Armed Train in the Apocalypse

”Clatter...”

Crisp chains rang out and echoed across the sky.

The Court of All Things, which had been diffusing to suppress, instantly shrank around Su Huan, and chains woven from strands of Energy Rules appeared in the void, crisscrossing in front of the Slaughterer.

The two Rules intersected in midair, but without the slightest sign of the clash their auras suggested—more like drops of oil in water, slipping past each other without any entanglement at all.

Under Su Huan’s stunned gaze, the energy chains slammed straight into the Terror Slaughterer, twisting around him like braided rope, while the Fear Rule plastered itself across his face.

In Su Huan’s perception, everything around him vanished.

The Plant Zone shrouded in thick fog, the hideous Slaughterer, No. 1 in the distance, already earmarked to be taken back as a wetware component.

All the images began to rewind at a speed that surpassed light.

Every one of them from Su Huan’s first-person point of view.

One second he was bullying Xiaoya, the next he was perched on the Traveler’s Tree chewing on Banyan Fruit, then with a single flicker of thought he was conducting a deep inspection of Yu Jing’s body modifications, and delivering a slap that shredded a mutant banyan, killing that weird creature Blue Bull, crossing an ocean to blow up several minor cities, fleeing across the seas from a horde of pallid demons...

Seeing it all laid out like this, he actually seemed pretty wicked.

Su Huan did a quick, one-second self-examination, then noticed the scenes were changing faster.

He vaguely understood what this guy was trying to do.

Dig out the thing he feared most?

More memories and events were being hauled out—taking bribes and freebies, robbery and extortion, squeezing passengers... one incident after another, even the ones Su Huan himself had already forgotten were being rifled through.

But the more it flipped, the faster it went, with an undercurrent of growing frustration.

So... it couldn’t find anything?

There were indeed plenty of fear-inducing things in his memories, but the problem was, all of them were other people’s fear.

The rewind sped up further, over a decade of life flashing by in an instant, to the point that even Su Huan could barely keep up.

Suddenly, everything before his eyes turned into a familiar darkness; his nerves relaxed a fraction. For others, darkness might be the unknown, unsettling, but for him, darkness actually brought a definite sense of safety.

But is the Fear Rule really that simple?

After all that effort, it could only conjure up a pitch-black void to scare him.

The ground beneath his feet suddenly turned dark red; clotted fresh blood rolled toward him, and halfway across it was frozen by the cold, raising the ground by a layer.

It belonged to a young man in filthy fatigues, stubble still unshaven on his face, half his body buried in snow, his eyes staring fixedly into the distance.

Following his gaze, Su Huan saw corpses in uniform overlapped into a foundation, metal pillars the thickness of ten men in an embrace stabbing into the heavens, hundreds, thousands of them stretching into the distance to prop up a steel firmament. Countless people charged silently toward the horizon, three banners whipping ceaselessly in the flames.

Artillery fire, banners, metal...

One familiar-yet-strange silhouette after another passed him by; he wanted to follow and see, but found he couldn’t move his feet.

This vaguely familiar tableau set his heart to restless unease, his eyes searching for something.

At last, he saw Xiaoba’s figure at the far end.

The boy’s frame was even more upright now, standing ramrod straight at the edge of the crowd.

As though sensing Su Huan’s gaze, he turned back, gave a slight nod, then walked forward.

”May you be reborn at the dawn of the apocalypse.”

In a blink, that departing back became Lin Jin’s, the steel firmament turned into half a sky of crimson clouds, a world burning so fiercely it was on the verge of shattering, nearly overlapping the scenes in his own memory.

”My path was set long ago, Su Huan. Next time we meet, I’ll carve a way for you at the end of Purgatory.”

Words he had revisited countless times slipped across the silent battlefield straight to his ear.

Su Huan snapped his eyes shut, the corners of his mouth splitting like they’d been cut by a blade, nearly tearing to the back of his ears; the fine rows of teeth reflected flames as red as blood.

”Can’t find anything so you start making things up, huh?”

”Good. Good...”

Every image was almost-but-not-quite right, and every one of them completely different from his actual memories.

But his memory did not fail.

Every grudge, every debt, he remembered with perfect clarity; every brush with death, every moment of despair, he’d carved into his very bones.

Everything he was seeing now was fake.

From here on, no matter how the scenes shifted, he kept his eyes locked shut, sealing his perception off entirely.

Only when everything fell utterly silent did he open his eyes again.

The bloody battlefield was gone, as were the familiar figures around him; in their place was an ordinary courtyard from before the apocalypse.

A row of connected brick houses formed an L-shape along the edge, a small hill rose behind the yard, maybe a hundred meters high, its head just poking up when you sat on the ground. In the center of the yard stood a pavilion; on either side were sculptures of red-crowned cranes, their thin iron legs already rusted.

A child stood with his back to him, sweeping the ground.

The only upside was: he could move now.

Su Huan first turned a circuit on the spot. At this point he no longer cared about that damned sense of familiarity; he’d realized this whole thing was like dreaming—everything you saw felt familiar.

Suddenly, he heard a rough, heavy panting, like a beast feeding.

The instant he turned his head, all sound vanished; only the child kept sweeping, looking all of five or six years old.

Su Huan licked his canine teeth, casually picked up a shovel from beside him, and asked, ”Was that you laughing at me just now?”

The child gave no response whatsoever.

”Not answering counts as admitting it, yeah...”

Su Huan let out a helpless chuckle, raised the shovel over his head, and swung it in a graceful arc.

”Thunk!”

The panting sounded again, this time from somewhere else—maybe the storage room, maybe the hall, maybe the pavilion to the side—as though from every corner there was a strange gaze fixed on him.