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

There was no sound inside the hyperspace tunnel.

There was no light. No direction. No reference points. Only the engines of the Devourer maintained a low, resonant frequency in the void, propelling this riddled, dark gold behemoth at a steady pace through the folded dimensional interlayers.

Su Yuan stood at the front of the car.

The cross-section of his right wrist was so smooth that it reflected the layers of gray-blue ripples of the folded space. His left eye socket was covered with uneven, dark red scabs, forming a solidified dark tumor, with the broken edges of the orbital bone protruding from the scabs at various angles.

The wind slipped through the gaps in the passageway walls and blew on his half-exposed cheekbone.

He didn't move.

The right half of the dark gold bone armor was intact. The left half, from the shoulder armor to the waist armor, had nearly 30% of its coverage area eroded away by pixelation. The exposed skin was so pale it was almost transparent, and the capillaries beneath the skin were clearly visible.

But he stood very straight.

From the spine to the cervical vertebrae, to the head with only two vertical pupils remaining, the vertical line did not deviate by an angle.

Inside the train carriage.

Xiao Huo's lips were white. Not the white of blood loss. It was the deathly white of someone who had bitten for too long and too hard, the kind of paleness left after the blood had been ground away from their lips by their teeth.

He stared at the vital signs monitoring panel in the upper right corner of the control panel.

Su Yuan's vital signs were severely damaged. The status of the left hemisphere's neural bridging showed "physical breakage." The bar chart for the energy reserve of the Negation Law had collapsed from full to less than half, the empty part being a hazy gray. In the remarks column of the biological damage label, the six words "Left Eye: Permanent Loss" were quietly arranged in the wasteland's common language.

Each character is small.

But when Xiao Huo looked at those six words, his vision blurred three times.

He didn't cry. He dared not cry. The master was still standing on the hood. The man who had just ripped his own eyeballs out of his brain was still standing straight on the hood of the car, without uttering a sound.

He has no right to cry.

Wang Hu's robotic arm froze in mid-air. The hydraulic joint in his palm was stuck at a half-open angle, and a small piece of alloy fragment that had just been ejected due to the violent tremors was still embedded in the gap between his two dark gold finger bones.

The fragment was stuck very deep. He could feel the pain sensors triggering an alarm, but he didn't try to pry it out.

His optical prosthetic eye, enhanced by the laws of nature, was fixed firmly on the front of the car. It pierced through the reinforced windshield, through the dark gold armor on the front of the car, and locked onto Su Yuan's back.

That figure was very quiet.

The silence was so profound that the air in the entire carriage felt heavy.

Neither of them spoke.

A silence descended. It pressed down from the ceiling to the control panel. From the control panel to the floor. From the floor into the chests of the two men.

The treasure chest of the guardian spirit was huddled in the corner. The lid was tightly closed. The law patterns that appeared on it were so dim that they were almost invisible. It was as if it too was holding its breath.

The Devourer glides through hyperspace.

Smooth. Uniform speed. Quiet.

It was so quiet that you could hear the faint gurgling sound of the coolant circulating in the engine's resonant chamber.

Su Yuan's consciousness sank.

Passing through the dark gold bone armor. Passing through the reconstructed muscle fibers tempered by acid. Passing through the entrance to the physical stomach pouch in the center of the chest cavity, where the gravity fold had closed most of its opening. Passing through layers upon layers of energy buffer membranes.

It sank all the way to the very bottom.

The deepest part of the endogenous universe.

A no-go zone of absolute isolation.

The dark golden amber floated in the vacuum of laws. Its translucent outer shell refracted an extremely faint backlight.

Inside the amber, the grayish-white optic nerve tissue had completely stopped moving. The worm-like patterns were frozen on the surface of the tissue; proliferation had stopped, wriggling had stopped, and even the very last tentacle, a few tenths of a micrometer in size, was frozen in place.

However, the inner wall of amber is not blank.

Those blood-red engravings were clearly arranged on the inner wall.

First line: "The Great Wall defensive line—the edge of the Oort cloud in the solar system..."

The second line reads: "Countdown to breaking through the barrier: 72 hours..."

The strokes are extremely rough. They are not precisely sculpted according to rules. They are information left by gray and white lines using the most primitive physical etching method, driven by the last bit of decoding power.

The engravings vary in depth. Some characters were engraved too forcefully, resulting in tiny cracks at the intersections of the strokes. Other characters lacked sufficient force, and the ends of the strokes were so faint that the dark golden amber texture beneath could be seen.

The handwriting is not good.

But every word is true.

Su Yuan stared at the two lines of text.

72 hours.

The two remaining vertical pupils condensed into two extremely compressed points of light in the space of consciousness.

It's not the pressure of higher-dimensional laws. It's not a conceptual countdown. It's a pure, physical countdown measured in the time unit of the Blue Star Era 2024.

It was in sync with his heartbeat.

With each jump, the remaining 72 hours decrease by a few seconds.

Jump.

71 hours, 59 minutes, and 58 seconds.

Jump.

71 hours, 59 minutes, and 57 seconds.

Jump.

Inside Su Yuan's chest cavity, his heart, reforged after undergoing ultimate acid tempering, beat steadily, encased in dark gold ribs. With each beat, a dark pulse traveled from the tip of his heart along the active pulse to his entire body.

Pain mingled with the pulse. It wasn't a feedback from the laws of nature. It was physical. After the left hemisphere's neural bridging was manually severed, the intracranial pressure balance couldn't be rebuilt spontaneously in a short time. The remaining cerebrospinal fluid in the cranial cavity, under uneven pressure differentials, washed over the exposed optic nerve stumps, each wash bringing a wave of dull pain from the base of the skull straight to the top of the head.

Su Yuan withdrew his consciousness from the inner universe.

The dull pain returned. The feeling of cold air seeping into the gaps in my skull, the emptiness in my eye sockets, also returned. The sense of loss of control, lack, and incompleteness in the left side of my body all rushed back to the half of my brain where my nervous system was still functioning.

He didn't pay attention.

Raise your left hand from your side.

Five dark gold finger bones unfolded. In the hollow of his palm lay a walnut-sized chip. Warm light shone through the encapsulated casing, flickering rhythmically. Sixty-two times per minute.

Su Yuan turned around.

His combat boots trod on the hood of the vehicle. His steps were slow, but each step was extremely steady.

He dragged the dark gold bone armor, its left side tattered but its right side intact, from the front of the vehicle across the connecting section, past the transitional passage with exposed energy conduits, and into the carriage.

The small fire suddenly sprang up from the control panel.

Its mouth opened. Then it closed again.

It's even clearer when viewed from the front. The tissues—skin, muscle, fat pads—that had been pixelated and eroded away on the left side of Su Yuan's face hadn't regenerated at all. His exposed cheekbones were pale, the grayish-white marks on their surface the last inactive lines left by the Cleaner's Agreement. His empty left eye socket was filled with congealed dark red scabs, and three or four white bone spurs protruded from the scabs along the shattered edge of his orbital bone.

The right side of his face was intact. Dark gold armor plates covered his jawline. Although the nine-colored patterns had faded by seventy percent, they were still there.

Two halves.

Two completely different halves.

Xiao Huo's Adam's apple bobbed. His hand gripped the control lever tightly, his knuckles making a soft metallic clanging sound.

His mouth opened a second time. This time, a sound escaped.

"host……"

"Navigation station".

Su Yuan's voice came from the right side of his throat. It was a one-sided resonance. Lacking the coordination of the left vocal cord, the final sound of each word had a hollow, incomplete echo.

But the tone was clean and crisp. There were no superfluous words.

Little Fire closed its mouth.

His fingers traced a couple of lines on the control panel. The physical interface for the navigation system popped out from the right side of the panel. An old-fashioned universal slot. The edges were slightly worn.

Su Yuan walked to the navigation console.

Turn the left hand over. The BGA contact array on the back of the chip is facing upwards. The gold-plated solder balls reflect a dim yellow light under the emergency lights in the carriage.

He did not hesitate.

The chip has a physical interface attached.

The contact and slot types are mismatched. The spacing is 0.3 millimeters different.

The remaining thin film of real source material on the fingertip automatically filled the gap. A sizzling sound. A faint buzzing sound of current overload emanated from the interface, and a small patch of charred blackening appeared on the plastic casing at the interface's edge from the high temperature.

The holographic projector at the navigation station was activated.

The star map slowly unfolded from the table.

light.

It wasn't the dark golden light of the laws, nor the energy light of the three-colored divine fire. It was the most basic, white, old-fashioned three-dimensional star map with scan lines from a holographic projector.

Su Yuan doesn't need law-level navigation. He needs physical-level navigation.

The star map expanded to a diameter of three meters inside the carriage. The main star systems, shipping lanes, and gravity wells of the wasteland universe were marked in mid-air with white lines and nodes.

Su Yuan's right eye searches for a target.

The solar system.

Oort cloud.

The Great Wall defense line.

The shortest physical route from the coordinates of the 000 stomach cavity ruins to the edge of the Oort cloud in the solar system is marked by a red dotted line on the star map.

The dashed line passes through seven star systems, thirty-one gravitational scattering zones, and fourteen broken hyperspace remnants.

At the end of the flight path, next to the target coordinates, a red box popped up.

The numbers in the box were extremely glaring.

Estimated sailing time: 7200 hours.

Su Yuan's right eye was fixed on that number.

7200.

One hundred times that of 72 hours.

His five finger bones on his left hand slowly tightened at the edge of the navigation console. His dark gold fingertips etched five shallow marks on the metal surface of the console.

At the bottom of the star chart is a very small line of annotation text, arranged in the system's default monospace font:

"The curvature of space has been locked to a flat state by the base protocol. Hyperspace warp efficiency has been reduced to one percent of the standard value. Reason: Scavenger protocol—anti-violation of physics constants blockade."

The space is locked.

It wasn't a law-sealing technique from a higher dimension. It wasn't a dimensional blockade matrix from a fleet. It was the operating system itself, a low-level act of retaliation executed after Su Yuan gouged out his left eye to escape the Scavenger Protocol's pursuit.

You ran away.

But don't expect to get to your destination quickly.

I stretched the road a hundred times longer.

Your speed remains the same. Your power remains the same. Your engine remains the same.

But the distance you have to travel has changed.

The purest form of physical confinement. It involves no laws. It involves no concepts. It simply changes a parameter related to the curvature of space.

Su Yuan cannot deny it. Because the law of denial is a capability of the application layer. It cannot deny the physical constants written in the spatial foundation.

7200 hours.

72 hours.

One hundred to one.

Even if he burned out the engines of the Devourer, he still couldn't catch up with this gap.

The red squares of the star map glowed quietly inside the carriage.

The numbers do not flash. They do not jump. They do not produce any unnecessary visual effects.

That's seven thousand two hundred.

Four straightforward Arabic numerals.

The silence was so profound it made my chest feel tight.

The holographic star map was simultaneously projected onto the main screen in the carriage.

Little Fire saw it.

7200 and 72.

Two numbers are displayed side-by-side in the center of the main screen. The former is shown in white, the latter in red. The white one is huge. The red one is tiny.

Xiao Huo's eyes immediately reddened.

It wasn't from fear. It wasn't from pain. It was the feeling of having fought a battle you couldn't possibly win, and when you stood up to move forward, you found that ninety-nine out of a hundred sections of the path beneath your feet had been torn down—a feeling that made your heart clench.

His knees bent.

It wasn't kneeling. It was going limp. His whole body slid down the edge of the control panel, his hands gripping the metal edge of the surface, his fingernails scraping against it with a harsh, screeching sound as he slid.

He slumped down in front of the control panel. He looked up at the main screen above him. The white and red of 7200 and 72 were reflected in his pupils.

The mouth moved. The trembling of the lips preceded the sound.

"It's too late..."

Three words. A breathy sound. Squeezed out from the very bottom of the lung lobe.

Wang Hu's robotic arm suddenly emitted a sharp overload alarm behind him.

The hydraulic joint, vibrating violently, exceeded its design limits, and the metal fatigue stress concentrated to a critical value at the joint's pivot point. Crack! A spark leaped from the bearing's gap. Tiny. But glaringly bright in the deathly silent carriage.

The spark fell to the floor. It went out. Leaving a black spot less than a millimeter in diameter.

Wang Hu clenched his teeth. The veins in his temples bulged under his skin.

He could understand those two numbers.

7200 divided by 72 equals 100.

The Devourer needs a hundred times more time than the remaining time.

Even if the master can devour the new god whole.

Even if the master can bully the black hole.

Even if the owner can gouge out their own eyeballs to fight against the base code.

No living being, no law, no force can compress one hundred days into one day in the face of the ironclad laws of physics.

This is not a game of chess in a higher dimension. It is not a battle of concepts.

This is the most basic, most boring, and most unsolvable physics.

Distance divided by speed equals time.

Elementary school math.

It's more ruthless than any god's killing move.

Su Yuan didn't look at them.

He stood in front of the navigation console. His right eye's vertical pupil swept across every route, every node, and every annotation on the star map.

It took four seconds to scan.

Then he removed his left hand from the navigation console.

The five dark gold finger bones were raised to the position of the right shoulder.

My fingertip touched the outer edge of my right scapula. There was a small, dark red scab there. About the size of a palm. Irregularly shaped.

This scab was a congealed waste liquid squeezed from Su Yuan's body surface when he reforged his golden body in the ultimate acid pool No. 000. It contained fragments of old bone peeled off by the acid, residual ash from the three-colored divine fire, and extremely small amounts of true source matter.

Su Yuan's finger bone was pressed against the edge of the blood scab.

I pried it off.

Grind with your fingers.

The pressure from the dark gold fingertip crushed the blood scab into powder. The powder was a dark reddish-black color, with extremely fine particles. It did not reflect light under the emergency lights inside the carriage.

But Su Yuan's right eye caught a few tiny bright spots in the powder.

The true source.

The quantity is extremely small. Not enough for him to perform any large-scale rule-based operations.

But it's enough for him to do one thing.

Su Yuan applied the powder to the holographic star map.

Dark red powder adhered to the optical medium surface of the holographic projection, appearing as eerie dark spots against the backdrop of the white star map.

A few bright spots of the true source material flashed twice in the powder.

Su Yuan's right pupil contracted.

The remaining energy of the negation law is drawn from the law cortex of the right hemisphere. Not much. Only a little over forty percent of its full capacity. But it's enough.

He doesn't need to deny the curvature of space. That's written on the base; he can't deny it.

He was denying something else.

The fastest distance between two points is a straight line.

This is not a parameter of spatial curvature. This is a physical axiom. An axiom does not depend on the parameter settings of the foundation. An axiom is mathematical. It is logical. It is a priori structure that existed before this universe was created.

The scavenger protocol locks the curvature of space.

But it doesn't lock the axiom.

Because axioms are not at a level it can govern. Axioms are at a lower level than the operating system. Axioms are determined by the physical structure of the hardware.

The true source material is the hardware.

The residual energy of the Negation Law reached the underlying data of the holographic star map through those few bright spots of real source matter.

The star chart jerked slightly.

The red 7200 flashed once.

Nothing has changed.

The flight path remains at 7,200 hours because the curvature of space is still locked. The straight-line distance has not shortened.

But there's an extra line on the star chart.

Dark gold. Extremely fine. Starting from the current coordinates of the Devourer, without following any known routes, passing through any star systems, or traversing any gravitational scattering zones.

It passed directly through a gray area marked "Distribution Area of ​​Digestive Tract Remains No. 000".

That area spanned fourteen star systems. It was a zone of biomass fragments left behind in the wasteland universe after the massive body of Number 000, tens of thousands of kilometers thick, disintegrated.

Su Yuan's right eye was fixed on the dark gold line.

The starting point of the line is the Devourer.

The line ends at the Oort Cloud of the solar system.

The middle section of the line doesn't pass through a vacuum. It passes through the digestive tract remains of number 000.

A completely dead, lifeless pipe, so vast it spanned fourteen star systems.

pipeline.

When Number 000 was alive, its digestive tract was a material transport channel connecting all the organs in its body. Food entered through its giant mouth, passed through the esophagus, stomach cavity, acid pool, and ultimate digestive layer, and was finally broken down into basic nutrients.

This pipe had physical shortcut properties when No. 000 was alive.

This is because the internal spatial structure of the digestive tract has been folded by the biofield of number 000. The physical distance from the esophageal inlet to the stomach fundus, measured outside the body, is tens of thousands of kilometers, but inside the digestive tract, it only requires a very short distance.

Number 000 died.

The digestive tract has collapsed.

But the remnants of the collapse are still scattered throughout the starry sky of the wasteland universe.

The folded structure is slowly collapsing without the support of a biofield. But "slowly" means that it is not yet completely collapsed.

Su Yuan intended to use the fragmented remains of the digestive tract as the inner wall of the wormhole.

He crawled through the intestines of a completely dead corpse of a new god.

The pulse signal from the warm-colored chip in his left hand was connected to the physical interface of the navigation station. At this moment, all of the Pangu chip's raw computing power was allocated to the flight path prediction module.

The estimated time for the new route is being recalculated on the holographic projection.

The numbers are jumping.

It starts to drop from 7200.

6300. 4800. 2100.

Not enough. It still far exceeds 72 hours.

Because the folded structure is collapsing. The later you depart, the lower the remaining fold rate, and the less time you save.

But Su Yuan's dark gold route continues to extend.

The end of the line drilled into the densest section of the gray area of ​​"000's digestive tract remains"—the cloud of remains at the location of 000's heart. That was once the strongest core of 000's biofield. The folding rate was the highest there.

It was also the last part of 000's body to disintegrate. The physical fragments produced by the disintegration were still spreading at high speed. The sharpness and density of the fragments were enough to slice any known material spaceship into microscopic slices.

Su Yuan looked at it for two seconds.

There was no hesitation in his right eye.

His fingertip traced a line across the navigation panel. The flight path terminal's simulation parameters were manually rewritten.

Engine power: 120% overload.

Shield allocation: 0%.

The entire energy reserves of the Wasteland Heart—the heart he had swallowed from beneath the frozen chessboard, composed of Earth fragments and discarded code—were poured into the propulsion system in one go.

Estimated sailing time: 97 hours.

It still exceeded the limit.

It exceeded 25 hours.

Su Yuan's right pupil paused on that number for a second.

Then his right wrist section hit the navigation platform.

That space that "never existed".

A blank space that has been completely erased from the physical level by the causal collapse wave.

When the blank space comes into contact with the underlying data of the holographic star map, the data creates a logical "break" at the edge of the blank space.

At the fractured gap, the curvature locking parameters of the Scavenger Protocol, written in the space base, were exposed for 0.3 percent of a second of underlying code.

Su Yuan's right eye read everything in those 0.3 percent of a second.

He then used the "non-existent" property of the right wrist section to create a tiny null pointer reference within the logical structure of that underlying code.

Null pointer.

A programmer's nightmare.

The most basic bug. The most fatal flaw. A pointer that should have pointed to a valid memory address was pointing to a blank space.

The operating system will not crash when it encounters this null pointer. The underlying system has a robust exception handling mechanism.

But it will freeze.

It stopped at 0.7 seconds.

The failure of the curvature lock parameter for 0.7 seconds means that the Devourer can perform an unrestricted spatial folding jump within this 0.7-second window.

once.

Not enough to jump to the finish line.

But it's enough to skip the longest dead zone.

The estimated sailing time has been reduced from 97 hours to 68 hours.

68.

It was 4 hours less than 72.

enough.

That's barely enough.

The final estimated number on the holographic star map settled at "68". White. Small font. Quietly displayed next to the target coordinates at the end of the flight path.

Su Yuan removed the chip from the navigation console.

I didn't watch Xiao Huo. I didn't watch Wang Hu.

He gathered the chip back into his palm with his left hand. The warm, pulsating light resumed its rhythm of sixty-two times per minute.

The data from the holographic star map was automatically synchronized to the main screen in the carriage as Su Yuan removed the chip.

7200 became 68.

Xiao Huo's pupils snapped back to focus from their unfocused state.

He stared at the number "68".

I stared at it for two seconds.

The tears welling up in his eyes didn't fall. He forced them back in. A very short, broken gasp escaped his nose.

Wang Hu's robotic arm stopped trembling.

The hydraulic overload alarm also went out.

He looked at the flight path on the main screen. The dark gold line cut through the gray "000 Digestive Tract Remains Distribution Area," its movement so cunning it was unbelievable—it allowed the Devourer to slip through the corpse of a new god.

Wang Hu's lips moved slightly. He didn't make a sound.

But the frequency of his optical prosthetic eye changed. It went from being tense to a frequency that he himself couldn't quite explain.

Su Yuan still didn't look at them.

He walked toward the one-meter-wide open space between the control panel and the ammunition supply cabinet.

There was nothing there.

Su Yuan stopped there, facing the metal surface of the ammunition cabinet. The dark gold bone armor cast a distorted shadow under the low light of the emergency lamp.

He raised his left hand.

The chip in his palm was carefully placed on top of the ammunition cabinet. Warm light rippled across the metal surface, creating a soft, diffused glow.

Then Su Yuan moved his left hand to his left shoulder.

On the pale skin exposed after the pixelation was peeled off, there was still a small area not covered by the dark gold armor.

Su Yuan's finger bone touched that patch of skin.

It stopped for less than half a second.

Then spread it downwards.

The fingernail scratched the skin.

A three-centimeter-long incision. Shallow. Dermis. Not reaching the fascia.

Dark red blood seeped from the incision. A normal color. Not black.

The blood flowed for two seconds. Then he ignored it.

Su Yuan's attention was focused on the blood.

What he brought out of the ultimate acid pool of No. 000—the core of the acid pool that had been devoured and digested—had been fused deep into his muscles and bones during past battles. But a portion of the high-density material that had not yet been fully assimilated remained, embedded like a vein in the subcutaneous tissue from his left shoulder to his left chest.

Su Yuan's finger bone was inserted into the incision.

My fingertip touched the skin.

I encountered a hard nodule between the muscle layer and the fascia.

About the size of a soybean. Cool to the touch. Smooth surface.

The remaining material in the core of the acid pool.

Su Yuan pried it out.

When the hard nodule was pulled out of the incision by pinching it between my fingertips, a bit of whitish fascia was revealed at the edge of the incision.

Xiao Huo witnessed this scene from behind the control panel.

A suppressed, incoherent sound escaped his throat. His fingers tightened even more on the joystick.

Su Yuan held the hard nodule in front of his right eye.

Silver-black in color. Metallic luster. Surface devoid of any regular patterns. Purely inorganic.

The acid pool core has existed within No. 000 for countless epochs. It has been immersed in the ultimate strong acid for countless years. Its physical hardness, chemical inertness, and thermal stability have been tempered by the extreme environment to the theoretical upper limit of its material properties.

It contains no rules.

There is no high-dimensional encoding. There are no conceptual attributes. There are no base-level data labels.

Pure physics.

Su Yuan pinched the edge of the hardened nodule with his left thumb and forefinger.

The finger strength has increased.

The nail plate of the dark gold finger bone emitted a slight metallic friction sound when squeezed.

The shape of the nodule slowly changed under the pressure of the fingers. It was crushed from a soybean shape into a flattened round shape. Then it became an ellipsoid. Then it became even flatter.

He is shaping.

The pad of the thumb pressed a shallow concave arc into the front of the nodule. The tip of the index finger pushed out a convex arc symmetrical to the concave arc into the back of the nodule.

Sphere.

Then Su Yuan's third finger bone joined in. The tip of his middle finger touched the side edge of the hardened nodule, and with extremely precise force, he ground out a thin, evenly thick edge on the side.

The thickness of the thin edge is less than 0.3 millimeters. The silver-black metal appears translucent at this thickness.

Then comes the fourth finger bone. The ring finger. Press down from the back of the nodule, and a tiny hole is pressed into the center of the convex arc.

Finally, the little finger. The tip of the little finger was inserted into the hole, scraping off a very thin layer of metal shavings from the inner wall.

The metal shavings were caught by Su Yuan's fingertips.

Then he did something that froze the air in the carriage.

He retrieved a small segment of electromagnetic signal parameters from the outermost layer of the inner universe—not a restricted area, but a normal storage layer—when the Pangu chip was activated.

AM (amplitude modulation)

Communication technology in the Blue Star Era 2024.

Su Yuan used the metal shavings on his little finger to scrape out a set of concentric grooves in the middle of the holes on the hardened inner wall.

The spacing of the grooves is not random.

These are the standard resonant parameters of an AM amplitude modulated antenna.

He's building an eyeball.

No.

He is building a machine.

A purely physical observation device with an inorganic core in an acid pool as its shell, AM amplitude modulation signal parameters as its underlying communication protocol, and no laws or codes contained therein.

Use two fingers.

On an open space one meter wide.

It was a hard knot that I dug out from under my shoulder.

A mechanical eyeball modeled after the 2024 standard was handcrafted.

It was silvery-black. Cold. Without temperature. Without any energy radiation.

The surface is an extremely inert metal with an acid pool core. The inner wall is engraved with AM resonant grooves. The concave arc on the front is the optical focusing surface. The hole on the back is the signal output port.

It was not created by higher-dimensional laws.

It is not a miracle of creation and evolution.

It was hand-rubbed.

Su Yuan held the silver-black sphere in his left palm in front of his face.

Expressionless.

The two vertical pupils of his right eye calmly examined the creation in his palm.

Then he moved his left hand toward his face.

The silver-black sphere was aimed at the left eye socket.

That bleeding cavity. That jagged scab. Those few white bone spurs protruding from the edge of the fractured orbital bone.

Su Yuan's finger bone touched the outer edge of the blood scab.

He first broke off three bone spurs.

Click. Click. Click.

Three sounds. Very soft. The sound of bone breaking was partially masked by the blood clots, leaving only a muffled vibration.

Then he used his index and middle fingers to peel away the blood clots piece by piece from the fractured surface of the orbital bone.

Fresh blood oozed from the edge of the scab that had been peeled away. Dark red. Warm.

That's all.

The void was completely exposed.

The fractured inner wall of the orbit. A cross-section of the severed optic nerve stump. And a thin membrane of cerebrospinal fluid at the bottom of the bone cavity.

Su Yuan inserted the silver-black sphere.

It wasn't just gently placed in.

Yes, it was pressed.

The dark gold finger bone is positioned with the posterior pole of the sphere facing the posterior wall of the orbital cavity, and then the finger exerts force.

The gap between the sphere and the inner wall of the orbital cavity was less than two millimeters. However, the edges of the fractured orbital bone were irregular, with several bone fragments protruding inward and blocking the path of the sphere's insertion.

Su Yuan's finger pressure did not hesitate.

Snapped.

The first bone fragment broke under the pressure of the sphere's edge. The bone fragment was pushed by the sphere and embedded in the soft tissue of the orbital cavity's lateral wall.

Snapped.

The second place.

crunch.

The third fracture. This one was thicker than the previous two. The bone emitted a longer squeaking sound before it broke. A tiny blood vessel nearby was severed by a fragment. Blood flowed down the inner wall of the orbit, along the curvature of the sphere, to the junction between the sphere and the orbital bone.

The sphere slid into its final position, lubricated by the blood.

The hole on the posterior pole was precisely aligned with the cross-section of the optic nerve stump. The two were separated by less than one millimeter.

Su Yuan's finger bones have loosened.

The sphere was stuck in the orbital cavity. The shattered edges of the orbital bone clamped it in place from all sides. Not loose, not tight, it wouldn't fall out.

Then Su Yuan took the final step.

His left palm pressed against his left cheekbone. The remaining microscopic analytical field of the One Who Returns to One seeped from his palm, traveling along the bone of his cheekbone to the fractured edge of his orbit.

The precision of the analytical field is not used to manipulate the laws.

It is used to guide bone cells.

Although the neural bridging in Su Yuan's left brain was severed, the bone cells in the left skull were still alive. They had their own regenerative capacity.

The microscopic analytical field generated extremely weak bioelectrical signals at the edge of the fractured orbital bone. The parameters of the signal were not set by Su Yuan—they were the most basic bone fusion-promoting factors extracted from the biological repair code he had devoured from No. 000's body.

The bones are starting to grow.

The speed was not fast, but the direction was extremely precise. Each newly formed trabecular bone grew from the fractured orbital bone towards the edge of the silver-black sphere. After the trabecular bone touched the surface of the sphere, it was bent by the metal and grew along the curved surface of the sphere.

The sphere was gradually enveloped by a thin layer of new bone from the edges.

It's welded shut.

A silver-black, extremely inert metal sphere was welded into Su Yuan's left eye socket by his own bone.

The concave optical focusing surface, facing outwards, protrudes from the bone's crevices. It is silver-black with a metallic sheen.

Like a dead fish eye without an iris or a pupil.

It's cold.

Su Yuan lowered his left hand from his face.

He turned around.

Facing the interior of the carriage.

Xiao Huo saw his face.

Right half: Dark gold armor leaves, two vertical pupils, intact skin and muscles.

Left side: Exposed cheekbone, grayish-white old wound marks, and a silver-black metal ball embedded in the gap of the reconstructed fragmented orbital bone.

The surface of the metal sphere was completely devoid of light. It neither reflected nor refracted. When the faint nine-colored light emanating from the dark gold armor leaf's right cheek shone on the sphere's surface, it was directly absorbed.

dead.

Metallic.

物理的。

Su Yuan closed his right eye briefly.

The silver-black mechanical left eye did not generate any image signal in the pure black field of vision after the right eye was closed.

But it moved.

Under the residual weak bioelectric stimulation in Su Yuan's orbital cavity, the AM resonant slot began to passively receive external electromagnetic radiation.

It was not an active scan.

It is passive listening.

The most primitive. The oldest.

Radio technology in 2024.

The concave-curved focusing surface of the silver-black sphere captured the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the emergency lights inside the Devourer's carriage. The frequency was in the visible light range, with a wavelength of 380 to 780 nanometers.

The AM resonant groove on the inner wall of the sphere modulates the captured electromagnetic signal into a low-frequency pulse. The pulse is output from the hole on the rear pole surface and reaches the cross-section of the optic nerve stump one millimeter away.

The pulse hit the exposed nerve fiber section.

The nerve cells on the cross-section produced a slight change in electrical potential under the stimulation of the pulse.

The electrical potential changes stumbled and staggered along the remaining fragments of the right visual pathway, which were not infected by the gray and white lines, towards the cerebral cortex.

The signal quality is extremely poor.

The resolution is so low that only light and shadow and general outlines can be distinguished. Color information is almost zero. The contrast is shockingly low.

But Su Yuan's left eye—not the eyeball, but that silver-black metal ball—"saw" something.

A blurry outline with alternating light and shadow.

That's a train carriage.

That's an emergency light.

That was a blurry human figure, Xiao Huo, slumped in front of the control panel, looking up at him.

That was Wang Hu's dark silhouette, frozen in place.

Blurry. Rough.

But it's true.

物理的。

The silver-black metallic surface lacked any iris pattern. There was no pupil. There was no sclera.

There was only a bare, cold metal sphere that did not reflect any light.

It was embedded in the eye socket of a living person.

Su Yuan's right vertical pupil was looking forward. The mechanical sphere in his left eye was also "looking" forward. Two completely different visual signals superimposed on each other in his remaining visual cortex.

High-precision tri-color law vision and low-bitrate AM amplitude modulation physical vision.

The mix-and-match went to an absurd degree.

Then the mechanical left eye fired.

It is not the law of negation. It is not the three-colored divine fire.

It is a loop of electromagnetic pulse.

AM (amplitude modulation)

It's the same kind of old, low-frequency electromagnetic wave from the analog signal era that the Pangu chip emits.

The pulse spread outward from the concave arc of the silver-black sphere. It passed through the reinforced glass of the carriage. It passed through the dark gold outer wall of the Devourer. It passed through the dimensional barrier of the hyperspace passage.

Heading outwards.

It spread into the physical space of the wasteland universe.

Like the pulses in the Pangu chip, this pulse does not carry information about higher-dimensional laws.

It is a hardware test signal.

Blue Star Era 2024.

The detection signal used by the Creator to check whether the base hardware is functioning properly.

It is older than the operating system of this universe.

It's even more fundamental than the Scavenger Agreement.

It predates all laws, concepts, chessboards, new gods, arbitration tribunals, and higher-dimensional beings combined.

When the pulse swept across the starry sea, it did not tear apart the void, shatter the laws, or create any observable high-dimensional energy fluctuations.

However, every operational observation device in the wasteland universe detected the same anomaly at the same time.

The underlying physical constants are fluctuating.

It's not an offset. It's not a rewrite.

It's shaking.

Like an old server that has been running for who knows how many years, the case vibrated slightly after hearing the boot audio that its manufacturer wrote into the BIOS when it was manufactured.

Wasteland shelter.

The commander knelt on the metal floor. His hands had moved from the edge of the platform to his knees. His fingernails dug into the fabric of his trousers.

A new signal label popped up on the main screen.

It's not dark red.

Silver-black.

The label has no text. It has no numbers. It contains no classification codes that any high-dimensional system can recognize.

There is only one frequency value.

AM modulation. Center frequency: 1090 kHz. Bandwidth: 10 kHz.

This set of parameters has no matching entries in any of the communication databases in the wasteland universe.

But the commander had studied the history of communications at a military academy.

It's in the most inconspicuous appendix of the textbook.

In the section marked "Archived technology - for archival reference only".

He had seen this frequency before.

1090 kHz.

The standard frequency for civil aviation transponders in the Blue Star Era 2024.

It shot out from the face of someone who had just gouged out his own eyeballs and rubbed a mechanical prosthetic eye out of the metal knot he had dug out from under his shoulder.

The commander's knee position changed at that moment.

He wasn't kneeling.

It collapsed from kneeling.

Both hands slid off their knees. Palms landed on the cold metal floor. Ten fingers spread out on the floor. The fingertips turned white under the pressure of their own weight.

His head drooped. His chin almost touched his chest. His entire upper spine was bent into an excessively curved arc.

It's not a crash.

After receiving this information, his body automatically gave up all the muscle tension needed to maintain an upright posture.

"That thing..."

The sound squeezed out from between the bent spine and the drooping head. Muffled. Indistinct.

"It's not about fixing myself..."

His fingers dug into the floor. His nails scraped against the metal surface. A faint, harsh grinding sound.

"It is... demoting itself..."

The staff officer stood beside him. He wasn't kneeling, but his legs were trembling. The trembling started from his glutes and went down to his calves. The amplitude wasn't large, but the frequency was high enough to be seen with the naked eye.

He looked at the silver-black signal label on the screen.

His mouth opened slightly.

"How badly...did you get demoted?"

The commander raised his head slightly. His eyes moved to the top of their sockets, revealing the bloodshot whites of his eyes.

"To the level of the Creator."

Temporary observation space for the high-dimensional dark web.

The young elder knelt before the wall of laws.

Black blood flowed from the corner of his mouth down to his abdomen, soaking through three layers of clothing. The innermost layer had already congealed and stuck to his skin; pulling it would rip up the fine hairs on his belly.

He received that signal too.

On the remaining observation interface, the silver-black labels hang quietly above all the dark red alerts.

It is not eye-catching. It does not flicker. It does not produce any high-energy radiation.

However, it has the highest priority among all tags.

Because the system doesn't recognize it.

After performing 3,700 cross-comparisons, the classification engine on the observation interface returned a value that it should never have returned in its original design.

"Signal source timestamp: earlier than the start parameters of the current cosmic era."

It predates this universe.

The young elder looked at the line of comments automatically generated by the system.

His mouth was twitching. The twitching on the left was more pronounced than on the right. He had completely lost control of the symmetry in his facial muscles.

"He replaced his eyes with discarded parts from the era of the Creator..."

The sound was squeezed out of a broken throat. Each word carried the wet sound of tearing mucous membranes deep inside the throat.

"The rules... are gone..."

"Concept... I don't want it anymore..."

"Higher-dimensional evolution...all destroyed..."

He raised his right hand from the pool of black blood. His trembling fingers pointed at Su Yuan's face on the observation interface, where half of his face was embedded with a silver-black metal sphere.

"It went back."

Fingertips trembled in the air.

"Everyone is climbing upwards. Climbing towards higher dimensions. Climbing towards the laws. Climbing towards godhood."

"It's going down."

"Go towards physics. Go towards hardware. Go into the Creator's broken toolbox."

The young elder's hand fell. It smashed into the black blood. A few drops splashed out.

"Who taught it...?"

No one answered.

The old elder's core of law had shattered. Gray mist still slowly dissipated among the fragments. A small cavity was hollowed out in his chest. His heart was still beating, but extremely weakly.

His eyelids twitched.

Her eyes were closed.

His lips trembled slightly.

It could be an facial expression. It could just be random muscle contractions.

I can't tell the difference.

The AM pulse continues to spread throughout the wasteland universe.

The speed is not fast. It's the speed of light. The standard physical speed of light.

However, in every region it passes through, the underlying physical constants of that region will experience a tiny, but not negligible, tremor.

The frequency and intensity of the tremors were far from sufficient to cause any physical damage.

But all higher-dimensional beings—those lurking in the abyss's fissures, those hidden in the folds of dimensions, those disguised as galaxies or nebulae—ceased activity the instant this pulse swept across.

It's not fear.

It is a reaction that is more fundamental than fear.

When the hardware receives a factory test signal, the operating system automatically suspends all foreground processes into a forced standby state.

The entire wasteland universe fell silent.

There was a three-second silence.

Then those higher-dimensional beings realized something.

They were not attacked.

They were detected.

It was tested by a cold, lawless, hand-crafted piece of obsolete hardware from the era of the creators of Blue Star, embedded in the eye socket of a human who had just gouged out his own eyeballs.

The edge of the wasteland universe.

Alarms sounded almost simultaneously in the flagship command rooms of the three large warlord fleets.

It's not a battle alarm.

It is an abnormal alarm indicating that the communication system is being forcibly broadcast and covered by an unknown signal source.

The communication frequencies of all three fleets were hijacked within the one second that the AM pulse swept across the area. This was not due to encryption cracking, nor signal interference.

It means that the underlying hardware of the communication device automatically switches to factory test mode after receiving the factory test frequency.

All encryption protocols are disabled. All frequency band locks are released. A test message pre-written at the factory and never to be triggered during normal use pops up on the communication device's status bar:

"Hardware self-test complete. Awaiting instructions from host computer."

Within three seconds of seeing this message, the communications officers of all three fleets lost control of their expressions.

It wasn't a hacking incident.

It is not a rewriting of the rules.

Their communication equipment mistook Su Yuan for the manufacturer.

The news spread much faster within the warlord's fleet than through official information channels.

Less than forty seconds.