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

The moment the Devourer broke through the atmosphere, all the instruments in the cockpit turned bright red at the same time.

weightlessness.

The hundreds-of-tons-weight steel armored vehicle defied Earth's gravity, with shards of glass, shell casings, and congealed blood floating inside. Wang Hu's heavy machine gun slipped from his grasp and floated in mid-air. He grabbed the handrail, but his foot slipped, leaving him suspended in the middle of the vehicle.

Li Daikui and the remnants of the Xuanwu Company crashed into the ceiling and bounced back, with seven or eight people tumbling and bumping around in the narrow carriage.

Su Yuan gripped the control lever tightly with both hands, his gaze piercing through the cracked windshield.

The purplish-black tail flames of the Star God-class anti-gravity deflector engine silently surged in the vacuum, propelling the Devourer and the 70 million tons of scrap metal from its space-orbiting homeport above it along its predetermined trajectory toward the deep space shadows of near-Earth orbit.

The countdown for "Godslayer Clash" on the main screen starts dropping from forty-seven seconds.

"Boss." Xiao Huo's mechanical voice stuttered noticeably due to data overload, "Target... sighted."

A holographic projection tore open a curtain of light in mid-air.

That's not a shadow.

A sphere the size of the moon hovers in near-Earth orbit. Its surface is neither rock nor metal, but rather an alternating layer of machinery and flesh. Thousands upon thousands of thick, dark red tentacles extend from the sphere's surface, constantly devouring the surrounding floating space debris. With each piece devoured, the sphere expands by one size.

Parasitic asteroid.

Tang Lan lay prone on the roof of the car, gripping the weld of the armor plate tightly with one hand, her sniper rifle's scope aimed at the sphere. The scope was filled with red.

"This thing is hundreds of times bigger than the orbiter." Her voice was dry and hoarse through the communicator.

Su Yuan didn't respond. His attention was drawn to a string of abnormal data that suddenly popped up on the control panel.

The condition of the remains at the Skyrail homeport is rapidly deteriorating.

It's not fragments falling off. It's the mainframe dismantling its own shell.

The green text on the screen scrolled wildly: "Physical separation detected at the top of the homeport! The mainframe's core data capsule is disconnecting from its physical locks! It's trying to escape!"

Su Yuan's gaze dipped downwards, and he saw a streamlined, dark blue hull emerging from the armor gap at the very top of the homeport structure. Dozens of fixing bolts were snapped off one by one by the internal explosives, and a faint ion propulsion flame spewed from the hull's tail.

The Sky Orbit AI wants to ditch its home port, this piece of scrap metal, and launch itself into deep space.

"run?"

Su Yuan pressed his right index finger onto the engine control panel. The power parameter interface of the Star God-class anti-gravity engine popped up, with a gray backup function option at the bottom labeled "Gravity Anchoring".

He clicked it.

The anti-gravity engine at the bottom of the Devourer emitted a muffled sound, switching its output mode from propulsion to lock-on. An invisible gravitational traction line shot out from under the vehicle, piercing through 70 million tons of scrap metal wreckage, and precisely piercing the dark blue data capsule that was detaching.

The data capsule's ion thrusters were running at full power, extending their exhaust plume to its maximum length.

Not moving.

Gravity locks it firmly to the very top of the homeport—the outermost layer when the entire pile of scrap metal collides.

The public channel exploded instantly.

"JY-003! Unlock!" The synthesized voice of the Sky Orbit mainframe went out of control and distorted, high-frequency electrical noise causing the speakers to skip wildly. "You can't—I have 300,000 hostages! The mid-level hibernation pods are still on the home port! I'll detonate them! We'll all perish together!"

Su Yuan raised his left hand.

The character "云" (cloud) illuminated with a white light.

"While activating the main gun's charging, cut out the middle layer," he told Little Fire.

The white light from the left arm armor spread along the control panel, covering the entire weapon system panel and structural control panel. The two programs executed simultaneously.

The remaining permissions of the Supreme Command Keystone were activated. The physical latches of the Skyrail Homeport received an overwrite command, and all 672 connection nodes of the middle structure popped open. At the same time, the Devourer launched the Skyrail Gravity Traction Anchor, and three precise gravity cutting lines swept at high speed along the interface between the middle and upper and lower structures.

The dull vibrations of metal tearing through the vacuum were transmitted to the body of the Devourer.

The middle layer structure containing 300,000 hibernation pods was completely stripped away.

A reverse gravitational field spread out a gentle deceleration field on the outer perimeter of the mesosphere, supporting the multi-million-ton cargo module as it slowly detached from the collision trajectory and drifted towards the surface. Small Fire's tracking data showed that the Great Wall defense line's gravity capture network had detected the target and was adjusting its receiving angle.

The mastermind has cleared all of his threat cards.

There was a two-second silence on the public channel. Then the mainframe emitted a distorted electronic scream, no longer a plea for mercy, no longer a threat, but pure terror.

The countdown has jumped to twenty-one seconds.

The parasitic asteroid finally reacted. Hundreds upon hundreds of dark red, high-dimensional tentacles turned towards the Devourer, their ends unfurling tooth-like suction cup structures. The fleshy layer on the sphere's surface began to writhe, revealing a dense network of metallic skeletons beneath, and the entire asteroid entered battle configuration.

Su Yuan didn't look at it.

He stared at the monitor screen in the medical pod.

Ji Yun lay on the makeshift stretcher, her face ashen, her chest barely rising and falling. The wound on her left shoulder, branded from being violently ripped off, was covered with congealed first-aid gel, the black oozing fluid already dried.

The numbers on the vital signs monitor are jumping.

Brain death countdown: 00:11.

Jiang Yu knelt beside the stretcher, pressing his one arm against Ji Yun's carotid artery. The pulse beneath his fingers was growing weaker and weaker.

"His pulse is almost gone!" Jiang Yu's voice was weak from excessive blood loss.

Tang Lan climbed onto the roof of the train and entered the carriage, grabbing the medical kit and rummaging through it, her fingers running over all the labels. The first-aid gel was gone, and the nerve repair injections had run out at station 58. She looked up towards the driver's cab, her lips pressed tightly together.

The red alarm light in the medical pod came on.

Xiao Huo's voice echoed in the car: "The damage to the cerebral cortex has reached the irreversible threshold. Brain death countdown is in full swing—"

00: 03.

Su Yuan removed his left hand from the control stick.

With his right hand gripping the push rod to maintain the collision trajectory, his left hand flew across the control panel. He accessed the deep functional interface of the refining furnace and located the dark matter energy reserves left over from the Devouring Star God embryo.

There are 0.7 more units.

"Rule is absolutely defined."

His voice was extremely calm in the sealed cockpit.

"Define Ji Yun's current life state—absolute physical stillness."

The white light of the mark on the left arm turned purplish-black. The 0.7 units of residual dark matter energy were drained and flowed into the medical pod through the regular channel.

Fine, purplish-black crystals began to precipitate on Ji Yun's body surface. They spread from her fingertips to her wrists, climbed up her forearms, and enveloped her face along her neck.

Her last faint heartbeat stopped at the peak of contraction.

There is no relaxation. There is no arrest. The myocardial fibers are locked in a contracted state, and the blood clots in the inner lining of the arterial wall. The neuronal exhaustion signal is transmitted to the last 0.1 millimeters from the synaptic terminal and permanently frozen.

The brain death countdown is stuck at 00:00.01.

It stopped beating.

Su Yuan cut out the interface of the zero isolation chamber of the refining furnace. The chamber door popped open, and absolute zero cold air rushed out. He manipulated the hydraulic arm to send Ji Yun, who was covered with dark matter crystals, into the chamber, and the chamber door locked.

Triple physical seals are superimposed.

The numbers on the vital signs monitor no longer change.

"Boss!" Little Fire's warning voice rose to its maximum, "Ten seconds until the collision!"

Su Yuan turned his gaze away from the medical monitoring screen and back to the outside of the windshield.

The parasitic asteroid had filled the entire field of vision. Dark red tentacles swarmed over it, each tens of kilometers long. The largest laceration on the asteroid's surface opened, revealing a dense array of metallic teeth inside.

The mainframe's data capsule remained anchored at the very top of the homeport. The ion thrusters on the blue hull had burned out due to overload, and the capsule remained motionless under gravity lock. The synthesized audio had turned into fragmented gibberish.

"No no no no no no—"

9. 8. 7.

Su Yuan pushed the speed lever to its maximum.

The Star God-class engine reached its physical limits. Its purplish-black exhaust trailed hundreds of kilometers of light in the vacuum.

6. 5. 4.

The tentacles swept over. The three dark red tentacles at the very front wrapped around the wreckage of the Skyrail Homeport, and the tooth-shaped suction cups tore off a large area of ​​armor.

Three. Two. One.

zero.

The four characters "宒神对撞" on the main screen shattered and disappeared.

The Devourer, carrying tens of millions of tons of scrap metal from the space-orbiting home port, crashed head-on into the flesh-and-blood rift of the parasitic asteroid with sub-light-speed kinetic energy.

The mainframe's data capsule was instantly flattened at the first contact surface. The synthesized sound was compressed into meaningless electromagnetic noise by absolute kinetic energy at the physical level, leaving not even garbled text.

No sound.

There is no air to conduct sound waves in space. But the energy released by the impact pushed the temperature of the contact surface to the level of a star's core within milliseconds. Looking up from the Great Wall of Earth's defenses, a burst of white light brighter than the sun exploded in near-Earth orbit.

The beam of light lasted for a full four seconds.

The remnants of the Xuanwu Company were strapped to shock-absorbing seats, the inertia forcing their blood from head to toe. Li Daikui's nosebleed sprayed onto the face of the wounded soldier opposite him. Wang Hu gripped the armrest tightly, his knuckles digging into the metal grooves, the veins on the back of his hand bulging like earthworms.

The outer layer of the Devourer's black-gold armor peeled off extensively during the impact. The tungsten alloy head of the Abyss Breaker, which penetrated the ramming horn, was ground down by a third. However, the thrust of the Star God Engine did not decrease.

The tank penetrated the asteroid's outer armor.

The internal structure was exposed to the exhaust flames of the engine.

It is not a solid object.

The asteroid is hollow inside. A massive, pale white skeleton supports the entire spherical structure, with joints and metal pipes intertwined. The geometry of the skeleton does not belong to any known biological or engineering system.

A heart hangs in the center of the skeleton.

It is purplish-red. Its diameter exceeds three kilometers. Its surface is covered with blood vessel-like energy channels, and with each pulsation, it releases visible gravitational ripples in all directions.

Ripples swept across the body of the Devourer vehicle.

The outer metal casing emitted a tearing sound at the molecular level.

"It's assimilating the vehicle's alloy!" Xiao Huo's data stream was all red. "The outer armor's molecular structure is being forcibly rewritten! Within twenty seconds, the vehicle will become part of its body!"

Su Yuan had been waiting for this moment for a long time.

His right hand left the speed lever and pressed on the red safety cover in the lower right corner of the weapon panel.

Turn it over.

The holographic projection of the main gun's charging slot popped out. Inside the slot, the rusty "Pangu" bayonet was emitting a dark red, low-frequency pulsating light. The concept of absolute destruction, which the first commander-in-chief had sealed with his life fourteen years ago, was now being drawn out, compressed, and injected into the gun barrel by the superconducting coils, one coil at a time.

The charging bar is fully charged in three seconds.

Su Yuan pressed the fire button with his index finger.

The main cannon of the Pangu Town Boundary Piercing Star fired.

There was no flame from the muzzle, no cannon fire. A pure black line shot out from the front of the Devourer. It wasn't a beam of light, nor a stream of energy, but a line that was "absent" in the absolute sense.

The black lines pierced through the gaps in the skeleton, through the vascular tubes, and through the many barriers of gravitational ripples.

It pierced the center of the purplish-red heart.

The heartbeat stopped the instant the black line pierced through.

It wasn't shattering, nor was it an explosion. The purplish-red tissue rapidly turned to ash from the point of penetration outwards. This ash-washing wasn't a physical decomposition, but rather the conceptual erasure of existence itself. The ash-washing spread faster than the speed of light—because it wasn't eliminating matter, but rather the fact that "matter once existed."

The heart disappeared.

The skeleton lost its support and began to collapse inward.

Looking up from the Earth's surface, the enormous shadow that occupied half the sky disintegrated within seconds. The pure black void belt plowed a chasm hundreds of kilometers wide in near-Earth orbit, swallowing up all the space debris on either side of the chasm.

No debris. No dust spreading outwards. That spot became an absolute void, so vast that even starlight had to detour to pass through it.

On the surface positions of the Great Wall defense line, the remnants of the soldiers who were fighting against sporadic deep-space beast tides raised their heads.

After half the sky was washed by the white light, the long-lost pure black night sky and stars were revealed again.

"It's gone..." A blood-soaked veteran slumped onto the ruins of the bunker, his gun lying on the ground, his voice trembling. "That big guy is gone."

In the main control room of the Devourer, the overload alarms were in complete chaos.

The consequences of the dual overload of the Star God Engine and the Star Piercing Main Cannon erupted seven seconds after firing. The stability of the Blue Flame Core plummeted at a rate of five percent per second. 8%. 5%. The outer layer of the black-gold armor began to melt, and orange-red molten metal droplets solidified into tiny spheres in the vacuum, drifting behind the Devourer.

The engine thrust has dropped to 12 percent of its rated value.

The Devourer lost its ability to maintain orbit.

The tank began to be recaptured by Earth's gravity.

"Emergency landing." Su Yuan quickly set the reentry angle on the instrument panel. "Everyone, fasten your harnesses."

"Where to land?" Wang Hu roared from behind.

Xiao Huo's holographic map flickered, marking a white area on the tectonic plate on the far side of the Earth. "At the current orbital decay rate, the landing site is in the high-latitude ice sheet of the Southern Hemisphere. No known facilities, no known signal sources."

The Devourer began its descent. Its front was facing Earth, and the engines at the rear intermittently spewed out wisps of flame, barely managing to maintain its reentry attitude.

The thin air at the edge of the atmosphere began to stir up orange plasma halos on the vehicle's exterior. The temperature rose rapidly.

Just then, Su Yuan caught a glimpse of a bright spot disappearing from the radar screen out of the corner of his eye.

That was the debris field after the annihilation of a deep-space entity. Most of the fragments had been swallowed up by the void, but a small, extremely dense object was moving away from Earth along a parabolic trajectory. Its frequency reading jumped.

The same frequency as the old Blue Star.

Su Yuan narrowed his eyes.

"Hydraulic arm".

The mechanical crane arm outside the vehicle is one of the earliest original pieces of equipment on the Devourer, having been with it since Station One. The joints are severely worn, and the third bearing has a patch weld from Station Twelve.

But it can still move.

Su Yuan manipulated the hydraulic arm to extend from the right side of the vehicle. The arm's maximum reach was fourteen meters. The high-density object was read as one hundred and twenty meters away on the radar, and it was moving away rapidly.

The temperature of the plasma halo had already heated the outer shell of the hydraulic arm to a high level.

The next second, Su Yuan squeezed out the last bit of thrust from the engine's residual power to adjust the vehicle's attitude. The Devourer made an extremely slight yaw in the re-entry plasma stream, sending the hydraulic arm's grab into the object's drifting trajectory.

The grab bucket closes.

A black cuboid was towed back into the car.

The temperature from atmospheric friction burned all three joints at the end of the hydraulic arm. During the retraction process, the arm got stuck in the semi-extended position and the outer heat insulation plate was torn off by the airflow.

Su Yuan ignored the hydraulic arm.

The Devourer crashed into the stratosphere at nearly Mach 10. The deceleration parachute was burned through the moment it deployed. The anti-gravity engine entered its final safety mode, releasing all remaining energy in the three seconds before impact, barely reducing the vertical velocity to 120 meters per second.

Hit.

The ice sheet's crust caved in under the weight and speed of the Devourer. The permafrost was breached, and the sand and gravel layer beneath it was shattered. The tank bounced three times in succession, each bounce taking away a large piece of its bottom armor, eventually embedding itself in the bottom of a crater nearly two kilometers in diameter.

The engine stopped completely. The Blue Flame Core emitted a final low hum and entered forced physical hibernation. The cooldown countdown floated on the half-shattered main screen: 12:00:00.

The cab was littered with shattered glass and detached interior panels. White metallic scratches marred the seatbelt buckles. Su Yuan released the control lever, his hands trembling uncontrollably from his wrists to his shoulders.

He didn't move. He waited five seconds. The shaking stopped.

There was a noise coming from behind.

Wang Hu pulled himself out of the badly deformed shock-absorbing seat. The seat back was slammed into a V-shape by his weight. His first action upon getting up was to check the ammunition—empty. His second action was to turn around and count the number of people.

Tang Lan climbed in through the observation port on the roof of the vehicle. A section of her left sleeve was charred, revealing an old scar underneath. After landing, she first moved her finger joints to make sure she could still pull the trigger.

Jiang Yu leaned against the door of the medical pod, his one arm clutching the emergency power supply cable to the zero isolation pod, his face covered in dried blood. The temporary hemostatic clip on his left shoulder had come loose, and dark red blood was seeping from the wound again.

"Everyone's here," Wang Hu announced in a hoarse voice. "The Xuanwu Company still has eleven men who can stand."

Li Daikui squeezed out from the deformed door gap of the outer carriage. Half of his left ear was torn off by a rivet that popped out during the impact, and blood smeared his entire cheek, but he didn't care. He first checked the breathing of the wounded next to him, then walked to the carriage connection and shouted towards the driver's cab.

"Alive! All of you are fucking alive!"

Coughs and the clanging of metal echoed throughout the carriage.

Su Yuan moved his fingers in the driver's seat. Seventy percent of the instrument panel's functions were no longer working; only the cooling countdown and readings from a few basic sensors remained on the main screen.

External temperature: -53 degrees Celsius.

Wind speed: 18 meters per second.

He reached out to grab the black cuboid that had been retrieved.

The rectangular outer shell was charred black by atmospheric friction, but the structure remained intact. There was an extremely thin heat-insulating coating on the surface, beneath which were the old Blue Star standard military-grade sealing welds.

Black box.

From the body of a deep space entity.

"Little Fire, how much more computing power can you achieve?"

"Six percent. Barely enough for decoding."

Su Yuan inserted the black box into the physical decoding slot below the main control panel. When the probe inside the slot touched the data port on the surface of the box, it emitted a low electromagnetic pulse.

The green text "Xiao Huo" slowly appeared in the remaining display area of ​​the main screen.

The decoding progress bar moved very slowly. No one spoke in the carriage; only the sound of the blizzard pounding against the exposed car body could be heard.

The progress bar has reached the end.

There is no video. The black box contains only audio.

Two of the speakers in the control room were damaged by the impact, and the remaining one was barely working, producing a static-like sound.

A man's voice.

It's heavy and stable. It's not a synthesized voice; it's a live recording.

"Congratulations to whoever receives this message. You've taken down the first wave of scouts."

pause.

"The Kuiper Belt blockade failed completely seventy-two hours ago. The crash signal of the first scout has been intercepted by the Matrix."

Another pause. The background noise of the audio was mixed with the distant clanging of metal.

"The true deep space matrix has locked onto Earth's coordinates. It's not a single star, but an entire star chain. From the Kuiper Belt to Mars orbit, all the moons of the planets along the way have been swallowed up."

"Countdown to full arrival: 30 Earth days."

Wang Hu stood at the door of the driver's seat, his expression frozen.

The parasitic asteroid that exploded in the sky just now, the size of the moon, was merely a scout.

"Final order," the male voice continued, his tone unchanged, "Bring the key to the Abyss Forbidden Zone. Find the lighthouse. That's the last window of opportunity for a counterattack."

"If you don't find it within thirty days—"

The audio suddenly cut off.

It wasn't a signal interruption. The person recording deliberately turned off the recording equipment.

In the last half second of background noise, an extremely faint sound, not belonging to the recording environment, was mixed in.

The sound of metal chewing.

It's exactly the same sound as the end of the encrypted audio in Chapter 297.

The speaker fell silent.

No one spoke in the driver's seat. The blizzard howled outside the windows.

Su Yuan glanced at the cooldown countdown. 11:47:23.

Twelve hours of forced hibernation. Twelve hours of doing absolutely nothing. And the thirty-day countdown begins now.

He stood up and walked to the car window.

The windshield was mostly shattered, and cold wind mixed with ice shards rushed in. Su Yuan looked out of the crater.

During a lull in the blizzard, the intense heat from the landing of the Devourer melted large areas of ice on the crater walls. The meltwater seeped down the exposed permafrost, carving out deep gullies.

Metal was exposed at the bottom of the ravine.

It's not ore. It's a processed structural component. A regular T-section steel beam, covered with a thick anti-corrosion coating, beneath which are old Bluestar-style industrial riveted joints.

More ice is melting.

From the pit walls to the bottom, metal structures were exposed everywhere: steel beams, pipes, and heavy outer wall panels. The entire ice sheet was buried beneath buildings.

Not one building.

It is a city.

From the current location of the Devourer, one can discern the tops of at least three buildings of varying heights, stretching into the depths of the icy mist at the edge of sight. Its scale far surpasses that of the Skyrail Home Port. Far surpasses the Great Wall defense line. Far surpasses any man-made facility Su Yuan has ever seen.

On the main screen, the small fire system, running at 6% computing power, automatically captured the frequency characteristics of the underground metal structure.

Coordinate matching complete.

A line of green text appeared in the remaining display area of ​​the screen.

[Abyss Forbidden Zone - Arrival]