Chapter 22: The Roadblock The world outside the driver’s cabin was a smear of gray and green. Clack-clack. Clack-clack. The rhythm of the rails was the only steady thing left. Seven kept his hands on the controls, but his mind was elsewhere. Cataloguing. The silent, corpse-strewn city was behind them. Now it was just overgrown fields and broken hills. Too quiet. In his experience, quiet was just the pause before the screaming started. His eyes—Lin Xian’s eyes, he kept having to remind himself—flicked upward. The sky over the dead city was still visible in the distance, dominated by that impossible, immovable cloud layer. It didn’t look like weather. It looked like a lid. Or a shell. Something’s in there, he thought, his new instincts humming. Something that makes zombies look like playground bullies. The old him, the one who’d just woken up in this meat-sack, might have felt awe.

Chapter 24: Desperate Fight to the Death CRUNCH. Seven’s head snapped sideways, the world tilting on its axis. He tasted iron. Felt the grit of riverbed stones grinding into his cheek. He was on his back, a crushing weight pinning his chest—a writhing mass of pale, fleshy ropes. Tentacles. His mind, cold and clear despite the fireworks in his skull, cataloged the data. Four of them. Strong. Grip like industrial cable. User: Male. Overweight. Face twisted in savage glee. Not a monster. Worse. A man who’d gotten power and liked using it. “Gotcha, you little rat!” the man snarled, spittle flying. His breath stank of rot and cheap liquor. The instinct to survive wasn’t an emotion for Seven. It was a protocol. A subroutine that overrode pain, fear, hesitation. He’d run it before, in darker places than this. His body went limp. Not surrender. Conservation. The man—Liu Wei, the name floated up from the borrowed memories—leered, thinking he’d won. A fatal mistake. Seve

Chapter 26: Scavenger RulesKRAK.The sound wasn’t outside. It was inside his own skull. A fracture line of pure, white-hot pain splitting the darkness behind his eyes.Seven’s eyes snapped open.He was on a mattress. It was soft. Too soft. The air smelled like fake flowers and sweat. A weight pressed against his side—warm, breathing, human.Not my bed. Not my room. Not my… anything.Memory slammed into him like a freight train. The last world, screaming. The cold void between. The system’s flat, toneless offer. The name it gave him to wear: Lin Xian.He discarded it immediately. He was Seven. Mo Seven. A Null. A ghost with a number.He lay perfectly still, letting the new data stream in. The faint, consistent rumble beneath him. The rhythmic clack-clack of metal on metal. A train. He was on a moving train. The body he wore was bruised but whole, muscles humming with a strange, foreign vitality. Superhuman. The term floated up from the leftover scraps of Lin Xian’s memories. Right. Th