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

Su Yuan's fingers rested on the edge of the dark blue casting table.

The foul-smelling fluid from the fall of the tumor still lingered around the crack in the floor tiles, the thick, yellowish-brown liquid trickling down the grooves of the bronze pedestal. This liquid failed to corrode the metal surface; instead, it hissed like water droplets falling on a red-hot iron plate, evaporating instantly. Su Yuan pressed his palm against the dark rust. The moment his skin touched the metal, the surrounding air stopped moving. The nauseating stench of the well's bottom was replaced by an absolute vacuum. The temperature on the third underground level remained unchanged, but the white breath he exhaled froze in mid-air, refusing to dissipate.

The "cloud" mark on his left arm suddenly throbbed. The purple light pierced through the skin's cover, climbed along the veins in his forearm, and crashed directly into the casting platform.

The ancient and fragmented runes on the bronze surface came to life. A dim light emerged from the previously dried grooves of the runes, resonating at a high frequency with the purple light of the markings. At this moment, the gravity of the entire underground space visibly shifted, and the shattered floor tiles floated up and remained suspended in mid-air.

Inside the helmet headset, Xiao Huo's mechanical voice was fragmented by intense electronic noise.

"Detected...unrecorded...high-dimensional code".

"Dimensional level...exceeding limits."

"Logical underlying matching degree, 100%."

Su Yuan did not respond. His vision was completely obscured by the sudden crimson light. It wasn't a change in external light, but an image projected directly into the depths of his retina.

Blood. Blood covering the mountains and fields. Fourteen years ago, at the bottom of the abyss, there were no lighthouses, no sacrificial arrays, only countless remains of the expeditionary force.

Su Yuan saw Qin Zhao. The first chief engineer who had left his name on the last page of the manuscript. Qin Zhao's polar protective suit was long since tattered into rags, his left arm severed at the shoulder, the break roughly welded shut with a high-temperature welding torch, the charred flesh exposed. Qin Zhao stood before this massive bronze machine, behind him hundreds of similarly maimed soldiers. Out of ammunition and supplies. Extreme cold. The scanning waves of the deep-space matrix, like tangible blades, repeatedly grazed over their heads.

Su Yuan watched as Qin Zhao turned around.

"We don't have enough materials." Qin Zhao's throat was full of blood and foam, and his voice sounded like sandpaper rubbing against an iron plate.

No one spoke. A soldier, his chest gouged out by claws, stepped forward, unfastened the harness from his waist, and without hesitation, leaped into the boiling furnace above the bronze machine. The dark red molten metal instantly engulfed his mangled body. There were no screams. Only the explosive sounds of bones and flesh being instantly vaporized by the extreme heat.

The second person stepped forward and jumped. The third, the fourth.

Qin Zhao gripped a rusty iron hammer in one hand. With each person who jumped in, he slammed it heavily against the edge of the casting table, compacting the slag that had solidified there. Finally, his left hand gave way, and he collapsed forward, half his body submerged in the furnace. He didn't struggle; he simply turned his head towards the direction of the camera, towards Su Yuan's position. In his eyes, blinded by the intense heat, burned a fire. Not a desire for survival, but a madness to push the entire Earth away from this despairing depths of space.

The image shattered. Su Yuan could see the darkness of the third underground level again. He looked down at his hands.

The dark rust on the casting table wasn't oxide left over from any particular time; it was layer upon layer of the bones and blood of their ancestors, sintered onto it. Fourteen years ago, the first expeditionary force used their mortal bodies to forge this machine, which originally did not exist in this dimension.

At the very center of the bronze platform, an ancient mechanical structure slides out to both sides. A semi-transparent prompt box rises from the base. Without any screen medium, the characters float directly in the air, carrying an unyielding sense of absolute order.

[Carrier ready detected.]

[Please input conceptual raw materials to forge a higher-dimensional paradox.]

Without pausing, Su Yuan reached for his waist with his left hand. He pulled out the dark red crystal he had forcibly ripped from the parasitic eye socket. The crystal's surface was still covered in deep-space mucus, and it still pulsated like a heart when held in his hand. This kind of thing would continuously emit faint high-dimensional coordinates as long as it was exposed to air.

He raised his hand, aimed the crystal at the opening of the bronze furnace, and slammed it down hard.

boom.

A deep, muffled thud. The crystal fell into the furnace. No ignition was needed, no external energy required. The moment it touched the core of the bronze platform, the dark red metallic outer shell of deep space on the crystal's surface shattered. The raging deep-space energy tried to break free, even condensing into a parasitic phantom above the furnace opening, emitting a piercing shriek.

The runes on the forging table shone brightly. From the rusted marks etched with the blood and bones of the expeditionary force, ripples of grayish-white rules surged forth. These ripples instantly engulfed the illusory image of the parasitic eye, forcibly tearing it apart and pressing it back into the furnace. The smelting began. High-dimensional purification requires no time. The crystal was completely stripped of its original properties, treated as pure raw material, reconstituted and forged within the bronze machine.

Meanwhile, there is a circular platform 100 meters underground.

The instant the main brain sarcoma lost its connection, the movements of the dozen or so "keepers" on the platform all ceased. Li Daikui clutched his chest, leaning on his entrenching tool on the floor, gasping for breath. He thought the monster had crashed and was about to turn back to check on Jiang Yu's condition when a sudden change occurred. The keeper closest to Li Daikui, consisting only of the upper body, suddenly turned its head, its massive mandibles snapping into the neck of a companion with a broken leg. Three ring-shaped bony teeth slashed wildly, tearing off pieces of dark red and dark silver flesh, which it then swallowed whole.

The bitten companion did not resist; instead, it turned its head and bit the third zookeeper on the back.

"They're eating each other!" Wang Hu roared, his armor-piercing axe completely chipped and cracked in the handle after the previous chop.

A dozen or so unrestrained monsters, driven by the most primal assimilation instincts of deep-space creatures, piled up into a mountain of flesh in less than three seconds. Bones broke and reformed, muscle fibers intertwined and stitched together like snakes. Yellow bodily fluids and viscous flesh splattered everywhere, slamming against the black Paradox Shield with a dense, corrosive sound. They did not weaken from losing their mastermind; instead, in their out-of-control state, they evolved into more purely killing machines.

A colossal creature, seven meters tall, rose from the pile of flesh and blood. It was a stitched-together abomination. Its torso was forcibly pieced together from the chest cavities of seven or eight keepers, completely devoid of any asymmetry. A dozen or so mouthparts of varying sizes were arranged in a staggered pattern on its abdomen, shoulders, and knees. The once dark silver living metal skeleton had completely turned outwards, forming an extremely thick layer of bony armor.

The Abomination spun its massive body, its eyeless head locking onto the black, hemispherical shield in the corner of the platform. It raised its thick right arm, made of five leg bones, clenched its fist, and slammed it down on the shield.

Boom! The platform trembled violently, and the surrounding alloy railings were twisted and deformed.

The surface of the Paradox Shield rippled violently. The black light blocked all the kinetic energy of the punch, but the inner wall of the shield emitted a teeth-grinding creak. This absolute defense left behind by Su Yuan when he left, after being deprived of the continuous support of computing power, reached its physical limit. Fine cracks began to spread from the point of impact, crawling across the entire black hemisphere like a spider web.

The abomination emitted a piercing screeching sound as its dozen or so mandibles opened and closed simultaneously, splattering brownish-yellow slime onto the shield. It raised its left arm, from which five meter-long, dark gold bone spikes protruded, tearing through the air with a sharp shriek, and once again slashed at the area with the densest cracks.

"I can't hold them off any longer!" Wang Hu slammed the shattered armor-piercing axe to the ground, his eyes bloodshot, and turned to stare intently at his retreat route.

Li Daikui didn't look for an escape route. The laceration in his chest had stopped bleeding, not because it had healed, but because the deep blood loss combined with the extreme hypothermia had caused his blood vessels to instinctively constrict and close. His face was ashen, like a dead man's, except for his eyes, which shone with a frightening light. The veteran forced himself to straighten up, holding the dulled entrenching tool horizontally in front of his chest. He took a step back, firmly shielding the semi-conscious Jiang Yu behind him.

"Company Commander!" Wang Hu roared.

"Don't worry about me, get ready to jump!" Li Daikui's voice didn't tremble at all, only the deathly silence of someone who had experienced countless desperate situations.

Tang Lan knelt on one knee beside Li Daikui, the barrel of her heavy sniper rifle resting steadily on the wrecked railing. She took a deep breath, the cold air in her lungs mixed with the smell of blood stinging her throat. Unloading, reloading, chambering—the entire sequence of movements was fluid and seamless, without any unnecessary pauses. The final three rounds were standard armor-piercing rounds; this was their only remaining firepower.

She pressed her right eye firmly against the scope, aiming the crosshairs at the largest, most violently opening and closing mouth in the very center of the abomination's chest.

"Tiger." Tang Lan's voice was extremely cold. "Once the shield breaks, I'll attack its main chest node. You only have two seconds to drag the company commander and Jiang Yu and jump towards the waste chute behind you. Below is the incinerator's ash layer; you won't die from the fall."

Snap—Boom!

Before the words were even finished, the Paradox Shield let out its final mournful cry, and the entire black hemisphere shattered into countless points of light, dissipating into the air. Without pausing, the Abomination's five dark gold bone spikes, imbued with immense kinetic energy, pierced straight for Li Da Kui's head.

Li Daikui didn't close his eyes, using his entrenching tool to parry the bone spikes upwards. He knew it was like a mantis trying to stop a chariot—it was futile. The longest bone spike broke through the entrenching tool's blockade, only three centimeters from his right eyeball. The foul wind from the spike's tip had already torn his cornea.

In that very instant.

A blinding bronze beam of light erupted without warning from the third underground level! The beam defied all laws of physics, ignoring the several-meter-thick rock strata and two layers of reinforced alloy grating, piercing straight up. The dazzling light illuminated the entire dimly lit circular platform as if it were daytime.

Within the area covered by the beam of light, time was forcibly paused. The bone spur, three centimeters from Li Daikui's eyeball, remained eerily frozen in mid-air. The Abomination's massive body remained in its forward-leaning posture, completely solidified.

Boom! The floorboards shattered.

Su Yuan stepped on the shattered shards of the grille, like a meteorite shooting upstream, soaring straight up from the third floor and landing steadily three meters in front of the Abomination. Rings of grayish-white, regular ripples surrounded him. His right hand hung at his side, holding a brand-new, freshly forged weapon upside down.

It was a two-meter-long bronze scalpel. The material of the blade defied description; its surface lacked any metallic sheen, instead flowing with a gray luster like ripples on water. This luster traced countless tiny "paradoxical runes" along the blade's edge, constantly appearing and disappearing in a cyclical pattern. This was not a weapon belonging to the three-dimensional realm of physics. It was a high-dimensional conceptual weapon—the Blade of Judgment—forcibly forged using a bronze machine and deep-space crystals as raw materials.

Su Yuan stopped. Without even raising his head, he slammed his left foot into the steel plate beneath him, channeling power from his waist and abdomen, and unleashing force from his right arm. There was no deafening battle cry, no fancy charging movements. The bronze horizontal blade drew a crescent-shaped gray line of death in mid-air, lightly grazing the massive, twisted torso of the Abomination.

There was no deafening clang of metal clashing, no sizzling sound of flesh being cleaved. Only a faint hissing sound filled the air, like a red-hot knife slicing through a block of butter that had been left at room temperature all day. The blade entered the abomination's right shoulder, slid diagonally downwards, and exited along its left side.

Su Yuan sheathed his sword and stood still. The horizontal blade sliced ​​through the air, leaving a trail of gray that quickly faded.

The Abomination remained in its downward lunge position, the bone spur still hovering three centimeters in front of Li Daikui. One second. Two seconds. Then, starting from that cross-section, the Abomination's structure collapsed.

It wasn't cut in half. Its living metal skeleton, deep-space cells, muscle fibers—all the fundamental substances that constituted its existence—were utterly reduced to nothingness in the area swept by the gray blade's light. Its right shoulder and half of its chest cavity were the first to turn into gray dust, which fell to the ground with a soft patter. The dust, upon hitting the ground, had no mass and dissipated directly into the air, leaving not even a drop of yellowish-brown slime behind.

The collapse was incredibly fast. In three seconds, the seven-meter-tall behemoth, the monster filled with maw and bone spikes, was completely wiped from the face of the earth before everyone's eyes. Not even a speck of dust remained on the ground; it had never existed at all.

This kind of absolute, dimensional reduction attack is far more awe-inspiring than the roar of artillery fire.

Wang Hu's jaw nearly dropped to his chest as he stared intently at the empty area, oblivious to the half-broken axe handle that had fallen to the ground. Li Daikui's mouth hung open, he forgot to breathe, his back already soaked in cold sweat. Even Tang Lan, usually so calm as to be almost mechanical, felt her fingers trembling violently as she gripped the heavy sniper rifle; she had to put the gun down to control the trembling in her hands.

Su Yuan stepped over the remaining footprints on the ground and walked to Li Daikui's side. His horizontal sword transformed into a streak of light, disappearing back into the "cloud" character mark on his left arm. His left hand pulled a translucent crystal, no bigger than a thumb and emitting a bright green glow, from his combat uniform pocket. This was a harmless remnant of life force, compressed by higher-dimensional forces, after the concept of deep-space crystals had been stripped away in the bronze casting platform.

Su Yuan pinched the crystal and pressed it directly into the deep, bone-revealing laceration on Li Daikui's chest.

Upon contact with the flesh, the crystals instantly transformed into a pool of green liquid, rapidly seeping deep into the wound. A miracle occurred. The everted skin and flesh intertwined and healed at a visible speed, the broken muscle fibers reconnected, and even the detached skin on the surface grew back completely within seconds, leaving only a faint white mark.

Li Daikui looked down at his perfectly intact chest, too shocked to utter a single word. The veteran had spent fourteen years navigating the wasteland, seen all sorts of medical pods, but this was beyond the realm of medicine; it was a miracle.

Before everyone could recover from the shock, Su Yuan's cold, hard voice abruptly cut off all the gasps of amazement.

"Tang Lan, Wang Hu, immediately go to the third floor and disassemble the bronze platform and take it away." Su Yuan pointed to the hole in the ground. "Its material is in an anti-gravity free state, and it is extremely light. It can be lifted with one hand. Carry it up; it is the only core to start the planetary engine. It must not be left here."

Wang Hu immediately stood at attention: "Yes, sir!"

Without saying a word, Tang Lan slung the heavy sniper rifle over her back and jumped into the cave with Wang Hu.

Just as Wang Hu and Tang Lan were descending, a piercing electronic static sound suddenly exploded in the public channel of Su Yuan and the others' headsets.

"Commander! Can you hear me, Commander?"

It was the amputee veteran who remained on the surface of the Devourer. The veteran's voice was completely distorted, revealing an almost manic anxiety and an unconcealable fear.

"Report the situation." Su Yuan's brows furrowed sharply.

"The temperature in the carriage is wrong! The heating system was working fine just now, but now the thermometer has gone off the charts, it's already over forty degrees inside! And it's still rising!" The veteran spoke very quickly, accompanied by a huge metallic tearing sound in the background. "Outside... the ice field outside is in trouble! It's cracked! It's all fucking cracked!" the veteran roared.

Su Yuan immediately used the neural interface at the back of his neck to forcibly switch to the monitoring network where Xiao Huo's computing power had just recovered to 15%. The image on his retina flickered twice before finally stabilizing. This was a wide-angle view of the Earth's surface transmitted back by the top probe of the Devourer.

The surface of the Arctic Restricted Area, which had already created a crater several kilometers deep, was now undergoing a devastating tectonic movement. The permafrost layer, several kilometers thick, was being violently pushed upwards from the ground by an unseen, gigantic hand. Vast glaciers were collapsing with deafening roars, and avalanches were sending up hundreds of meters of white dust. The hard alloy armor plates and the defensive tracks laid fourteen years ago were shattering like cookies in the face of absolute physical force.

The underground city was suddenly hit by a second violent tremor. This tremor was completely different from the aftershocks of the sarcoma's main brain being slain. It did not travel within the structure of the Abyss Forbidden Zone, but rather from deeper within the Earth's crust, directly up from the planet's mantle.

It was a deafening roar, as if a miniature star had decayed deep underground. The terrifying infrasound easily penetrated thousands of meters of rock, pounding against everyone's eardrums and hearts. Jiang Yu, who had just regained some consciousness, was so shocked by the roar that he coughed up another mouthful of blood and collapsed onto the grating panel.

Su Yuan stared intently at the monitoring screen on his retina. Beneath the cracked permafrost on the surface, there was no living metal, no tissue of deep-space creatures. What shone through was a cold, ancient, absolutely lifeless pure black metallic luster. The data stream from Xiao Huo refreshed frantically before Su Yuan's eyes, the originally light blue notification box instantly turning a blinding blood red, filling his entire field of vision.

[Top Alert!]

[The ultimate error correction mechanism of the Pangu Defense Line, 'Zero Purifier,' has been activated!]

[Energy Level: Abyssal Annihilation Level.]

[Instruction set being read—]

[Target locked: Displacement trajectory of the bronze casting platform.]

[Countdown to contact with Earth: 30 seconds.]

Zero the Purger. Fourteen years ago, those mad engineers, to prevent the forging table from falling into enemy hands, not only piled up corpses to create a secondary explosion array, but also buried an ultimate weapon underground to format everything. Now, this out-of-control killing machine has judged them, who had just moved the forging table, as illegal intruders and is about to wipe everything on the surface. Including the Devourer, which is currently in forced hibernation and has absolutely no defensive capabilities. Including the few wounded soldiers in the vehicle who are powerless to fight back.

Su Yuan closed the interface. His eyes were icy cold. He turned around and drew a special entrenching tool from his waist. There was no hesitation, no weighing of options, only absolute decisiveness.

"Wang Hu, Tang Lan, get the stuff and come up immediately!" Su Yuan's roar exploded in the public channel, carrying an undeniable sense of oppression. "Everyone, back to the surface! Protect the vehicle!"

"Got it! As light as a piece of paper!" Wang Hu's gruff voice came from the bottom of the well. Immediately afterward, two figures climbed upwards at an astonishing speed, using both hands and feet, clinging to the maintenance ladder on the well wall. Wang Hu, carrying the bronze casting platform that was nearly half a person's height in one hand, looked utterly incredulous, but his pace didn't slow down at all. Tang Lan, behind him, constantly used the well wall for leverage, her movements as agile as a cheetah poised to pounce.

"Five seconds!" Tang Lan rushed onto the platform and rolled over to dissipate the force of the impact.

Wang Hu followed closely behind, landing steadily and tucking the bronze platform under his arm. "Boss, this thing is amazing, it's weightless!"

"Save your nonsense for when we get up there!" Su Yuan scooped Jiang Yu up from the ground and tossed him to Li Da Kui. "Da Kui, you carry Jiang Yu on your back, Hu Zi, carry the platform, and Tang Lan, clear any obstacles along the way. Return the way you came, and be quick. There's no cover, and no backup plans."

"Yes!" Li Daikui didn't waste any words and hoisted Jiang Yu onto his shoulder. After recovering from his injuries, his physical strength was now even greater than in his prime.

Countdown: 22 seconds.

The five people sprinted down the spiral passage they had come from. The underground city's structure continued to shake from the aftershocks of the earlier rumble, large chunks of alloy plates and shards of glass raining down from above. Tang Lan led the way, firing her short assault rifle intermittently, shattering any large obstacles in her path. With no remains to hinder them, the first level's cylindrical glass detonation array had been completely destroyed in a chain reaction. Their path was unobstructed; only the constantly trembling grating beneath their feet served as a constant reminder that true terror was awakening.

"Faster! Faster!" Wang Hu roared from behind, his worn-out combat boots making a series of muffled thuds on the metal plate.

Countdown: 12 seconds.

They rushed to the first entrance of the underground city, which was an extension of the crater created by the Devourer. Looking up, the original two-meter-wide cut had now been torn into a huge chasm more than ten meters wide. The wind and snow outside had long since stopped, replaced by a suffocating wave of scorching heat rushing in through the chasm.

"Get up!" Su Yuan stepped onto a broken T-shaped steel beam, used the momentum to leap up, and gripped the exposed rocks on the ice wall with both hands. The others followed closely behind, like a group of ants climbing upwards in a desperate situation.

Countdown: 5 seconds.

The moment Su Yuan gripped the edge of the pit and flipped his body onto the surface, the sight before him caused his pupils to contract sharply.

This wasn't an avalanche; it was a complete reshaping of the Earth's surface. The ice sheet within a ten-kilometer radius vanished entirely. In its place lay a boiling lava lake. The permafrost, frozen for millennia, was instantly melted by unimaginably terrifying heat, groundwater was vaporized, and the entire space was filled with thick white fog and a pungent sulfurous odor.

In the very center of this lava lake, a colossal figure was slowly rising. It was so large that it made it impossible to judge its size. It was a mechanical titan forged from pure black metal, lacking a humanoid form and resembling more of a mobile geometric fortress. Its surface was seamless, and its monolithic black armor shimmered with a chilling, eerie light under the reflection of the lava.

As it ascended, the surrounding space was distorted by an extremely terrifying gravitational field. The white mist, rubble, and even sparks from spewing lava that drifted in the air were crushed into fine dust within a hundred meters of it. This was Zero the Purifier. The last trump card of the Pangu Line, and also its most desperate annihilation procedure.

On the edge of the lava lake, on a barely protruding rocky reef, sat the battered and wrecked Devourer. Only two hours had passed since the twelve-hour forced physical hibernation period began. The vehicle's outer shell crackled and popped under the intense heat, and the old uniforms the veterans had stuffed into the cracks had burned completely.

Through the shattered windshield, Su Yuan saw the amputee veteran. The veteran was strapped tightly to the seat in front of the control panel, his hand gripping the exhausted welding torch, his eyes fixed on the rising mechanical Titan. The critically wounded soldiers in the medical bay lay quietly, perhaps unconscious, or perhaps in the final shock from the intense heat.

"Commander..." The veteran's voice on the public channel was extremely weak, but he showed no sign of backing down. "Cabion Zero... is still here..."

He kept his promise: as long as he had a breath left, no one could touch Cabin Zero.

"I know." Su Yuan stood on the scorching rock. "Well done. Close your eyes and leave the rest to me."

At the top of the mechanical titan, a massive red sphere of light slowly illuminated. It was its core locking system, a prelude to the imminent release of the annihilation beam. The sphere rotated, passing over the Devourer, and directly locked onto the bronze casting platform under Wang Hu's arm, simultaneously encompassing Su Yuan and the others within its locking range.

[Intruder locked.]

An extremely cold, emotionless mechanical sound echoed across the entire ice field, drowning out the deafening roar of churning lava.

[Execute the erasure.]

A burst of crimson light erupted, and the entire world lost all color in that instant. Su Yuan stood at the forefront, facing the annihilating crimson light that could vaporize everything, without retreating a single step. The "Cloud" mark on his left arm emitted a violent purple light a hundred times more dazzling than it had been in the underground city. The phantom of the bronze horizontal sword flickered in and out of his palm.

"You dare to smash my car with a broken lock?" Su Yuan's eyes were icy cold.

He took a step forward and met the red light.