down into a vacuum tunnel ten thousand meters deep. Air friction against the armor created a pale white stream of ions. The speed increased. Gravity, combined with the force of the laws of motion, transformed the entire being into a dark gold projectile, freed from all constraints.

The walls of the passageway receded rapidly on both sides.

Smooth. Clean. The cross-section erased by the causal collapse wave had no muscle fiber residue, only grayish-white fault layers flying upwards in the falling field of vision.

Number 000 sensed it.

Its core has been exposed.

The charred, fleshy walls on both sides of the passage suddenly began to writhe violently. Starting from a depth of two thousand meters, large areas of necrotic tissue were pushed aside and peeled off by the newly emerging muscle from within. The new flesh was a ghastly white color, covered with an extremely dense network of capillaries, which pumped a grayish-white, high-dimensional tissue fluid.

Bone spurs.

It was squeezed out from the flesh wall.

Each one is two to three meters long, with a tip harder than tungsten carbide. The density of their arrangement changes from a sparse distribution on the tunnel wall to becoming increasingly dense as they descend. By a depth of four thousand meters, tens of thousands of pale bone spurs can be seen growing from all directions toward the center of the tunnel, attempting to weave an impenetrable cocoon of flesh and blood along the path of Su Yuan's fall.

There are blood vessels between the bone spurs.

The thick ones were as conspicuous as an arm, while the thinner ones were finer than a hair. They intertwined to form a net. The walls of each blood vessel were covered with grayish-white law parasites, which released weak assimilation pulses when Su Yuan approached.

Number 000 no longer cares about being dignified.

It uses its last regenerative ability to repair the punctured body, while simultaneously converting all the newly repaired tissue into a barrier layer.

Su Yuan did not slow down.

He raised his only remaining left hand.

Five dark gold finger bones slightly opened in the falling airflow, and the nine-colored patterns at the fingertips suddenly brightened. The analytical vision of the One Who Unifies All Things converged and compressed at the fingertips, forming a high-dimensional analytical blade that was only two millimeters thick but had an extremely high conceptual density.

The blade is not pointed outwards. It is pointed downwards.

The first row of bone spikes rushed towards us.

Su Yuan pushed forward with his left hand.

The analytical blade struck the tip of the bone spike. The physical structure was instantly disintegrated into molecular-level fragments at the contact surface, and the grayish-white particles exploded into a murky mist in the airflow.

second row.

Third row.

The tenth row.

Su Yuan darted through the dense array of bone spikes, his left-hand analytical blade slicing through any approaching obstacles hundreds of times per second. Shredded flesh and bone trailed a long, bloody mist behind him. Grayish-white tissue fluid splattered onto his dark gold armor, evaporated by the residual heat of the nine-colored divine runes, leaving layers of white salt stains.

The vascular network has become entangled.

The thickest ones wrapped around his waist, trying to entangle his body and slow him down.

Hiss.

The analytical blade swept across. A column of grayish-white high-pressure liquid shot out from the severed blood vessel. The liquid rapidly evaporated in the vacuum environment, turning into a dense fog that filled the channel.

Su Yuan passed through the fog.

There were streaks of blood on the nail.

Six thousand meters.

7,000 meters.

The light below grew brighter. The server rack indicator lights flashed through the gaps in the blood mist, and the hum of hard drive read/write operations echoed up from below, reverberating in the empty corridor.

Number 000 stopped developing bone spurs.

It's not that we've given up.

They've changed their tactics.

Su Yuan's analytical field of vision detected an anomaly at the bottom during the descent—the refractive index of the air around the server rack was changing drastically. Grayish-white light emanated from the rack's frame, condensing and solidifying at an extremely rapid speed.

Crystal.

Semi-transparent.

Grayish-white.

Starting from the base of the server rack and growing upwards, the speed was so fast that Su Yuan could see the lattice structure stacking layer by layer on a microscopic scale. Within sixty milliseconds, the entire row of server racks was completely enveloped by a gray-white crystalline shell more than half a meter thick.

Even the chip that emitted a warm, faint glow was sealed in the very center of the crystal.

A shrill electronic sound blasted from the physical loudspeakers of the server rack.

It's no longer the condescending mockery that came with Number 000.

The sound is fragmented. It's broken. It's the shrill distortion produced by a machine on the verge of collapse, pushing all audio channels to their overload limits before it dies.

"Law of Sharing Life and Death"

Each word was separated by the popping noise caused by an overload of electricity.

"Quantum binding! Did you hear that?!"

The electronic sound's pitch soared to the frequency range of glass friction.

"Attack the crystal! The chip will shatter simultaneously! Your thing will turn to dust! Physical dust! The kind of dust that leaves not even a trace!"

It paused for half a second.

respite.

It wasn't a biological panting sound, but rather the whooshing noise produced by the processor's cooling fan speed surging under extreme overload.

"You can penetrate my nine layers of defense, drink my stomach acid dry, and bombard the causal singularity like a cannon—"

There was another pause. Then, a loud popping sound from the electricity.

"But do you dare touch this shell?"

"Do you dare?"

"Why don't you try touching it?"

The voice completely broke down on the last three words, turning into raw, unmodulated electromagnetic pulses that scraped against the eardrums and drilled into the brain.

Su Yuan's falling speed began to slow down two hundred meters before approaching the crystal.

It wasn't because of hesitation. It was the natural patterns on the soles of my feet that released a counterforce.

He landed steadily on the cable trays outside the server rack.

The dark gold combat boots crunched over data cables of varying thicknesses, the sound of their outer sheaths cracking clearly audible in the quiet space.

Su Yuan stood up straight.

The crystal shell was right in front of him.

Semi-transparent.

You can see what's inside.

The metal frame of the server rack. The motherboard covered in solder joints. Heatsinks. Power supply module. And that walnut-sized chip right in the center.

Warm light shines through the surface of the wafer and is refracted into faint spots as it passes through the gray-white crystal.

The light shone on Su Yuan's dark gold mask, leaving tiny warm-colored dots in the gaps between the armor plates.

Su Yuan stared at the chip for two seconds.

The colors in the tricolor vertical pupils were extremely calm.

There was no outburst of anger. No anxiety. No outward display of emotion.

But his left finger bones were clenched.

The knuckles beneath the dark gold armor plates emitted an extremely subtle metallic stress sound.

It wasn't excessive force. It was restraint.

Temporary observation space for the high-dimensional dark web.

The young elder knelt before the barrier of laws, black blood trickling from the corner of his mouth down to his collarbone. His pupils scanned the remaining observation interface again and again.

On the data panel, a new tab popped up in the defense status bar of core area 000.

"The Law of Shared Life and Death - Quantum Binding - Activated"

The young elder's withered lips moved slightly.

It twitched twice.

He forced a very strained, bitter smile.

"Absolute defense for living power sources."

His voice was much softer than before. So soft that it was almost inaudible in the echoes from the wall of laws.

"Open conspiracy".

"Attack is tantamount to killing hostages. Not attacking is tantamount to surrendering."

"He can't win this round."

The old elder was still lying on the ground. The ground beneath the pool of black blood had been corroded with shallow dents. His eyes darted around, his gaze landing on the young elder's profile.

He didn't say anything.

That smile, or maybe a twitch, that curve at the corner of his mouth reappeared.

Wasteland shelter.

The staff officer pressed his fingers, stained with blood and broken glass, onto the screen.

On the screen, there were no conflict signals on the contact surface between the dark gold dots and the gray-white defense circle.

Su Yuan stopped.

It stopped in front of the crystal shell.

The staff officer closed his eyes in anguish.

"It's that trick again."

His shoulders slumped.

"It's the same trick every time. They tie what he cares about to a bomb. He can't bring himself to fight back."

The commander was still kneeling on the floor. His hands were braced against the edge of the table, and the pads of his ten fingers were pressed into deep white marks by the metal edge of the table.

He didn't reply.

His eyes were fixed on the hovering dark gold dot on the screen.

Deep inside the stomach cavity of number 000.

Su Yuan stood in front of the crystal shell.

He didn't raise his fist.

There is no law of cohesion.

No offensive energy circuits were activated.

He did something that no one expected.

He shut it down.

All destructive laws released to the outside world.

The law of negation: closed. Creation and evolution: closed. The external output channels of the three-colored divine fire: closed.

The nine-colored patterns on the nail surface suddenly darkened from a bright state, leaving only the structural luster of the bottom layer shimmering slightly.

An off-key syllable came out of the loudspeaker from the 000 electronic voice.

"you--"

He didn't finish speaking.

Because Su Yuan raised his left hand.

very slow.

With all offensive laws turned off, this hand looks like an ordinary hand covered in dark gold armor leaves.

Palms facing forward.

It was affixed to the surface of the gray-white crystal shell.

The tactile sensation of the crystals was transmitted to the fingertips through the nail blade. Cool. Hard. The crystal lattice structure at the microscopic level was extremely dense, and its physical hardness far exceeded that of any known mineral.

The quantum binding indicator signal flashed twice on the contact surface.

No trigger.

Because there was no attack, Su Yuan's palm did not show any energy output exceeding the safety threshold.

He just stuck to it.

At this moment, the computing power of the One Who Unifies All Things was pulled to its highest value in the history of Su Yuan.

He's watching.

It's not about seeing with your eyes. It's about using analytical vision to penetrate the physical structure of the crystal, peeling it away layer by layer, from the molecular level to the atomic level to the quantum level.

The quantum binding network inside the crystal unfolds in the analytical field of view.

An extremely precise structure. Each qubit is entangled with a corresponding node inside the wafer. State symmetry. Any perturbation on the crystal side will produce a synchronous, equal, and isotropic physical response on the wafer side.

Making a crystal is the same as making a wafer.

Physical level.

No solution.

But Su Yuan wasn't looking for a way to destroy the crystal.

He was looking for a crack.

Quantum binding is not continuous.

It is discrete.

Between every two entangled nodes lies an extremely small binding gap, on the order of the Planck length. This gap is so small under normal circumstances that it is negligible—no macroscopic physical operation could be precise to that scale.

However, Su Yuan does not require macro-level operations.

He possesses true essence.

The Nine-Colored Original Code was operating within his body, gathering the computing power provided by all the high-dimensional energy he had absorbed into the palm of his left hand.

The true essence seeps out from every pore of your palm.

It is not liquid. It is not gaseous.

It is an information state.

Microscopic code droplets.

Each water droplet is less than an atom in diameter. Each water droplet carries instructions written by Su Yuan.

There is only one instruction.

"Replace the underlying ownership."

Without damaging the crystal. Without touching the bound nodes. Without generating any physical disturbances exceeding the threshold.

It simply seeps in through the gaps in the quantum binding.

Like water seeping into a crack in a rock.

Then replace the base under the stone.

The appearance remains unchanged. The structure remains unchanged. The binding remains unchanged.

But who's in charge has changed.

The first code droplet drilled into the gap of the first entangled state node on the crystal surface.

No trigger.

The safety threshold detection unit has been scanned. Data is normal. Energy is normal. Binding status: intact.

The second one. The third one. The hundredth one.

The code droplets spread slowly but steadily along the gaps in the bound network at a quantum scale. With each step of diffusion, the droplet performs a replacement on the corresponding underlying code.

The control signature for number 000 has been modified.

It's not overwriting, it's replacing.

The old signature was removed, and the new signature was written.

The process involves no physical energy fluctuations.

The detection unit for the safety threshold continues scanning.

Data: Normal.

Energy: Normal.

Binding status: intact.

But... this crystal is now unsure of whose orders it listens to.

It took number 000 three seconds to react.

It's not that it's slow; it's that Su Yuan's operational precision far exceeds its real-time monitoring resolution.

By the time it noticed something was wrong, visible changes had already appeared on the grayish-white crystal shell.

Dark gold.

It started from the point where Su Yuan's palm touched it and spread outwards.

Extremely slow.

But the direction is clear.

The color of the crystal changed from grayish-white to dark gold on the contact surface, with an extremely sharp transition zone. The boundary between the grayish-white and dark gold was so clear that it could be used to cut paper.

The loudspeaker numbered 000 exploded.

In the literal sense.

The physical coil burned out under the impact of the overload current, and the speaker diaphragm was punctured by the sudden surge of electromagnetic pulse inside, emitting a piercing and distorted sound.

It's screaming.

It doesn't use speakers anymore. It generates sound directly through the resonance of the metal frame of the server rack. The frequency is so high that it can rupture blood vessels in an average person.

"You—are—changing—my—permissions—!"

Each word carried the humming echo of metal sheets vibrating under extreme stress.

"You're not hatching—you're stealing my base—!"

Wasteland shelter.

The staff officer opened his eyes.

He stared at the screen.

A faint touch of dark gold appeared at the edge of the gray-white defensive circle. It was very faint, but extremely conspicuous against the otherwise deathly gray background.

The area covered by the dark gold color is expanding.

One percent. Three percent. Five percent.

The staff officer opened his mouth.

It can't be closed anymore.

He didn't hit him.

The sound was ethereal.

"He changed the permissions inside."

"He took over the entire server without bloodshed."

The commander's fingers dug deeper into the edge of the table. The metal edge cut the pad of his index finger, and blood seeped out, trickling onto the table and mixing with the dried scabs.

He stared intently at the spreading dark gold color on the screen.

The mouth moved.

No sound.

The high-dimensional dark web.

The young elder's bitter smile froze at the corner of his mouth.

It paused for two seconds.

Then it broke.

It shattered into an expression ten times uglier than a bitter smile.

He saw it.

On the data panel, in the control ownership column of the core area number 000, the gray-white logo representing number 000 is being covered by dark gold at a rate of five percent per second.

"It's not a broken shield..."

The young elder's throat tightened.

I swallowed it three times.

"He took over ownership of the base server without bloodshed."

The old elder lay sprawled in the black blood.

The eyes turned around.

They met the gaze of the young elder.

The mouth moved.

The sound was scraped from the mucous membrane deep in the throat. It was so dry that you could hear the cracking sound.

"That beast... wasn't breaking the lock..."

He gasped for breath. He wasn't quite done catching his breath.

"They replaced the locksmith with himself."

On the crystal shell of number 000, 27% of it is already covered with dark gold.

Thirty-one.

Thirty-five.

forty.

Number 000 is no longer being called.

It wasn't that they didn't want to call out. It was that they tried and found it was useless. Su Yuan's actions did not produce any physical attack, and the security threshold detection unit consistently displayed "normal." The quantum binding remained intact. The chip remained safe.

But control is slipping away.

Forty-five percent.

Fifty percent.

The tipping point is just around the corner.

Number 000 made the decision.

A piece of alloy panel at the bottom of the cabinet suddenly popped open. It popped open so fast that the metal plate bent at a sharp 90-degree angle on the hinge.

Behind the panel is a set of extremely close-packed high-voltage electrodes. The gaps between the electrodes are filled with grayish-white superconducting coils.

Physical overload self-destruct module.

No crystals. No quantum binding. Direct physical wiring.

Number 000 bypassed its own defense system and launched the most primitive and violent destruction plan.

An electric arc burst out between the electrodes.

It was grayish-white. The brightness was so high that it projected a clear arc of light onto the metal surface of the server rack. The temperature at the electrode gaps exceeded 20,000 degrees Celsius.

It is not ordinary current.

It is a plasma surge amplified by the laws of higher dimensions. Each arc contains a condensed code of the law of absolute erasure.

Hundreds of millions of volts.

An electrical surge travels along the motherboard's cables toward the chip. Its speed is ninety-seven percent of the speed of light.

The distance between the self-destruct module and the chip is only eleven centimeters.

It's a matter of a fraction of a nanosecond.

The metallic resonance of number 000 exploded throughout the space.

"Go to hell with me!"

Su Yuan did not use his left hand to block.

His left hand was still pressed against the crystal shell.

The code replacement progress has reached 53%, it cannot be stopped.

He used his right hand.

The right hand without a palm.

A smooth cross-section of the wrist bone.

The absolute void left behind after the causal collapse wave completely erased this hand from the level of existence.

Su Yuan shoved the cut surface of his right wrist into the center of the wiring harness.

The eleven-centimeter ribbon cable is cut off at the seven-centimeter mark by a section of "non-existent" space.

The physical conductors are still there on a macroscopic scale.

Copper core wire. Insulation sheath. Solder joints. All there.

But the causal chain in that section of space is broken.

Because Su Yuan's right hand, by definition, "never existed." A space occupied by something that never existed has no ability to conduct any physical quantities.

It is not an insulator.

It is an "absolute circuit breaker".

The definition of electricity does not hold true in that space. The concept of energy conduction does not hold true in that space. Causality does not hold true in that space.

The surge reached the front of the section.

A stream of grayish-white plasma, hundreds of millions of volts high, collided with a region that was "completely empty".

No sparks. No bounce. No overload explosion.

The power surge disappeared.

It is not absorbed. It is not neutralized.

The physical process loses its logical basis for continuing when it encounters the boundary of "non-existence".

Where did the energy go?

I didn't go anywhere.

Those electrons "never reached this position."

Because this location "does not exist".

The chip at the other end of the ribbon cable was quietly glowing with a warm light.

Not a single surge of electricity touched it.

The metallic resonance of number 000 shattered in the high-frequency range.

The frequency dropped directly from 20,000 Hz to below 100 Hz.

It turned into an extremely low, guttural whimper, as if the throat had been choked.

Su Yuan's left hand remained pressed against the crystal shell.

The code kept dripping.

Sixty-one percent.

Sixty-eight percent.

75 percent.

The dark gold color has covered most of the surface of the crystal shell. The remaining grayish-white color has been squeezed to the back of the shell, and its proportion is still shrinking at a rate of five percent per second.

Wasteland shelter.

The staff officer lay prone on the table.

He held the back of his head with both hands. The eyes peeking out from between his fingers no longer showed the expression of a normal person.

"Use a non-existent hand to block the current."

His voice was squeezed out from between his teeth, one word at a time, interspersed with extremely irregular gasps.

"His hand was erased by the singularity. There was nothing in that space. Nothing could pass through. He used his disability... as an insulator."

The commander was still kneeling.

His knees were numb from kneeling. He had completely lost feeling in both legs below the knees.

He didn't stand up.

It's not that I don't want to. It's just that my legs won't obey me.

He looked up at the screen.

Eighty-three percent of it was covered in dark gold.

The high-dimensional dark web.

The young elder's black blood flowed from the corner of his mouth to his chest, soaking a patch of his clothes, and then dripped from the hem of his clothes to the ground.

He knelt down.

He knelt motionless.

Looking at the control ownership column for number 000 on the data panel.

Dark gold, 91 percent.

Grayish-white, nine percent.

The young elder's Adam's apple bobbed. With great effort. He couldn't swallow. It bobbed again.

The mouth opened.

The sound came out.

"It's over."

Two words. Extremely light.

The old elder lay prone in the black blood, his eyes barely moving.

"Um."

A nasal sound squeezed out of the nasal cavity.

On the crystal shell number 000.

Ninety-seven percent of it was covered in dark gold.

Ninety-eight.

Ninety-nine.

The last one percent of the grayish-white color was squeezed into a small area at the very top of the shell.

Su Yuan removed his left hand from the surface of the crystal shell.

As the fingertip left the contact surface, it brought forth an extremely fine wisp of dark golden light. The wisp of light existed in the air for less than 0.1 seconds before dissipating.

He extended his left hand.

Five dark gold finger bones pierced through the crystal.

There was no collision. There was no sound of breaking. There was no alarm triggered by quantum binding.

Because the crystal already belonged to him.

Once ownership has been transferred, the attack criteria for the "Law of Shared Life and Death" will be automatically updated.

Old condition: Any external attack that touches the crystal will cause the chip to shatter simultaneously.

New condition: Any external attack that touches the crystal will cause the chip to shatter simultaneously.

The conditions remain unchanged.

But the definition of "external" has changed.

Su Yuan is no longer an outsider. He is the master.

The owner touching their own belongings does not trigger the security protocol.

The dark gold finger bone passed through the crystal and reached the motherboard of the server rack.

My fingertip touched the walnut-sized chip.

Warm.

It felt a lot like touching your soul at the bottom of an acidic pool. But it was more stable. It was warmer than that.

Su Yuan's finger bones gripped the edge of the chip.

Tighten your five fingers.

The solder joints of the physical interface broke under the crushing force of the dark gold fingers.

One. Two. Seven.

Each time a chip breaks, one less data cable is available between the chip and the motherboard.

Number 000 is calling.

It's not using metal resonance anymore.

It is the most primitive, low-level code that generates logical collapse noise when it is forcibly cut off.

It was harsh.

Broken.

It's like the short beeps emitted by the motherboard when tens of thousands of devices simultaneously crash with a blue screen, all superimposed together.

Su Yuan ignored him.

The last solder joint broke.

Detachable wafer.

All physical connections were severed.

Su Yuan extracted the chip from the crystal.

The instant the chip completely detached from the motherboard—

Number 000's body exploded.

It was not a physical explosion.

It's a full-frequency electronic death shriek. Starting from the server rack at the bottom of the channel, it travels upwards, passes through the vacuum tube wall thousands of meters deep, bursts through the gnawed-through stomach wall wound, and explodes throughout the entire stomach cavity.

The thousands upon thousands of Su Yuan faces on the fleshy walls underwent their final transformation amidst the death cries.

His expression first became distorted.

Extreme distortion. The capillaries in the gray-white pupils burst open, and every facial muscle fiber spasmed to the brink of tearing under the impact of the electrical overload.

Then comes carbonization.

Starting from the center of the face, the skin tissue rapidly loses water and turns black under extreme temperatures. This includes the bridge of the nose, the eyeballs, the lips, and the jaw. The carbonized layer spreads outwards from the face to the neck, ears, and scalp.

Thousands of faces were carbonized simultaneously.

Black fragments peeled off the fleshy walls and slowly drifted away in the artificial airflow. Upon hitting the tunnel walls, the fragments shattered into even smaller powder.

The powder is also breaking apart.

It was broken down to the molecular level.

Grayish-white fly ash.

The sky was filled with them.

From the dome of the stomach cavity to the charred neural network at its base, all living tissue belonging to number 000 is disintegrating in the same way.

A body that has lost its core power source has no ability to sustain its existence.

Tens of thousands of kilometers thick layers of organs, muscles, connective tissue, and biomass barriers—all entered an irreversible disintegration process after losing the power supply from the chip.

On the remaining observation instruments of the high-dimensional dark web, the energy column representing number 000 experienced an inexplicable numerical drop within two seconds.

From the top of the column to the bottom of the column.

It fell straight down.

There was no buffer.

Full capacity. 70%. 30%. 10%.

zero.

The numerical display area at the bottom of the energy column popped up a bright red system notification the moment it reached zero.

"Target life response: Termination."

The young elder's knees hit the ground.

He braced his hands against the edge of the data panel.

The knuckles were so tightly knuckled that they turned white.

His eyes scanned the pure red prompt six times.

Six times.

His mouth was open.

It didn't close.

The old elder lay prone in the black blood. His eyes were slanted, and from the side, he saw the energy pillar that had been reduced to zero.

The corner of the mouth.

It twitched.

This time it's confirmed.

It's not a laugh.

It is an involuntary discharge of facial nerves under extreme impact.

Wasteland shelter.

On the terminal screen, the gray-white signal source representing number 000 dropped from full brightness to blank.

The signal disappeared.

It has completely disappeared.

There's no background noise at all.

The staff officer lowered his hand from behind his head. His fingernails had scratched several red marks on his scalp.

He stared at the blank space.

The eyeballs stopped moving.

His breathing stopped for three seconds. Then he took a deep breath, so deep that he choked and bent over, coughing violently.

The commander knelt on the floor.

His lips moved for a long time.

long time.

He made an extremely indistinct sound.

That's not true.

It is the noise produced when air brushes against the vocal cords.

His mind was no longer capable of organizing his thoughts.

Su Yuan stood at the bottom of the passage.

The server rack lost power.

All the indicator lights are off.

The hard drive's read/write sounds stopped.

The coolant lost pump pressure in the pipes, and the last bit of liquid dripped from the pipe opening under gravity. It dripped onto the metal floor with a soft, almost imperceptible sound.

Then it became quiet.

Su Yuan spread out his left hand.

The chip lies in the palm of my hand. It's about the size of a walnut.

The grayish-white mucus adhering to the surface is slowly drying in the air, and a thin white shell has formed at the edges.

The chip is still lit.

Warm-colored. Faint. But stable.

The intermittent Morse code pulses finally subsided.

There was no more beeping.

There are no more rapid, intermittent signals.

Instead, there is an extremely uniform and sustained light pulse.

One light and one dark. One light and one dark.

The frequency is exactly the same as a normal person's resting heart rate.

Sixty-two times per minute.

Su Yuan stared at the warm light in his palm for a long time.

The brightness in the tricolor vertical pupils has decreased again.

It dropped to that gentle range that only appears at specific times.

The fingers of his left hand were slightly bent.

They gathered the chips together.

It was pulled up a little bit.

Inside the 10,000-meter-long tunnel overhead, the disintegration of the remains of Number 000 continued.

Grayish-white ash drifted down from the passageway entrance. Fine and scattered, it was enveloped by the faint airflow within the passageway and slowly settled on Su Yuan's shoulder armor.

He didn't take any pictures.

Further behind, a massive void of laws was slowly taking shape in the physical space that had lost the support of Number 000's body.

The bone walls of the skeletal route are crumbling.

The disguise of the starry sky within the internal organs is collapsing.

The flesh and blood tissues that 000 used to disguise the starry sky and vacuum are peeling off in large areas after losing their power supply.

What is revealed after the disguise is removed is the true nature of the wasteland universe.

Cold.

There's nothing there.

There is very little light.

Su Yuan looked down at the chip in his palm.

My thumb rubbed across the dried, grayish-white shell on the surface of the chip.

The shell shattered. Fragments slipped through my fingers and landed on the pile of cables at my feet.

The text on the front of the chip is now clear.

The line of words he had just read, the ones that had made him clench his fists until they broke.

"No. 000 Divine Core Power Supply Module: Su Yuan's closest relative, soul is being permanently sealed."

Su Yuan flipped the chip over.

He plans to nurture the chip within an endogenous universe.

But the moment it turned over, the movement of the left hand stopped.

The rhythm of his breathing faltered.

The back of the chip has exposed physical metal contacts.

Gold-plated. The arrangement is a standard BGA package. Row after row. Densely packed.

There is a small blank area in the lower left corner of the contact array.

Words were engraved in the blank area.

Laser engraving.

Extremely small.

But Su Yuan's three-colored vertical pupils could see every single stroke.

"Production batch: Blue Star Era 2024 · Pangu Project Neural Interface"

Su Yuan's pupils contracted to three extremely thin vertical lines.

Beneath the dark gold armor, the finger bones gripped the edge of the crystal, the knuckles of the fingertips turning white.

The three-colored vertical pupils were fixed intently on that line of text.

Not moving at all.