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

The world stood still.

The proxy's bone nails hovered in mid-air, while the false king's gravity threads were frozen to the rock face.

Time was emptied, leaving only Su Yuan and the face on the screen that looked exactly like his.

The JY-003 brand on the back of my neck was burning hot, searing my nerves.

Fragmented images—no, memories—were forcibly poured into his mind.

Fourteen years ago, inside the JY-007 test chamber.

Ji Yun shoved a core data disk into "his" hand, his eyes resolute.

"Live on, as a traitor."

"Draw K-001's attention away from the real plan."

Behind him, the six members of the JY-007 crew gave him a final military salute before turning and walking toward the self-destruct control panel.

It's not betrayal.

It is to face death.

The three-second stillness ended.

The world has returned to its hustle and bustle.

The attacks from the proxy and the false king did not come down.

For the first time, two terrifying wills that had been locked in a life-or-death struggle reached a bizarre consensus and simultaneously locked onto Su Yuan.

"The Seventh Key to Judgment".

"It turns out that the key itself is alive."

The voice of the proxy puppet was cold, and the will of the false king reverberated in the space.

"Devour you, and you will unlock the throne."

"The abyss will welcome a new king."

Two monsters at the top of the abyss abandoned each other and joined forces to press down on the observation tower.

"Damn it!" Wang Hu, his eyes bloodshot, stood guard at the stairwell, the barrel of his heavy machine gun glowing red. "They've stopped firing, they're charging at us!"

A pale, bony finger crushed the steel beams at the top of the tower and plunged straight into the main control room.

Wang Hu instinctively used his arm to block, and a string of old nameplates hanging on his arm armor jingled.

Those were the identity tags of all the fallen members of the Old Blue Star Expeditionary Force that he had collected along the way.

A bizarre scene unfolded.

The seemingly indestructible bone finger, upon touching the old nameplate of the 011 train crew, emitted white smoke as if boiling water had been poured over snow, and a small piece of the fingertip silently melted away.

Wang Hu was stunned.

"It works!" he roared, tearing off all the nameplates from his neck and hanging them like curtains from a curtain, using both hands and feet, on the broken windows around the vehicle. "These things will stop them!"

At the same time, Tang Lan kicked open the rusty drawer of the observation tower's main control console. Inside, there were no weapons, only a dusty paper diary.

JY-007 Original Mission Log.

She quickly flipped to the last page, her pupils suddenly contracting.

A handwritten secret order, the handwriting as sharp as a knife.

JY-003 was ordered to defect with forged core data, attracting all pursuers and buying time for Project "Spark".

The signature contained two words that she could never mistake.

Ji Yun.

"Su Yuan, it's true." Tang Lan's voice came through the channel, with a slight, almost imperceptible tremor.

The sudden tilt of the observation tower interrupted everyone's thoughts.

The false king's gravitational threads have completely torn apart the base of the tower, and the executor's skeletal hands are peeling away the layers of the tower like dismantling building blocks.

"Boss! Down below the tower!" Jiang Yu suddenly pointed to the distorted geological scan map on the main control screen. The living metal veins on his arm were throbbing violently. "There's something! JY-003's... skeleton!"

In the footage, deep within the foundation of the observation tower, a skeleton, long since turned to skeletal form, is buried in collapsed rock strata.

In its hand, it tightly gripped half a lead shell, and on its wrist, it wore a copper bracelet that was exactly the same as the "cloud" mark on Su Yuan's left arm.

Is it a clone, or...?

Su Yuan didn't have time to think it through.

"Railway cannon, fire!"

He didn't aim at any enemy, but instead focused on the empty rock formation between the two monsters.

A devastating beam of light blasted out, blasting a huge gash in the rock.

A visible white stream of cold air gushed out from the gap.

It was high-concentration liquid nitrogen that had been sealed at the test site back then.

The extreme cold instantly froze the bone hand and the gravity threads, buying the Devourer a precious few seconds.

"Rush!"

Like a steel behemoth breaking free of its cage, the Devourer crashed out of the collapsed observation tower and hurtled toward the launch pad along the broken tracks.

Strange things happened again.

Along the track, the old defense systems that had previously attacked indiscriminately all changed direction and automatically raised layers of armor plates after recognizing the burning brand on the back of Su Yuan's neck, blocking the gravity debris chasing from behind the Devourer.

JY-003's permissions are still valid here.

Five hundred meters from the launch pad, the orbit came to an abrupt halt.

Ahead was a corrosive pool filled with thick, living metal.

"Exemption granted by the rules!"

Su Yuan activated the newly acquired permissions and defined the tracks of the Devourer as "orbit adaptation components".

An eerie purple light emanated from the tracks, pressing directly onto the living metal on the surface of the corrosion pool, forcibly creating a temporary passageway.

The chariot plunged into the pool.

At the bottom of the pool, a broken, dark gold behemoth suddenly opened its single eye.

It is K-002.

Controlled by the False King's gravity, it crashed into the chassis of the Devourer without regard for the consequences.

"I'll do it!"

Jiang Yu's eyes were bloodshot. He actually pushed open the car window and stretched out his mutated arm, releasing a living metal signal of the same origin.

K-002's movements faltered for a moment.

In that instant, the Devourer rushed through the corrosive pool.

The giant gate of the launch pad sensed the authorization and opened automatically.

Inside the door stood a remnant soul dressed in the uniform of the co-pilot of 011.

He was holding a deformed bullet in his hand.

"The boss made me do it back then."

"I missed."

"She didn't die in that rearguard action at all."

The remnant soul raised its hand, and a huge base projection unfolded in the center of the launch pad, with seven slots on it.

"The seven keys are not sacrifices to open the abyss passage."

"It's used to initiate a 'reverse format' to completely shut down this area."

"The rules of the throne were altered by K-001 from the very beginning!"

No sooner had the words left his mouth than the proxy and the false king broke through the liquid nitrogen blockade and chased after them to the door.

A deadly bone nail, ignoring space, aimed straight for Su Yuan's back.

The remnant soul in the passenger seat smiled.

He spread his arms and lunged forward, using his soul, which had endured humiliation and hardship for fourteen years, to block the bone nail.

Before his soul dissipated, he implanted Ji Yun's last memory of entering the core of the abyss into Su Yuan's mind.

"Live on...to see her..."

With a blank expression, Su Yuan inserted the six keys into the base one by one.

In the center of the base, a hot palm print groove popped out, perfectly matching the brand on the back of his neck.

He pressed it.

Seven beams of light shot into the sky.

Arbitrator privileges, fully unlocked.

[Gaining a new ability: Absolute definition of rules]

Su Yuan raised his head and looked at the arrogant, pale bony hand outside the door.

Definition: "Absolute physical immunity" is "physical vulnerability".

"Wang Hu, fire!"

Wang Hu kicked open the breechblock, pushed the last high-explosive shell into the breech, and slammed the firing button down.

The bone hand that had once left everyone helpless shattered amidst the gunfire.

The ceramic figurine fell from mid-air and shattered into pieces on the ground.

Seeing that things were going badly, the false king began to shrink violently, attempting to detonate itself and take the entire test site with it.

Su Yuan simply raised his hand.

"Absolute suppression of living metal".

All the escaping gravity was forcibly gathered, along with the black fragment, and shoved back into isolation chamber zero.

The energy readings of the Blue Flame Core soared from near depletion to 150%.

The crisis is over.

Su Yuan walked towards the control panel on the launch pad, where there was an encrypted voice message.

It was Ji Yun's voice.

"I'll be waiting for you at the core. Don't trust anyone, especially Base 04."

"Boss! We're rich!"

Wang Hu's roar came from underground. He pried open a storage box, inside which were brand-new expeditionary exoskeletons, mountains of medical supplies, and high-energy fuel.

The Devourer is fully loaded once again.

"Su Yuan." Tang Lan's voice suddenly came from the lookout post, tinged with wariness, "Straight ahead, at the end of the track."

A jet-black armored train, marked with the logo of Base 04, was speeding towards them.

Its main gun has locked onto the launch pad.

"Drip, drip, drip..."

Jiang Yu's face turned pale; he had intercepted the other party's communication.

"Target confirmed, JY-007, carrying all seven keys. Commander's order: retrieve the keys and eliminate all witnesses."

"Commander... it's AI Rikuno."

Before he could finish speaking...

The "cloud" mark on Su Yuan's left arm suddenly became hot.

The ground in the center of the launch pad cracked silently.

A brand new track, spiraling downwards, leads to the unknown depths.

At the end of the track, a faint but familiar ticking sound came from.

It was the sound of Ji Yun's old-fashioned mechanical timer, which he never parted with.

Su Yuan turned around and sat back in the driver's seat.

"Load all bullets."

"Let's go down."

The massive body of the Devourer slowly entered that new downward track.

Behind them, the black 04 base train fired its first shell.

The shell landed five meters behind the vehicle that the Devourer had just left, exploding into a cloud of iron filings.