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

Wang Hu squatted down but didn't touch the broken arm.

He checked the blood first.

The bloodstains on the track splattered from deep within the tunnel, trailing in an arc of about one meter after hitting the ground. The cut surface was dark red, and the platelet-coagulated layer had not yet completely sealed the wound; the oozing fluid glistened damply under the headlights.

"A mechanical rack and pinion." Wang Hu pointed to the tearing texture on the edge of the cross-section with a wrench handle, his voice low, "It's not a cutting tool—it's the meshing surface that was forcibly crushed, a rotating part, and the rotation speed is not low."

He placed his index finger, which was covered in charred black gloves, about half a centimeter from the cut surface and paused for two seconds.

"Thirty-six degrees. It's still hot."

Su Yuan stood at the edge of the front beam, his gaze sweeping over the six characters on the steel plate.

Don't stop. There are people behind you.

Behind.

Not in front. Not deep inside the passage.

It's towards the rear of the car.

"Slow fire," Su Yuan said without raising his voice, "Full-scale quality radar, depth scan. Now."

"Scan initiated—" Xiao Huo's speech suddenly quickened, "Blind spot at the intersection of the 009 commemorative mount and the 012 forward probe, abnormal mass. Living. Sixty-five kilograms."

Wang Humeng looked up.

Su Yuan had already turned to the main screen. He didn't look at the radar values; instead, he tapped his finger directly on the directional joystick of the surveillance camera array.

The seventh probe spun rapidly, the image flashing across the dark tunnel wall before finally freezing.

An image pops up on the main screen.

A person was squatting above the crossbeam of the 009 rack.

The gray-green lining is standard issue for expeditionary forces. The face is blurry—not because of insufficient resolution, but because its facial contours themselves are trembling at a low frequency, the features appearing undefined. But the hands are intact. The ten fingers are spread, gripping the welds of the hanging bracket beam.

Its posture is incorrect. Humans don't squat like that. The external rotation angle of the hip joint is beyond the normal range, and the curvature of the spine makes the entire upper body almost flat against the beam surface.

Its head was not looking forward.

He stared intently at the rear of the vehicle. He stared intently at the 005 emplacement.

No one spoke in the driver's cab.

"Cuffs." Wang Hu's voice came through the roof-mounted communicator—he had already climbed halfway out, looking through the optical scope. "Hand-stitched reinforcement. Exactly the same as the one on the severed arm."

Su Yuan slapped the power lever with his right hand.

seventy.

"Listen up, everyone." His voice boomed into every carriage through the train's communications system. "No slowing down. No one is allowed to touch the brakes."

The power lever was locked at the 70 km/h output setting. Airflow swept across the roof of the car through the tunnel, and the headlight beams left rapidly receding streaks of light on the concrete walls.

"Wang Hu".

"exist."

"Go and handle it."

Wang Hu didn't ask any further questions. The safety harness buckle clicked into the D-ring on the chest of the tactical vest, and the steel cable was pulled out of the reel and hung on the guide rail of the roof beam.

Seventy kilometers per hour. The tunnel is eight meters wide and five meters high. Airflow fills every groove on the roof surface, producing a continuous low growl.

Wang Hu lay down.

He advanced with alternating knee and elbow thrusts, each movement grazing the welds of the roof armor. The dents left by the gate, deforming the streamlined roof of Station 43, became his gripping points. The blister on the back of his right hand rubbed against the lining of his glove, but he ignored the pain.

Section 3. Passed.

013. Passed. Tang Lan's voice came from the roof window of the casualty ward: "What's the situation up there?"

"Never mind him. Keep him pinned down." Wang Hu didn't stop.

014. Refining furnace hanger.

The optical sight is attached to the right eye. 12x magnification.

It's still there.

Squatting on the 009's overhead rack, facing the rear of the car, his fingers were deeply clenched into the metal seams. The hand-stitched details on the cuffs were eerily clear in the lens—thick, grayish-white reinforcing thread, with stitches spaced four millimeters apart, exactly the same as the cuff of the severed arm. Even the small round ball where the thread ends had been melted was replicated.

Wang Hu's index finger rested on the outside of the trigger guard of the armor-piercing rifle.

It moved.

It wasn't turning my head. It wasn't standing up.

Its head suddenly turned ninety degrees from the angle where it was staring intently at 005.

I saw Wang Hu.

The blurry face stopped trembling. In a fraction of a second, the features solidified—the bridge of the nose, cheekbones, and jawline emerged from the chaos. But the solidification was incomplete. The right cheekbone was two millimeters higher than the left, and the corners of the mouth were asymmetrical.

It did not hide.

The legs exert force. It's not a human way of exerting force—the thigh muscles expand too quickly, stretching the grayish-green fabric taut, and the quadriceps bulge abnormally in the trouser legs.

catapult.

It jumped from the 009 hanger crossbeam.

The trajectory wasn't upwards—it was forwards. It was close to the roof of the car, heading towards the lead car.

Cross over the top of the refining furnace. Cross over 014. Cross over 013.

The speed far exceeds seventy kilometers per hour.

"Su Yuan!" Wang Hu shouted, but the cat had already passed over his head.

Inside the cab, Su Yuan removed his hand from the power lever and slapped it on the crane boom control panel.

The heavy-duty lifting boom rose from the right side of the Devourer—not slowly unfolding, but with a violent extension under full hydraulic pressure. The steel boom drew an arc in mid-air, its jaws wide open, sweeping horizontally straight upwards.

The crane arm swept across a space less than one meter above the roof of the vehicle.

The dummy was suspended in mid-air. The sweeping trajectory of the crane arm precisely covered its path of motion. The three-ton steel arm swung at a linear speed of twelve meters per second.

It flipped over.

A standard old Blue Star military tactical roll. The shoulders first make contact with the outer wall of the crane, then roll in the direction of impact, the back slides along the curved surface of the jaws, the legs tuck in, and the entire body completes the kinetic energy conversion in less than 0.2 seconds of contact.

The crane boom missed its target.

Wang Hu saw the roll. Every detail was perfect. Shoulder entry, back roll, hip fold and leg tuck, toes touching the ground before springing back. It was so perfect it could be included in the old Blue Star military academy textbooks.

It's not an instinctive reaction. It's trained.

It has read that person's memories.

The tumbling inertia propelled it toward the top of the 013 casualty compartment. The sound of its feet landing was soft, like a cat's. But the weight was off—the top armor of 013 dented half a centimeter upon impact.

It crouched down. Its palms rested on the surface of its nails. The tips of its ten fingers changed from grayish-white to dark gold, with a metallic sheen extending outward from the nail bed.

Fingertips transformed into sharp claws.

Five parallel white scratches were slashed across the surface of the armor. They weren't deep, but the speed was increasing; the second scratch was deeper, sending metal shavings flying.

It is cutting 013.

"Tang Lan!"

Inside cabin 013.

Tang Lan looked up the moment the first metallic scratch was heard. The top armor was an old structure retained from the renovation of the purification tank and medicine cabinet at Station 32. In the middle was an eight-centimeter square observation window—a transparent alloy plate, designed to inspect the top pipes during maintenance.

She saw those dark gold fingertips through the observation window.

When the third scratch appeared—it changed the cutting position. Gather your five fingers into a single point, aiming at the center of the observation window, and gather your strength.

Tang Lan had already raised her gun.

The anti-blast rounds seized at Station 19 were stored in her old standard-issue pistol, whose barrel had been reinforced in a refining furnace.

She didn't wait for it to come down.

The muzzle was pointed 15 centimeters directly above the observation window—not at its hand, but at its knee.

It was crouching. Its weight was on its knees.

Fire.

When the anti-explosive round penetrated the alloy plate of the observation window, it shattered the outer shell, sending fragments flying. The core continued upward—passing through the weak point of the top armor and striking the outside of the left knee joint.

It was powerful enough.

The dummy's body suddenly tilted to the right. An abnormal angle appeared between the left leg below the knee and the upper body—not the angle of a fracture, but a structural break.

It fell from the top of 013.

Wang Hu, lying on top of 014, watched it fall.

There was no blood.

What gushed from the severed knee wasn't red liquid. It was steam. Dark golden, high-temperature steam spewed from the break, carrying the same metallic, acrid smell as when the giant eye pipe burst in Chapter 292.

It did not die.

Upon impact, his body slammed against the outer wall of the refining furnace. Normally, a fall from this height and angle would bounce someone off. But he didn't.

It's stuck.

Both hands and the remaining palm of his right leg had turned a dark gold color. The metallic surface clung tightly to the refining furnace armor plate, anchored like a mollusk's suction cups. His entire body lay sprawled against the furnace's outer wall, fitting together seamlessly.

Its fracture—the one where steam was emanating from the knee—was seeping into the refining furnace armor. Dark gold liquid flowed from the fracture, spreading downwards along the scratches and microcracks in the armor plates.

Xiao Huo's voice boomed from the control room: "The temperature control defense line on the outer wall of the refining furnace has been overwritten by an external frequency! The first layer has been lost—the second layer is currently—"

It doesn't intend to kill anyone.

It needs to be melted into the refining furnace.

It wants to take it back.

Chapter 292. The items Su Yuan extracted from the giant eye cable using the refining furnace: liquid dark gold alloy, data transmission fibers, and fragments of the main control brain nerve bundle. Those three sets of solidified and sealed nerve bundle fragments.

It came to reclaim its brain.

Su Yuan stood in front of the main control panel. The alarms from the small fire were coming in one after another. The second line of defense for the refining furnace's temperature control was being torn apart, and the living metal from the dummy was seeping into the furnace cavity along the micro-cracks in the armor. If it broke through the third layer, it would directly come into contact with the nerve bundle fragments sealed inside the furnace.

Contact is fusion. Fusion is resurrection.

Su Yuan reached for the safety barrier lever.

This lever was never used. Its purpose was for emergency unloading—to open the external main suction port and eject everything out of the furnace when the material inside the furnace became out of control.

But you can use it the other way around.

Open the main suction port. Full power negative pressure.

It sucks in things from outside.

Su Yuan pulled down the lever.

On the outer wall of the refining furnace, the six blades of the main suction inlet are rotated open under hydraulic drive. A black hole with a diameter of forty centimeters appears in the middle of the furnace body.

Full power.

The furnace temperature is 1420 degrees Celsius. The negative pressure field expands outward from the center of the suction port.

The dummy sensed it. Its body, pressed against the furnace wall, was being dragged toward the suction port by an irresistible force. Dark gold hands tried to grasp the armor plates—fingertips scratched ten deep grooves into the alloy surface, sparks flying.

Useless.

The suction of the negative pressure field poured in through every pore, every crack, and every channel from which liquid metal seeped out. Its body surface began to peel away—not in one piece, but layer by layer. The outermost layer of grayish-green expeditionary cloth tore apart first, revealing the dark golden metallic tissue beneath that was not muscle. Then the metallic tissue also began to peel away.

High-frequency whistling.

It wasn't a sound a human could make. It was the resonance generated by the forced stretching of its internal dark gold alloy structure. The frequency was extremely high, penetrating the armor of the refining furnace, the walls of the 014 cooling chamber, and the glass of the 013 medicine cabinet.

Tang Lan covered one of the wounded soldiers' ears, clenching her teeth.

The dummy's lower body was sucked in first. The severed left leg was the first to disappear into the suction port. Then the right leg, the hip, and the waist.

It struggled as it was gradually swallowed up. Its hands gripped the blades at the edge of the suction nozzle tightly, the dark gold on its fingertips no longer gleaming—it had turned into a brittle, grayish-white shell, its vitality fading. The furnace temperature was burning it from the inside out.

When the chest cavity is half-filled—

Its neck was tilted back. Its mouth was open.

There is no tongue. There are no teeth. Inside the mouth cavity are dark gold tubular structures arranged like vibrating diaphragms resembling vocal cords.

The diaphragm vibrates at an extremely high frequency, transmitting sound waves through its contact surface with the refining furnace armor plate, bypassing the air and propagating directly within the metal structure.

Inside the driver's cab, the main control panel, levers, steering wheel, and all the metal parts resonated simultaneously.

The sound was extremely clear.

Human language. The pronunciation method of the standard old Blue Star military communication frequency band.

"001—You've been fooled—The Great Wall is long dead—"

As the last word ended, its head was pulled into the suction port by negative pressure. The dark golden face was compressed, deformed, and shattered at the edge of the suction port, finally disappearing into the 1400-degree furnace fire.

The suction inlet blades close.

There was a three-second silence in the control room.

The furnace temperature jumped from 1400 to 1580, then slowly dropped back down. The sound of the small fire broke the silence first:

"The object has been completely decomposed. 4.7 kg of living metal alloy residue and 0.3 g of biological information storage tissue have been added to the furnace."

He paused for a moment.

"Another compressed data packet was discovered. It is nested in the core layer of its central organization. It is in the format of the top-secret log of the old Blue Star Pangu Project. Encryption level: black box. Storage time—fourteen years ago."

Su Yuan stared at the main screen.

"read."

"Decoding in progress... Severely fragmented, about 23% of which is readable."

Text began scrolling across the screen. Military code mixed with plaintext. The date stamp was fourteen years ago—seventy-two hours after the last major communications record of the Great Wall.

The content is fragmented.

"...The organisms on the ground at Station 58 are not invasive alien species..."

"...The Seventh Dome Conference resolved...the Great Wall defense line faces an insurmountable threat..."

"...Symbiosis Experiment Approval Certificate Number PG-058-7..."

"...actively introducing reactor symbionts...to counteract..."

The rest of the content is missing. Only the last line of the sentence remains complete:

"Seventeen days after the symbiote went out of control. Central communications at the Great Wall defense line were interrupted. All automated systems have entered a no-maintenance cycle."

Su Yuan remained silent.

The Great Wall is dead.

The fake rules, fake announcements, and fake medical vehicles from station 55 to station 57—all part of a fourteen-year-old automated loop of unmanned systems.

The giant eye at Station 58 wasn't an intruder. It was something the Great Wall itself created.

Wang Hu's voice came through the roof-mounted communicator: "500 meters ahead. There's a building."

Su Yuan looked up at the front.

The headlights pierced the darkness deep within the passageway, illuminating the half-collapsed concrete structure—the underground commuter platform. It was the standard old-world design; the station sign was broken, leaving only the iron pole.

Platform edge.

A single figure.

Standing there. Swaying in the wind.

He only has one arm.

Su Yuan reduced the power from seventy to fifty. Forty.

The headlights illuminated the details of the figure bit by bit.

The gray-green expeditionary force's standard inner lining. The same as the one worn on the severed arm. The same as the one worn on the dummy. But this one was covered in dried blood—not a uniform dark red, but layers upon layers of dark brown scabs, repeatedly soaked, dried, and soaked again. The left arm was missing below the elbow, the cut surface wrapped with grayish-white strips of cloth, soaked in blood, the edges curling up.

His face was deathly pale.

The stone wall behind him—the load-bearing wall behind the platform—was covered with inscriptions.

"009".

The letters "009" are densely packed. They are carved from waist height all the way up to where you can reach them with your hand. The force applied to each group of characters is different—some are deep, some are shallow, some are crooked, and some are neat. The higher up the carving goes, the more sloppy it becomes. The strokes of the top few groups are no longer recognizable, leaving only frantic knife marks.

The same knife.

the same person.

The Devourer was slowing down. The braking distance of the 300-ton train caused the friction noise between the wheels and the rails to bounce back from the tunnel walls.

The people on the platform moved.

He turned around. His bloodless face was facing the headlights. Sunken eyes, prominent cheekbones, and chapped lips. A living face. Not the blurry, trembling face of a mannequin—a real, exhausted human face.

Right hand.

He was holding something in his only remaining hand.

An old-style military high-frequency cutting gun. The metal casing is severely worn, and two of the heat dissipation fins at the muzzle are missing. However, the battery indicator light is on—full green.

He raised his gun.

A blue laser beam, as thin as a needle, shot from the muzzle. It wasn't aimed at the driver's cab. It wasn't aimed at Su Yuan.

Align with the area below the front beam. At the exposed joint of the main hydraulic pipe.

Highest setting. Cutting power.

A single shot can burn through the main hydraulic line. Once the hydraulic pressure is cut off, the brakes fail, the steering fails, and the crane boom fails.

Su Yuan stepped on the brakes.

分段式重载制动阵列咬住轨面。头车、第三节、013、014、精炼炉、012、009挂架、005——整列编组的制动片同时压下去。轨面上摩擦出的火花从车底喷射出来，在黑暗的通道里拉出两道几十米长的橙红色尾迹。

A metallic scream.

The train jolted the moment the wheels locked. The connecting beam, bearing the difference in inertia between the front and rear carriages, emitted a dull thud. Something had fallen over inside 013—a medicine bottle or something else—Tang Lan cursed.

The Devourer has stopped.

The distance between the front of the train and the edge of the platform is 4.7 meters.

The headlights illuminated the one-armed man, leaving him nowhere to hide. Every dry hair, every bloodstain on his face, and every tear in his gray-green cloth was clearly visible.

His hand was trembling. His right hand, gripping the gun, shook violently, and the blue laser beam drew irregular circles on the surface of the hydraulic hoses on the front beam.

But he did not fire.

I haven't let go either.

"Stop—"

He spoke. His voice was so hoarse that it was almost indistinguishable from human speech, like sandpaper grinding on cast iron. His Adam's apple bobbed several times before he managed to squeeze out a complete sentence.

"Don't come any closer! You brought 'that thing' in here!"

Wang Hu stood on the roof of the vehicle. His armor-piercing rifle was leveled, the muzzle pointed at the center of the one-armed man's chest. He did not fire.

"The convoy is clean!" Wang Hu's voice echoed in the corridor. "The dummies have been disposed of! No tails!"

The one-armed man's lips moved. Not to speak—he was smiling. A distorted arc stretched across his pale face.

He shook his head.

It was shaken very slowly and with great force, and the cervical spine made a cracking sound when it turned.

His gaze did not fall on Wang Hu. Nor did it fall on the Devouring Wasteland.

down.

Look at your feet.

The platform floor. Concrete slab. The headlights shone down from above, casting a clear shadow of his body.

normal.

A one-armed, hunched figure with a gun in his right hand. Normal.

But he wasn't looking at a shadow.

He was looking at his left arm.

That severed arm. The cut end wrapped in blood-soaked bandages.

The headlights are bright enough.

It was unclear from the driver's seat. But Wang Hu was on the roof. A 12x optical sight was pressed against his right eye. His breath caught in his throat.

The edge of the fabric strip.

In the gaps between the grayish-white bandages and the dark brown dried blood.

Something is moving.

A thin thread. Extremely thin. Not much thicker than a hair. Dark gold. It slowly, very slowly, emerged from the depths of the severed arm wound, from the gaps between the dried muscle fibers and blood clots.

Living metal.

Wang Hu's lips moved slightly.

The one-armed man looked down at his severed arm. The dark golden tentacle extended two millimeters further. Its tip swayed slightly in the air, veering towards the Devourer—then retracted a little. Then it extended again.

The man looked up.

sad smile.

The expression on his face changed from despair to a strange sense of relief.

He threw away the high-frequency cutting gun. The metal gun body hit the concrete ground, bounced twice, and the blue laser beam went out.

His right hand reached towards his neck. A thin steel wire hung inside his collar, with a metal cylinder about the size of a thumb hanging from the end of the wire.

Military self-destruct detonator.

Su Yuan recognized the model. It was issued to the special forces of the old Blue Star. Its effective range was three meters. Enough to blast a human body into fragments starting from the chest cavity.

The man's thumb rested on the safety helmet at the top of the detonator.

His mouth moved again. This time the sound was softer than before, but every word could be heard in the quiet corridor.

"So... I was the last lock they left behind."

His thumb lifted the helmet.

The red trigger button underneath is exposed.

Su Yuan's hands were on the control panel. His right hand covered the dark gold conduit ejection button on the refining furnace panel. His left hand pressed the remote switch for the 014 cryogenic export valve.

4.7 meters.

The effective ejection distance of the dark gold conduit in the refining furnace is twelve meters. The effective spray distance of the liquid nitrogen mixture is eight meters.

Enough.

The man's thumb pressed down one millimeter.

The trigger button on top of the metal cylinder did not move.

It was pressed down another millimeter.

Didn't move.

He looked down. He pressed his thumb with all his might—his fingernail turned white. The button didn't budge.

The dark golden tentacle protruded another three centimeters from the wound on his severed arm.

A very faint metallic scraping sound emanated from inside the detonator. Something within the mechanical firing mechanism was preventing the spring from releasing—not a jam, not a malfunction. It was a thin metal wire, about the thickness of a hair, that had drilled into the cable interface at the bottom of the detonator and become entangled in the firing lever.

Branches of the whiskers.

Starting from the wound on his severed arm, the route follows the blood vessels on the inside of the arm stump, passes under the armpit, along the neck, and enters the detonator along the lanyard.

The self-destruct mechanism was locked from the inside.

The man stopped.

He looked at his severed arm. He looked at the dark golden tentacle that was still slowly wriggling.

"Fourteen years," he said. His voice was no longer trembling. "It stayed inside me for fourteen years. I thought I had won. I cut my own hand. I burned my wounds. I swallowed iodine tablets until my liver bled."

He held the severed arm up to the headlight. The dark gold tentacles reflected a faint luster in the light. "It's not long. Fourteen years, just this one. But it's not dead."

His voice was unnaturally calm, as if he had exhausted all his wildest emotions on that stone wall carved with 009.

"Every time I stop for more than six hours, it grows a little longer. So I keep going. Keep walking. Keep carving. Keep leaving things for you."

Su Yuan remained silent. His left hand remained pressed on the 014 cryogenic export valve switch, while his right hand covered the dark gold conduit ejection button. The distance was four meters seven inches. If both systems were activated simultaneously, the time from trigger to impact would be no more than 0.4 seconds.

But he didn't press it.

"You left your severed arm on the tracks," Su Yuan's voice came through the driver's cab window. "That's not a road sign for us. It's bait for that fake behind you."

The one-armed man paused for a moment, then nodded.

"It split off from me. Three days ago. When I cut my hand, I thought I had cut it off. But the piece I cut off... grew back on its own."

He turned his gaze to the darkness behind the Devourer.

"I left my arm on the road to entice it to chase. It chased the arm, not me—because the cells on the arm were newer than the cells on my body. It prefers freshness."

Wang Hu didn't lower his gun on the roof of the car. In the scope, the tentacle extended outward by another millimeter.

"What is it doing now?" Wang Hu asked.

The man looked down at his severed arm.

"It gets active when we get close to the heart of the town," he said. "Your car... it's too hot. The frequency is too high. It's excited."

The tips of its tentacles veered slightly from their direction towards the Devourer. This time, they didn't retract.

Su Yuan stared at the tentacle for three seconds.

How much is left in your body?

"I don't know." The man shook his head. "I can only see the outside. Inside... I can feel it moving along the bone. Sometimes my left rib feels cold. But I'm not sure if it's that or if I've taken too many iodine pills."

Xiao Huo's voice rang out in the driver's cab, loud enough for only Su Yuan to hear: "Wheel pressure radar scanned the target's body. Distributed metallic foreign objects detected: periosteum of the fourth to seventh ribs on the left side, inner wall of the left subclavian artery, and epididymis of the third to fifth cervical vertebrae. Total mass approximately eleven grams. Extremely low growth rate, homologous to fragments from the incubator at Station 51."

Eleven grams.

It is distributed in the thoracic cavity and cervical spine.

Su Yuan's finger twitched.

"The fact that you got this far shows that it hasn't taken over your motor system yet. It hasn't taken over in fourteen years." Su Yuan said.

"Because I keep moving," the man repeated. "It needs me to be still to grow. If I don't move for more than six hours, it starts climbing up the nerve fibers from the periosteum. When I move, it contracts. So—"

He pointed to the stone wall behind him.

The number "009" is densely packed.

"So you've been moving all along. You've been carving all along," Su Yuan said.

"Carving. Walking. Sharpening knives. Anything." The man's lips twitched again. "Sleeping is out of the question. I haven't slept for four hours straight in fourteen years."

The passageway was quiet for a few seconds.

Wang Hu's voice came from the roof of the car: "Is he getting in or not?"

Su Yuan did not answer immediately.

He stared at the dark gold tentacle on the man's severed arm. Then he glanced at the metal distribution map in the body marked by Xiao Huo on the main screen—like an extremely thin and slow vine that had been climbing along the skeleton for fourteen years, covering less than half a meter.

"What's your name?" Su Yuan asked.

The man's expression changed. Not surprise. It was an expression he hadn't used in a long time—the expression one has when being questioned as if they were a person.

"Jiang Yu," he said, "011 crew. Position three. Communications soldier."

Crew 011

Ji Yun's people.

Su Yuan's fingers left the 014 cryogenic export valve switch.

"Get in the car."

Jiang Yu didn't move. He looked at his severed arm, and at the tentacle.

"I got on the bus, and it got on the bus too."

"I know."

"It will grow faster as it gets closer to your core."

"I know." Su Yuan placed his hand on the refining furnace panel. "013 has medicine. 014 has liquid nitrogen. The refining furnace can separate eleven grams of metal fragments. But you have to live to get there."

Jiang Yu stood at the edge of the platform. The headlights illuminated him. Four meters and seven inches away. His eyes went from the lead car of the Devouring Wasteland to the 009 memorial rack—the rack where the belongings of his comrades from back then were hung.

He stared at it for a long time.

"Where is Ji Yun?" he asked.

No one answered.

Silence itself is the answer.

Jiang Yu nodded. Very lightly.

He took a step. His right foot landed on the gap between the edge of the platform and the track, and his body swayed slightly. The price of fourteen years of continuous exercise was written in every joint of his body—a slight creaking sound when his knee bent, and a noticeable lag when his ankle landed.

He walked toward the 013 casualty pod.

I took two steps.

Stop.

He turned to look at Su Yuan.

"The Great Wall is dead," he said. "But something lives beneath it. Deeper still than the giant eye."

The dark gold tentacles on his severed arm had shrunk back by one centimeter.

Once inside the shadow zone of the Devourer's headlights, the activity of its tentacles visibly decreased. It contracted inwards, moving away from the core of the mountain-suppressing structure.

wrong.

Xiao Huo's data was updated simultaneously: "The activity of metallic foreign objects within the target's body has decreased by 47%. Cause analysis: Radial effect of 005 protective chamber. Within seven meters of 005 protective chamber, the growth rate of living metal has decreased to three percent of that outside the station."

005.

The conclusion of Chapter 287: Living metal tentacles will deactivate and shatter into powder upon contact with a radius of one meter from 005. Their activity level drops drastically within a seven-meter radius.

Jiang Yu is currently standing 6.8 meters away from the 005 emplacement.

He sensed it himself. He stopped and looked down at his severed arm. The tendrils had completely retracted under the bandages covering the wound.

"What's in this car?" His voice changed—no longer the weary calm, but filled with an indescribable emotion. "It didn't stop for fourteen years while I was out there. But it shrank back when it got to your car."

Su Yuan did not answer the question.

"013," he said into the communicator, "Tang Lan. Send someone to pick up the wounded."

013 The side door opened. Tang Lan's face appeared in the doorway. She glanced at Jiang Yu—from top to bottom. Her gaze lingered on the severed arm for half a second.

"Can you walk?"

"able."

"Come in. Don't touch the third shelf on the left of the medicine cabinet. The stuff in that shelf is even harder to treat than what's in your wound."

Jiang Yu entered the 013 wounded ward.

The moment the side door closed, Xiao Huo's data updated again: the activity level of the metallic foreign object inside the target's body dropped to 1.2%. The growth rate returned to zero.

Wang Hu climbed back into the driver's cab from the roof. His armor-piercing rifle was still there, hanging on the side of his tactical vest, muzzle down, safety off.

"Trust him?"

Su Yuan pushed the power lever back to seventy.

"Trust Data".

The Devourer restarted. The contact sound between the wheels and the rails returned to a steady rhythm. The beam of the headlights continued to extend deeper into the tunnel.

Su Yuan's gaze fell on the corner of the main screen. Xiao Huo zoomed in on the decrypted fragment of the Pangu Project log to the bottom right corner, the last complete sentence still lit up:

"Seventeen days after the symbiote went out of control. Central communications at the Great Wall defense line were interrupted. All automated systems have entered a no-maintenance cycle."

The Great Wall died fourteen years ago.

The fifty-eight stations they passed through were all filled with still-breathing corpses.

The passageway continued downwards. The spacing between the emergency lights on the concrete walls changed from fifty meters to thirty meters, then to twenty meters. The lights were still off. But the reflective glass inside the lampshades looked increasingly new.

Someone has changed it.

Wang Hu saw it too. He peeked at the top of the corridor: "The lampshades aren't dusty. The screws aren't rusty."

"Jiang Yu changed it," Su Yuan said.

"Is he alone?"

"Fourteen years. One hand. Can't stop for more than six hours." Su Yuan's gaze didn't leave the front. "Besides carving road signs, he also needs to find something else to do."

A fork appeared ahead in the passage. To the left was the main track that continued downwards, and to the right was a narrower auxiliary track, with a handmade iron sign welded above the entrance.

The iron plate is engraved with crooked characters:

"Number 59. I built it myself. It has water."