Players, Please Board the Train

Just a second ago, the invincible Middle-aged Woman was killed in the blink of an eye. The Curly-haired Female Player, who had been about to charge forward and die together with her, instinctively stepped back, putting distance between herself and the corpses before warily watching the players around them.

The scene fell silent, and everyone looked like they could have been the one who made the move.

No player spoke, and naturally, no one admitted to killing the Middle-aged Woman. But since she was already dead, this fight could be temporarily put to rest.

The Curly-haired Female Player loaded her companion’s corpse into a body bag and returned to stand beside Xu Huo and the others.

A night passed, and when daylight broke as usual the next day, the number of surviving players from the bus had dwindled to two-thirds of what it had been before.

Nearly four days had passed since the Dimensional Storm struck, and the Track Supply Department still hadn’t shown up. This dashed the hopes that had just begun to rise, plunging players back into despair over the possibility of never being rescued. Arguments and fights broke out frequently. Some were injured, some were robbed, but since it was broad daylight, everyone exercised some restraint. No one went for the kill, all wary of exposing their own items.

”Hey, look at that!” Yan Jiayu said suddenly, gazing into the distance.

Xu Huo followed her line of sight and noticed ripples at the junction line where space met at the edge of their vision. It was like looking through steam—the originally horizontal line began to undulate.

”That should be an alternative timeline,” the Train Operations Director said, instructing someone to record the distant scenery with instruments.

”Timeline? Time can be seen too?” Yan Jiayu asked.”Time is just a concept that happens to be convenient for humans. Some things in certain spaces don’t change according to the methods we understand, so the concept of time doesn’t quite hold up there.” The Train Operations Director said with keen interest, ”According to how science fiction novels explain multidimensional space, every frame of time and space can extend into countless possibilities. But this doesn’t exist in the Dimensional Rift. The complexity of space and timelines far exceeds human imagination and comprehension. The time we see can be simply understood as a straight line, but in some spaces, ’time’ is a curve.”

”Time is a curve?” Most of the people present couldn’t follow, but the elderly man asked, ”Is it like the difference in time flow speed in cultivation novels?”

”That’s just one very small part of the pattern.” The Train Operations Director said, ”But the curve is only what we see with our naked eyes. In reality, the curve is produced by the special movement of space. It’s like observing a planet from a macro perspective—you can see the changes in its terrain and waterways, but if you’re standing on it, you wouldn’t feel a thing.”

”So this is a wonder. The appearance of this curve means a particular space is going through a special period.”

Many players had already pulled out items to record the scene before them. Xu Huo stared at the hazy landscape and said, ”If time moves in a curve, does that mean if someone enters a space with ’curved time’ from ’straight-line time,’ and then returns to ’straight-line time’ at some special moment, they might complete a journey through space-time?”

The Train Operations Director gave him a sideways smile. ”In the game, there’s almost no such opportunity.”

The elderly man seemed to know a bit about it. He said to Xu Huo, ”When you first enter the game, the time to clear a dungeon basically matches normal months, weeks, and days. As dungeon difficulty increases, the time span covered by clearing them grows larger. The standard seven-day clearance model becomes impractical, so the time inside dungeons extends accordingly. However, it’s still converted at a certain ratio. Generally, after leaving such a dungeon world, it’s impossible to obtain a train ticket for the same world for a long time. The chance of verifying space-time travel is very small.”

Small aside, the game would definitely patch that loophole.

Moreover, even if conditions on both the game’s and the player’s side were met, for such a special space, the key would be how to safely execute the operation.

Unless one was an expert in this field, relying on a bit of knowledge from others’ explanations, one could spend a lifetime and still never figure it out.

The ”curved time” disappeared. The Train Operations Director raised his hand to check his watch. ”The rescue team is here.”

The moment he finished speaking, a track-laying train appeared in the distance. The front of the train had an automated track-laying instrument that repaired the rails as it moved. It was slower than a normal train, but still seemed very fast to the players.

The train stopped near them. Track Supply Department members in uniform exchanged a few words with the Train Operations Director before telling them to board.

Players returning to the train nearly wept with joy. Someone said, ”I never thought I’d see a train and feel like I was seeing family!”

That was a bit of an exaggeration, but compared to the agonizing wait of wandering aimlessly by the tracks, fighting and killing on the train no longer seemed so repulsive.

The staff members had a separate carriage after boarding, while players were directed to the carriages at the rear. No one really cared about that, but as they were leaving, Xu Huo overheard the Train Operations Director telling the Track Supply Department to report the ”curved time” incident.

He paused thoughtfully, then suddenly realized something else. The Game Government was searching for Dr. Wu, and Dr. Wu had been drifting between different Game Partitions all along. Simple tracking and pursuit methods should have long since stopped fitting their cat-and-mouse dynamic. Hadn’t they ever clashed within ”curved time”?

Had Dr. Wu been moving between different Game Partitions just to spread the S-version Potion?

The fact that he could smoothly evade the Game Government’s pursuit might not simply rely on items and player power, but also on his understanding of the order of space-time.

But from this angle, it was also clear that space-time travel wasn’t so easily accomplished. Even if it could be done, it wouldn’t be as convenient as ordinary people imagined. Dr. Wu had a daughter. If space-time travel could be done at will, Dr. Wu would definitely go back to the past to find his daughter. And the Game Government, in order to control Dr. Wu, would use the same method to try to get their hands on his daughter.

It was unclear whether they had ever clashed over this. Judging from the results, basically decades had passed without progress on either side—Dr. Wu hadn’t completely shaken off the Game Government, and the Game Government hadn’t actually managed to catch Dr. Wu.

There was another small question here. The letter-style notes Xu Huo had seen among He Pu’s belongings seemed somewhat predictive of the future. Could it be that items tinged with ”premonition” or ”causality” all bore traces of ”curved time”?

If so, was Dr. Wu’s placement of the Perfect Potion random and capricious, or did it serve a specific purpose?

Like He Pu’s notes, had he obtained the Perfect Potion entirely by chance?

”What’s wrong with you?” Yan Jiayu looked at him strangely.

Xu Huo shook his head slightly. ”I was thinking, if curved time exists, does everything have the chance to be tested, corrected, and tried again?”

Yan Jiayu laughed instead. ”Curved time isn’t looped time. Curved time should still move forward, right? It can’t be that good. What’s happened is fact. How could it be so easily changed?”