My Apocalypse Train

Translator: AnubisTL

The Doomsday Abyss plunged nearly six thousand meters deep. At that depth, sunlight barely reached the bottom. In the darkness, beneath the deafening DJ music, slaves relentlessly swung their picks, striking Iron Ore.

"..."

Chen Mang walked alone to the edge of the Abyss, reaching out to touch its wall, lost in thought.

The cliff face was perfectly vertical.

Or rather, it was unnervingly precise—exactly ninety degrees.

The cross-section was impossibly smooth, whether rock or soil. It looked as though someone had cleaved it with a single, perfectly vertical stroke.

"I don't remember this Abyss existing before the apocalypse, do you?"

"No," Old Pig nodded. "It definitely wasn't here before. We don't know when it appeared. It's strange, of course, but after the apocalypse, so many bizarre things have happened that this hardly seems surprising."

The Doomsday Abyss stretched for several kilometers, nearly forty meters wide.

Chen Mang had seen abysses before, but he'd never witnessed one with such a perfectly uniform cross-section. This wasn't a natural formation; it was clearly the result of external intervention.

Perhaps...

He looked up at the sliver of sunlight overhead. Could this Abyss truly be a gateway to Hell?

Did he really have to go to Hell to mine and build a Hell Train?

Eighteen carriages in total, each carriage representing a layer of Hell?

Soon—

A day passed, and the time to inspect their labor's fruits finally arrived.

Today's harvest: 1,280 units of Tier 2 Iron Ore.

Everyone had worked incredibly hard.

One unit of Tier 2 Iron Ore is equivalent to ten units of Tier 1 Iron Ore. This means they had collected a total of 12,800 units of Tier 1 Iron Ore today—more than Chen Mang had mined in the wasteland during the previous half-month combined.

This was the allure of Tier 2 Iron Ore, a high-grade resource mine.

The same labor, the same time, but with a far greater yield.

As night fell once more, the bottom of the Abyss was plunged into endless darkness, with only the dim lights inside the train providing a faint glow. Without the Target Acquisition Radar, the thugs would have been virtually useless as guards in such conditions.

Throughout the entire day, the Target Acquisition Radar remained silent, indicating that almost no creatures had approached their location.

Of course, under these circumstances, any radar warning would mean something big was coming.

Without hesitation, they would have to flee immediately.

Just as Chen Mang was preparing to spend all the resources they had gathered that day, he glanced up and saw the starry sky through the narrow strip of sky above. He froze, a look of horror flashing across his eyes as he stared intently at the countless stars overhead.

On the wasteland.

Once night fell, the sky was always ablaze with stars, a sight he had witnessed nearly every night since his arrival.

He had never given it much thought, attributing it to the lack of industrial pollution after the apocalypse or perhaps this planet's naturally clean atmosphere, coupled with the absence of light pollution now that the cities lay in ruins.

But now—

He suddenly realized that if he were at the bottom of the Doomsday Abyss, the stars were no longer random. Looking up, he saw a pattern in the narrow strip of sky above.

Some stars shone alone.

Others clustered together, forming horizontal lines like "——".

There were long lines and short lines.

The stars in the wasteland were unusually dense, like grains of sand on a beach. In the vast expanse of the wasteland, no one would notice this subtle anomaly. But from the bottom of the Doomsday Abyss, focusing his gaze on the narrow strip of sky overhead, he could easily discern the faint irregularity in the starry expanse.

Hidden within the familiar, often overlooked tapestry of stars above, a sequence of stars formed a message in Morse code.

Translated into Latin letters and then into Chinese, the message was simple, consisting of only two sentences:

"Escape the Nayi Star System."

"Five years remaining."

"..."

Chen Mang stepped out of the locomotive cabin and looked up at the twinkling stars overhead, which seemed harmless yet were constantly flashing. For a moment, it felt unreal. Since he had transmigrated to this world, he had integrated relatively smoothly. This world had both Mandarin and English.

He wasn't sure if they had Morse code.

But in his previous life, he had happened to learn it.

He had self-studied many useless things.

The Nayi Star System was the galaxy to which his planet belonged.

Upon seeing the Morse code formed by the stars above, he suddenly seemed to understand the true purpose of the Doomsday Abyss. It wasn't a gateway to Hell, but rather an information reception point—or perhaps an observation window?

Some advanced Civilization was desperately trying to communicate with the inhabitants of his planet.

The Doomsday Abyss existed for this very reason. Its periodic tremors might be a way to draw attention to it, and the high-grade resource mine at its bottom might be a lure to attract people.

Just perhaps this advanced civilization never considered how difficult it would be for humans to reach the bottom of the Abyss. They had tried their best to convey information in a way their planet could understand, yet it remained difficult to truly comprehend their civilization. It was like humans failing to understand why ants endlessly circle a line drawn on a piece of paper.

Huuu

After a long while, Chen Mang lit a cigarette in the night wind, leaning against the train. He withdrew his gaze, feeling the unsettling silence and darkness that enveloped him.

It had been over a year since the apocalypse.

He didn't know if the information encoded in the constellation had changed. In other words, he had no idea how much time remained in the five-year window—whether it was five years from now or if tomorrow would be the last day.

But all that information was too distant.

Humans shouldn't dwell on matters too far removed from their immediate reality; it could easily trap them in a sense of insignificance.

At least one thing was clear:

If their true goal was to escape the Nayi Star System, this train was their only hope, their only means—for them and their entire Civilization. There was no other way. After the apocalypse struck, all technological development across the entire Civilization was forcibly halted.

To flee this planet, they had only the train to rely on.

Chen Mang leaned against the train, gazing down at the crimson light flickering at his fingertips. He felt as though he had grasped something, but when he tried to piece it together, it remained elusive.

Perhaps...

This apocalypse wasn't just the end of this planet.

It was the end of the entire galaxy, perhaps even the entire cosmos.

In this apocalypse, the train was the only means for Civilization to endure.

And whether it was the train itself, its components, or resource mines, all were products of a higher civilization. Like Noah's Ark in the hands of God, they were the only tickets to escape the apocalypse, presented in an almost gamified form to make them more accessible.

Just like the Morse code flashing above the Doomsday Abyss.

(End of the Chapter)

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