Players, Please Board the Train

The atmosphere on the daytime train was relatively pleasant. By the time Xu Huo and Yan Jiayu returned from getting food, that pushy middle-aged woman had also come back into the carriage, though there was a bit of bruising at the corner of her mouth, clearly having hit a wall in another carriage.

Minor injuries from player encounters were nothing serious. The middle-aged woman didn’t care what others thought of her either, cheerfully sidling up to Yan Jiayu’s side to share some food.

Yan Jiayu wasn’t the stingy type, and she even struck up a conversation proactively, ”Do you only do business on the train?”

”Sometimes I do it in dungeons too,” the middle-aged woman said. ”Can’t help it, I was in sales before becoming a player. It’s the only thing I know how to do, just earning a bit of pocket money for potions. Otherwise, I’d find some players who seem easy to talk to and ask them to carry me along. If not, I’d have died in this game long ago.”

”Then you’ve run into some good people,” Yan Jiayu said with a smile.

The middle-aged woman nodded. ”Ain’t that the truth. That’s why I always say, there are still more good people than bad in this world. You’re not bad yourself, sis. If it weren’t for you, I’d probably be going hungry today.”

”You can’t even afford a single bowl of rice?” The curly-haired female player in front turned around and said, ”You sold quite a bit of stuff just now, didn’t you?”

The middle-aged woman sighed. ”Small profits, quick returns. Besides, I’ve got a family now, trying to save up a bit to support them. Skipping a meal or two isn’t a big deal.”

The other players in the carriage didn’t have much sympathy for her. Some could relate, that was all. Only Yan Jiayu looked at her with pity. ”You’re really pitiful.”

The middle-aged woman offered a smile in return.But Yan Jiayu’s pity ended there. After handing out the snacks, she got ready to rest, and the middle-aged woman had no choice but to move to another seat.

Yan Jiayu padded her seat with a sleeping bag and started to doze off.

Most players chose to rest in the afternoon, so before long, the carriage grew quiet. Apart from that woman frantically knitting wool, everyone else closed their eyes to rest. The middle-aged woman wasn’t picky at all, simply grabbing a bag, tossing it on the floor, and lying down in the aisle to sleep.

It was smooth sailing until dinner time. Xu Huo was jolted awake by bright light. He opened his eyes and found the train was passing through a stretch of crystal-clear water. The mirror-smooth surface reflected shimmering, multi-colored light, yet there was no visible color in the sky above, as if the light wasn’t projecting down from above, but growing up from within the water itself.

Yan Jiayu was already awake, leaning against the window to look outside. She turned back and asked Xu Huo, ”What kind of light is this?”

Xu Huo shook his head.

”This is called fish light,” the elderly man with the cane said, also walking over to the window, a look of awe on his face. ”It looks like an aurora projection on the surface, but it’s actually light emitted by a strange fish that thrives in wasteland zones.”

”When this kind of fish is still, its body is transparent, with only the spine connected to its head showing gray. Once it starts moving, the gray matter in its spine immediately pumps through its entire body, reacting to form all sorts of brilliant colors.”

”Because they only grow in some unstable spaces, they’re rarely seen. Didn’t expect to run into one today.”

”So what’s this fish called?” Yan Jiayu asked. ”If someone’s studied them, someone must have caught one before, right?”

The elderly man chuckled. ”It’s called the Gray Fish.”

”Why would such a beautiful fish get a name like that?” the curly-haired female player said.

”Because anyone who’s encountered this fish will, after learning about its habits, pray it stays asleep,” the elderly man said, tilting his head slightly. ”Look ahead.”

The people in the carriage crowded to the window, just in time to see a stretch of gray clouds appear in the sky ahead.

Quite a few people recognized the Gray Fish, but several players recognized those gray clouds instead, their faces turning grim as they said, ”Is a violent storm coming?”

Xu Huo had encountered a thunderstorm before.

”Just our luck,” the middle-aged woman said with a dark face. ”Dangerous weather rarely pops up near train tracks normally.”

Because the train had to traverse multiple spaces, many of which were chaotic zones, the tracks were laid in the places with the lowest accident probability, and the same went for travel times. As a result, the space around train tracks usually looked extraordinarily beautiful most of the time.

If they were unlucky enough to hit special weather, a delay was the least of their worries. There was a real chance the train would be destroyed and everyone would die.

”Old sir, what should we do in a situation like this?” Yan Jiayu asked the elderly man.

The elderly man remained unruffled. ”Sit down, eat and drink well, then leave it to fate.”

The others couldn’t help but look at him sideways, but the elderly man calmly explained, ”If the space around here is relatively stable, then even if the train gets flipped over, we can still wait nearby. But we just encountered the Gray Fish. Gray Fish only move when they sense a change in the weather. I said earlier that they live in extremely harsh environments. Let alone whether the space outside can stay stable for long, whether a person can even breathe once they step out is another question. So there’s no other option but to wait out the violent storm.”

Xu Huo estimated the distance of the cloud layer ahead, then said to Yan Jiayu, ”Heading to the front carriage.”

Yan Jiayu followed him without a second thought. The other players looked at each other, and the middle-aged woman said in confusion, ”They don’t think it’s safer at the locomotive, do they? This crazy wind isn’t like an ordinary storm. If it really comes to that, the locomotive tips over first!”

But the two of them were already gone.

The other players waited a moment. The elderly man and the injured player were the first to leave, and once they went, the others trickled out one by one as well. When players in the rear carriages saw them leaving, they followed along too.

Xu Huo wasn’t actually heading for the locomotive. The middle-aged woman was right that storms near the tracks weren’t like ordinary storms. In a regular storm, the center takes the brunt of the impact while the edges are weaker, but storms on the tracks were uniform. No matter where the storm came from, once you were caught in it, the impact was the same everywhere.

The cloud ahead completely covered the track’s range. There was no dodging it. Based on the migration speed and appearance, this was extremely close to the worst natural disaster that could be encountered on the tracks, a dimensional storm.

A dimensional storm, put simply, was a small-scale collapse of space and time caused by unstable connections between spaces, or by the temporal-spatial rift created when the train crossed dimensions. Just as stars were born and destroyed in the universe at all times, these spaces were also active. When they would collapse or reorganize couldn’t be fully predicted. In the Game Government’s description, this fell under ”travel accidents.”

Xu Huo had seen related records in the maintenance logs he’d reviewed in District 011, and he’d also watched storm videos. Regardless of a dimensional storm’s size, once it covered the track range, both the tracks and the train would almost be destroyed to the point of being impossible to repair on the spot. However, the fact that the game had laid tracks here proved the area was relatively safe. As long as the space on both sides of the tracks wasn’t completely obliterated, staying inside the train would still save their lives!