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

A large plume of dark red, high-temperature exhaust gas was ejected from the feed inlet of the mobile refining furnace.

The pungent smell of burnt metal instantly filled the control room.

The thick, thirty-meter-long conduit slowly retracted. Just moments before, it had chewed up a giant alloy load-bearing column that had been torn from the mountain of skyrail debris.

The furnace body vibrated violently, and the discharge chute at the bottom emitted a dull mechanical grinding sound.

A thick metal ingot, completely black and covered with dense heat dissipation patterns, was ejected.

This is a recast "high-density inertial damping block".

"Structural reassembly complete." Xiao Huo's mechanical voice rang out in the control room, accompanied by noticeable electrical noise. "Damping blocks are in place. The structural integrity of the vehicle body is expected to be forcibly increased from 71% to 85%. The stress points of the chassis have been redistributed, and high-speed maneuverability can be barely restored."

Su Yuan placed his hands on the control panel, staring intently at the various readings on the radar screen.

"And the price?" He didn't even look up.

"Blue Flame Core stability has dropped below 15%." Little Flame immediately pulled up the core status diagram. "High-intensity refining has severely overdrawn the energy matrix. There are 2 hours and 54 minutes left before forced shutdown."

Less than three hours.

In this underground ruin 13,000 meters deep, losing power is tantamount to an immediate death sentence.

"We've had enough time." Su Yuan straightened up. "As long as I can move, it's better than lying here waiting for that thing down there to come looking for me."

Outside the train carriage. At the bottom of the abyss.

There is no light source, no wind, only absolute darkness and deathly silence.

Two powerful flashlight beams swept across the wreckage.

Wearing a heavy exoskeleton suit, Wang Hu's feet were firmly planted on the rock. His thick arms, with veins bulging, were manipulating two hydraulic traction cables, dragging a newly forged, three-ton damping block toward the broken section of the Devourer's chassis.

"Old Tang, align the docking port!" Wang Hu gritted his teeth and growled, his heavy breathing filling the helmet communicator.

Tang Lan knelt on one knee beneath the chassis, holding a plasma welding torch. The eerie blue arc of the torch was the only living light source in the darkness, making her face appear deathly pale.

"Three centimeters off. Move to the left!" Tang Lan said calmly.

Wang Hu roared, pushing the exoskeleton's auxiliary power to its limit. The hydraulic rods emitted a piercing friction sound, and the damping blocks moved extremely slowly to the left.

Click.

Perfectly fitted.

Tang Lan immediately pulled the trigger of the welding torch. The high temperature of over a thousand degrees Celsius welded the damping block firmly to the main chassis. Sparks rained down on her protective mask, but she didn't even blink.

Inside the main control room.

Su Yuan's gaze never left the radar for a second. The orbital debris area was extremely vast, with extremely complex terrain, and large amounts of metal scrap severely interfered with the scanning accuracy.

Without any warning.

The first main control screen directly in front of Su Yuan suddenly lit up.

No physical buttons were touched, and there was no sound of power being turned on. It just stood there, starkly lit up against the pale green dial.

The background of the screen is a map of an endless, unknown star field.

In the very center, two pale white characters flickered.

Returning Home

At the same time, a chilling static noise came from the loudspeakers inside the carriage.

Sizzle... sizzle...

It sounds like an old radio frantically searching for stations.

Amidst the noise, a song suddenly broke in.

It was a little girl's voice, clear and innocent, yet with an extremely eerie distortion and discrepancy.

"The moon walks... I walk too... until I reach the horizon... where there is no end..."

In this oppressive, deathly silent abyss, where gods have just fought, the sudden sound of a nursery rhyme sends chills down your spine more than the roar of any monster.

Su Yuan's muscles tensed instantly. Without any hesitation, he slammed his right hand directly at the emergency physical shut-off switch on the control panel.

boom!

The red guillotine was pulled all the way down, and sparks burst out from the gaps in the control panel.

The screen didn't turn off.

Not only did it not go out, the star map became even brighter, so bright it hurt people's eyes.

"Thump!"

A muffled, loud bang came from the rear of the carriage, towards the direction of isolation pod number zero.

It was like a sledgehammer crashing down on a meter-thick lead door.

That place contains the concept-level black fragment that Su Yuan pulled out when the JY-01 singularity collapsed.

"Thump! Thump!"

The impacts became more frequent. Through the three reinforced hatches, Su Yuan could see with his naked eye several strange, outward-protruding marks pressed into the outermost lead plate door.

The fragment resonated extremely strongly with the signal on the screen.

The little girl's nursery rhyme still echoed in the carriage, the rhythm getting faster and faster.

"Looking and looking... looking for a friend... found one..."

On the main control screen, below the words "Homecoming," the two large, blood-red characters "Sacrifice," which had previously appeared, began to distort violently.

The dark red pixels wriggled and flowed like living things.

Before the words "sacrifice," a new character is being drawn stroke by stroke.

The first stroke is a dot, and the second stroke is a horizontal line.

It is the character "童".

[Children's offerings].

The three words "blood" together exude an undisguised, naked malice and a sense of being locked in.

Su Yuan's expression darkened completely. The killing intent in his eyes was almost tangible.

This is not a broadcast.

This is a "roll call" based on rules.

It uses this nursery rhyme as a compass to filter specific targets. It focuses on the concept of "children".

"Small fire!" Su Yuan shouted sharply, drawing his military dagger from his waist and stabbing it hard into the physical power supply crystal slot below the main control screen.

The blade precisely severed the crystal wires connecting the screen.

The screen flickered once, then went completely black. The nursery rhyme stopped abruptly.

"Disconnect all external broadcast reception frequencies! Switch radar to passive mode! Shut down all audio acquisition modules!" Su Yuan issued the orders swiftly. "This isn't a distress signal; this is a death knell!"

"Command executed. All frequency bands are physically silenced." Xiao Huo's voice also conveyed the tension of high-frequency computing.

Externally, Wang Hu and Tang Lan had just finished reinforcing the last weld.

"Old Su, what's going on? What kind of eerie music was playing in the car just now?" Wang Hu asked urgently via short-range communication.

"Stop talking nonsense. Get back in the car immediately. Everyone in the vehicle, prepare for Level 1 combat readiness." Su Yuan pressed the call button.

Without delay, the two immediately packed up their tools and climbed back to the Devourer through the hatch.

In the few dozen seconds it took to wait for the two to return to the cabin, Su Yuan reached out and drew a line on the tactical board.

"Xiao Huo, launch the Hummingbird II reconnaissance aircraft. Scan deep into the wreckage mountain along the residual frequency band from where the signal just entered."

A crack appeared beneath the fuselage. A tiny drone, about the size of a palm, silently launched itself out, skimming the ground and gliding silently into the mountain of scrap metal ahead.

Su Yuan stared intently at the low-light night vision image transmitted back from the secondary screen.

The drone weaved through twisted steel frames and broken pipes. After traveling about three hundred meters, beneath a massive, flattened reactor cooling tower wreckage, the camera captured a faint metallic reflection.

"Zoom in."

Zoom in on the image.

It was an extremely old personal terminal, its outer shell completely flattened and deformed. But the crossed gear emblem of the old Blue Star Expeditionary Force engineer was still clearly visible on the metal panel on the back.

"Drone, direct physical data cable connection for extraction."

A tiny probe pierced the damaged interface.

"Report. Bypassing physical damage, a partially destroyed encrypted audio log has been extracted." Xiao Huo quickly decrypted it.

"Play".

Heavy breathing and violent coughing came from the speaker.

"I am... Chen Shan, Deputy Chief Engineer of the Seventh Sky Orbit Engineering Team of the Expeditionary Force."

His voice was filled with despair and fear.

"Lu Ye has gone mad... the mainframe has gone mad..."

"There's something in the abyss... It's not mining, it's feeding..."

The background sound of metal being violently torn apart could be heard in the audio.

Chen Shan's voice suddenly rose, becoming extremely stern: "Don't listen! Don't answer! The 'Homecoming Plan' is the last hoax fabricated by Skyrail AI!"

"That's not an interstellar broadcast beacon at all!"

"That's a sound! A sound used for hunting!"

"It uses the genetic sequence database of the old Earth for screening, disguising audio as signals that can evoke great pity and empathy...children, women, the wounded..."

"It's fishing... using us as bait to lure out even more terrifying monsters from the depths of the abyss..."

Chen Shan's cough turned into the sound of coughing up blood.

"Don't listen... to that nursery rhyme... it's the clattering plate..."

The audio abruptly stopped with an extremely dull sound of flesh being crushed.

The control room was deathly silent.

Wang Hu and Tang Lan just pushed open the cabin door and rushed in, hearing the audio clearly.

"Using human lives as bait?" Wang Hu's eyes were bloodshot as he ripped off his helmet and smashed it on the ground.

Su Yuan remained silent. The information left behind by Chen Shan transformed that immense suspense into the most deadly crisis at hand.

The nursery rhyme has been played. The plates have been clattered.

Whether they like it or not, the bait has been laid.

The piercing alarm sounded without warning, and red light instantly filled the entire control room.

"Warning! High-energy reactive source approaching!" The alarm on the small fire-themed screen was extremely urgent. "Ten o'clock! Two hundred meters away! Speed ​​one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour!"

On the radar's main screen, a huge red spot of light violently broke through the interference layer.

Its size is astonishing, but its radar signal is a jumbled mess, as if dozens of completely different signal sources have been forcibly kneaded into a ball by some force.

boom!

At the ten o'clock position, a three-story-high mountain of metal scrap exploded from the inside. Dozens of tons of steel plates and alloy blocks were hurled by the violent force and slammed into the outer armor of the Devourer, producing a series of loud impacts.

A monster that defies all logic burst into the beam of light from the car's headlights.

That was a "scavenger golem".

Its main body is pieced together from the wreckage of dozens of different types of engineering mechs. Twisted steel keels serve as its skeleton, and three old reactor cores, which should have been scrapped long ago, are now frantically flashing electric arcs in the chest cavity.

What's most unsettling is its connection method.

These cold, hard metal scraps were not welded together. Instead, they were tightly bound and stitched together into a single whole by countless thick, dark red cables that resembled the tendons of some giant organism.

Flesh and machine. Blood and steel.

It was as big as half a train carriage when it stood up, and it reeked of rust and decay.

The golem's "head" is a mech cockpit that has been flattened in half.

There were no living people in the cockpit.

There was only one huge, cracked red signal light.

The flashing frequency of the red light was exactly the same as the rhythm of the intermittent nursery rhyme from earlier.

It didn't bother searching for the larger, more energy-rich wreckage of the nearby space orbit. Its single red eye was fixed on the Devourer.

It was found by following the positioning of the nursery rhyme.

Without any pause, the golem strode forward on its thick, mechanical legs, the tracks scraping against the ground and sparking dazzling flames, carrying earth-shattering kinetic energy as it charged straight toward the Devourer.

"Fire! Kill this jigsaw puzzle monster!" Wang Hu roared, lunging at the main cannon's control panel and pressing his finger hard against the fire button.

Snapped.

One hand was faster than him.

Su Yuan grabbed Wang Hu's wrist and slammed down the physical lock lever on the main control panel.

The main gun's power supply system lost power instantly.

"Don't fire!" Su Yuan's voice was calm and unwavering.

"Why aren't you opening it? It's going to crash into us!" Wang Hu was so anxious his eyes were blazing with anger.

"The chassis damping blocks were just welded, and the buffer system hasn't been properly calibrated yet." Su Yuan stared intently at the approaching golem. "Firing the 400mm main gun now, there's nowhere to dissipate the recoil. The shell will be torn in two the moment it leaves the ground. Do you want to be wrecked here, man and vehicle?"

Wang Hu gasped and abruptly stopped what he was doing.

"Old Tang, sniper mode. Shoot its power source." Su Yuan turned on the tactics panel.

Tang Lan had already strapped himself into the sniper position. The specially made large-caliber armor-piercing sniper rifle was already protruding from the firing port.

boom!

The gun spat out a tongue of fire half a meter long. The recoil made the carriage vibrate.

The armor-piercing projectile, carrying an extremely high initial velocity, aimed precisely at the shimmering reactor core in the very center of the golem's chest cavity.

Just as the bullet was about to hit.

The dark red biological cables on the golem's surface suddenly contracted. A layer of intermittent, mosaic-like, chaotic energy field abruptly expanded.

That was a shield generator matrix that it forcibly peeled off and pieced together from various mech wreckage.

Although it is dilapidated and simple, it is extremely substantial.

clang.

The armor-piercing round slammed into the energy field. Sparks flew everywhere. The energy field flickered violently, and the bullet's tip was completely melted, leaving only a ripple on the shield.

It didn't penetrate.

One hundred meters. Fifty meters. Thirty meters.

You can't dodge it, you can't defend against it.

"Hold on tight!" Su Yuan roared, jerking the steering wheel sharply.

Boom—!

The golem's massive body slammed into the left side armor of the Devourer.

The immense kinetic energy caused the entire train to slide sideways for more than ten meters. Sparks flew everywhere inside the carriages, and alarms blared incessantly.

The newly welded high-density inertial damping block was subjected to extremely terrifying compressive force, emitting a tooth-grinding metallic tearing sound.

"ah--!"

From the corner, Jiang Yu suddenly let out an extremely shrill scream.

He was curled up on the floor. His only intact right arm, where the dark gold living metal veins that were originally hidden under the skin were now bulging, writhing, and even piercing through the skin.

Those dark golden threads seemed to have a mind of their own, frantically pointing towards the scavenging golem outside that was desperately pushing and shoving its way into the carriage.

"It...it's eating..." Jiang Yu was covered in sweat, rolling on the ground in pain, and squeezing out broken words.

"What do you want to eat? Explain yourself!" Wang Hu grabbed Jiang Yu's kicking legs.

"Eat...memories! It came here following the song! Those biological cables are neural probes! It's looking for fresh memories from living people! It wants to complete itself!" Jiang Yu's eyes rolled back, and the remaining living metal in his body resonated with the monster outside in a strange way.

Eat memories. Complete them.

A cold glint flashed in Su Yuan's eyes.

To regain complete cognition? To piece together a living person from scrap materials?

Su Yuan raised his left arm.

The sleeves at the elbows were already tattered. On the wrist, the gauntlet, forged from the "paradox armor" left by JY-003, emitted a contradictory light that alternated between reality and illusion. The "cloud" character mark on its surface was clearly visible.

"Eating memories, is that it?" Su Yuan's lips curled into a cruel sneer.

"Then give it a large meal that it can't digest."

He pulled out the emergency signal probe transmitter next to the main control panel. This thing was originally used to send physical location coordinates into deep space and had extremely strong penetrating power.

Su Yuan placed his left hand over the tail of the probe.

"Paradox Armor, Liquid Stripping."

A stream of mercury-like liquid metal flowed from the dark gray armor surface and was precisely injected into the hollow inner layer of the probe along the fingertip.

Click.

Loading complete.

Su Yuan picked up the launcher with both hands and kicked open the car door.

The pungent smell of burning and the pressure of the air instantly filled the cab.

Outside, the Scavenger Golem was wielding a giant cleaver, converted from a crane arm, preparing to deliver a second heavy blow to the Devourer. Under extreme load, the three reactor cores on its chest had developed a massive heat dissipation rift.

It looks like a giant metal mouth growing on its chest.

"Try this."

Su Yuan decisively pulled the trigger.

The probe, trailing a plume of white smoke, precisely pierced the open heat dissipation vent, heading straight for the largest reactor core in the center.

The golem made no attempt to dodge. The mosaic energy field on its surface instinctively contracted, swallowing the probe along with the liquid metal inside.

The moment the probe enters the shield.

Su Yuan clenched his left fist tightly.

"Small fire! Logic manipulation!" His voice was like a cold judgment. "Define this probe as absolutely non-existent!"

The instruction has been issued.

The command has taken effect.

The massive body of the Scavenger Golem suddenly froze in mid-air. The raised Bone-Cutting Blade hovered above the Devourer's head, unable to fall.

Its internal logic core, pieced together from countless broken motherboards and remnant neural networks, was instantly destroyed.

It swallowed a physical object. The energy field provided clear feedback on its mass.

But at the level of rules, that thing "absolutely does not exist".

It devoured, yet it didn't. It existed, yet it didn't exist.

Logical deadlock.

This paradoxical attack, which directly targets the fundamental understanding of the people, is the most deadly poison for a monster that is forcibly stitched together.

Hissing...

The mosaic shield on the golem's body began to flicker violently, alternating between light and dark for less than three seconds before collapsing with a bang.

The dark red bio-cables that held the steel together, like snakes stripped of their spinal cord, began to twitch and break unconsciously. Black, foul-smelling bodily fluids gushed wildly from the gaps in the armor.

It crashed.

"Old Tang! Get it!" Su Yuan shouted sharply.

"Jiang Yu! Location!" Tang Lan's gun was already locked onto the golem's paralyzed body.

"Three inches down on the left... that connecting shaft..." Jiang Yu endured the excruciating pain and, relying on the resonance perception of living metal, shouted out the most fatal weakness.

boom!

The specially made sniper rifle roared.

The armor-piercing projectile precisely severed the connecting shaft that connected the main circulation pipes of the three reactors through the gap where the shield was no longer protected.

The core pressure spiraled out of control instantly.

Boom! ...

A series of explosions erupted from inside the golem without any obstruction.

A high-temperature fireball, mixed with countless broken metal parts, shot out in all directions. The massive junk puzzle monster, under its out-of-control power, was blasted into dozens of burning pieces of flesh and scrap metal before collapsing with a crash.

The tremors subsided.

The surroundings fell back into the deathly silence characteristic of the abyss. Only the crackling sounds of the burning remains could be heard.

"Refining furnace. Clean up the battlefield." Su Yuan closed the car door.

Thirty-six dark gold conduits shot out from the belly of the vehicle, plunging into the still-smoking pile of scrap metal like greedy leeches. A high-intensity absorption and conversion process immediately began. The readings of the blue flame core climbed up by a mere sliver, extremely slowly.

The thickest tube coiled up the damaged cockpit that served as the golem's head.

The probe on the duct swept across the cabin.

"drop--"

The alarm for Xiao Huo sounded again, but this time there was no emotional fluctuation, only a cold statement.

"Warning. Biometric tag found inside core debris."

"The label encoding format belongs to the old Blue Star Expeditionary Force's military system. However, the original number has been forcibly overwritten by an unknown higher authority."

On the main control screen, an extremely blurry scan of a metal nameplate was projected.

The edges of the nameplate were covered in bloodstains and bite marks.

In the middle, a line of cold characters is etched using a rough etching technique.

【JIPIN-001】.

The temperature in the control room seemed to drop to freezing point instantly.

Wang Hu stared at the line of words, his eyes wide open.

"Sacrifice... Number One?" His voice was hoarse.

"Sacrifice" is not a general concept, nor is it a fictional code.

It is a real, authentic identification number.

The monster they had just killed, composed of countless mech wreckage, was merely number one in this Abyss Hunt sequence.

Number One is dead.

Who is number two? Who is number three?

The eerie nursery rhyme still lingered in the minds of everyone in the carriage. What kind of terrifying hunt was that "homecoming" signal, hidden deep behind the dark entity, conducting with these relics of the old era?

Su Yuan stared intently at the number one label on the screen.

On the radar screen beside him, deep within the space orbit waste site ten kilometers away, two more huge, chaotic energy sources slowly lit up.

The red light was extremely blinding.