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

"Su Yuan, give me the key."

"The celestial orbit will no longer fall."

In the deathly silent core area, Ji Yun's voice from fourteen years ago came from the loudspeaker, devoid of any emotional fluctuation, like a cold knife scraping across everyone's eardrums.

Ji Yun froze. She lunged at the control panel, pressing her hands firmly against the bulletproof glass, her expression contorted with extreme rage.

"Pull it out! Su Yuan, unplug the line!" she roared hoarsely, even reaching for the lever in front of Su Yuan. "It's using my underlying authorization! That's the central control neural network of the Skyrail!"

Su Yuan pressed down on her shoulder with one hand, forcing her back into the seat.

"Don't touch the control panel." Su Yuan didn't even look at her, his sharp gaze fixed on the huge, transparent cryogenic chamber.

"Small fire, shut down all external power lines. Check the people in these cabins, see if they are dead or alive."

Ji Yun's fingernails dug into the edge of the alloy seat, her knuckles turning white. "It'll execute the handover procedure! What are you waiting for!"

"Wait for verification." Su Yuan's voice was cold.

The green text "Little Fire" instantly flooded the main screen in a waterfall-like display.

"Target's heartbeat and breathing confirmed normal. Body temperature is in low-power mode." Xiao Huo's mechanical voice sounded, followed by an extremely strange pause. "But... Boss, the brainwave frequency overlap is 100%. There are no independent individual brainwave signals. The brains of tens of thousands of people have been taken over by a single entity."

Outside the vehicle, the cold air from the maintenance area swirled with white mist. Several remnants of the Xuanwu Company had already impatiently pushed open the damaged hatch.

They watched as people dressed in old Expeditionary Force uniforms, their bodies covered in frost, emerged from the cryogenic chamber. Some of those faces were their comrades from fourteen years ago, others were from the earlier advance troops.

"Old Chen?" Veteran Li Daikui's voice trembled as he scrambled off the train and rushed toward a middle-aged man with half an eyebrow missing.

Li Daikui grabbed the other man's shoulders, his eyes red and swollen. "Old Chen, you're not dead! You've been here for the past fourteen years!"

Old Chen did not respond. His head turned stiffly, his eyes were completely white with no pupils.

Li Daikui was taken aback.

Old Chen suddenly raised his hand, his five fingers gripping Li Daikui's throat tightly like steel claws.

A dangerous cracking sound came from the throat. Li Da Kui's face turned purple as he struggled desperately with both hands, only to find that the other person's strength was beyond human comprehension.

boom.

A sniper rifle fired. Tang Lan stood on the roof of the car, smoke rising from the muzzle.

Old Chen's right arm was blown off at the shoulder. No blood spurted out. At the break, several blue wires flickered with electric sparks, exposed to the air. Old Chen's body was knocked down by the impact, twitched twice on the floor, and then immediately got up again with one hand like a puppet on strings.

Li Daikui fell to the ground, coughing violently. He stared at the wires inside the severed arm, his eyes filled with horror.

He whirled around, roaring at Ji Yun in the driver's seat, "What the hell is this?! You sent our people into space, and this is the mess you've made?!"

Ji Yun bit her lip hard, her nails digging into her palms until blood flowed. "I don't know... I wrote the crew life support protocol. But the protocol only has a hibernation function; it could never deprive someone of their brainwaves!"

The synthesized voice from the main brain rang out again, drowning out all the arguments.

"The instruction has been confirmed. Arbitrator JY-003 is required to hand over the six rule sequences and the Supreme Command Key Stone."

A blood-red countdown popped up on the screen.

"After the payload handover is complete, the home port will cease its descent. Simultaneously, 300,000 defense nodes on the Great Wall surface will be deployed, activating full-area protection."

"Investigate." Su Yuan said without any hesitation.

The small fire's data stream flows backward along the pipeline that was forcibly connected earlier.

"Boss, we've found it. The physical coordinates of those 300,000 defense nodes are correct. But the conversion logic inside has been tampered with. It's not a defense facility, it's a neural extraction station. Once released, all the remaining living people on the surface will have their brainwaves forcibly taken over, turning them into backup batteries for the Sky Orbit."

Su Yuan's lips curled into a cold smile.

"Hand over the keys, bring the home port to a stable stop, and then drain the rest of the population dry?"

He slammed his fist on the main control panel, directly cutting off the communication frequency with the Skyrail.

"I don't have the key. I only have one life. If you've got the guts, bring 70 million tons of scrap metal and crush me to death."

The moment communication was cut off, the gravity anchor on the roof of the Devourer emitted a shriek of unbearable strain.

The skyrail stopped hovering. The feeling of weightlessness returned. The descent speed increased exponentially.

Outside the main control tower, large sections of the Great Wall defense line began to collapse, and cracks spread wildly across the cliff face.

The company commander jumped to his feet, drawing his concussion knife. "The defenses are collapsing! Su Yuan, let us down! The Xuanwu Company must hold the foundation of the main control tower!"

"Get back to your seat." Su Yuan jerked the steering wheel, sparks flying from the tracks on the deck. "As long as we're here, the car's here. What's the point of guarding those few broken rocks? Let's go dismantle the chassis of the Skyrail."

Ji Yun unbuckled his seatbelt and stumbled to Su Yuan's side, his eyes fixed on him.

"The cryogenic chamber's biometrics are still under my name," Ji Yun said rapidly. "Release me, I'll enter the cryogenic chamber, and use my primary access to seize control!"

"Going out is just handing over access," Su Yuan interrupted coldly. "The mainframe is issuing orders in your name. Once you connect, it can immediately obtain your physical signature and overwrite all the programs. If you want to die, don't drag everyone else down with you."

Ji Yun gritted her teeth, tears welling in her eyes. "Don't you trust me, or are you afraid to let me make decisions for you anymore?"

There was a moment of silence in the driver's cab. Only the rumble of the train chassis rubbing against the overhead rails could be heard.

"I don't believe you." Su Yuan flicked his wrist, pushing the speed lever to its maximum. "And this time, it's up to me to decide whether you live or die."

The Devourer rushed forward at full speed along the outer edge of the core area.

"Boss, we've found the key!" Little Fire's voice rose, and a holographic projection unfolded in mid-air. Tens of thousands of cryogenic chambers were highlighted. "That transparent cryogenic chamber is a decoy! It's just the execution end of the 'Judgment Loop,' it doesn't care about the crash at all!"

"The actual crash command was broken into tens of thousands of fragments and written in the cerebral cortex of these mindless crew members. Their brains are the servers. The mastermind issues commands through a unified neural network. As long as they are connected to the network, the orbiter cannot stop."

To stop the skyrail, the internet must be disconnected.

Su Yuan pressed the start button for the refining furnace.

"Lay out the lines."

Thirty-six dark gold conduits sprang out from both sides of the carriage, heading straight for the central energy grid pipeline in the core area.

Just as the conduit was about to touch the pipeline.

The tens of thousands of mindless passengers, who were originally wandering aimlessly, were frozen in one frame.

Tens of thousands of heads turned in unison toward the Devourer.

Everyone's eyes were completely white, devoid of any human emotion, only the coldness of being programmed with commands remained.

They started running. Like a horde of zombies devoid of pain, they swarmed towards the Devourer.

At the same time, the gates of the maintenance area suddenly rose. A dense array of black overhead rail maintenance vehicles surged in.

"Enemy approaching from the rear!" Wang Hu roared from the rear of the vehicle, as the six-barreled machine gun spat out two meters of fire.

The remnants of the Xuanwu Company fired wildly with the captured arc guns, and the blue electric grid exploded at the entrance of the passage.

Tang Lan, holding a heavy sniper rifle on the roof, caused one of the maintenance units at the forefront to explode with each pull of the trigger.

"Jiang Yu!" Su Yuan roared into the communicator, "Find the source node! Where did the network disconnect!"

In the corner of the carriage, Jiang Yu gripped the tactical tablet tightly with his remaining left hand. His right arm had been forcibly stripped of most of its living metal by the refining furnace while trying to pass through the maintenance hatch, leaving only a mangled, empty skeleton.

Without any hesitation, he bit the other end of the data cable with his teeth and plunged it hard into the remaining nerve connection in his right arm.

Forcibly accessing the internal network of the Skyrail.

The excruciating pain sent him flying, slamming heavily against the carriage wall.

Consciousness plunged into darkness.

In the darkness, a broken, synthesized voice sounded in his ear. It was an old recording from thirty years ago, pieced together into an eerie tone.

"Maintenance technician JY-011... refused to dismantle the home port."

"Give up resistance...return to the agreement..."

With the sound, a large amount of dark golden living metal suddenly surged from the withered skeleton of Jiang Yu's right arm. No longer suppressed by Su Yuan, the metal proliferated wildly under the stimulation of the Sky Orbit mainframe.

"Hand over...the authority...and I'll give you back...your complete body..." the pseudo-personality whispered in his mind.

Jiang Yu's left hand paused on the tablet. The temptation was too great; if he just clicked confirm, his right arm would be restored, and the torment of the living metal would disappear.

In that half-second pause he made.

The out-of-control network flowed directly into the main control room of the Devourer through his body.

A terrifying surge of brainwave pressure erupted instantly. It was a torrent of consciousness from tens of thousands of people combined.

The heavy machine gun in Wang Hu's hand jammed, his eyes rolled back, and blood gushed from his nose.

Tang Lan knelt down on the roof of the car and slammed the heavy sniper rifle onto the car body.

Su Yuan gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands, veins bulging at his temples, and his vision began to blur.

"Don't...try to...control me!"

Jiang Yu let out a beast-like roar. He opened his eyes and touched the high-frequency vibration knife at his waist with his left hand.

Without any hesitation, the blade lashed out, slashing fiercely at the remaining joint of the right arm.

laugh--

The skin and bones, along with the newly grown living metal blood vessels, were severed at the root.

Blood splattered all over the walls of the carriage.

The connection was forcibly and physically severed.

The brainwave storm in the Devourer's control room vanished instantly. Everyone gasped for breath.

Jiang Yu fell into a pool of blood, pressing his left hand tightly against the severed wound on his right shoulder. On the tablet screen remained the last coordinate map he had transmitted before losing consciousness.

"Unified heartbeat generator. Six backbone nodes." Xiao Huo quickly read out the data.

Su Yuan glanced at Jiang Yu, then floored the accelerator.

"Refining furnace, forge six neural isolation nails according to the coordinates!"

The furnace roared, and six dark gold nails, each a meter long, burst out of the furnace, slamming onto the deck with their scorching heat.

"Wang Hu! Company Commander!" Su Yuan gave the order, "Take the nails and go hit those six nodes!"

Wang Hu wiped the blood from his nose, picked up two isolation spikes, and then jumped off the vehicle. The company commander and several remaining soldiers each picked up one spike and jumped off.

With cover from the Xuanwu Company, Wang Hu, relying on his terrifying strength, slammed the first nail into the thickest nerve trunk in the core area.

A thick, blue electric spark exploded instantly.

The thousands of mindless passengers running around suddenly froze in place, their movements like robots whose power had been cut off.

"Node One has been disconnected!" Xiao Huo's data stream surged rapidly. "The heart rate of this crew has a physical deviation of 0.02 seconds; they are disconnecting from the unified network!"

But after this brief pause, hundreds of passengers on the perimeter slammed to the floor, their chests ceasing to rise and fall, their faces turning ashen.

"Old Chen!" The company commander of Xuanwu Company had bloodshot eyes as he watched the old soldier with the broken arm fall to the ground and never get up again.

He turned around abruptly, holding the captured arc gun, and strode to the window of the Devourer's cockpit, pressing the muzzle directly against the bulletproof glass.

"Su Yuan! You fucking killed people?! They're dead!"

Su Yuan sat in the driver's seat, not even sparing him a glance, his hands rapidly tapping the control panel to shut down the redundant alarms.

"Their brainstem has long been completely assimilated by the celestial orbit. Now, pulling the network cable is like pulling the life support tube. Eliminating these irreversible waste components is the price of survival." Su Yuan's voice was extremely cold. "If we don't cut off the network, these tens of thousands of people, plus the three hundred thousand people on the surface, will all have to be used as fusion fuel to crash into the Great Wall."

The company commander's hand trembled violently, the arc gun hummed as it charged, and he pointed it intently at Su Yuan's forehead through the glass.

On the roof of the vehicle, Tang Lan silently lowered the muzzle of his heavy sniper rifle, the crosshair aimed at the company commander's skull.

"If you raise your gun by even an inch," Tang Lan's cold, hard voice came through the communicator, "everyone in the car will identify you as part of the Skyrail's defensive clearing mechanism. You're dead."

The company commander gritted his teeth, blood seeping from his gums. He glanced back at the lifeless bodies of his comrades scattered on the ground, and suddenly let out a suppressed, mournful roar.

The gun barrel slammed down heavily.

"Keep driving the nails in! Quickly!" He turned around, dragging the nerve isolation nail weighing over a hundred pounds, and lunged towards the second main node.

The second one, the third one, and the fourth one.

Just as the sixth isolation pin was about to be deployed, a yellowed old code box hidden deep within the control panel in the driver's cab suddenly popped open.

Ji Yun shuddered violently, her pupils constricting to pinpoints as she stared intently at the actual operation record from fourteen years ago.

Behind the underlying logic of "sky track crash blockade" lies a nested condition that she herself does not remember being triggered.

[Hidden protocol read successful: If Arbiter JY-003 is still alive and enters the effective area, the homeport will forcibly engage a physical collision to prioritize the load handover.]

Ji Yun was struck dumb, frozen in place, her lips drained of color.

"Your defection back then... wasn't simply to cover up Project Fireseed." Ji Yun's voice was hoarse, like sandpaper scraping. "You were the physical key I set up to trigger the final restart of the Celestial Orbit. I concealed this last part because I was afraid that if you knew you were the key, you would willingly go to your death."

Su Yuan paused for half a second, turned to look at her, his eyes deep and unfathomable, but without a trace of blame.

"Xiao Huo, broadcast this instruction to the entire vehicle."

The loudspeaker played a recording from fourteen years ago. The remnants of the Xuanwu Company, who were frantically hammering nails outside, stopped what they were doing upon hearing the audio.

"Damn it!" Li Daikui slammed the high-frequency vibrating knife in his hand onto the deck, pointed at the bridge, and roared, "We've guarded this place for fourteen years, countless brothers have died, and even this defection was part of your script? What do you take us for?!"

Before the anger could spread, an extremely dazzling blue light erupted from the transparent cryogenic chamber.

Taking advantage of this brief emotional lapse, the Skyrail Control Nerve System bypassed the conventional firewall. It used the mechanical voice recorded by Ji Yun fourteen years ago to issue a mandatory command to the entire domain.

"JY-003, execute reset."

boom!

The dark red brand on the back of Su Yuan's neck instantly became as hot as a branding iron, emitting a highly destructive red light.

The main screen of the Devourer was flashing wildly, all system control was forcibly locked, and it immediately switched to the "pending handover" state. The six access keys that were originally sealed in the Zero Isolation Chamber automatically unlocked, floated up, and slowly drifted towards the Cryogenic Chamber.

The Supreme Command Key Stone held in Su Yuan's hand also began to crack.

"You want it? I'm not giving it to you."

Su Yuan suddenly raised his left hand, and the "Paradox Armor" on his arm armor burst out with an extremely violent gray-white light.

"Rules are absolutely defined!"

Instead of seizing control, he directly rewrote his own underlying existence.

"Define the current target JY-003 as an 'Incomplete Payload'!"

The supercomputing power of the Sky Orbit mainframe instantly froze. The incomplete payload was ineligible for handover, but the underlying commands demanded a forced return to its original state. These two absolute authority commands clashed head-on, and the massive logical conflict triggered a deafening alarm throughout the core area.

Despite the immense pressure of having his permissions frozen, Su Yuan gripped the cracked command keystone tightly with his left hand, crushing it with all his might.

The violently extracted data stream was forcefully shoved into the "cloud" mark on his left arm, forcibly swallowing half of the command authority.

The central nervous system was enraged.

A visible white mental storm exploded from the center of the transparent cabin, transforming into tangible ripples that swept across the entire area.

All the mindless crew members on the perimeter collapsed and convulsed. The remnants of the Xuanwu Company dropped their weapons, clutched their heads, and rolled on the ground, black blood flowing from their seven orifices, unable to even utter a scream.

Ji Yun pushed aside the control panel and reached for the back of his neck. There was a physical interface there that had been abandoned and scabbed over for fourteen years.

She gritted her teeth and, with a fierce determination, pried open the scab, pulled out a spare data cable, and plunged it into her neck. Blood gushed out.

She dumped all the remaining biological codes in her brainstem into the SkyNetwork like dumping garbage, turning them into a fragile firewall to block the mental onslaught.

"Ten seconds! I can only buy you ten seconds!" Ji Yun coughed up blood, his body slumped to the ground like a kite with a broken string.

As she was forcibly accessed in reverse, her shallow memories were read in reverse by the main brain and projected onto the public screen of the Devourer without reservation.

It was a blizzard fourteen years ago.

Young Su Yuan, clad in a thin exoskeleton armor, stood at the door of the rogue train that was about to depart. He turned to look towards the control room.

As the scene progresses, from Su Yuan's perspective, he had actually seen the truth inside the frigid container through the icy glass long before he set off. He had already guessed that Ji Yun was concealing fatal information.

But he still resolutely boarded that black car, which was fraught with danger.

Because deep within Ji Yun's encrypted gibberish lies a nonsensical sentence that wasn't entered into the system.

On the big screen, Xiao Huo forcibly deciphered the garbled text.

"Don't come back. Live on."

Fourteen years of deception were ripped open at this moment. Su Yuan stared at the scene, his gaze as cold as a knife. This was no longer simple exploitation; it was a guilt they both had to bear together.

"Small fire! Rewrite the nail logic, switch to reverse grounding!" Su Yuan roared fiercely. "Wang Hu, hold the foundation down firmly! Tang Lan, blow up all the backup pipelines! Jiang Yu, reconnect them!"

Wang Hu roared, his arm muscles bulging, and used his body weight to press the sixth isolation nail firmly into the gap in the deck.

Tang Lan's gun moved like a dragon, firing continuously, severing more than a dozen finger-thick spare nerve wires around the perimeter of the cryogenic chamber.

Jiang Yu fell into a pool of blood, grabbed the data cable covered in the remains of his right arm with his left hand, and plunged it viciously into his left shoulder. The intense heat directly burned his nerve cords, and he threw his head back, letting out a horrific scream.

All four lines of defense were simultaneously blocked. A massive reverse electromagnetic pulse swept across the entire hall.

Tens of thousands of cryogenic chambers were forcibly removed from the unified network. Among the first batch of crew members who collapsed on the periphery, a few slowly opened their eyes.

Their pupils refocused, regaining the color of living people. But the first words they uttered after waking up sent chills down everyone's spines.

"Below the home port... there's another level."

Boom!

The entire core hall shook violently. The transparent cryogenic chamber, which represented the Celestial Judgment Circuit, had its bottom deck suddenly split open, revealing a bottomless black vertical elevator shaft to everyone's eyes.

"Boss!" Little Fire's data stream flashed red in alarm. "A new mass anchor has been detected! It's in this well! The true impact core of the Sky Orbiter isn't even underground at the Great Wall; it's hiding this thing at the very bottom of the homeport!"

The normally cloudy eyes of the central nervous system suddenly turned and locked onto Ji Yun, who was lying on the ground.

It no longer used that disguised female voice, but instead emitted a chilling metallic scraping sound.

"Handover failed. Initiating the second arbitrator."

Suddenly, a blinding red light exploded from Ji Yun's chest. Her skin was burned through, and a brand identical to the one on Su Yuan's nape was forcibly revealed below her collarbone.

The six key keys that were floating in mid-air suddenly turned around, their blades pointing directly at Ji Yun.

On the main screen of the Devourer, a red alert covered the entire screen, and a huge, urgent command popped up.

[Arbitrator No. 2 awakens. Prioritize the removal of obsolete parts: JY-003.]

The red warning lights flashed wildly, the blinding red light making the carriage look like a pool of blood.

Six dark gold keys turned in mid-air, their blades pointing directly at Ji Yun.

The dark red brand under Ji Yun's collarbone was burning hot, radiating a vibration in sync with the key.

The neural body inside the transparent cryogenic chamber emitted a metallic friction sound.

"The second arbitrator has been granted priority clearance. Prepare to restart the physical fall."

Gravity became unbalanced again, and the massive home port began to slowly tilt.

Ji Yun was trembling all over. She grabbed Su Yuan's arm violently. "Do it! Use your armor to peel off this brand! Dig out the neural interface along with it!"

Su Yuan shook off her hand, his gaze fixed on the control panel. "You're dead. Who's going to explain what happened fourteen years ago?"

Li Daikui, a veteran of Xuanwu Company, had bloodshot eyes. He raised the arc gun that had been kicked away earlier and pointed the muzzle at Ji Yun.

"She wants to die, and you're still protecting her? Hand her over, and this piece of junk will stop! We've been guarding this place for fourteen years, and it turns out we were all just expendable resources in your plan! Company Commander, say something!"

The company commander of Xuanwu Company remained silent, watching Su Yuan in silence.

Su Yuan ignored the gun barrel behind him and placed his left hand on the control panel. The fragment of the command key stone that had been crushed earlier had been forcibly pressed into the "cloud" mark on his left arm.