"Brother Lin… what exactly is going on here?"

Shi Diyuan, still looking like a mess, finally asked.

And it wasn’t just him—Monica, Qian Dele, and others who had fought alongside them all looked equally confused. They all knew that serpent definitely wasn't dead, so how could the Dark Marks on it just vanish?

Lin Xian took a deep breath and explained what had happened—how the Silver Dragon Ten Thousand Faults, a Disaster Plant, had suddenly bloomed like a divine intervention and saved them at the last moment.

"Honestly, I’m not sure what’s going on either. If we don’t get attacked in the next while, that probably means those weird things can’t detect us in this silent state… basically, we’ve temporarily gone invisible under their noses."

"That weird?"

"Another Disaster Plant…" Qian Dele’s eyes lit up. "That sounds even more magical than powers. They say Disaster Plants grow only in Star Abysses and Polar Night zones. Now I really want to get my hands on a few for research."

Monica’s eyes brightened too. "I once saw a convoy in Xilan City using a type of Disaster Plant that accelerated cell regeneration across an area. It could speed up healing and help with ability evolution."

"Because of that plant, they ended up targeted by the Descent Faction and got into a ton of trouble. Last I heard, their whole crew got absorbed by the Phoenix Society…"

"So that Disaster Plant ended up with Phoenix Society too?" Ning Jing asked.

Lin Xian furrowed his brow slightly and looked over at Monica.

Monica shrugged. "Of course. The Phoenix Society is really focused on Disaster Plant research these days. But they don't just take things by force. That team followed Nightwalkers to the Phoenix HQ. At least they don’t have to keep stumbling through this doomsday like we do."

Lin Xian nodded. "That Disaster Plant was a gift from a friend’s convoy. It didn’t do anything for the longest time. I never thought it’d save our lives like this."

Shi Diyuan gave Lin Xian a serious look. "Brother Lin, if the official powers find out about a Disaster Plant that can erase Dark Marks, they’ll definitely want to study it."

Lin Xian understood his meaning and replied plainly: "Honestly? If someone official could get us out of here alive, I’d be thrilled. And if they can study this plant like the Hell Black Chrysanthemum and figure out a cure for Dark Marks, that’s a gift to all humanity."

Back in Xilan City, Lin Xian had worried about this. The Phoenix Society saw massive research value in the Hell Black Chrysanthemum, but because of its connection to the Marks—and the fact that the scientist Dr. Wei was an old friend—Lin Xian didn’t hide anything.

According to Chen Sixuan, after the battle in Xilan, Zhao Yu, Wen Zhuo, and others from Phoenix never brought it up again. Lin Xian guessed their researchers had already extracted all useful data from the Black Chrysanthemum, or maybe they didn’t realize it could convert Dark Energy and enhance abilities. Otherwise, Phoenix Society might have pushed harder for control.

Still, that was all in the past. From what Monica said, it was clear that rare Disaster Plants weren’t exclusive to Lin Xian—other convoys, the Federation, and the Phoenix Society all had their own.

It had taken forever for Silver Dragon Ten Thousand Faults to bloom even one bud, and there was no telling if a second would ever appear. Its true value remained to be seen. But Lin Xian couldn’t deny—this divine lifesaver was no less than a trump card. If he could fully master it, combined with his Heteromorphic Cube, it would be a get-out-of-jail-free card. A treasure beyond measure.

----------------------------------------

"Captain Lin, does this mean we’re stuck here?" Zhou Hongji of the Red Rose convoy asked nervously. She understood that while they were safe for now, being trapped in a dark forest with no rail and no sunrise could only mean one thing—death, sooner or later.

"Yeah." Lin Xian didn’t sugarcoat it. He was utterly exhausted. He’d nearly torn himself apart trying to activate the Gravity Lens for the seventh time. The only thing keeping him upright right now was sheer willpower.

"I don’t know how long this ‘stealth’ state will last. Either way, we clean up what we can and stay alert. That serpent’s still nearby. It could attack at any moment…"

He had no confidence in the current situation. No idea how long the fragile silence would hold.

Chen Sixuan’s face turned grim. "Everyone, go back to your own trains and rest while you can. We’ve taken serious losses this time. A few minutes of breathing room is better than none at all. Just… stay ready to fight at any time."

In the strange darkness of this forest, everyone had an uneasy feeling. The convoy leaders who’d gathered dispersed quickly back to their own trains, taking advantage of this precious moment to regroup. All communication was now done via radio.

As small teams moved, Ren Qian surveyed the train perimeter. Silhouettes moved in and out of the light from the train cars. The air reeked of blood and char.

Corpses lay throughout the camp. The temporary rail line from Black Lake to the battlefield was littered with bodies—hundreds who had been alive just hours ago. Now, lifeless. In the swamp, the dead were sinking into the mud. In the forest, white shadows dragged icy corpses deeper into the dark.

No one dared venture far from the camp to retrieve weapons or supplies. Everyone stayed within the perimeter, catching their breath after sheer terror.

Through the windows of the inner-ring cars, survivors stared out into the pale, white-bleached woods. Whispers echoed faintly. Mountains still pulsed and twisted. The sky hung heavy, a strange, eerie blue.

Convoy members quietly cleaned up the battlefield. Those with medical equipment lined up to treat the wounded. Core teams tallied headcounts and ammo. Engineering groups rushed to repair train damage. Combat teams reloaded vehicle weapons. Some whispered. Others sat in heavy silence.

More than three thousand souls now clung to each other in this forest of death, united by fate.

Among them, the Infinite Train, equipped with a Heteromorphic Cube, had taken the least damage. Its auto-defense systems had kicked in the moment the Dark Invasion began. Lin Xian didn’t understand why the cube’s field had expanded so widely—enough to shield their whole section—but it had saved them.

Back inside the Infinite, Lin Xian rejoined the team in Car 2. The team was giving damage reports. Lin Xian took off his power armor, sat in a corner, and opened the blackout blinds—outside was a forest of pure darkness. His expression was icy.

"We had seven wounded. Nothing life-threatening."

"About ten over here too. Nothing fatal, though Old Li lost an eye to one of those flying bugs."

Liang Lei and Big Lou, both core assault leaders, had a hundred elite fighters armed with Lin Xian’s best tech. Even so, four power armors had been destroyed, and several more were in need of repairs.

"All 1130 ammo's gone. A few arc pulse vibrators are fried too. Lucky our armor held out." Luo Yang, still in power armor, added: "I’ve deployed sensors outside. With our Sentry System, we’ll know the moment anything moves."

"Let’s hope nothing does." KIKI tapped away on her keyboard, checking systems. "Only the railguns are still operational. Everything else is spent..."

After a night of war, Shu Qin noticed the heavy mood and tried to lighten it. "We’re lucky to have made it this far. Last time, we at least had rail to run on. This time, we’d have been dead without Captain Lin’s move."

"Yeah, at least we survived a Polar Night. As long as we’re alive, there’s still hope!" Li Yi added.

"So... what now?" KIKI swiveled her chair around and looked at Lin Xian. All eyes followed.

Lin Xian shook his head. He sighed deeply. "I’ve got no plan right now. The main issue is—we don’t even know where we are." He showed them his watch: the compass was spinning wildly.

"Not just that. Comms are useless. Without train repeaters, radios cut off after a kilometer. All stations are down…"

This was the most hopeless situation since Lin Xian’s Infinite Train Plan had launched from Jiang City. It wasn’t just derailment—they had been dragged into a strange mountain forest, a place where not even Lin Xian could lay new track.

The only backup plan left was one Qian Dele had proposed: use the two all-terrain trains plus some cars. Lin Xian could cannibalize the train to build vehicles and try to carry people out.

But it was a terrible idea. Without the 1130s and railguns, charging blindly into a haunted forest was suicide.

So for now, Lin Xian had nothing.

Shu Qin frowned. "Back in the Polar Night, at least we could tell direction. But here, no signs, no familiar terrain… no one’s seen this lake or these mountains before. Could we actually be inside the Star Abyss?"

"Wait!" KIKI suddenly turned to Lin Xian. "When the light came up briefly, didn’t we see the sunset direction? We should be able to tell east from west."

"And then what?" Lin Xian looked at her. "If we don’t know where the Star Abyss center is, how do we know which way leads away from it?"

Everyone fell silent.

Then, Qian Dele stepped forward seriously. "It’s not about knowing where we are—it’s about knowing where we aren’t."

He and Miao Lu, Da Yuan, and others had just finished clearing the front cars. "KIKI, your Sentry System must have recorded video. Pull it up. Match sunset angle and timestamp. Then use radar to scan mountain terrain, match it to the global topographic maps—you’ll get our location."

His words sparked interest. Lin Xian’s eyes lit up. "You’re right, Professor Chen!"

"But the terrain looked weird. Global matchups could be tough," Li Yi added.

"Not that hard." Ren Qianyu, hands in her pockets, stepped into Car 2 with a serious face. "There are tons of ways to assist orientation. For example, under cosmic tidal influence, rivers in the Northern Hemisphere tend to erode less on the south banks. Those trees? Based on leaf morphology, we’re looking at Eucalyptus species—Myrtaceae family. They grow best in eight global regions: North America’s Cota State, Oceania, and… the Hengduan Mountains."

"The Hengduan Mountains? The Luling Forest?!" Luo Yang’s eyes widened. "Then we are outside Star Abyss No. 5!"

"That complicates things," KIKI realized immediately. She began pulling Sentry System footage and radar maps to compare with the global terrain database.

"Focus on that western mountain," Lu Xingchen said mysteriously, arms crossed. "I noticed something strange at dawn—there was nothing there before."

"I saw it too," Chen Sixuan said. "That’s definitely not a mountain."

As soon as she said it, the atmosphere in the carriage tensed. Everyone understood what she meant. Off to the side, Shasha quietly pulled back the blackout curtain a sliver and peered toward the mountain-like silhouette in the west. Her little face was full of worry. "That’s not... some kind of super monster, is it?"

Lin Xian pushed her head back down. "Wrapped up nice and tight."

----------------------------------------

21:00

The night descended like liquefied pitch, stirred and poured through gaps in the treetops, submerging the forest in a viscous blackness. Only the sky above remained frozen in a sickly shade of deep blue. Fragments of the Celestial Gulf floated across the western heavens, suspended in a murky abyss that didn’t even seem part of the real world anymore.

After more than an hour of cross-checking by KIKI and the others, Lin Xian’s team finally pinpointed their location: Southwest corner of the Hengduan Mountains, about 800 kilometers northeast of the center of Zone 5 Abyss. Right beside a swamp lake called Lake Butuo.

The name instantly rang a bell for Lin Xian. He’d seen it on a documentary once—a deep forest lake nicknamed the "Bottomless Lake".

He had no idea how the Allied Train ended up 4600 kilometers away from the Aksai Dead Zone in the middle of a primeval forest, but it did confirm the bizarre encounter that Old Mo and Hu Lushou had previously described.

With their position now confirmed, Chen Sixuan pulled up the map and found the closest railway-connected location.

Baicheng.

A mountain city roughly 85 kilometers from the convoy's current position—long swallowed by the Abyss on Day One of the Apocalypse.

There was still a rail line from there to Haiqu, stretching another thousand-plus kilometers to Luling.

Standing in front of the info center, Lin Xian stared at the map, eyes heavy. The good news: Eighty-five kilometers wasn’t far. Plus, it was east of the Abyss core. Most of the terrain was just forest—not overly rugged. With effort, they might be able to lay a makeshift track to get the Allied Train into Baicheng.

Now that the Ocean and Parrot Convoys had been disbanded and their captains killed, Lin Xian ordered Shidi Yuan to reassign the survivors to other convoys. Their materials were also to be taken and repurposed—Lin Xian planned to absorb those two trains for construction resources. If they could recover materials while moving forward, supply wouldn’t be an issue.

The bad news: They couldn’t move just yet.

Lin Xian knew how the Heterocube’s shielding worked—it could block the dark invasion force but not the Dark Marks created by Eerie Entities. Their current safety was thanks to two things: silence, and the Heterocube’s interference field. It created a temporary safe zone.

But the moment they started laying tracks, they’d be exposing themselves. The noise would be too great, and movement too slow. If even a Level-1 Dark Mark were to hit them out here in the Abyss... it would be a death sentence.

Earlier, even with dual-direction rail engines, it had taken two full hours to finish that emergency circular track defense line—barely over ten kilometers. And that track was crude. Most of it was already sinking into the soft humus. Its only real purpose was keeping the current trains from tipping over.

So if Lin Xian wanted to get the Infinite and the entire Allied Train out of the forest... It would be a monumental challenge.

In Carriage 2, Lin Xian activated the communicator and began discussing options with the convoy leads.

"85 kilometers," Shidi Yuan said, frowning. "All deep forest. There’s no way we avoid attacks from Eerie Entities. This is too hard. Back in Yijin City, we only had to deal with 20 kilometers—and that was all paved roads."

“Captain Lin, can’t your mechanical ability turn the train’s iron wheels into tracks?” Qian Dele asked bluntly.

“No,” Lin Xian replied flatly. “That would be harder than building the rails.”

He’d considered the idea. Both Queen Mo and Longshan No. 1 had all-terrain modules. He’d scanned their blueprints already.

But building an all-terrain drive was essentially the same as rebuilding the entire train. The core of any train was the power carriage and rail drive wheels—everything else was basically just a steel box.

In other words, if Lin Xian wanted to convert the Infinite into an all-terrain train set, he’d have to replace everything except the nuclear power core and the carriage shells.

Weilong-Class, Huanxing-10A, even the massive Whale 03E gas turbine locomotive—all of them would need full reconstruction.

That wasn’t just a matter of difficulty—it was a matter of raw materials, and they didn’t have nearly enough.

That’s why Lin Xian’s actual plan was to reach Jinhai, where Dragon Country Rolling Stock Group and a wealth of rail manufacturing lines were located. Only there could he upgrade his train to a fully Eternal-Class All-Terrain Train.

Ning Jing added, “There’s another issue. Baicheng has been Abyss territory since Day One. So even if we make it there, we don’t know if the tracks are still usable.”

“Yeah, it’s a miracle we’re even alive right now,” one of the convoy captains muttered.

“What if we ditch the trains and drive out?”

“We’ve got too many people. Not even a third of us would make it out in vehicles.”

“Why the h*ll are we even here? Did anyone see anything?”

Someone finally traced the root of the problem.

“It’s probably that statue in the Aksai Dead Zone,” said Shidi Yuan. “Didn’t we say there was a Forbidden Object? I bet that’s what swallowed us.”

“So… if we find it, could it send us back?”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Monica from Queen Mo said tiredly. She stared at the eerie night outside. “We’re lucky just to avoid it. You want to go looking for it?”

“So that’s it? We’re just gonna rot here?” Shidi Yuan asked grimly.

Inside the Infinite, the room fell quiet. Some stood, some sat—but no one had an answer.

“Let’s not panic.”

Lin Xian finally picked up the comms again and spoke calmly, “We’ve already been through worse. Whatever comes next, it won’t be worse than that. So there’s no point freaking out. In the Abyss, every minute alive is a bonus. As long as we’ve got people and bullets, there’s always a way.”

“So here’s what we do for now: all convoys clean up the mess. Regroup, reload, and rest. If the monsters aren’t coming to us, then we stay put and conserve energy. That’s a tactic too.”

His words calmed the comms. Shidi Yuan replied first: “Yeah… you’re right, Lin. It’s not gonna get worse than this. We’ve all dodged death too many times. At this point, staying alive is just free extra credit. Let’s see how far we can really go in the Abyss.”

“Then let’s get brainstorming,” said Qian Dele. “Looks like we’re stuck for a while anyway.”

Monica asked, “Should we go lights-off and silent?”

“Do it if you can,” Lin Xian said. “But just stay within the train formation. The lights have been on since the start—if that was a problem, we’d already be dead.”

Lin Xian no longer used normal logic to interpret the behavior of these Abyssal creatures. A flower could explode into a spatial bubble. A Heterocube could block off dark forces.

Compared to lights and noise, Dark Marks were the real killers. The fact that none of the convoys were marked right now—that was the only thing that mattered.

After speaking, Lin Xian stood up. Chen Sixuan called to him, “What now?”

“Keep every carriage on standby.”

After giving his orders, Lin Xian headed to Carriage 3.

Ding Junyi was already waiting, having prepped all observational data on the Silver Dragon Tenfold Misalignment.

“Growth accelerated after entering Polar Night,” she explained. “Even more so after we were pulled into the Abyss. During the battle just now, the flower bud showed a bizarre growth curve. Might’ve been triggered by some energy source.”

“But it didn’t react like this back in Xilan City,” she added.

Lin Xian frowned. “When I used the Gravity Lens?”

“You might be onto something,” she said, nodding. “Your ability can influence spatial forces, and that lines up with the spatial bubbles we observed in the Misalignment.”

Silver Dragon stood nearby, staring at the plant glowing with violet pulses. His face darkened.

“Dragged into the tide. The whole train jumps 4600 clicks into the Abyss. Disaster flora. Forbidden objects. The things from that pale-dark world really do want humanity dead...”

He looked to Shidi Yuan. “What about him? The resonance with the disaster flora—did he gain a similar ability?”

Shidi Yuan’s face was pale. “Hard to say. That resonance puts minimal strain on your body, but it’s hard to activate at will.”

“Last time, you passed out completely,” he said, glancing at the pale-haired child now curled up under the massive flower stalk. “You only stayed standing because your ability kicked in—or maybe it was something in the disaster plant.”

[Non-mechanical energy converted. +1000 Mech Source Points.]

At that moment, a message from the Heterocube popped into Lin Xian’s vision.

Earlier, a massive amount of white fog had been absorbed by the Hell White Chrysanthemum and converted via the Heterocube into Mech Source Points.

Opening his Mechanical Heart interface, Lin Xian saw his abilities had drastically increased.

He hadn’t even had time to check them before—too busy fleeing and fighting.

[Mechanical Heart – Level 5 (6340 / 20000)] Mechanical Devour – Lv. 4 (1960 / 2000) – Increases devour efficiency Mechanical Construction – Lv. 5 (1210 / 3000) – Increases build efficiency

“Almost time for another level-up in Devour… Construction’s already doubled. Last time it was just 510…”

“My stamina’s recovered a bit. If we’re stuck here… might as well absorb all those abandoned train carriages and the nuclear locomotives. Boost our level and stockpile materials!”

In this desperate situation, Lin Xian forced himself to find a direction—to act. Because if he wanted to keep building bullets, building power…

He was going to need a whole lot more steel.