Chapter 72#

Gears of Fate 14#

Yu Feichen and Murphy on the train didn’t have a good time.

After loading a full car of ore, the train slowed considerably. This caused problems when going through curves and steep slopes—it could no longer pass quickly like before. It transformed from a roller coaster into a climbing vine. The ore crashed against the grating with thunderous noise. Centrifugal force wasn’t enough to pin them to the wall. Sometimes they had to move to the same corner to avoid falling in the engine room.

During the first move to the same corner, Murphy pursed his lips and said: “Keep your distance from me.”

Yu Feichen replied sincerely: “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

The second time, because they were mutually disgusted and pulled too far apart, they missed the optimal balance position. Murphy hit his head on a horizontal bar, and Yu Feichen got burned by the furnace’s heat.

From the third time onward, they finally found a suitable safe distance. The train slowly flipped within the mechanical world. Finally, it regained stability and entered a pitch-black horizontal tunnel.

Exiting the tunnel, they arrived at a gigantic space filled with thick smoke. The vault here was extremely high. Due to accumulated steam and smoke, it resembled a continuous snowy white sea of clouds. The ceiling had hundreds of chimney and air duct-like exits. Smoke poured out of the circular ducts, forming large and small dense white vortexes. The entire ceiling presented an eerie yet magnificent scene in stark contrast to the dark, cold machinery below. Further down, the middle and bottom sections were crisscrossed with conveyor track networks.

Surveying the landscape, thousands of the “magic furnaces” they’d seen in the classroom stood here. The pitch-black furnaces stood like forest gravestones amid the smoke, their surrounding machinery roaring like strange winds.

Only after seeing this scene did Yu Feichen understand that what they’d seen in the classroom was merely the upper half of the magic furnace—the section that discharged products. Now the entire train was at the very bottom of the furnace, where raw materials entered.

The train slowly tilted. The door of the first car opened, and ore rolled into the nearby conveyor belt below. The belt slowly transported them into various magic furnaces.

The middle section was the furnace’s product outlet. After a roar, one of the magic furnaces near them spewed out freshly baked red-black crystals.

This roar caught their attention. Yu Feichen looked toward it and suddenly stopped.

—Through the white smoke, in front of the central platform of that magic furnace, several hazy humanoid figures suddenly stood up.

These shadows resembled people but weren’t quite, because their movements were extremely stiff and their limbs grotesquely abnormal. Yet from a distance, every one of them wore the same long coat, with two arms and two legs.

The style of the long coat was even…

Yu Feichen glanced down at his own clothing to confirm it was the same.

Then those figures crouched in front of the crystal pile and began methodically sorting crystals from the heap, placing them on conveyor belts. Countless conveyor belts crisscrossed the vast space, transporting red-black crystals to places concealed by thick fog.

Due to the abundance of magic furnaces, the temperature here was extremely high. Upon arrival, the glass windows fogged up immediately, making many things unclear.

Just then, the ore from the first car finished dumping. The train returned to horizontal position, moved forward by one car length, and tilted again to dump the ore from the second car onto the conveyor belt.

Yu Feichen’s brows furrowed tightly. He exited through the slatted gate and looked out through the open first car door—

In the endless forest of magic furnaces, countless platforms concealed countless mechanical dummies with stiff movements. Each wore the academy’s uniform and mechanically sorted crystals when the furnace discharged products, classifying them.

Were they also visitors from the outside world?

Or, to phrase it differently, were those figures… people?

Murphy also came here and similarly observed those figures.

Yu Feichen said: “I intend to go over there.”

Murphy: “I’ll go. You stay.”

Yu Feichen felt like he was watching a dog speak human language. A man who wanted to kill him half an hour ago now volunteered to venture into danger instead. Truly, fragment worlds contained every oddity.

“Pardon me,” Yu Feichen said, “do you possess any power beyond this body?”

Murphy: “No. All the power I once gained in the eternal night was returned to the Tower of Genesis when I became an official.”

Yu Feichen: “Then I suggest you stay here.”

Murphy’s tone was flat, but clearly reluctant: “Protecting the members of paradise is my duty to fulfill.”

Yu Feichen spoke the truth: “I don’t want to be dragged down by you.”

With that, he descended from the car. There was no knowing when the train would move to the next location—time couldn’t be wasted on bickering. Exiting the first car, he immediately made his way to the conveyor belt. With a light leap, he landed on a piece of ore on the belt. The belt pulled the ore forward at extreme speed. Just as it neared the furnace’s maw-like opening, Yu Feichen climbed up to grip the furnace’s rim stone, rolled over it, then climbed along the entire furnace body like a ghost. The furnace was massive, but few places offered leverage. Murphy had also exited the train and pointed out a few directions from below to help.

Yu Feichen quickly reached the central platform. The mechanical dummies showed no reaction to his arrival and continued working mechanically. Up close, he finally saw their full appearance.

—The uniforms remained uniforms, only now they were tattered and worn. The hands and necks exposed beneath the uniforms were many times thinner than normal human limbs, with a metallic sheen. The joints were connected by gears, as if beneath the uniform lived a metal skeleton. Looking at the face—it was a metal ellipsoid with grayish-white eyes.

This certainly couldn’t be called human, but rather mechanical dummies.

Yu Feichen saw what he wanted to see. Without wasting further time, he rapidly returned.

The moment he landed, the train emitted a whistle that only sounded before departure!

He couldn’t rely on the conveyor belt’s speed for the return. Yu Feichen took a deep breath and sprinted toward the train at the maximum speed this body could achieve!

Smoke began rolling from the train’s front. He drew closer to the car door. The train began slowly moving forward—unexpectedly, Murphy hadn’t returned to the safety of the engine room but stood near the first car’s door, pulling Yu Feichen forcefully inside the moment he arrived!

Yu Feichen safely returned to the train. Back in the engine room, he briefly described what he’d seen.

“They are people forever left in the fragment. The lives of the deceased collapse into pure power. Those who remain long are eroded and assimilated into this world’s substance according to the rules governing it. Both methods are how fragments acquire power,” Murphy said. “If we don’t escape in time, we’ll become like them too.”

Reaching this point, he continued as if talking to himself: “Resurrection day… not much time left. Must escape before then. I don’t know the time ratio between this world and paradise.”

Today was their third day in this world. Time in a fragment world of life and death uncertainty always seemed extraordinarily long. Murphy muttered about “resurrection day,” wanting to return to paradise before it arrived.

Whether they could make resurrection day in time—Yu Feichen harbored no strong desire about it, since the only significance resurrection day held for him was seemingly catching a glimpse of that so-called supreme deity’s true form.

The train continued through pitch-black tunnels on the following stretch. The two of them maintained the distance strangers should keep, though they exchanged a few more words. Because Yu Feichen suddenly discovered that compared to the evasive Claros, Murphy was practically a question-answering machine dispensing science.

Yu Feichen: “After deconstructing this world, it becomes the supreme deity’s property?”

“Yes,” Murphy said. “Fragment worlds are littered with white bones. Batch after batch of innocent people are captured. Even those fortunate enough to escape cannot fundamentally affect this world unless aided by greater power to deconstruct it. Once deconstructed, it can never again harvest innocent lives in the eternal night… this is one of the meanings behind establishing paradise.”

In everyone’s accounts, gods are pure, kind, and compassionate toward all people—whether under their rule or not.

Yet fragment worlds capture people, and paradise captures fragment worlds. The two seem without hierarchy, merely with more grandiose justifications.

Yu Feichen: “Don’t gods acquire power through both methods—killing and assimilation?”

Deconstructing fragment worlds, claiming complete worlds. Beneath the appearance of grace and gospel, gods obtain endless power from the eternal night.

“Is that how you see Him?” A faint light streamed in, and the tearful expression reappeared on Murphy’s face. “That’s only because you don’t understand Him… you will never know. If you’d seen the deity at the beginning, you wouldn’t speak like this. You are that kind of person… why…”

This person’s speech became as fragmented as his mental state once more.

They stopped talking afterward. The magic furnace workshop was the first stop. The train took them to three more similar locations—also called “workshops,” because they featured strange machinery similar to the furnaces, also using the gray ore from the train as raw material, with many mechanical dummies working numbly.

The second workshop produced papyrus. The third produced the friction metal used on conveyor belt surfaces, with black ink as waste product.

The fourth was extraordinarily strange. This place had only one production facility—a pitch-black disk, yet it consumed half a train car of ore. During the train’s stop, the two stared straight at the disk’s lower section until all the ore was unloaded, finally seeing a single drop of pure white liquid fall from the disk’s outlet into a tray inscribed with strange patterns on the ground.

After touring all four workshops, the train brought them back to the classroom entrance. Apparently, the train’s work for the day was complete.

—But the people in the classroom still hadn’t finished their lessons. So all that remained for Yu Feichen and Murphy was endless silence and awkwardness. Until finally, Anphiel and the others’ figures appeared in the corridor, Yu Feichen felt a sense of relief.