“Understood!” “On it!” “I have arrived!!”

At the front lines near the Black Lake, several top fighters appeared on the rooftops of the trains. Infinite Train’s three G3 railguns all swiveled toward the massive black shadow writhing through the forest floor, locking on via suppression radar.

“Careful, that red mist around it might be like the sea urchin's defense—able to absorb weapon attacks!” Ning Jing warned.

ZIIING!

Before her words had fully left her mouth, the three railguns fired simultaneously. Blazing blue trajectories lit up the dark forest, slamming into the monstrous cyan serpent.

But—no explosion. No impact flare. The immense power of the railguns vanished into the crimson mist. It was unnervingly silent.

“That’s not just defense—it’s absorption.” Qian Dele’s brows furrowed deeply.

Shi Diyuan clenched his fists. “Sht. Even railguns are useless—what the hll is that thing?”

“Let me try dispersing the red smoke. Maybe that’ll help!” KIKI volunteered quickly.

“Hold on. Let A-Bai go first!” Ning Jing stopped her. A-Bai nodded, raising his sunglasses and aiming at the creature.

WHUMM—

His eyes revealed dark blood patterns, and twin beams of crimson laser burst forth, striking the serpent’s head. The heat surge was immense. Lin Xian’s Shadow Armor suddenly picked up an alarming spike in the creature’s temperature—the red mist turned brighter, hotter.

“That mist stores energy—and it explodes!”

KIKI was instantly reminded of their battle with the giant sea urchin—when red mist melted metal and ended in a devastating detonation.

“This thing can be hurt,” Lin Xian barked. “But we need to hit it from a distance!”

At once, everyone fired in unison. The train’s arsenal of railguns and automatic cannons roared to life.

“Fire Fist!” Lu Xingchen shouted coldly, launching himself into the air and slamming down with a massive flame attack.

BOOOOM—

As they launched a barrage, the giant serpent surged forward, now charging the convoy with terrifying speed. Its red mist began to glow, almost fluorescent.

ZIIIIIIING!

More than twenty Lightning Falcon drones zipped past Lin Xian’s flank. At the same moment, his kinetic energy cannon unleashed dozens of beams.

Then—the red mist detonated.

First came micro-explosions, tiny cavitation bubbles, then a violent shockwave ripped through the air and forest, right beneath the serpent.

The explosion was massive—so intense it rocked the entire forest, sending shockwaves through the convoy. Train cars trembled with metallic groans, but the sheer weight of the multi-ton train chain prevented derailment.

Just then, Lin Xian’s HUD lit up with a deafening warning:

[WARNING: Massive Object Approaching!]

“Look out!”

KIKI expanded her psychic shield to protect the team, but the battlefield was now a storm of ash, black smoke, and red haze. Visibility dropped to zero.

Suddenly, KIKI unleashed a wave of psychic energy, sweeping away the smoke—and right then, the serpent’s gaping maw appeared directly above the convoy!

Time seemed to freeze.

The visual impact was overwhelming—everyone’s heartbeat skipped in unison. A cold gasp spread across the survivors.

Lin Xian’s pupils constricted. The red mist had finally vanished—that was the moment to strike.

“FIRE!!”

All Lightning Falcon drones opened fire at once—and Graviton Lens activated.

WHUMMMMM—

A low-frequency space-time pulse echoed across the battlefield. Everything fell silent. Even the light dimmed, as if color itself was being drained.

A swirling black vortex opened in the serpent’s mouth—a literal black hole. Light, wind, and matter were sucked into the singularity. Lin Xian felt his body grow light, the train shook violently, and the forest itself was being devoured.

Then—a blurred figure appeared in his vision:

Chu Yan!

She vanished in an instant, just as the black hole collapsed—leaving a massive cratered hole in the serpent’s throat.

Trees, rocks, and mud—everything surged upward and crashed into the serpent’s open mouth.

“NOW!” Lin Xian shouted. The two 1130 CIWS and three G3 railguns fired simultaneously. Monica’s Sonic Blade, Qian Dele’s golden flash, A-Bai’s laser storm, Shi Diyuan and Ning Jing—they all charged the serpent’s underbelly!

KIKI and Fire Bro launched full-force—blade storm and flaming sword surged skyward.

Inside Car 3, Ding Junyi, still watching the Hell Black Chrysanthemum, suddenly noticed something. The silver flower inside the stasis pod—Silver Dragon Tenfold Thorn—was blooming in real-time.

BOOOOOM!

A tidal wave of dark invasion power smashed the entire train, shaking it violently.

“Watch out—it’s releasing the red mist again!!” Lin Xian shouted.

Despite the heavy barrage, the serpent’s coral-like spikes began spewing red mist again—this time directly toward the convoy.

“Sh*t! Don’t let it explode this close!”

“I’ll drag it away!” KIKI gritted her teeth and flew upward.

“No!!” Lin Xian grabbed her. “That thing stretches all the way from the Black Lake—your psychic power won’t move it!”

Instead, he lifted his arm—ready to use Graviton Lens again.

It was their only hope. If the weapon could strike without triggering an explosion, they might have a chance.

But nothing happened.

No pulse, no feedback. Just a jolt of pain down his spine that made him stumble.

SKREEEEE—

A terrifying, rattling vibration echoed from above—not a voice, but a threat display. It wasn’t a roar. It was something inhuman.

Everyone froze.

Below, Ning Jing and Shi Diyuan looked up in horror.

Infinite Train kept firing. Sally’s Train unleashed its full arsenal. But the red mist only grew brighter.

The crushing pressure of despair fell like a mountain on every survivor’s chest.

They had built a defense line—only to die beneath this nightmare.

“KIKI!” Lin Xian shouted—

But KIKI grabbed his hand tightly.

She clenched her silver teeth and raised her other hand—spreading her psychic barrier wide enough to cover everyone.

Pop.

A strange, bubble-like sound echoed in every person’s head. Small as a whisper. Loud as thunder.

At that exact moment—all 3,800 survivors felt their fear halt. Their trembling stopped.

Then—a brilliant light exploded across the sky.

Not light. Not fire.

More like a dimensional ripple that tore the darkness open, sweeping away the red mist. A blinding white brilliance that felt like it could shatter your retinas.

Reflexively, everyone shielded their eyes.

All automatic weapons fell silent. Only a few survivors kept firing—reflexively.

Lin Xian, KIKI, Fire Bro, Qian Dele, Monica, Shi Diyuan, Ning Jing... all stood beneath that radiant, godlike light.

Slowly, vision returned.

And then—they saw.

The black forest, the Eerie Entity, the cyan serpent, and the red mist—gone.

All that remained was a desolate battlefield of scorched forest under snowy peaks. Infinite Train rested on the shores of a black lake, the earth scarred with the grooves left by war.

Corpses littered the edges of the old track.

In the sky—a golden sunset pierced the clouds.

But far above, an eerie dark-blue night sky still lingered—layered over the mountains like a second dimension.

A suspended bay… shattered space.

The entire forest and wilderness felt like a luminous world trapped within a crystal globe, while humanity stood peering outward into the darkness beyond.

What struck terror into their hearts was this: the massive, writhing mountain range once visible near the Black Lake... had vanished. Lin Xian’s vision trembled— Could it be? That mountain—was it actually a living creature of darkness?

This terrifying phenomenon stunned everyone into silence. Gunfire ceased. Even breathing stalled.

And then— Darkness fell again!

It was as if the world had been instantly switched off. Lin Xian and the others experienced the immediate blindness that follows lights being shut—unable to make out even the outlines around them.

A few seconds later, their eyes adjusted. They were still in that black forest. The sky was a deep, desaturated blue. The mountainous outline in the distance returned—but now shifting, pulsing in and out of the hazy black mist, like the land itself was alive.

As they instinctively raised their defenses, still riding the adrenaline of combat, something even stranger happened.

The corpses of the bizarre creatures they had killed were gone. The blue serpent, too, had vanished. Even the red mist in the air had dissipated. If it weren’t for the burning forest, the scattered fragments of the serpent’s jaw, and the charred remains, Lin Xian might have believed it had all been a nightmare.

“What the h*ll?!” Qian Dele was the first to speak. “Where did those nasty freaks all go?!”

“Something’s not right...” Shi Deyuan leapt onto a train roof, his expression baffled.

Monica, scanning with her Power Armor’s systems, turned up nothing. “This doesn’t feel like a hallucination. They just... vanished.”

“Lin bro, did you use some god-tier technique just now?” Lu Xingchen descended from the sky, eyes wide with astonishment.

“Vanished?” Lin Xian shook his head in disbelief. “Impossible. I didn’t...” He couldn’t have used the Gravitational Lens a second time—he was sure of it. Let alone something that could affect the entire battlefield.

“They really are gone.”

Ning Jing, arriving with A Bai, looked grim. “A Bai says... all of our darkness marks—they’re gone.”

“What?!”

“That’s impossible!”

“Could it be the serpent’s death that caused it?”

“No. I don’t think we... killed it,” KIKI said, pointing.

Amid the burning trees was a massive trench, carved clearly by the serpent’s body. It led back toward the Black Lake. The broken trees still toppling into the groove suggested the creature had only just left.

“This is too strange.” KIKI’s expression tightened. “What the h*ll just happened?”

“Lin Xian.” Just then, Ding Junyi’s voice came over the comms.

Her face was pale. She clutched the Silver Dragon Ten Thousand Bloom, chest heaving as though she’d survived a major trauma.

“I figured it out... the flower’s trait.”

Lin Xian’s heart jumped. He opened the roof of Carriage 2 and shouted to the others, “Wait here for a sec!”

Inside Carriage 3, shimmering distortions still hung in the air. His Black Shadow Armor’s HUD flickered with unstable signals, a weird numbing energy brushing across his skin.

“Director Ding!” He found her standing over the lab table, visibly drained. On her head, the silver flower was now in full bloom—her eyes glowing faintly green, a sign her abilities were in overdrive.

“What happened?”

Ding Junyi placed the flower down and leaned against the table. Her expression flickered.

“That explosion—it was a void-layer reaction triggered by the first flower bud’s detonation.”

The sensation she got when using her powers to connect with the Silver Dragon Ten Thousand Bloom was indescribable. Where the Black Chrysanthemum of Hell had allowed her to see into the dimension of dark creatures, the Silver Dragon revealed a layered world—like overlapping realities nested within sky bubbles. Even she, a scientist, couldn’t fully grasp it all in such a short time.

But she did catch one crucial detail:

The moment the flower exploded, this entire region became disconnected from the outside world—a total severing. Not just what they could see, but even the unseen forces... Like the darkness invasion and the marks on their bodies.

In other words, the bloom cut this zone off from the Abyss itself—blocking the corruption and cleansing the marks.

“I’m not sure if there’ll be any other side effects. But as of now, we’re all clean. We’ve entered a ‘stealth state.’”

After she explained, KIKI frowned. “A disaster flora’s power? But those monsters were right next to us. Even if we broke the connection, shouldn’t we have been remarked immediately?”

“They really did stop attacking.” Chen Sixuan joined them. “And earlier, it was like we were in another world. Totally surreal.”

“No,” Lin Xian said calmly. “That wasn’t another world—that was the original world.”

“Original world?” Ding Junyi’s eyes lit up. “You said something similar the night before the blizzard at Hengshan Pass.”

Lin Xian nodded. “Time-wise, it was probably sunset just now. What we saw— could have been the world before the Abyss fell.”

KIKI and Chen Sixuan quickly understood.

“So we... isolated ourselves from the Abyss?”

“No idea...” Lin Xian was still puzzled. He tried accessing the Hetero-Cube, only to see a pop-up:

[Beep! Conducting non-mechanical reflection detection...] [No signs of dark energy infiltration within the zone. Abyssal forces blocked.]

“Blocked...?”

Stunned, he ran back to the train rooftop. Now linked with the Hetero-Cube, he could faintly see a membrane of light radiating from the Infinite Train’s core— A 3-kilometer-wide shield, covering most of the Joint Convoy’s ring.

Realizing the significance, he shouted:

“Everyone, stop firing! Fall back to the train!”

He rushed to Carriage 1, grabbed the Hetero-Cube, and placed it at the center of the camp’s formation. Only after the faint light dome fully encompassed them did he exhale in relief.

Though most didn’t understand, they followed orders. Combat teams withdrew. The camp compacted.

“Back up—Captain Lin says no gunfire! Don’t alert the monsters!”

“Fall back! Stay quiet!”

Thousands of survivors had no idea what was happening, but Lin Xian had already mounted the Hetero-Cube onto a Thunder Year 2000 UAV, which now hovered at the camp’s heart.

Around them, the dark forest fell eerily silent. Only the crackling trees from the earlier battle remained. Even that fire looked subdued, like viewed through a dark filter—chilled and lifeless.

Inside the field, though, the space felt clear, the icy terror completely gone. It felt like a normal cool night in September—even the air was easier to breathe.

Convoy leaders gathered at the center. Though the battle had stopped, tension remained. In the Abyss, no one knew what might come next.

But everyone now looked to Lin Xian.

“Captain Lin... we’re really in stealth mode?”

“You knew the monsters wouldn’t come back?”

“Thank god you acted when you did. If not, we’d all be dead.”

“Yeah... you saved us.”

Some were even on the verge of worshipping him. In such a nightmare, his leadership was their anchor.

But Lin Xian was helpless inside. His only move had been to hold formation and hunt that monster— Yet ironically, the one that saved them all was the Silver Dragon Ten Thousand Bloom, a plant that had seemed utterly useless until now.

Inwardly, he sighed. Was he unlucky—constantly facing hellish scenarios? Or lucky—because a random plant had become the key to survival?

Though he bore no dark mark, it was as if fear itself had engraved something deeper onto him.

Based on Ding Junyi’s explanation, Lin Xian guessed: The flower's void bloom had purged all darkness and marks from their zone. Then, combined with the Hetero-Cube’s shield, it had made their circular camp effectively invisible within the Abyss.

The theory sounded absurd even to him. But right now? It was the only explanation.

And so, just moments after a bloody, frenzied battle, the battlefield around the train had fallen into a surreal, unsettling—

Silence.