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

When the cooldown countdown reached 11:58:07, all the lights in the Devourer went out.

It wasn't flickering, nor was it dimming; it was a sudden power outage. The sounds of the heating system's fans, the electrical hum of the main control panel, and the ticking of the medical compartment's monitors all vanished. The entire train was plunged into utter silence.

Su Yuan sat in the dark for two seconds, then heard his own breath condense into white mist in front of him.

The emergency indicator light in Cabin Zero was still on, a pale green dot suspended in the darkness. Apart from that, the Devourer had become an iron coffin.

"A small fire?" he asked.

There was no response. The main control screen was black, without even the faint light of standby mode. Forced physical hibernation had frozen the entire system.

The sound of the wind outside the cabin became clearer. A blizzard of eighteen meters per second swept across the vehicle, swirling ice shards into the breach. The windshield was mostly shattered, and the crack was now an open mouth, letting in minus fifty-three degrees Celsius air into the driver's cabin.

One minute later, the temperature inside the carriage dropped below zero.

Wang Hu groped his way to an emergency glow stick in the dark and lit it. The pale green light spread out, illuminating the shattered glass and half-congealed bloodstains on the ground. He looked up and saw his own breath dissipating in the beam of light.

"Boss, this is fucking frozen into dried meat."

"Seal the windows." Su Yuan stood up, his voice flat. "Seal all the openings that can be sealed. Do it entirely by hand; don't rely on anything electrified."

No one asked why. A twelve-hour hibernation period meant that everything from then on would depend on hands, blood, and life itself.

Wang Hu and Jiang Yu went to the right side of the vehicle. There, a whole piece of armor plate had been torn apart when it crashed, its edges curled up, letting in a blast of cold wind. The two of them tried to pry it off with their bare hands. The steel plate was frozen brittle, and the edges were sharp. Jiang Yu only had one hand, so he used the stump of his severed arm to brace against the bottom edge of the plate, while Wang Hu pressed down on top of it. The sharp sound of metal scraping against metal echoed back and forth in the carriage.

Tang Lan squatted beside the wrecked reconnaissance mech at the rear of the vehicle, using a multi-tool to pry off the sealing gaskets at the mech's joints piece by piece. When the gaskets were frozen solid and couldn't be pried off, she warmed them with her body heat, softening each layer before prying it off. Her fingers turned purple from the cold, so she bit the handle of the tool in her mouth and continued prying.

On the outermost edge, Li Daikui led the remnants of the Xuanwu Company to do something no one expected.

They took off their blood-soaked old military uniforms. The frozen fabric was still covered with scabs of blood, and when they tore it apart, skin and flesh were torn together. The eleven veterans twisted the clothes into strips and stuffed them layer by layer into all the gaps in the vehicle. For the last few gaps that couldn't be sealed properly, they simply used their backs to push them up.

"Company commander, your wound on your back is still bleeding," a young wounded soldier said.

"The bleeding is just right, it'll stick." Li Daikui pressed his back even more firmly. "Back in the Xuanwu Wall, it was minus sixty degrees Celsius, and we used frozen corpses to plug the gap for three days. This is nothing."

No one laughed. No one tried to comfort them. The veterans each found their own spot, shielding themselves from the cold wind.

Forty minutes later, the thermometer in the carriage—a very primitive mercury column—stopped at minus fifteen degrees Celsius.

"Hold on for three hours." Tang Lan looked at the mercury column. "After three hours, the seriously wounded will be the first to give up."

She was telling the truth. There were six seriously injured people lying in the carriage. Due to blood loss and hypothermia, the most seriously injured one was already unconscious, and his breathing intervals were getting longer and longer.

Su Yuan didn't reply. He sat in front of the control panel, his flashlight tucked into his shoulder, flipping the black cuboid he had retrieved from the tracks over and over again.

The black box. Retrieved from a deep-space entity. Military-grade welds, typical of old Earth. The man in the recording says, "Thirty days, the Abyss Forbidden Zone, find the lighthouse."

Su Yuan's finger stopped on the side of the box.

A row of semi-circular bite marks. Five, evenly spaced, cutting into the metal casing by about two millimeters. He shone a flashlight close to the cut; the surface was so smooth it reflected light, without burrs or chips.

A human could not bite out such a mark. Hydraulic shears could not create such a curve.

Xiao Huo is dead, so there's no way to analyze it. But Su Yuan remembers the background noise in the last half second of that audio clip—a metallic chewing sound. It's exactly the same sound as the end of the encrypted audio clip in Chapter 297.

Now, the same marks have appeared on the outer shell of the recorder's portable black box.

The thing that sent the distress signal is chewing on it. Or, chewing on the owner of the signal.

Su Yuan stuffed the black box back into his pocket and zipped up his coat.

"Come here, everyone." He stood up. "I have two things to say."

Under the glow of the glow sticks, everyone's eyes were drawn to them.

"First, we won't last more than three hours here. Waiting for twelve hours is just waiting to die. Second—" He rolled up the car window shutter and pointed outside.

The blizzard paused. On the crater walls, water was seeping down from the ice melted by the intense heat of the Devourer's crash, washing over the frozen soil and revealing what lay beneath: T-beams, pipes, and exterior wall panels, stretching deep into the icy fog.

A city buried beneath an ice field.

"The black box says the lighthouse is down there." Su Yuan withdrew his hand. "The heat source is down there too. I'll go find it."

"I'll go with you," Wang Hu said immediately.

"Tang Lan, Jiang Yu, Li Daikui, the three of you." Su Yuan nodded, then looked at the others, "The seriously wounded and the rest of the Xuanwu Company stay here. Keep the temperature in the vehicle stable, don't move around, and don't waste oxygen."

No one objected. The assignment took only two minutes.

Before leaving the cabin, the seven wounded soldiers of the Xuanwu Company who remained behind did one thing.

Li Daikui's deputy, a veteran who had lost his left leg, had the handle of the medical pod door welded to his own belt with a welding torch. The welding torch was the last usable handheld device, burning chemical fuel rods.

"Commander," the veteran saluted Su Yuan, his hands trembling with cold, but his salute was ramrod straight. "As long as we have a breath left, no one can touch Cabin Zero. Anyone who wants to touch it will have to get through us first."

Su Yuan looked at him for two seconds.

"Wait for me to come back."

He didn't say another word. The hatch closed behind him, and the blizzard lashed down on him.

Five people, linked together by a climbing rope. Wang Hu led the way, Jiang Yu was in the middle, Su Yuan and Tang Lan protected the flanks, and Li Daikui brought up the rear. They mainly carried melee weapons: high-frequency knives, armor-piercing axes, and entrenching tools. Their only kinetic energy weapons were Tang Lan's heavy sniper rifle and two short assault rifles. They had less than sixty rounds of ammunition in total.

At the edge of the crater created by the Devourer, melting ice carved out a two-meter-wide gash that extended downwards into the darkness. The five people descended rapidly along the gash, the ice walls scraping against their combat suits, their exhaled breath being torn away by the wind before it could even dissipate.

I descended thirty meters and stepped on metal.

Not fragments. It was a complete grid platform, rust forming a thick shell on the grid. Further down, the beam of a flashlight pushed through the darkness, illuminating the first level of this underground city.

Wang Hu cursed, but the words caught in his throat.

There were none of the expected military fortresses, ammunition depots, or defensive works. Instead, there were hundreds of enormous glass cylinders, each thirty meters tall, arranged in an array and extending into the depths of darkness. The cylinders were filled with a murky yellow liquid, from which large clumps of dark, flocculent matter were suspended. Thick, nerve-like cables pierced down from the top of the cylinders and plunged into the ground.

The entire space was so quiet that you could hear the slow convection of liquid within the pillars.

Li Daikui took a few steps forward, his flashlight sweeping across a nameplate on the cylindrical base. He stopped.

"Heavy element detonation array." His voice was dry. "Type 7. I memorized the deployment diagram in the training unit. This arrangement is the standard three-layered detonation array for the expeditionary force, used to detonate the heavy element depot at the last moment, destroying it along with the landing deep space units."

"Has it detonated?" Tang Lan asked.

"No." Li Daikui swept his flashlight across the array. "Not a single detonator has been moved. They've been here for fourteen years, just an empty array."

Su Yuan didn't speak. His attention was on the yellow liquid. The flocculent matter was moving, wriggling very slowly, like something that had sunk in formalin but wasn't quite dead yet.

A sudden tremor came from beneath my feet.

It was very light, coming from deep within the array, one beat after another, with a steady rhythm. Immediately afterwards, the sound of metal joints clinking came from the shadows to the side and rear.

Three figures crawled out of the darkness between the pillars.

Old Blue Star polar protective suits. Grayish-white, shriveled, clinging tightly to the skeleton like a layer of skin that has shed for many years. They show no signs of life; the chest does not rise and fall, but the hydraulic rods exposed at the joints of the limbs are contracting and releasing, and two dark green lights shine in the place where the eyes are.

Extremely fast.

The first skeleton covered the twenty-meter distance in three strides, charging straight at Wang Hu, who was at the front. Wang Hu swung his armor-piercing axe, the blade striking the skeleton's shoulder, but it bounced off, causing a split in the tiger's mouth.

"Tang Lan!"

A shot rang out. A specially designed armor-piercing bullet fired, accurately hitting the skull of the remains.

The warhead disappeared.

It didn't bounce off, it didn't deflect. The moment it made contact with the remains' mask, the bullet was like falling into strong acid, silently corroded and devoured, leaving not even a fragment. The remains' head didn't even twitch.

"The bullet got eaten." Tang Lan pulled the pin, ejected the spent cartridge, and the cartridge fell onto the grille, rolling twice.

The second skeleton lunged at Li Daikui. The veteran fired his arc gun, the electric arc striking the skeleton and sending sparks flying. The skeleton opened its mouth and bit off the middle of the gun barrel. The broken barrel fell to the ground, the cut smooth, with the same semi-circular serrations.

It doesn't bite flesh. It eats metal.

The dark green eyes of the third skeleton locked onto the entrenching tool at Su Yuan's waist.

Su Yuan did not withdraw.

The paradox armor on his left arm was reduced to its final basic form, lacking both computational power and regulatory authority, possessing only the most primal physical hardness. Instead, he took a step forward and snatched the high-frequency vibration blade from Jiang Yu's hand.

"Su Yuan! It eats metal!"

"It consumes kinetic energy," Su Yuan said calmly. "Then give it something without kinetic energy."

He sidestepped the wreckage's attack, his armored left hand forcefully blocking the hydraulic claw. Sparks flew as metal rubbed against the armor, the claw firmly locked in place. Su Yuan twisted his waist and abdomen, channeling all his strength through his spine into his right arm, and thrust his high-frequency blade upwards, plunging it into the wreckage's neck.

The blade didn't stop on the hydraulic line. He stirred it.

The dark green light went out. The remains convulsed and went limp, a faint stream of heat escaping from the severed neck, white steam dissipating in the cold air.

The other two remains were held back by Wang Hu and Li Daikui using the terrain, while Tang Lan switched to a regular bullet to shoot the hydraulic joints, and the three shriveled bodies fell to the ground one after another.

Su Yuan crouched down to examine the source of the heat emanating from the severed neck. The heat was directional, surging from deep within the array.

He looked up following the flow of heat.

Deep within the array, at the edge of darkness, stood a silent pyramid-shaped structure. Its surface was weathered, and one wall shimmered with a faint red light. The flickering red light cast shadows on the mottled wall, revealing a line of standard road markings from the old Blue Star expeditionary force.

The lighthouse heating center is 500 meters ahead.

"Heat source," Tang Lan said.

"Walk."

The 500-meter stretch was traversed by seven scattered waves of skeletal remains. These withered creatures were no longer happy; some were alone, some were mutilated, and one was reduced to only the upper body, climbing the grating with its arms. But each one tried to gnaw on any metal as it got close, including the grating panels beneath its feet.

The pyramid's lead door was half a meter thick, and its hinges were rusted shut. Wang Hu and Su Yuan worked together to break it open.

It wasn't the heat wave from the reactor that hit us.

It smelled like bone ash.

A thick, greasy smell of burnt ashes wafted out from under the door, smearing his face. Jiang Yu immediately bent over and gagged.

Shine the flashlight inside.

Inside the massive building is a bio-incinerator hundreds of meters deep. The ring-shaped furnace walls narrow downwards in layers, and are densely covered with names. Thousands upon thousands of names, one after another, with engravings of varying depths, some deep, some shallow, some clearly carved by a single hand, crooked.

Below the name, at the bottom of the furnace, is a line of blood-red characters.

It wasn't engraved; it was written on with something dipped in ink. The strokes were thick and heavy, as if they penetrated the metal.

If the lighthouse isn't shining, we'll light it.

Li Daikui's legs went weak.

The old soldier, who had stood guard on the basalt wall for fourteen years and hadn't uttered a sound even after losing half an ear, knelt down slowly, leaning against the doorframe. He shone his flashlight on the names on the furnace wall, one by one, and his hands began to tremble when he reached the third row.

“These names… I recognize them.” His voice cracked. “Zhou Hongbin, the artillery squad leader on the western section of Xuanwu Wall. Chen Mo, from my recruit company… They didn’t die in battle; their names appeared on the missing persons list fourteen years ago.”

He suddenly turned to look at Su Yuan, his eyes frighteningly red.

"Sir, there is absolutely no energy source here. The Abyss Forbidden Zone has long been cut off from supplies. Deep-space entities scan from the sky, and any heat signal will be detected, so we cannot burn coal, we cannot burn oil, and we cannot start the reactor."

He couldn't continue.

Tang Lan finished speaking for him, her voice very soft, as if afraid of disturbing the ashes at the bottom of the furnace.

"So they burn people. Biomass combustion has the lowest calorific value and the weakest signal. A wounded soldier jumping in can maintain the lighthouse's standby signal for 72 hours."

"They've been lining up to jump." Li Daikui knelt on the ground, slamming his fist on the threshold. "They've been lining up... to jump for fourteen years."

The ashes at the bottom of the furnace were so thick they reached above his ankles. Mixed in with the ashes were unburnt metal buttons, belt buckles, and ID tags. Jiang Yu squatted down, picked up an ID tag from the ashes, wiped off the ashes, and the name and number on it were still there.

He put the ID card back in its place, stood up, and said nothing.

Su Yuan stood at the furnace opening, staring at the line of blood-red words for a long time.

"The lighthouse hasn't gone out," he said. "The red light is still flashing. Fourteen years, hundreds of thousands of names, all to protect a standby signal."

He turned and walked toward the control panel.

"Now, it's our turn to use it."

The control panel was located on a circular platform above the incinerator. Su Yuan pried open the inspection cover and located the heat output circuit. As long as one heat output circuit was cut to supply heat to the Devourer, the wounded soldiers inside the vehicle could survive.

Physical combination lock.

The lock cylinder's surface was covered in dark silver threads, the living metal completely rusting the keyhole and pivot. Su Yuan lightly touched the lock case with the back of his knife, and a faint pre-compression sound of the self-destruct mechanism immediately came from inside the lock cylinder.

"Forced demolition will cause the entire central thermal energy pipeline to self-destruct." He sheathed his knife. "What it recognizes is the original frequency of living metal."

Everyone looked at Jiang Yu.

Before anyone could speak, Jiang Yu rolled up his empty left sleeve and raised his right arm, the mutated one, its dark golden veins throbbing beneath the skin.

"What's inside me is living metal." He walked to the control panel. "I have the original frequency here."

"It will be sucked dry," Tang Lan said.

"Then don't let it suck dry."

Jiang Yu pressed the severed stubble of his right arm hard against the combination lock.

The moment the dark gold veins came into contact with the dark silver threads inside the lock cylinder, the two homologous substances screamed simultaneously. High-frequency resonance climbed up Jiang Yu's arm to his shoulder, and he gritted his teeth, forcibly steer the frequency towards the lock cylinder's frequency band.

Excruciating pain. His veins bulged from his neck to his temples, blood seeped from the whites of his eyes, and blood began to ooze from his seven orifices.

"Frequency verification in progress... 60 percent..." The console displayed incomplete characters.

"Hold on." Su Yuan pressed down on his shoulder.

"Ninety percent..."

Thin, dark silver threads began to burrow into Jiang Yu's severed arm along the contact surface, frantically drawing upon his bioelectricity. Jiang Yu's pupils began to dilate, and his knees buckled.

"hundred percent."

A piercing electronic sound exploded. The combination lock snapped open, and a muffled metallic tearing sound came from below the control panel. A hidden door was forcibly forced open and sprang inward.

Jiang Yu fell backward, but Wang Hu caught him. His right arm was charred and blackened, and the dark gold veins had dimmed; he was already half-conscious.

"He won't die." Wang Hu checked his breathing. "He's still breathing heavily."

Su Yuan was already standing in front of the hidden door.

Shine the flashlight inside.

There was no backup thermal valve, no pipeline interface, and nothing he had expected inside the hidden door.

In the dimly lit space, a person hangs upside down, only their upper body remaining.

Below the waist, there was nothing. A dense network of metallic blood vessels extended outwards from the break, connecting to the pipe network in the four walls, stretching deep into the building. These vessels pulsated slightly with a certain rhythm, delivering nutrients and energy and removing metabolic waste.

He was wearing the uniform of the old Blue Star Expeditionary Force, and the identification badge on his chest was illuminated by a flashlight.

It is exactly the same as the serial number etched on the black box casing.

The person recording.

Having lived for fourteen years, it hangs in this form at the heart of this incinerator.

The man struggled to open his cloudy eyes. His eyeballs were extremely cloudy, but he focused quickly, clearly remaining alert as he had for fourteen years.

When he first saw Su Yuan clearly, he felt no surprise, no ecstatic joy at being saved.

It was fear. Pure, bone-deep fear.

"You…" A hissed, lisping sound escaped his throat, his vocal cords like two tattered rags, "Why did you bring the keys down with you?!"

Su Yuan narrowed his eyes.

"That audio was forcibly synthesized using my vocal cords!" the man roared, blood and foam gushing from the corner of his mouth. "Thirty years ago, they cut off my vocal cords and recorded every word I uttered! I threw the black box out; I threw it onto the track with my last bit of strength, but they replaced the audio content!"

The air inside the hidden door froze.

"The Abyss Forbidden Zone isn't a defensive line at all!" The man spoke at breakneck speed, unsure how much time he had left. "The Lighthouse isn't a weapon for retaliation either! The Lighthouse was a guiding beacon left on Earth by the Deep Space Matrix! It crashed here fourteen years ago, and our comrades jumped into the furnace layer by layer, not so the Lighthouse could retaliate."

He coughed violently, and the blood he coughed up fell onto the metal blood vessel, where it was instantly absorbed.

"It's to keep the lighthouse silent! Low-power standby, with the heat signal suppressed to the minimum, so the Matrix can't scan it! You just need to restart the lighthouse with the key, and it will operate at full power, broadcasting the precise mass coordinates of the entire Earth to Starlink! Thirty days? Not even thirty days! The moment the signal is sent, the Matrix's vanguard will turn around!"

Li Daikui suddenly stood up: "That counterattack window mentioned in the recording—"

"It's bait!" the man roared. "It's been bait from day one! They were waiting for the key to come down by itself!"

Su Yuan stood still, without moving.

Thirty days. The Abyss Forbidden Zone. The Lighthouse found. The final window for a counterattack.

Every single word is true, but put together they form a complete lie. The power of deep space doesn't target humanity's weapons or defenses; it targets humanity itself. People in dire straits will grab onto any rope that says "way out."

"They...are right down here." The man's voice suddenly lowered, becoming almost a whisper. "The core of the lighthouse...I've been hanging here for fourteen years, serving as...a spare core for them..."

Before he could finish speaking...

A sound came from his throat. A metallic chewing sound. Not from his mouth, but from deep within his chest, from under his ribs.

Click. Click. Click.

The man's ribs buckled outwards. One, two, the white bone piercing the skin, like a door being pushed open from the inside.

A spherical structure, one meter in diameter, emerged from his chest cavity. Dark red metal and nerve cords intertwined to form a shell, and in the very center of the shell, a huge compound eye slowly opened, its pupil vertical, within which flowed dark patterns like a star map.

Deep-space parasitic eye.

A gravitational wave swept across the entire space in an instant. All five people simultaneously felt a sudden increase in weight, their knees buckling. Oxygen was sucked from their lungs, their eardrums caved inward, and the edges of their vision went black.

"run……"

With his last ounce of strength, the man managed to squeeze out half a word before his head drooped. The metal veins tightened, suspending him even higher, like a suspended tool.

The parasitic compound eye turned towards Su Yuan. The cutting rays condensed, and the dark red light twisted into a line in the pupil.

The moment the ray tore through the air, Su Yuan moved.

He didn't dodge.

The rays grazed his shoulder, vaporizing the fabric of his combat suit and scorching his skin with the intense heat. He took one step forward, then another, still in that position.

Because on his retina, red text was flashing wildly across the screen.

[The physical barrier of the Abyss Forbidden Zone has been breached; the high-dimensional resonance of Isolation Chamber Zero has been activated!]

[Physical hibernation forcibly oversteps authority! Blue Flame Core extracts Star God remnants, computing power restored: 10%!]

[The core of the "Pangu" military dagger suppression system is awakening, and its charging path is being reconstructed.]

Ten percentage points. Twenty-four hours ago, that amount of computing power wouldn't even have been enough to turn on the ignition valve of the refining furnace.

But for now, it's enough.

The "Cloud" character mark on Su Yuan's left arm burst forth with a purple light. The Paradox Armor switched from absolute hardness to a liquid state, and dark metallic fluid flowed, gathered, and stretched along his forearm, condensing into a 1.2-meter-long black sword within two seconds. On the blade, the pattern of the "Cloud" character mark glowed, and the edge of the blade did not reflect light; it swallowed all the light that shone upon it.

The parasitic eye's compound eye suddenly contracted. It sensed something, and the direction of the gravitational wave abruptly changed, pressing entirely towards Su Yuan's left arm.

late.

Su Yuan stepped into the gap in the rays, raised his long sword, and pointed the tip directly at the compound eye.

"Hiding here playing tricks," his voice was terrifyingly steady in the weightless gravitational turbulence, "I'll use you to start my car."