Chapter 76#

Gears of Fate 18#

When the hour hand became perpendicular to the ground, class ended. They submitted their notes to the tray and walked out together. The moment they left this only somewhat normal human classroom with desks and blackboard, the mechanical world’s cold silence enveloped everything again.

The loudspeaker bid them farewell with a sweet voice.

“I won’t call you a stupid loudspeaker anymore,” Chen Tong muttered. “As long as you let us all pass.”

No one knew if today’s notes would be graded as passing or failing. It was perhaps lonely, but definitely not merciful to outsiders. However, they’d written everything they could write, and their mindset remained relatively calm. Walking toward the train, Xue Xin even half-joked: “We took history class today. Tomorrow won’t be a civics and morals class, right? I don’t want to write essays.”

Yu Feichen was thinking about a different problem. After this lesson, he already understood the entire dungeon’s mechanism and origins. Even if dragged into the system space now, he could deconstruct it almost completely. Yet he still hadn’t figured out how to leave.

By rights, fragment dungeon escapes could involve accidentally finding an exit path without successful deconstruction. But this situation shouldn’t be like now—already understanding how to deconstruct but not knowing how to leave.

Lillia sat in her seat, her eyes full of confusion: “Do we have to find the fortress’s product and help it achieve its wish? But how would we find that?”

The people in the car fell into thought. After a brief silence, Yu Feichen said: “No.”

The so-called product couldn’t actually be found, nor needed to be.

The mechanical fortress wasn’t like the holy son from the previous dungeon with clear consciousness. For such a fragment, the missing product was like a homeland that could never be returned to. Even if they handed the product over, it wouldn’t recognize it anymore. It had lost the material supply, lost the manufacturing process, understood that maintaining operation was its only survival path. What remained was only that kind of forlorn melancholy.

As he fastened the safety restraint, locking himself in the seat, Yu Feichen glanced out the window at the mechanical corridors spinning emptily.

Fragment worlds were like this. People were too. For instance, himself. He often didn’t know what he was seeking, wandering through these worlds. Perhaps that thing didn’t exist at all. He only possessed the desire to seek something—like a ship adrift on a turbulent ocean yearning for a navigation route.

The only difference was he’d encountered Anphiel again, thereby recovering something approximating a homeland. This feeling was difficult to describe. His heart, previously drifting, suddenly found solid ground. In this silent, eerie non-human dungeon, he surprisingly felt at peace.

Anphiel noticed his gaze and turned to look. Yu Feichen thought this person perhaps mistook him for worrying about his motion sickness. Otherwise, why would he gently place his right hand on Yu Feichen’s left hand as comfort?

Not really. His standard for Anphiel had already lowered to simply: as long as he didn’t die.

His thoughts returned to the dungeon. There had to be something he hadn’t noticed.

The train stopped at the corridor entrance. Yu Feichen thought for a moment and decided not to return. He would continue following the train to other parts of the fortress.

“But you haven’t eaten dinner,” Anphiel’s eyes, glazed from dizziness, spoke seriously nonetheless.

Dinner was certainly lost—by the time they went back and forth in the dormitory corridor, the train had already left. But not consuming that “energy” meant unpredictable consequences. Yu Feichen weighed the options and decided to stay on the train.

The curriculum’s difficulty had already progressed from “super simple” to “very difficult.” They didn’t have much time left. He refused others’ requests to go together. This was risky—no need for more people.

Before leaving, he removed his badge to give to Anphiel. But Anphiel didn’t take it.

“Don’t remove it,” Anphiel said to Yu Feichen. “I’ve written some protective spells inside.”

Yu Feichen was somewhat surprised. After his surprise passed, he put the badge back on, thinking this treatment was quite good.

The goodbye was brief. Yu Feichen went to the engine room early. Soon his companions’ figures disappeared into the corridor. The train’s whistle gave a long cry, the car shuddered, and it left the corridor entrance.

Yu Feichen easily found a fixed position and looked out the window, planning to let the train take him to new places.

However, the scenery passing outside became increasingly familiar until a memorable steel wheel crossed the window—Yu Feichen confirmed: this was the same old route he’d traveled before.

The old route ended. The train slowed and stopped before the familiar fortress gates. The gates opened, and boulders rolled down and filled the cars. In the deafening crashes, Yu Feichen watched them expressionlessly.

How was this different from what he and Murphy experienced yesterday?

The return visit ended quickly. The train, filled with ore, drove toward the same familiar routes. Predictably, another round of revisiting was about to begin—he would first reach the first workshop producing red-black crystals, then workshops two, three, and four. Finally returning to the dormitory entrance. He would see nothing new.

When the locomotive roared and stopped in the first workshop’s furnace forest, Yu Feichen, rarely, looked back at his previous experiences.

He wasn’t a cautious person. He was even someone who didn’t mind taking risks. In the past, he’d risked many times, and these risks had yielded results exceeding expectations. They had value. This risk, however, seemed like… loneliness.

If he hadn’t taken this trip, the hot water bottle would have self-evidently snuggled against his chest by now.

The car tilted. Ore rolled from the car door onto the conveyor belt. Yu Feichen watched the slowly advancing belt. They would be sent to different furnaces, the fortress assimilating outside power into structures it could control—becoming red-black crystals, then the fortress’s motive force. After these crystals were exhausted, new outside ore was invested. Just as after humans were exhausted, new outside visitors continued to supply them.

No new routes. No new things. The train traveled this fixed track, day after day, cycle after cycle.

When “cycle after cycle” formed in Yu Feichen’s mind, Anphiel’s words suddenly manifested ghostlike at his ear.

The second path: finding what it lacks compared to complete worlds.

What was missing hinted at the escape route—

Yu Feichen froze. His breathing and heartbeat seemed to stop momentarily. A thought tore through the dark night like brilliant lightning.

In that instant, he suddenly understood everything.

The train’s route had only one path, oscillating between gates, workshops, dormitories, and classrooms. What controlled everything was merely a cycle.

Why had he thought the evening train would drive a new route?

—Why was there an evening at all?

The fortress was eternally sealed, lights perpetually bright. This place had no distinction between day and night. So-called night was merely the humans’ sleep period. A human’s day was one day-night cycle, but for the fortress, it had already passed two cycles.

What was missing wasn’t night—it was time.

In the loudspeaker’s broadcast, the markers for class start and end weren’t time points but when the clock face’s sole hand became perpendicular to the ground. The measure of a magic furnace producing a batch of products wasn’t two hours but how many degrees the hour hand had moved. The mechanical fortress had no time scale. Indeed, for machinery, time didn’t exist in the world at all—they only cared about what fraction of a cycle had progressed.

A train loaded with ore marked the start of a small cycle.

New outside visitors entering the fortress marked the start of a large cycle.

Humans walked through time. Each moment differed from the last. Time was the invisible force pushing these changes.

But machinery didn’t recognize time. What drove their progression and cyclical rotation was a visible thing hidden among billions of precisely meshing gears.

The so-called “hour hand” was merely an illusion floating on the face—beneath the watch face, the gears equally rotating controlled the hand’s movement.

A bold plan filled with unknowns formed gradually in Yu Feichen’s mind.

Simultaneously, weightlessness and numbness gradually spread through his body.

It was a strange feeling—not hunger, not exhaustion, like life had become a tangible substance slowly leaking from his body—energy insufficient.

This was the consequence of not eating dinner.

The train’s journey continued. The power-depleted sensation grew more intense. Yu Feichen retreated to a safe corner of the engine room, deliberately slowed his breathing to conserve energy. Yet the act of gripping fixed objects and preventing himself from being thrown from the train still consumed his dwindling power rapidly. In the end, only willpower allowed him to grip the handle.

His limbs were cold and stiff; his vision became blurred. But it was manageable. Yu Feichen’s standard for himself was simple: as long as he didn’t die.

The train slowly stopped before the dormitory corridor. Yu Feichen disembarked. The corridor didn’t look familiar. It was drastically different—gears and metal plates crisscrossed, leaving only a dark narrow gap.

If there were a mirror, Yu Feichen had no doubt he’d look identical to the dizzied Anphiel. When power-depleted, the brain approached shutdown too. He slowly remembered that during human sleep time, the module containing the dormitory had been integrated into other functional operations as part of the mechanical whole.

But… it should be nearly time to return.

Rapidly depleting energy and darkening vision constantly reminded Yu Feichen he wasn’t far from death. The crystalline, translucent blood-salt heart quietly manifested, gripped in his palm. After becoming a reward item, it had become much smaller.

If anything unexpected occurred, he would choose to restore to perfect condition. But luck favored him. Though the corridor had become a dangerous gap, it was indeed nearing complete return. Walking along the gap, he reached the semi-formed hall, successfully finding his dormitory door.

Badge near the dormitory door, the mechanical door silently slid open. Everything before his eyes was hazy and blurred like illusion. From the doorway angle, Yu Feichen first saw the desk with a half-cup of energy liquid on it—left by Anphiel, he presumed. At that moment, he felt a peculiar pleasant sensation emerge in his chest.

He shifted his gaze toward the room’s center, and through the unclear vision, a person appeared who shouldn’t be in this dormitory.

Murphy.

And not a standing Murphy.

The chestnut-haired young man was half-kneeling before a high-backed chair. Yu Feichen recalled religious rituals from some worlds—if the chair held someone, this posture would allow one to lower their head and kiss the power ring on that person’s finger.

Sensing the movement at the door, Murphy raised his head. That beautiful face didn’t have time to compose itself, still draped in mist-like tenderness and melancholy, eye corners faintly red, tear-stained.

Yu Feichen’s gaze moved expressionlessly from his face. Toward the high-backed chair with its back to him. Silent all around, his visual focus gradually rose, everything else blurred.

Only one thing remained clear—a few strands of slightly curled long hair.