Armed Train in the Apocalypse

What came next was simple: raise the stakes, raise them hard, put out a condition the other side couldn’t refuse.

Hua Zonglin straightened his expression. ”I heard the conductor has been collecting information about the apocalypse?”

Su Huan half-squinted at him.

”You have some?”

”We do.”

Su Huan’s body leaned forward slightly. Even though his aura was tightly restrained, the two still felt their vision go black for a moment, like the sky was collapsing on them, the pressure crushing.

Su Huan said seriously, ”You can start talking. If it’s valuable, I’ll accept your deal. If it’s useless, I won’t pay anything for it.”

Hua Zonglin said sincerely, ”We trust the conductor’s character.”

Hearing this, Lord Lian beside him almost couldn’t help letting out a soft scoff.

She was already thinking she needed to raise two lobbyists this good herself.

But the aura rising beside her made even her involuntarily hold her breath.

Su Huan sat on the sofa with his hands interlaced. Pale lines silently crept up to the corners of his eyes. His Domain poured down onto the floor like running water, soundlessly covering the entire carriage. The two Tier Two Evolvers clenched their fists in tension. The furnishing in front of them was still the same furnishing, but in their senses, every single object had turned into the deadliest of traps.

Even the slightest movement would bring annihilation crashing down.

It left them so paralyzed they didn’t dare move at all—in other words, they were being locked in place by their own instincts.

Even with mental preparation, Hua Zonglin was still shocked by this terrifying presence. The feeling Lian gave them was already scary enough, but compared to Su Huan, they were worlds apart.

The former could give them a threat like ”I can punch you to death,” but facing the latter, a horrifying illusion arose in their hearts: ”I must not go against him.” It was like meeting a great figure out of history, that sense of awe like a nightmare that wouldn’t fade.

The influence exerted by this aura had already soaked from the physical level down into the heart.

”Worthy of being a living legend.”

Hua Zonglin’s gaze grew even more respectful as he continued, ”...So, we concluded that the Twelve Calamities of Heaven aren’t just disasters, but twelve defensive lines!”

”Evidence.”

The two cold syllables fell, and the temperature in the room dropped several degrees.

He immediately spread the file out on the table, and at the same time pulled out a small vial about ten centimeters long from his coat.

The instant she saw this vial, Lian’s expression tightened slightly.

The vial was brimming with violent Energy fluctuations, every inch equivalent to a Pan-energy Crystal scaled to the same size, yet the inside of such a precious vial was completely empty!

She instinctively looked to Su Huan, only to see his pupils tracking something as if they were following it around.

This change made her jolt in shock. There was something inside!

In Su Huan’s eyes, a clump of flame formed of some special Energy darted around inside the vial, occasionally contorting into a grimacing face, baring its fangs as it tried to scare him. It had no physical shape, like a fire demon, or... a ghost.

Hua Zonglin’s eyes fell on the vial, thick with dread. ”This was the earliest anomaly to appear in the world, but because it’s colorless and invisible, there was no way to detect it with pre-apocalypse technology. They slipped into our world without a sound.”

”They first appeared in the White Eagle Federation, capable of warping cognition, catalyzing desire...”

”You still remember White Eagle’s chaos, right?”

”At first none of us paid attention. We thought unleashing beasts to devour humans was simply the nature of their civilization, the inevitable result of reaching a certain stage of development...”

Listening to his narration, Su Huan sank into thought, his mind drifting back to long, long before the apocalypse.

Even if he wasn’t someone who followed the news, he at least knew how chaotic that period in the White Eagle Federation had been. Problems that had built up for hundreds of years erupted all at once, all sorts of perverse and absurd incidents endlessly emerging, everyone isolated from each other, split into individuals.

A country that had clearly been powerful just a few years before suddenly slid straight into the abyss.

Back then he’d just watched from the sidelines for the fun of it, never thinking much.

Turns out it had been an omen.

”They called them Pale Demons. Because of the constant trade dealings, we discovered recently that these things actually didn’t dare enter Donghuang. After repeated verification, the ’defensive line’ conjecture emerged.”

”So you’re saying the apocalypse was triggered by these things?”

Su Huan picked up the small vial and turned it slowly in his hand. The Pale Demon inside seemed even more full of Anger now, rushing up and down, occasionally blowing itself into fireworks, only to quickly gather back together from the void, returning to its original shape.

Hua Zonglin shook his head. ”If it were only them, Donghuang wouldn’t have gone so far as to ignore hundreds of millions of lives to erect twelve defensive lines that hurt others and themselves.”

He didn’t say the rest, but everyone present understood his meaning.

Su Huan’s lips curled slightly. ”Looks like the trouble this world has to face is even worse than I thought.”

His fingertips exerted a slight force, and under the two men’s horrified gazes he crushed the glass vial.

With a bang, a figure of invisible flame instantly rose in the carriage, growing from finger-length to over three meters tall, towering up. It bent down sharply, lunging at Su Huan, opening its mouth wide and Roaring right against his nose.

The shapeless wave vanished the instant it touched Su Huan, not even stirring a single strand of hair.

They’d thought the man before them would panic, but he only looked at it calmly, which made the Pale Demon furious. Its body twisted into a coil and turned into a stream of flame, trying to climb onto Su Huan’s body, but it was blocked by the multiple Energy barriers covering his skin.

No matter how it struggled, it couldn’t break through these strange Energy barriers, as if it were still locked in the vial.

The flames shifted from colorless and transparent to a ghastly pale texture, looking even more like a ghost.

But the two men opposite still could not see it at all; only Lian could vaguely sense where it was.

”Interesting.”

The tiny figure that had been struggling suddenly found the barrier gone. Overjoyed, it rushed straight in through Su Huan’s nostril.

And in Su Huan’s eyes, an extra white figure appeared.

Ge Mian, stunned, had just opened his mouth to speak when Hua Zonglin grabbed him, signaling him to hold his tongue.

Su Huan’s eyes turned from pitch-black to a deep blue, and the little figure became like a leaf boat dropped into the ocean, desperately trying to get out, but with no way to escape this sea.

Su Huan closed his eyes, and the strange scene vanished.

With Inner Vision stirred, Su Huan saw the Pale Demon. It was bound in the void by chains of gleaming white, wrapped around it again and again. Those chains were the Rule of Energy evolved into form.

This was the ”inside” of Su Huan’s body—a four-dimensional space.

In the past he only saw this space when he was observing Rules. He hadn’t expected this thing to be able to enter as well.

Curious.

As killing intent thickened in Su Huan’s eyes, the chains tightened further and further. The Pale Demon opened its mouth wide but couldn’t utter a sound.

With a bang, it blew apart into white sparks.

Unlike its explosions in the outside world, this time it truly died, ground completely to pieces by the Rules.

The fragments scattered like snowflakes across the entire space. A portion landed on the chains of Rules, and Su Huan felt a huge mass of memories that didn’t belong to him flood into his mind.

It was a space with no color, vast and void.

Countless Pale Demons ”identical” to it were stationed there. Some blotted out the sky, some were as small as needle tips, some had gaping mouths and tusks like war behemoths, some had graceful, curving figures like goddesses descended. But no matter how huge their size or how savage their forms, they were all utterly silent, their shapes frozen without the slightest fluctuation, all gazes full of reverence, looking ahead into the far distance.

Su Huan followed their line of sight.

In this bizarre world, distance and space seemed to have lost all meaning; his gaze could stretch infinitely far.

His sight passed over layer upon layer of Pale Demons, and finally he saw a gigantic throne.

The throne towered up like a pillar between heaven and earth, every line on its surface obscure and indescribable, blurred. When Su Huan’s gaze instinctively lifted higher, he suddenly realized there was someone on the throne.

It was a pair of legs, a pair that didn’t belong to any human yet perfectly fit his sense of beauty. He couldn’t even describe what shape those legs were, couldn’t be sure whether they were clothed, and they could change along with Su Huan’s shifting aesthetic sense and his understanding of Power and Rules!