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

The black blood has thickened.

Between Su Yuan's fingers covering his left eye, dark droplets increased from one per second to three per second.

The first one landed.

The metal floor loses all physical properties within a five-centimeter radius of the contact point.

The second one landed.

The blank area has been expanded to twelve centimeters.

The third one landed.

Time stood still in that area.

It's not slowing down. It's absolute stillness.

A fragment of remnant number 000 near Su Yuan's feet drifted just past the edge of that area. The first half of the fragment was still moving, but the moment the second half entered the area, its kinetic energy, angular velocity, and molecular thermal motion all dropped to zero.

The debris hung suspended in mid-air. Half of it was moving, and the other half was dead.

Su Yuan's left finger bones pressed against the edge of his left eye socket. The dark gold nail plates were pushed up at the corners by the cheekbone above the socket. The pupils that peeked through his fingers were no longer jet black.

It was a grayish-white light.

In his tricolored vertical pupils, the right eye and the central pupil were still functioning normally. But the pitch-black pupil on the left, representing "nothingness" and "negation," was being swallowed up from the inside by a gray-white spider web.

The gray-white lines are multiplying.

It wasn't a slow infiltration. It was a worm-like, explosive replication. Each gray-white line split into two, two split into four, four split into sixteen. The exponential rate of proliferation meant that half of Su Yuan's vision was devoured by the gray-white line in 0.3 seconds.

The lines run along the optic nerve and penetrate deep into the brain.

Su Yuan could sense it.

It wasn't a perception at the level of laws. It was the most primal, physical pain. Something was wriggling in his optic nerve bundle, tearing channels in his nerve sheath, leaving grayish-white crawling traces on the surface of his brainstem.

The goal is extremely clear.

The root directory entry point of the endogenous universe.

The core of the "One Who Returns to Oneness" analysis completed a full-power scan in a fraction of a second, and the results were fed back to Su Yuan's remaining right visual cortex.

It's not the 000th.

Number 000 is dead. The chip was in his hands. The core power supply was cut off. That body, spanning tens of thousands of kilometers, has turned into ashes.

The gray-white striped code signature was exactly the same as the underlying architecture of the dark red cube-shaped cage that Su Yuan had faced a few minutes earlier.

Scavenger Agreement.

Su Yuan used his last remaining strength to reconstruct the intrusion path.

Just now.

The Crimson Cage experienced a large-scale logic failure due to a compatibility conflict with the AM pulse. When the cage walls shattered, the system's immune mechanism did not fail. It executed its final instruction at the very moment of shattering.

They compressed their core code to the nanometer level.

Background noise disguised as a holographic image.

Those old, blue-white, 24-frame images with snow-like noise.

In the background of each frame, there are 0.007% gray-white code particles mixed in.

Su Yuan saw that video.

He stared at his loved one's back for a long time.

He read the last lip movements of his loved one.

His gaze lingered on each frame for a considerable amount of time.

The Scavenger Agreement came in following his line of sight.

It wasn't penetrating the defense. It wasn't breaking the laws. It was flowing in reverse into his left eye, which represented "nothingness," through a visual channel that Su Yuan had deliberately opened, using photons as a carrier and gazing as a bridge.

A base-level intrusion.

It goes deeper than laws. It goes deeper than concepts. Because it doesn't operate at the level covered by Su Yuan's defense system at all.

All of Su Yuan's laws—negation, creation, unification, imperial authority, and the three-colored divine fire—are applications running on this universe's operating system.

The scavenger protocol, on the other hand, is the operating system itself.

The application cannot kill the kernel process.

The grayish-white lines have moved from behind the left eyeball to the optic chiasm. Half a centimeter further forward is the brainstem.

Beyond the brainstem lies the root directory entry point of the endogenous universe.

If the root directory is infected—

Su Yuan's Law of Negation. Creation and Evolution. The One Who Unifies All Things. Imperial Authority. Nine-Colored Primitive Code. True Source Matter. And all the power he accumulated by devouring an entire high-dimensional universe and destroying countless chess games will be "unloaded" from the root.

He himself will be deleted as well.

The gray-white stripes suddenly jumped two millimeters.

My left eye is completely out of control.

Without any warning, Su Yuan's hand, which was pressed against his left eye, was jolted away by a force erupting from inside his eye socket. His dark gold finger bones shifted fifteen degrees from their original position due to the impact of the rebound.

A jet-black beam of negation shot out from his left eye socket.

thick.

It has a diameter of over three meters.

The beam of light was pure, absolute, and pitch black, containing no other frequencies. It was Su Yuan's own law of negation, which, after its release parameters were altered by the gray-white patterns, poured out uncontrollably.

The beam of light grazed the eastern wall of the 10,000-meter-long tunnel.

The wall disappeared.

It wasn't shattering. It wasn't melting. It was being erased from existence at the conceptual level by Su Yuan's own law of negation. A gap more than two hundred meters long and thirty meters deep was sheared off the entire passage wall. The fly ash produced by the disintegration of No. 000's remains was drawn into the vacuum outside at the gap.

The beam of light continued upwards.

It passed through the passage. It passed through the layer of fly ash. It crashed into the front of the Devourer.

The first layer of the dark gold shield shattered.

The second layer of dark gold shield shattered.

The third layer of dark gold shield—two-thirds of its area was shaved off, and the remaining part cracked with dense fissures during the tremors.

Within the communication link, Xiao Huo's scream cleaved through all the electrostatic interference across all frequency bands.

"Master!! The shield—the shield has been breached!! It wasn't an external attack! It came from your position—it was yours—"

The sound broke.

It's not that the signal is lost.

Xiao Huo was so frightened by this fact that he couldn't say the rest of the words.

Su Yuan's left eye was still shooting.

The direction of the negation beam was deflecting erratically. He couldn't control it anymore. The gray-white patterns had completely taken over the output of the negation law, turning Su Yuan's left eye into a randomly firing conceptual annihilation turret.

The beam grazed Su Yuan's left shoulder the second time it deflected.

The dark gold shoulder armor was negated at the molecular level the instant it made contact. The armor plates did not fall off. Because "falling off" requires gravity, the concept of gravity in that area was also negated.

The shoulder armor disappeared directly from Su Yuan's body.

It revealed the pale skin beneath, skin that had never been exposed to light because it had been covered by bone armor for so long.

Wasteland shelter.

The staff officer stared intently at the main screen.

The dark red warning label on the screen hadn't faded yet. New warnings piled up. One after another. Red. Dark red. Dark red. The LED indicator on the screen bezel was flashing, the cooling fan was spinning at its maximum speed, and a buzzing vibration transmitted from the case to the table, causing ripples to spread across the half-eaten water in the glass.

"Su Yuan's highest administrator privileges..." The staff officer's eyes scanned the data stream rapidly. "He's being downgraded."

He swallowed hard.

"Nine colors, down to seven. Seven colors down to five. And it's still falling."

The commander's knees were still on the metal floor. His hands were bracing against the edge of the table. The cuts on his fingertips had stopped bleeding, replaced by a layer of dark red scabs.

He didn't look up at the screen. He was listening.

The staff officer's reports grew faster and faster.

"The energy graph of the negation law has shown a reverse flow—it's eating back!"

"What?"

"The law of negation within Su Yuan's body is now devouring his own life force! The rate of decay is 3.7 percent per second!"

The commander's fingers dug new white marks into the edge of the table.

The staff officer's voice trembled.

"At this rate, his vital signs will drop below the irreversible threshold in thirty seconds."

Temporary observation space for the high-dimensional dark web.

The young elder was half-prone in front of the Law Wall.

Black blood trickled from the corner of his mouth down to his waist, soaking the entire front of his robe. His face was ashen. His lips were purple. But his eyes were still moving.

On the remaining observation interface, Su Yuan's permission level is being covered by dark red at a visible speed.

The highest level administrator was demoted to a senior administrator.

Senior Administrator – Demoted to Standard User.

Standard user – soon to be downgraded to restricted visitor.

The young elder's lips curled into a smile.

It wasn't a smile. It was the arc produced by random electrical discharges from twitching muscles under extreme fatigue. But this arc, combined with his expression at that moment, did indeed look like a smile.

A desperate laugh.

"Base code".

His throat was already bloodshot. Every syllable was accompanied by a wet, mucous membrane-like friction sound.

"No matter how strong your laws are, how much you eat, or how many gods you kill... before the foundational code, they are all just toys of the application layer."

His head snapped back. The back of his head slammed against the wall of the law. A dull thud.

"If the operating system wants to uninstall you, what file will you use?"

He gasped for breath. The air rose from deep in his throat.

"Use your laws? Your laws are just something that's attached to it."

"Use your power? Your power is what it allocates."

"Use your administrator privileges? Your privileges were issued by it."

The young elder closed his eyes.

You can't win against your own foundation.

"No one has won."

Deep within the ruins of stomach cavity number 000.

Bottom of the passage.

A voice echoed in Su Yuan's mind.

There were no inflections. No emotions. No tonal variations typical of human language. Purely synthesized sounds. Standard Mandarin with perfect pronunciation. The duration of each syllable was accurate to the millisecond.

"Unauthorized privileges detected."

A pause. 0.3 seconds. Exactly 0.3 seconds.

"Initiating the uninstallation of violating rules and attached hosts."

Su Yuan's left cheek began to crumble.

It's not a physical rupture. It's a conceptual stripping away.

The dark gold bone armor's scales began to pixelate at a visible speed, starting from his left cheekbone. The edges of each scale first blurred, then broke down into tiny square blocks of color, which floated in the air for less than half a second before completely dissipating.

The flesh beneath the nail plate was also peeled away along with it.

Su Yuan watched as the muscle fibers of his left cheek were disassembled layer by layer during the pixelation process. Fascia. Fat. Capillaries. Each type of tissue was reduced to its most basic data format, then marked as an "illegal file" and deleted.

My left ear is gone.

The outer side of the left mandible was exposed. It was white, with bits of meat still clinging to it.

The zygomatic arch below the left eye socket began to show signs of becoming transparent.

He is being eliminated by his own supreme power.

It is not an external enemy.

It was not a higher-dimensional attack.

It was his own internal law of negation, driven by the gray and white patterns, that treated Su Yuan as garbage data that needed to be cleaned up.

He killed himself.

The highest-level user kills the user who holds the highest-level privileges.

Su Yuan smiled.

Low.

It was squeezed out from the deepest part of my throat.

A hoarse sound, a tearing sound from the right corner of the mouth pulling at the remaining muscles on the left.

He didn't panic.

He placed his left hand on the back of his neck. The dark gold finger bones touched the area between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae.

That was the physical convergence point of his central nervous system bridging.

All nerve signals originating from the brain and transmitted throughout the body via the spinal cord pass through this location.

Su Yuan grabbed it.

The five dark gold finger bones tightened simultaneously. The blades of the nails sliced ​​into the skin at the back of the neck. Beads of blood oozed from the cut. Not black; a normal dark red.

Blood on the right side.

His finger pressure continued to increase. The nail pierced through the subcutaneous fat layer. It touched the muscle. It touched the paravertebral ligament.

Then he cut it off.

It didn't break the spine. It severed the neural connection between the left side of the brain and the torso.

Precise. Selective. Cut only the left side.

The microscopic analysis of the One Who Unifies All Things operates at his fingertips, guiding the blade of the nail to avoid the motor and sensory nerve bundles on the right, performing physical cuts only on the conduction fibers on the left.

Click.

An extremely subtle cracking sound.

It's not the sound of bones. It's a moist, extremely tiny popping sound produced when a nerve fiber tears open its cell membrane.

All sensation on the left side of my body vanished instantly.

It's not numbness. It's emptiness.

Su Yuan could no longer feel the existence of the left half of his body. The left arm, left leg, left half of the torso, and left half of the face were still peeling away like pixels—all the sense of touch, pain, and proprioception were reduced to zero the moment the neural bridge was severed.

He isolated the battlefield.

The assimilated gray-white patterns were locked within the left half of his skull. Without neural bridging, they could not extend downwards to the torso and the root directory entrance of the inner universe.

The price was that Su Yuan lost control of half of his body.

But the gray-and-white striped one was also kept in a cage.

At the same moment, Su Yuan unilaterally shut down all external energy supply channels of the inner universe. Without energy input, the gray-white patterns in the left half of the skull lost the fuel to propel it towards the root directory of the inner universe.

It is still multiplying. But the rate of multiplication has plummeted from exponential to linear.

It went from a flood to a trickle.

Su Yuan bought time by harming himself.

Wasteland shelter.

The staff officer's hands were pressed against the table, the pads of his ten fingers turning white.

In the energy thermal imaging, Su Yuan's body outline was split into two completely different halves along the midline.

Right half: Dark gold. Normal temperature. Normal energy circulation.

Left half: Alternating flashes of gray-white and pitch black. The temperature soared to the point of overloading the sensors. The energy density in the brain region went from red to purple, then to black.

The staff officer looked at the thermal image of the human figure that had been forcibly cut in half.

"He...cut off his own escape route?"

The sound is indistinct. It's incomprehensible. The brain refuses to process the information.

"Actively severing the neural connections in the left hemisphere of the brain? Allowing the brain to overload and burn through? He—"

A fist slammed onto the table.

The commander's.

The impact made a dull thud as the metal deformed on the table. A nearby water glass was knocked over, spilling water onto the table and into the gaps in the screen's base.

The commander remained kneeling, his upper body upright. His entire uniform was soaked with cold sweat, from the collar to his belt. Sweat streamed down his temples.

His mouth was trembling.

"He's not waiting to die."

The staff officer was stunned.

"He's cutting off the battlefield."

The commander's pupils contracted to an extremely small size.

"That madman used his head as an isolation chamber—locking the enemy inside—and then preparing to put that half-head inside—"

He couldn't continue.

It wasn't that he was afraid to speak. It was that the conclusion he reached was too insane. So insane that it sent chills down the spine of this old soldier who had spent forty years crawling through piles of corpses in the wasteland universe.

Ruins of stomach cavity No. 000.

Su Yuan stood at the bottom of the passage.

He has lost sensation on the left side of his body. However, he can see the condition on his left side with his right eye.

The pixelation continued. The left cheekbone was now fully exposed. Grayish-white. Grayish-white veins crawled across the bone surface. The beam of negation in the left eye socket, having lost precise control, changed from continuous firing to intermittent pulsed eruptions. Every two or three seconds, a jet-black mass of law would explode from the eye socket, slamming into the wall of the passage and blasting open a conceptual void two meters in diameter.

The synthesized sound was still echoing in his head.

Uninstallation progress: 37 percent.

Uninstallation progress: 41%.

"Uninstallation progress: 44%"

Su Yuan's right hand—the smooth cross-section of the wrist bone without a palm—moved slightly.

Then he raised his left hand.

His left hand.

Five finger bones covered with dark gold armor leaves.

Just minutes ago, the left hand was stuck on the gray-white crystal shell, using code droplets to steal the base's permissions.

A few minutes ago, my left hand held that warm-colored chip with extremely precise control of its strength.

The left hand that had touched the encapsulated shell of the soul of a dear relative.

Five dark gold finger bones opened up.

He aimed his fingertip at his left eye socket.

No hesitation.

The remaining computing power of the One Who Unifies All Things converges at the fingertips. It is not energy at the level of laws. It is a precision field of microscopic analysis. The fingertip of each finger bone is enveloped by an analytical field, with precision reaching the molecular level.

Su Yuan's five finger bones pierced his left eye socket.

The first two phalanges were wedged between the upper and lower margins of the orbit. The third and fourth phalanges penetrated deep into the gap between the lateral and floor walls of the orbit. The fifth phalanx—the thumb—pierced through the medial wall of the orbit and directly touched the entrance to the optic canal.

The skull shattered under the crushing force of the dark gold fingers.

It wasn't a complete fragmentation. It was precise, directional fragmentation along a path calibrated by the analytical field. Bone fragments were broken apart, scattered, and pushed aside piece by piece from the weak areas of the orbital bone.

Then comes the muscle.

The orbital fat pad. The tendon of the superior oblique muscle. The attachment point of the lateral rectus muscle. Each muscle fiber was pried open by the dark gold finger bone with an extremely faint, moist tearing sound.

blood.

A large amount of blood.

It wasn't black anymore. It was bright red, mixed with grayish-white high-dimensional tissue fluid. It seeped out from the gaps in the eye sockets, flowing down the joints of the dark gold finger bones. It flowed over the cheekbones. It flowed over the jawline. It dripped onto the fragments of the breastplate.

Su Yuan's right side of his face was expressionless.

The three vertical pupils, the right and center ones, gazed calmly ahead. There was no curve at the corners of his mouth. No furrowing in his brow. His breathing remained unchanged.

He was gouging out his own eyes.

The finger bone touched the optic nerve bundle.

Thick. Approximately three to four millimeters in diameter. Dense bundles of fibers encased in a nerve sheath. The surface is covered with grayish-white worm-like patterns.

The patterns sensed a threat.

The proliferation rate suddenly accelerated. The grayish-white code frantically advanced from the surface of the optic nerve toward the skull, attempting to break through the last few millimeters before being severed.

Su Yuan brought his thumb and forefinger together.

The fingertip pinched the optic nerve bundle.

The One Who Returns to Oneness transforms into a microscopic carving knife at the fingertips.

It's not about cutting physical structures. It's about identifying, marking, and disconnecting, one by one, the half of the optic nerve infected with the gray-white markings—along with all the gray-white code attached to the nerve sheath, the residual encoding of the contaminated negation rule, the base-level intrusion program injected by the scavenger protocol—from normal brain tissue at the molecular level.

The precision requirements are so high that they cannot be described by human language.

If even one axon is missing, the grayish-white striations will follow the remaining connection channels into the brainstem.

If even one more axon is severed, Su Yuan's left visual pathway will be permanently damaged.

But he no longer needs left-side vision.

What he needs is to live.

Su Yuan suddenly closed his thumb and forefinger together by the last half millimeter.

Hiss.

It's not a metallic sound. It's the sound of biological tissue being precisely torn apart, as the fibrous collagen of the nerve sheath breaks layer by layer under shear force.

It's wet.

Dense.

It comes from inside the bone cavity. It's a low-frequency vibration that resonates within the body cavity.

The optic nerve was severed.

Su Yuan pulled his left hand out of his eye socket.

A fist-sized mass was sandwiched between five dark gold finger bones. Its surface was covered in blood and grayish-white high-dimensional tissue fluid. Grayish-white patterns writhed wildly on the surface of this mass, attempting to spread from the broken ends toward Su Yuan's fingers.

Su Yuan's fingers clenched tightly.

It wasn't about overwhelming force. It was about precise, just-right restraint. It confined the writhing, grayish-white veins to the surface of this mass of tissue, preventing them from crossing the edge of the dark gold nail plate.

He looked down at what was in his hand.

That was a part of him.

His left eye.

His optic nerve was partially severed.

The part of his negation law that was contaminated.

He was pulled out of his own skull while he was still alive.

The left eye socket is now a bleeding black hole. Dark red blood seeps irregularly from the fractured edges of the orbital bone. There is no eyeball. No muscle. No fat pad. The empty bone cavity reveals the cross-section of the severed optic nerve stump at the bottom.

On the cross-section, the bright red and grayish-white sides were clearly distinct. The grayish-white half had already left the cranial cavity along with the removed tissue mass. On the stump remaining inside the skull, only the normal, pinkish cross-section of nerve fibers remained.

Clean.

"Uninstallation progress..." The synthesized voice paused in Su Yuan's mind. It stopped for a full two seconds. Then came a buzzing sound that Su Yuan had never heard before, with the characteristics of a low-level system error.

"Target missing. Relocating. Relocation failed. Target has detached from its host. Relocating. Relocation failed."

It's looping.

The synthesized sound got stuck in a vicious cycle.

The violation rules it was supposed to uninstall were ripped from Su Yuan's brain, along with half of his optic nerve. The base code couldn't find the execution object. The instructions were still running, but the file to be deleted couldn't be found.

Because Su Yuan had the document in his hands.

The pixelation of the left side of the face has stopped.

The parts that have already peeled off will not grow back. But the parts that haven't peeled off have stabilized. The grayish-white lines, having lost their anchor point from the left eye, rapidly atrophied and degenerated within the remaining infected area inside the skull, eventually turning into several inactive grayish-white marks.

The synthesized sound is still looping.

Location tracking failed. Location tracking failed. Location tracking failed.

Then it fell silent.

Because Su Yuan's right wrist slammed into his temple.

That "non-existent" space physically cuts off the transmission path of the synthesized sound.

My mind is clear now.

The high-dimensional dark web.

The young elder knelt before the barrier of laws.

He saw it all.

From the moment Su Yuan's fingers pierced his own eye socket, to the sound of his skull shattering being transmitted via gravitational waves to the vibration sensor on the observation interface, to the image of blood and grayish-white tissue fluid gushing from between his fingers, to the entire process of that writhing optic nerve tissue being pulled out of his eye socket by five dark gold finger bones.

On the data panel, Su Yuan's "negation rule" reading plummeted by half in an instant.

From full.

Halfway through.

The upper half of the bar chart collapsed. The empty space was white. Utterly white, with nothing in it.

However, the Trojan's assimilation reading also returned to zero at the same time.

It has fallen to its lowest point.

A clear and distinct zero.

The young elder stared at the two data points for three seconds.

Then his gaze shifted to the video feed.

Su Yuan stood at the bottom of the ten-thousand-meter passage. His left eye was a bleeding hole. The jagged edges of his fractured orbital bone were exposed to the air. Dark red blood flowed continuously from the hole, running down his left cheekbone, where skin and muscle had been peeled away.

He stood ramrod straight.

The dark gold bone armor on the right side of his body remained intact against the backdrop of ashes. The nine-colored patterns shimmered faintly on the surface of the armor. Only two of the three-colored vertical pupils remained, shining quietly.

The left half is blood, bone, and hollows.

The right half features Dark Gold, Armor Leaf, and Silence.

He stood there, holding a clump of infected tissue he'd pulled from his own skull in his left hand. The "non-existent" section of his right wrist pressed against his temple, isolating him from system noise. Beneath his feet lay the powerless servers and solidified coolant.

The young elder's knees hit the ground.

It wasn't the kind of exhaustion and collapse that I experienced before.

They knelt down.

Both knees touch the ground simultaneously. The person's center of gravity drops vertically downwards. The kneeling posture is upright.

His face was devoid of any superfluous expression. No bitter smile. No fear. No despair. No mockery. All emotions had been smoothed over by the scene, leaving only something primal, something surging up from the deepest recesses of his being.

Trembling.

My whole body was shaking. It started in my spine and spread to my limbs. My fingers. My toes. My shoulders. My neck. Every muscle was spasming uncontrollably.

It's not cold.

It's not pain.

They were intimidated.

Something that can do this to itself.

A killer program that targets the base level, choosing to use the most primitive physical means to dig its eyes out of its brain.

Something that stood perfectly straight after being dug up, its breathing rate unchanged.

The young elder opened his mouth three times.

On the third attempt, he managed to squeeze out a syllable.

That syllable is not a word in any known language. It is a raw sound produced by the throat in extreme fear, without being processed by the language center.

Bottom of the passage.

Su Yuan squeezed out the last drop of true source matter from the deepest part of the inner universe.

Dark gold. Thicker than before. So thick it's almost non-flowing.

He dripped the real essence onto the wriggling, grayish-white optic nerve in his hand.

The moment the real source material comes into contact with the tissue surface, it solidifies.

It's not physical solidification. It's information encapsulation. The hardware-level coding of the true source material completely encapsulates that mass of tissue at the molecular level, forming a translucent, dark golden amber.

Inside the amber, the grayish-white veins are still wriggling. But the speed of this wriggling is decreasing dramatically. The grayish-white code, isolated from external data interaction by the information amber, has lost its operating environment and is entering a dormant state.

Su Yuan stuffed the amber into the deepest part of the inner universe.

The deepest corner.

The highest level of isolation privileges.

It's a forbidden zone that even he himself wouldn't easily touch.

After doing all this.

Su Yuan's right wrist section was moved away from his temple.

He turned around.

Blood was still flowing from his left eye. It trickled down his bare cheekbone, down his jaw, and onto the edge of his shattered breastplate near his collarbone.

He didn't wipe it.

The dark gold combat boots stepped onto the pile of cables. One step. Two steps.

Then his legs bent.

The force of the law bursts forth from the patterns on the soles of the feet.

The over four-meter-tall body transformed into a broken, dark golden streak of light, soaring straight upwards along the ten-thousand-meter-long passage.

The walls of the passageway receded rapidly on both sides.

The fly ash was carried by the airflow and swirled behind him in a spiral shape.

Three seconds later he landed on the front armor of the Devourer.

The moment the boots touched the armor, several pieces of the remaining three layers of shield shattered amidst the vibrations.

Xiao Huo's holographic image popped up from the control panel inside the car. His face was white. His lips were trembling. His eyes were red. Both hands were gripping the control lever tightly.

He saw Su Yuan's left eye.

That emptiness.

A hollow cavity seeping blood.

Fragmented orbital bone.

Exposed bone cavity.

Little Fire opened its mouth. It seemed to want to say something, but couldn't. Its lips moved four or five times.

Su Yuan didn't look at him.

The two vertical pupils on the right side glanced in the direction of the passage, confirming that the gray-white patterns hadn't followed.

He spoke.

"withdraw."

One word.

The sound originates from the right side of the throat. The left vocal cord has lost its vibration function due to the severance of the neural bridging. Therefore, the word sounds off-center, unilateral, and carries a hollow feeling, as if it's incomplete, lacking half of its resonance chamber.

Xiao Huo's hand trembled on the control stick for two seconds.

Then he gritted his teeth and pulled the pusher all the way down.

The engines of the Devourer roared deafeningly amidst the ruins.

Dark golden exhaust plumes erupted from the rear of the vehicle, washing over the charred muscle walls remaining after the stomach cavity of No. 000 had disintegrated, burning the carbonized tissue layers on the surface into swirling black ash.

The train started moving.

Driven by the force of the laws, the gaping maw at the front of the vehicle suddenly thrust upwards, smashing through the wreckage of the No. 000 body above the ten-thousand-meter passage, which had already lost its structural support.

Bone fragments. Flesh scraps. Broken blood vessels. Nerve fiber fragments.

Everything was reduced to streams of debris that flew off both sides under the impact of the car's front end.

The Devourer passed through the remains of 000. It passed through the skeletal flight path. It passed through the pseudo-starry sky composed of dark matter filaments.

The vehicle's surface was covered with a thick layer of grayish-white fly ash and dried dark red bloodstains. Less than a quarter of the three layers of armor remained. The dark gold armor plates on the front of the vehicle shattered into more than a dozen pieces during the impact.

But the engine is running.

The thrust is increasing.

The speed is increasing.

The starry sky of the wasteland universe rushed past the car window.

Su Yuan stood at the front of the car.

The blood in the hollow of the left eye finally began to congeal. Dark red scabs slowly formed from the fractured edges of the orbital bone. Ugly. Jagged. They caked the edges of the hollow into a dark, congealed mass.

His right hand—the section of the wrist bone without a palm—dangled at his side.

The chip still clutched in his left hand. Warm light seeped through the gaps between his dark gold fingers. One moment bright, the next dim. One moment bright, then dim. Sixty-two times per minute.

The entire universe's surveillance array went off at the same time.

It's not a specific star sector. It's not a specific sphere of influence.

That's all.

Terminal screens in wasteland bunkers. Remnants of nodes from the high-dimensional dark web. An automated observation instrument still functioning in the ruins of the Arbitration Court. A deep-space outpost of the Hunter Alliance. Independent probes scattered across various galaxy corners.

Every device capable of receiving gravitational wave signals detected the reactivation of the same signal source the moment Su Yuan's Devourer broke free of the remains of No. 000.

The feature encoding of the signal is completely consistent with the previous one.

But the energy readings are different now.

The negation law has been reduced by half.

The physical mass increased by 20%—consuming the incremental increase in the 000 chip and server components.

And a newly added index for which no corresponding entry could be found in the database of all observation instruments.

Biodamage labeling.

The label's notes section reads in wasteland common language:

"Left eye: Self-damaged. Status: Permanently missing."

Every living being that sees these words—whether it's a commander kneeling in a wasteland bunker, an old elder sprawled on a pile of black blood in the high-dimensional dark web, or an ancient consciousness that has lain dormant for millions of years on the edge of some unknown galaxy—

They all received the same message at this moment.

That thing is still alive.

It gouged out its own eyes.

It cleared the intrusion of the base code in this way.

It returned to the wasteland with a bloody hole and half a damaged set of bone armor.

Its bottom line is lower than any of them could imagine.

It's gotten to the point where they'd be willing to operate on their own bodies.

The Devourer rushed into the hyperspace warp portal.

The fly ash and bloodstains on the vehicle's surface were peeled away layer by layer by the energy washout of the hyperspace. The dark gold armor was revealed once more. Damaged. Incomplete. But still there.

The passageway collapsed completely 0.7 seconds after the train had completely passed through.

It collapsed into nothingness.

The deepest layer of Su Yuan's endogenous universe.

An absolutely isolated forbidden zone.

The dark gold amber floated quietly in the vacuum of laws.

Inside the amber, the grayish-white optic nerve tissue had ceased its movement. The base code of the Scavenger Protocol had entered a completely dormant state; the grayish-white patterns had solidified on the tissue surface and no longer proliferated.

There was silence for seventeen seconds.

Then a very small change appeared on the inner wall of the amber.

One of the ends of the gray-white lines lit up again.

It's not proliferation. It's decoding.

The remaining blue star-level code within the patterns began to execute a pre-written output program. The ends of the patterns slowly moved across the inner wall of the amber, leaving engravings.

The color of the scratches is not grayish-white.

It is blood red.

It was engraved word by word.

It's very slow.

But every word is so clear that it can be read directly without any parsing.

"The Great Wall Defense Line—the edge of the Oort Cloud in the Solar System..."

It paused for two seconds.

Continue engraving on the second line.

"Countdown to breaking through the barrier: 72 hours..."