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

Blue Star Era 2024.

The Pangu Project.

Neuron interface.

Seven characters. Fourteen characters. Six characters.

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils were fixed on the laser engraving on the back of the chip, his pupils shrinking to their physiological limits. As they contracted, the three colors were squeezed, superimposed, and devoured each other, eventually becoming three extremely thin, almost invisible vertical bright lines.

The computing power of the One Who Unifies All Things was pulled to its highest peak in the history of Su Yuan in this one second.

He didn't start it on his own.

The parsing core automatically enters a stress state the moment it sees that line of text, clears all priority queues, and directs all computing resources toward a single target.

Search.

Data remnants from the wasteland universe. Fragments of laws left behind by Number 000. The underlying archives of the swallowed Founding Server. The encrypted database of the Star Destroyer Fleet. The historical document index of the Arbitration Tribunal. The remaining high-dimensional information streams on the Dark Web.

All the data that Su Yuan had consumed, digested, and plundered was turned upside down in that instant.

The results popped up one by one.

"Blue Star" - No match.

"Anno 2024" - No match.

"Pangu Project" - No match found.

"Neural interface" - no match.

"Blue Star Era" - No match.

"Pangu" - No match found.

No match found.

No match found.

No match found.

The analysis process processed 97 million cross-references in 0.3 seconds, but none of them returned a valid result.

In this universe—the universe where he fought his way from virtual to reality, from pawn to player, from white pawn to new god—there was no corner that recorded these words.

But it's etched onto the chip.

Laser etching at the physical level. Not data. Not code. Not virtual information that can be tampered with.

It is a physical entity.

It refers to physical texts that someone has carved onto physical materials using physical means.

This chip was soldered onto the core motherboard of Number 000, used to encapsulate the soul of his loved one, and was used as the ultimate power supply module for the entire New God Project.

A chip from the "Blue Star Era 2024" powers a high-dimensional deity capable of devouring galaxies.

Su Yuan felt a chill run down his spine.

It's not an attack at the level of laws. It's not a change in temperature at the level of physics.

It is a pure, physiological chill that comes from the depths of cognition.

That feeling you get when you stand on land you thought you had conquered, look down and realize that the foundation beneath your feet is made of a material you don't recognize.

absurd.

Icy.

There's also something indescribable, pressing on my chest, making it hard to breathe.

Su Yuan's left finger bones trembled slightly.

It's not obvious. You can see the joints trembling through the gaps in the dark gold armor plates. The amplitude is no more than half a millimeter.

But before that, he didn't tremble when his right hand was blown off by the causal singularity, he didn't tremble when he was burned to bones by the ultimate strong acid, and he didn't tremble when he was soaked in the gastric juice of No. 000 and gnawed through nine layers of biomass barrier.

His hands were shaking.

Above the 10,000-meter-long tunnel, a massive, dark gold-colored front end protruded one-third of its cross-section from the tunnel entrance.

The physical communication link of the Devourer was transmitting sound intermittently. The signal quality was very poor. The electromagnetic interference generated by the disintegration of the 000's remains was completely disrupting the communication frequency band.

"Owner--"

Xiao Huo's voice. So anxious. His throat was practically cracking.

"Vital signs detected! You're still alive, right?! Answer me! Please answer me—"

Wang Hu's voice cut in from behind. It was urgent, but a fraction more composed than Xiao Huo's.

"Life force detected at zero for number 000. The law field in the core area is collapsing. You need to get up here. This place won't last much longer."

Su Yuan stood at the bottom of the passage.

The server rack was powered off at my feet. The indicator lights were off. The last drop of coolant had solidified at the pipe opening.

Dust settled around him.

The gray-white ash from the disintegration of No. 000's remains drifted down from the tunnel entrance, which was ten thousand meters high, gently and slowly landing on his shoulder armor, on his mostly shattered breastplate, and on the empty section of his right wrist.

Su Yuan spoke up.

The voice was squeezed from the deepest part of the throat. Low. Hoarse. With a metallic resonance in the final note and the roughness unique to a throat burned by high temperatures.

They don't look like living people.

"Stay put."

Three words. Each word was spaced about half a second apart.

Silence fell on the other end of the communication link. Xiao Huo wanted to say something, but Wang Hu stopped him.

Su Yuan looked down at the chip in his left palm.

It's about the size of a walnut. He had wiped away the grayish-white slimy shell, revealing the dark outer casing and gold-plated contacts on the edges.

Warm light emanated from within the chip. A flickering light, then a dim one.

Sixty-two times per minute.

Su Yuan's five fingers on his left hand slowly came together.

It's not about clenching your fist.

It is.

The fingertips gently pressed against the edge of the chip, tightening their grip with utmost precision. The pressure was controlled to the extreme – just enough to hold the chip firmly in the hollow of the palm, without any unnecessary pressure.

He raised his left hand to chest height.

The shattered dark gold breastplate reflected the faint glow of the remaining nine-colored patterns amidst the gray and white dust, casting a very faint golden edge on the chip's encapsulation shell and adding to the warm, pulsating light.

Su Yuan held the chip in his hands.

The posture was very light.

Very careful.

That left hand—the one that had pierced through nine layers of biomass barriers in an acid pool, that had swapped server base permissions with quantum-level precision, that had crushed neutron star density solder joints with its finger bones—was now holding a chip the size of a walnut, as if it were holding something that would break.

There was silence at the bottom of the passage for three seconds.

Then the physical constants collapsed.

There was no warning whatsoever.

It's not a gradual offset. It's not a chain reaction triggered by a parameter slowly sliding to a critical value.

It is a kind of extremely precise, surgical-like cut.

Within a circular area with a radius of seven meters beneath Su Yuan's feet, the constant of the speed of light was rewritten in 0.001 seconds.

It went from 299792458 meters per second to zero meters per second.

The light stopped moving.

At the boundary of this circular region, electromagnetic radiation of all wavelengths was frozen in its propagation path. Those photons that hadn't yet reached Su Yuan's retina were stuck in mid-air. Still. No reflection. No refraction. No scattering.

Su Yuan's view was cut off at the boundary.

All image information outside the circular area stopped updating. The furthest distance he could see was seven meters. The passage walls beyond seven meters, the falling dust, and the outline of the Devourer's engine above were all frozen in the last frame.

It's not the 000th.

Number 000 is dead. The chip is in Su Yuan's hands. The core power supply has been cut off. The framework of laws is completely collapsing. That body, tens of thousands of kilometers thick, is no longer capable of performing any active operations.

This is something else.

With the light frozen, Su Yuan's analytical vision switched to a non-electromagnetic perception mode. The nine-colored patterns on his nails flashed faintly twice, transmitting the physical information of the ground beneath his feet back to his brain via contact transmission.

The ground is seeping liquid.

Dark red.

It's seeping from the molecular gaps in the metal floor. It's not blood. It's not tissue fluid. The temperature is absolute zero. But it's liquid.

Liquid matter at absolute zero.

This doesn't make sense physically. Any known substance would solidify at absolute zero. But this thing is liquid, and it's flowing and spreading.

It is not matter.

It is data.

The dark red liquid data stream is physically represented directly from the underlying code.

Su Yuan recognized this kind of thing.

When the initial server was being devoured, there was a bunch of folders locked in the deepest part of the underlying codebase, all protected by red access locks. The encryption level of those folders was three levels higher than the Nine Colors source code. Su Yuan tried to decipher them but couldn't, so he skipped them for now.

The folder's outer shell is this dark red color.

Scavenger Agreement.

The security system at the very bottom of the cosmic chassis. Not under the control of the chess player. Not under the control of Number 000. Not under the control of the arbitration tribunal. Not under the control of any higher-dimensional being that Su Yuan has seen, eaten, or killed.

It is a base-level product.

Operating system level.

It is older, more low-level, and more violent than all the programs running on it.

The triggering conditions for its activation at this moment are extremely clear.

It wasn't because Su Yuan killed Number 000.

It wasn't because Su Yuan stole the chips.

It was because Su Yuan saw those four words.

The Pangu Project.

A dark red liquid data stream gushed out from the cracks in the floor beneath Su Yuan's feet. The flow was slow, but the coverage was extremely uniform. After spreading outwards for about two meters from the center, the direction of the flow suddenly changed.

It's no longer outward-facing.

up.

The dark red liquid rose vertically along the gaps between the air molecules surrounding Su Yuan. It wasn't a splash, nor a spray. It was an extremely quiet, capillary-like ascent, following the physical structure of space itself.

They converged three meters above Su Yuan's head.

A dark red dome.

Then the dark red surroundings also sealed it off.

A perfect, airtight cubic cage took shape around Su Yuan.

The side length is seven meters.

Six sides.

Each surface is a solid wall composed of dark red liquid data at absolute zero. The surface of the wall is so smooth that it cannot reflect anything, because the speed of light has been reduced to zero in this region.

No sound.

Sound wave propagation requires the vibration of a medium. The vibration of the medium requires time. Time continues to pass inside this cube, but the physical mechanism upon which sound wave propagation depends has been altered. The air is still there. The molecules are still there. But the vibrational frequencies of the molecules are locked in a microscopic range that does not produce macroscopic acoustic effects.

A world of deafness.

The world of the blind.

Su Yuan stood in the very center.

The chip in my palm started acting strangely.

Warm, pulsating light was flashing. It wasn't the steady rhythm of sixty-two flashes per minute anymore. It was a rapid, irregular, and increasingly fast flickering.

The frequency jumped from 62 times per minute to 120 times. 200 times. 300 times.

The chip is struggling.

Dark red data streams emanated from the six walls of the cube, forming extremely fine tendrils. Each tendril was less than one-tenth the diameter of a human hair. Dark red. Absolute zero. At an incredibly slow but unstoppable speed, they converged from six directions toward Su Yuan's palm.

It needs to freeze the chip.

It's not freezing at the physical level.

It's a concept freeze.

All the causal relationships, information encoding, soul frequencies, and encrypted data stored in the chip are frozen in the concept of absolute zero. From physics to information to causality to existence, four dimensions are frozen simultaneously.

Frozen things will not be destroyed.

But it will never be read.

It will never be decrypted.

No one will ever know what's inside.

More vicious than destruction.

Destruction leaves behind at least fragments. These fragments can be pieced together. They can be analyzed. The original content can be deduced from the remaining information.

The concept freezes, leaving nothing behind. It preserves things exactly as they are, but makes them forever inaccessible to everyone.

visible.

I can't get it.

Su Yuan's tricolored vertical pupils shone brightly in the pitch-black darkness. In a world without light, those three vertical lines were the only source of light.

The dark red tendrils were still forty centimeters from his palm.

Thirty-two centimeters.

25 centimeters.

The chip flickered even faster. The warm light struggled and fluttered under the oppressive dark red light, its brightness sometimes reaching its limit and sometimes plummeting to the brink of extinction.

Like a flame about to be extinguished.

Temporary observation space for the high-dimensional dark web.

The young elder knelt before the wall of laws.

Black blood trickled from the corner of his mouth down to his chest, the soaked fabric clinging cold to his skin. He no longer had the strength to kneel; he lay half-paralyzed, half-prone.

A red label suddenly popped up on the remaining observation interface.

It's not just any ordinary red.

It was a darker red, two shades deeper than the 000 life-ending warning.

There are no words on the label. There is only a symbol.

A symbol he had only seen once in the entire record of his term as an elder, in a footnote on the very last page of a taboo chapter in a textbook.

The young elder's pupils shrank to two black dots the instant he saw the symbol.

His mouth opened.

It's closed.

It opened again.

The color drained completely from his face between the three opening and closing movements.

"Origin-level..."

The sound came out scraping from his throat. Broken.

"The Cleaner Agreement..."

His back slammed into the wall of law. Not by leaning against it. His legs completely gave way, and he fell backward, only to be caught by the wall.

"That's the base seal... something even chess players dare not touch..."

He gave a bitter laugh.

The curve of his upturned lips was completely mismatched with the emotion conveyed by his facial muscles. A smiling mouth, but eyes as lifeless as a dead person's.

"He just survived a causal singularity. He doesn't even have time to catch his breath..."

I took a deep breath. Too fast. I choked.

He coughed twice. A few drops of black blood splattered from the corner of his mouth.

"This time, even that chip will be completely frozen to death..."

The old elder was still lying on the pile of black blood. His eyes darted around. He didn't speak. He didn't even have the strength to twitch his lips.

Wasteland shelter.

A dark red label indicating synchronization with the dark web popped up on the terminal screen.

The staff officer's face was white. White from his forehead to his chin. Even his lips had lost their color.

"Sir."

His voice was abnormally flat. It was flat to the point of being in a special frequency of extreme fear causing nerve overload and emotional forced shutdown.

"Origin-level alert."

The commander was still kneeling on the floor. He looked up at the screen.

The dark gold spots were perfectly enclosed by a dark red square border.

The brightness of the dark gold is decreasing.

Dark red has the highest stability value.

The commander's mouth moved.

His lips moved three times before he managed to squeeze out a mumbled syllable. It wasn't a complete word.

The staff officer did not pursue the matter further.

The two of them shut their mouths at the same time.

The dark red square on the screen was perfectly still. It didn't flicker. It didn't fluctuate. It didn't generate any extraneous energy radiation.

It was so quiet it sent chills down your spine.

Deep inside the stomach cavity, number 000.

Bottom of the passage.

The dark red tendrils were still nine centimeters away from Su Yuan's palm.

Seven centimeters.

Five centimeters.

The warm-colored pulsating light on the chip surface had become almost transparent. The flicker frequency had dropped from three hundred times per minute to one hundred times per minute. It was decreasing.

Su Yuan did not apply the negation rule.

There was no pioneering evolution.

There are no external output channels for the Three-Colored Divine Fire.

The Scavenger Protocol is a base-level sealing mechanism. Its operational level is lower than anything Su Yuan had ever encountered—down to the root directory of the operating system kernel.

Su Yuan's rule is the application running on this operating system.

Applications can't beat the kernel.

He should have realized this when he swallowed the Nine Colors source code and gained the highest administrator privileges. What are administrator privileges? They are granted to him by the operating system.

The system can reclaim anything assigned to him at any time.

The scavenger agreement is the mechanism for reclaiming the operating system.

The dark red tendrils were still three centimeters away from the palm of the hand.

Su Yuan's tricolored vertical pupils stared intently at those dark red thin lines.

There was no anger.

There was no fear.

Deep within his eyes churned an extremely dense, high-speed train of thought.

he was thinking.

I tried my best to think.

Then he had an idea.

It's not about the rules.

It's not about strength.

It's all about where you came from.

Su Yuan's left hand did not move.

The right wrist—that empty, smooth cross-section left after the causal collapse wave was erased—lifted slightly.

It's not about using your right wrist to do anything.

It's the body's center of gravity that's being adjusted.

Deep within Su Yuan's chest cavity, the entrance to his inner universe opened slightly under extreme compression.

Not much. Just enough to squeeze out a single drop of liquid.

The true source.

It wasn't the power of laws. It wasn't higher-dimensional encoding. It wasn't anything he acquired in the battles of this universe.

It was the material that he extracted from the physical foundation of this universe when he devoured the fingertips of higher dimensions.

The actual source material does not belong to the operating system.

It is hardware.

a drop.

Dark gold. Extremely concentrated. When squeezed out from the cracks of an inner universe, surface tension stretched it into a perfect sphere. Less than a millimeter in diameter.

Su Yuan guided the drop of true essence from the residual channel of the gravity folds in his chest cavity, and sent it along the veins on the inside of the dark gold bone armor to the palm of his left hand.

It was precisely dropped onto the gold-plated contacts on the back of the chip.

Metal contacts.

BGA package.

Standard industrial manufacturing process in the Blue Star Era 2024.

The actual source material comes into contact with the surface of the contact point.

Su Yuan's tricolor vertical pupils caught a detail in that fraction of a second.

The physical structure of the contact points resonated under the influence of the real source material. It wasn't activated; it was awakened.

Those neatly arranged gold-plated solder balls have recalibrated their spacing at a microscopic level. The calibration parameters do not come from any higher-dimensional laws, but from an extremely ancient and primitive set of physical standards.

It is the 2024 BGA packaging specification.

The chip recognized the true source material.

Or to be more precise, the true source material is the chip's native operating environment.

They are from the same origin.

The key was inserted into the lock.

An ancient array dormant within the chip was activated the instant it came into contact with the real source material. It wasn't a slow awakening; it was a power-off restart. The entire chip's energy consumption state jumped directly from "low-power standby" to "full-power operation."

The warm, pulsating light exploded.

It's not flickering. It's constant brightness.

The brightness soared from near extinguishing to a blinding level, and the dark gold armored leaves cast clear shadows under the light.

Then the chip fired.

A ring of ripples.

Electromagnetic waves.

Standard, early Blue Star electromagnetic pulses, bearing the hallmarks of the analog signal era.

The frequency band is extremely low. The modulation method is shockingly primitive—AM (amplitude modulation). Amplitude modulation. The kind of technology used in radios in the last century.

The ripples spread outward from the surface of the wafer.

It collided with the dark red tendrils.

The dark red, absolute zero liquid data stream cracked the moment it came into contact with the electromagnetic ripples.

It wasn't shattered. It wasn't burned through. It wasn't denied.

It was split open by a compatibility bug.

The dark red filaments represent high-dimensional data streams at the base level. Their operating environment is the kernel of the operating system within this cosmic chassis.

This AM (amplitude modulated) electromagnetic wave originated from the hardware testing phase before the operating system was installed.

It's older than the operating system.

It's even older than the base.

It is a probe signal used by the base manufacturer to test whether the hardware is working properly.

The scavenger protocol encountered a signal type that was not in its security rule base.

It's not because the signal is too strong.

It's because the signal is too old.

It was so old that the version number of the Scavenger Protocol hadn't even been compiled yet. It was so old that the entire operating system of the spacecraft was just a conceptual sketch in a design document.

The dark red tendrils broke in the middle.

The data flow at the break point experienced a logical overflow due to a compatibility conflict with the AM ripple. The overflowed data overwrote the execution instructions of the contact wire, causing the data flow on both sides of the break point to lose its behavioral definition for further extension.

It didn't know which way to go.

Because its instruction set does not have a contingency plan for handling this type of signal.

Su Yuan knew this wasn't enough.

The scavenger protocol will update its rule base after it reacts. This takes a very short time—just a few seconds.

He can't wait.

The chip is still emitting AM pulses. Wave after wave.

On the six walls of the crimson cube cage, a crack appears at the location where each AM pulse arrives. The crack is small, a few centimeters wide. The crimson data stream briefly malfunctions at the crack due to a logical overflow, but is repaired by the self-healing mechanism of the Scavenger Protocol after a few seconds.

Neither offense nor defense is sufficient.

You should read it.

While I can still read.

Su Yuan flipped his left hand over. The contact array on the back of the chip was facing upwards.

He did not hesitate.

The cross-section of his right wrist was aligned with his chest. He turned his body slightly to the side, exposing the entrance to the physical stomach gravity folds on the shattered dark gold breastplate.

It's not about stuffing it into the stomach.

It connects to the exposed nerve connections at the edge of the stomach.

Su Yuan pressed the chip directly onto the chip.

The physical interface standards of the contact array and the neural interface are completely incompatible. One is a BGA package from 2024, and the other is a signal terminal for a high-dimensional biological neuron.

But the real source material is still on the surface of the chip.

It served as an adapter.

sizzle.

An extremely piercing sound of electrical overload.

Su Yuan's entire left side convulsed the instant of contact. From his fingertips to his shoulder to his neck to half of his faceplate, the dark gold armor plates crackled and popped from the violent muscle spasms.

The data has been fed in.

It is not a high-dimensional law information flow.

It's a video.

Old-fashioned. Low bitrate. The kind of video with such low resolution that you can see individual pixels.

The holographic image exploded from the connection point in Su Yuan's chest cavity.

From the cracks in the dark gold bone armor, the gaps between the armor plates, and the grooves of the nine-colored patterns, old blue-white light surged out. The edges of the light were marked with snowflake-like noise, and the frame rate of the image was so low that it could be counted by the naked eye how many frames per second it was.

Twenty-four frames.

Standard 2024 video frame rate.

The images unfolded dramatically within the 10,000-meter-long tunnel.

It did not take place inside the cube-shaped cage.

It was through the cage.

The dark red concept freeze wall suffered widespread compatibility failures under the impact of these old blue-white images. The image data carried by the AM amplitude modulation wave occupied the wall's logical bandwidth, causing resource contention between the freeze command of the sweeper protocol and the playback command of the image data in the same code space.

The visuals won.

Because it's at a lower level.

Blue and white holographic images surged from the bottom of the tunnel along the pipe walls. They passed through the ashes left behind by the disintegration of Unit 000's remains. They traversed the tunnel, which was ten thousand meters high. They passed through the hull of the Devourer.

It broke through the barrier of the laws.

The old blue-white image was projected directly onto the starry sky of the wasteland universe.

It's not a projection.

It's about signal coverage.

The entire wasteland universe, including the area that can receive electromagnetic radiation, was hijacked by this 24-frame low-bitrate video.

The image quality is very low.

But the content of the image is extremely clear.

A room.

The ceiling is white plasterboard, with one patch yellowed and a crack along the edge. The fluorescent light tubes are old-fashioned, long and narrow. One of the tubes has a faulty ballast, causing the light to flicker at a very low frequency.

The floor was made of gray epoxy resin. There were a few scratches. A folding chair was tucked into the corner against the wall, its fabric cover faded from washing.

A row of server racks stood in the center of the room.

Old-fashioned.

A black metal frame. A handwritten label is affixed to the front panel, the writing mostly blurred by sweaty hands. The cooling fan is spinning. A buzzing sound. The cables at the top of the rack are laid out haphazardly like a spiderweb, several bundles loosely tied together with cable ties.

Several people were standing in front of the server rack.

Four. No, five. The last one was squatting, only half of its head was visible.

They were all wearing white coats.

A typical lab coat, the kind from 2024. Not the kind of high-dimensional arbitration tribunal's robe, not the antimatter alloy armor from a wasteland universe. Just a cotton lab coat with a pocket sewn onto the chest and a hem that reaches to the knees.

One of them had two pens tucked into his breast pocket. One was blue, and the other was red. The cap of the blue pen was cracked.

The other person's white coat had coffee stains on the cuffs.

The third person was wearing glasses. The frames were metal. One of the nose pads was wrapped with tape.

The person in the front has their back to the camera. A silhouette. Not tall. Narrow shoulders. There's a loose thread along the shoulder seam of their white lab coat.

He is operating the server.

Fingers tapped on the keyboard. An old-fashioned mechanical keyboard. The keycaps were worn smooth and shiny. The switches made a crisp, even sound.

Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.

Then he stopped.

Fingers hovering above the keyboard.

He turned around.

An extremely slow turn. With a sluggishness that comes from long-term fatigue, where joints and muscles are not quite in sync.

His face was revealed.

The moment Su Yuan saw that face, all five fingers of his left hand clenched tightly. The dark gold armor was pushed up at the edges by the force of his fingers. His knuckles made a dull metallic cracking sound.

They were his closest relatives.

It is not a soul frequency. It is not a conceptual projection. It is not a counterfeit of Number 000.

It is a living person.

Standing in that room filled with old servers and fluorescent tubes, a living person wearing a white coat with coffee-stained cuffs, with dark circles under his eyes and chapped lips from long-term sleep deprivation.

Su Yuan recognized every line on that face.

I recognize the mole on the tip of my eyebrow.

I recognize the scar on my left earlobe from an inflammation I had as a child.

I recognize a small patch of skin on the right side of my chin that is half a shade darker than the surrounding skin; it's a remnant of a burn I suffered one summer.

A close relative spoke up.

The sound came from the holographic image.

It is not information transmission based on higher-dimensional laws. It is not cross-dimensional communication based on quantum entanglement.

It is a physical sound wave generated by the vibration of the vocal cords pushing air molecules.

His voice was hoarse. The kind of hoarseness that comes from overusing his vocal cords after working continuously for more than ten hours. Each syllable ended with a slight breathiness.

"If anyone can be compatible with this chip."

His gaze wasn't on the camera; it was fixed on the server rack in front of him. He spoke slowly, enunciating each word carefully, with pauses indicating deliberation in his choice of words.

"This indicates that the first layer of the high-dimensional sandbox has been breached."

He turned his head away.

Facing the camera, but not in focus. Looking further away, on the wall behind the lens, or something behind the wall.

The corners of her mouth twitched. Not in a smile. It was a slight, uncontrollable upward twitch of the muscles at the corners of her mouth, a sign of extreme fatigue.

"Dear high-dimensional crawlers."

He said.

The sound was flat.

There was no mockery. There was no smugness. There was no anger.

I'm just too tired.

I was so tired that all the superfluous emotions in my voice were gone. All that remained were the most dry, unadorned statements.

"Welcome to the testing grounds of Earth."

The blue and white light of the holographic image reached its peak brightness the instant those words were spoken.

The light burst forth from the 10,000-meter-long tunnel.

It broke free from the disintegrating remains of Number 000.

They broke through the skeletal route.

They rushed into every corner of the wasteland universe.

Planets, space stations, fleet wreckage, dark web nodes, and the Arbitration Tribunal observation array that can receive electromagnetic radiation all received the same image at the same time.

A dilapidated room. Several humans in white lab coats. A row of old-fashioned servers.

And one sentence.

Wasteland shelter.

The staff officer looked at the person in the white coat on the main screen above his head.

Looking at that room with its yellowed ceiling.

Look at that row of servers with their cables bundled together with cable ties.

Looking at that keyboard, worn smooth and shiny.

His brain underwent a complete shutdown and reboot within three seconds.

It's not a metaphor.

It was as if his nervous system, after receiving the information that "the higher-dimensional universe is a testing sandbox for Earth," broke the underlying logical chain of his cognitive framework. His old worldview collapsed. A new one hadn't yet been built. A gap had formed in between.

The blank space lasted for three seconds.

Then his knees bent.

It wasn't that I knelt down intentionally. The supporting force of my knees failed due to the cascading effects of cognitive breakdown. My brain couldn't allocate enough neural signals to maintain my standing posture.

My knee hit the metal floor.

A dull thud.

He knelt there. His hands hung at his sides. His mouth was open, unable to close.

Tears welled up in my eyes.

It wasn't emotional crying. It was physiological tear gland overload caused by the pupils receiving an overwhelming amount of information.

Tears streamed down the curve of her cheekbones, tracing the bloody cuts inflicted by the shards of glass. They mingled with blood as they dripped down.

The commander knelt beside him.

Two kneeling people. Face to face. Neither looking at the other. Both staring at the screen above them, which had switched back to a static image.

The commander's mouth was moving.

The ground shook repeatedly.

Don't make a sound.

The lip shape is a repetition of the same word. You can tell if you look closely.

"Sandbox".

"Sandbox".

"Sandbox".

The high-dimensional dark web.

The young elder leaned against the wall of laws. Black blood flowed down to his waist. His clothes were soaked through, clinging to his body, icy cold.

His eyes were fixed on the old blue-and-white image on the remaining observation interface.

The low bitrate of 24 frames per second became even more blurry due to the reflection from the lawful wall. But he could hear every single word clearly.

"...Testing grounds."

The young elder's lips trembled.

It wasn't a bitter smile. It wasn't fear.

It is a disordered twitching of the facial expression system after the structural cognitive foundation is removed, resulting in the loss of a frame of reference.

His faith.

His universe.

It is a high-dimensional civilization that has existed for millions of years.

It is a testing environment for a group of low-dimensional carbon-based organisms wearing white lab coats.

"us……"

The sound was squeezed out from his broken throat.

"Yes……"

He didn't finish speaking.

I can't continue.

The old elder lay sprawled in the black blood.

He did something at that moment.

His hand emerged from beneath his body. A hand stained with black blood. A hand with deformed knuckles. A hand trembling so much it could barely perform delicate actions.

He touched his chest.

There lies a core of laws.

The foundation of the existence of the High Dimension Elders. A crystallization of laws formed from the condensed essence of tens of millions of years of cultivation.

The old elder grasped the core of his own laws with his trembling hand.

Then I pinched it.

crunch.

An extremely faint cracking sound.

The core is broken.

Cracks spread from the contact point throughout the crystal. Three. Five. More than a dozen. Each crack had an irregular trajectory, and a very faint gray haze seeped between the fragments.

The old elder closed his eyes.

All the facial muscles were relaxed.

The black blood operation has grown even larger.

The young elder saw it.

His head slowly turned, gazing at the shattering core of law on the old elder's chest. He watched as the gray mist drifted out from between the fragments, appearing extremely faint against the backdrop of black blood.

His Adam's apple bobbed.

He didn't speak.

It was not stopped.

Deep within the ruins after the remains of No. 000 disintegrated.

The bottom of the 10,000-meter tunnel.

Su Yuan stood still.

Under the incompatibility conflict between AM pulses and holographic images, large areas of logical collapse appeared on all six walls of the dark red cubic cage. The dark red liquid data stream solidified into irregular crystals within the collapse areas, losing its fluidity.

The cage is still there, but it's riddled with holes.

Su Yuan did not take the opportunity to break through.

He stood there, his left hand pressed against his chest. The chip's contacts were still connected to the neural interface.

The video is still playing.

In the video, after the close relative finished speaking, they turned back to typing. The other doctors in white coats were also busy with their work. One was looking at data on a monitor. Another was drinking water. It was a plastic cup. There were water stains on the cup.

It's a very ordinary scene.

It's so ordinary that it makes your heart ache.

Su Yuan's tricolored vertical pupils remained fixed on the back of his loved one in the image. He stared at the uncut thread at the shoulder seam of the white coat. He stared at the habitual posture of his little finger curling up when he held the mouse in his left hand.

He recognized him.

I recognize them all.

The image quality is degrading. The blue and white light is dimming. The frame rate is dropping from 24 frames per second. 18 frames per second. 12 frames per second.

The chip's storage power is exhausted.

This video is almost finished playing.

Su Yuan removed his left hand from his chest. A thin wisp of blue-white light was drawn from between his fingertips and the crystal. The light wisp broke.

The image began to dissipate in the passageway above the Devourer.

The blue and white pixels collapsed inwards from the edges of the image. First, the corner of the room disappeared. Then the ceiling. Then the light bulbs. Then the metal frame of the server rack.

The back of a loved one is in the very center of the image. It is the last part to disappear.

Just as the images were about to completely fade away.

The loved one in the video stopped typing.

The finger hovered in mid-air.

He did not turn around.

The back of his head is facing the camera.

But his mouth was moving.

Very slight lip and teeth movements.

It wasn't said to my colleagues.

He said it to the camera.

Or to be more precise—it passed through the lens, through the data encapsulation layer, through the physical medium of the chip, through the ruined tunnels tens of thousands of meters deep, through the shattered remains of Number 000, through the dimensional barriers that separated the wasteland universe and the Blue Star era by countless layers—

He said this to Su Yuan.

Lip reading.

With the last bit of resolution remaining in the remaining image quality, Su Yuan's tricolored vertical pupils managed to read those words.

Seven characters.

"Come to the Great Wall."

It paused for half a second.

"Watch out for your left eye."

The image has faded.

The blue and white pixel fragments eventually turned into a very thin layer of light mist, which floated in the passage for less than a second before being absorbed by the freezing waves emanating from the remaining walls of the dark red cage.

The passageway went dark again.

Su Yuan stood in the darkness, clutching the chip in his left hand. His tri-colored vertical pupils emitted a faint light in the pitch-black environment.

Then his left eye started to hurt.

It is not feedback at the level of laws.

It is not a high-dimensional attack.

It is physiological.

Sharp.

The excruciating pain begins at the root of the optic nerve at the back of the eyeball and extends forward through the entire cavity of the eye.

Su Yuan suddenly covered his left eye with his left hand. His dark gold finger bones pressed against the edge of his eye socket. A trickle of liquid squeezed out between his fingers.

It wasn't tears.

Black.

Thick.

Dark liquid seeped from the tear duct of his left eye, slowly trickling down the veins of his dark gold nail plate. It condensed at the tip of the nail plate on his chin, forming a droplet the size of a bean.

It dripped.

It crashed onto the metal floor at my feet.

silent.

The moment the drop of black liquid hit the ground, all physical properties of the metal sheet on the ground within a three-centimeter radius of the point of contact were reduced to zero.

It wasn't corroded. It wasn't denied.

It was emptied by something carried in that drop of black blood.

A three-centimeter blank space.

Su Yuan removed his left hand from his eyes.

Looking at the layer of black residue left on my fingertips.

Within the three vertical pupils, the jet-black pupil on the left, representing the laws of "nothingness" and "negation," is rapidly contracting and expanding uncontrollably.

Contraction. Expansion. Contraction. Expansion.

The frequency is getting faster and faster.

Deep within the pupils, in that pool of absolute negation and pitch black, a tiny, non-written law pattern emerged.

Grayish-white.

Su Yuan stared at the stripes.

The black blood was still dripping from the finger bones of his left hand.