2026-03-01 16:51:41
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Chapter 114. The Underground Casino
The atmosphere inside the cramped workshop was as tense as an interrogation room. Twenty pairs of eyes stared at a loaf of wheat bread sitting on top of a wooden barrel. The bread was already a little stale, its edges slightly burnt, but the smell... that scent of yeast and grain was like a magnet pulling at their guts. In The Rust District, you worked twenty hours straight in front of boiling steam furnaces just to earn a ration tube of synthetic lubricant that tasted like used motor oil mixed with sewer water. Real bread was a myth. And now, this strange man in a tattered suit was offering it for free. The condition? Just guess a number. It was an insult to logic. A violation of cosmic law in Aethelgard. "Determinism Law, Article 04-A..." muttered the man with the single mechanical eye, his body trembling. Cold sweat trickled past the dirty camera lens embedded in his face. "There is no result without cause. No reward without labor. This... this is a trap." "
Chapter 113. The Rusted
The steam pipe tunnel was narrow, scorching hot, and smelled like a bus exhaust mixed with dried blood. Oliver crawled behind the filthy girl ahead of him. Every so often, bursts of hot steam hissed from leaking valves, scorching what remained of his already shredded white shirt. But he didn’t complain. After being chased by homicidal calculator robots up above, this suffocating tunnel felt like a five-star hotel. “Can you move a little faster, Variable X?” the girl whispered. Her voice was restrained, but the sharpness in her tone remained. She glanced back over her shoulder. Her left eye, replaced with a mechanical lens salvaged from an old camera, rotated to focus on Oliver’s face in the darkness. Whirrr... click. “I just fell out of the sky, got chased by scrap-can maniacs, and nearly got a hole drilled through my shoulder,” Oliver replied flatly. His right hand, glowing with golden light, flickered softly and provided a faint source of illumination in the dark
Chapter 112. Variable X
The four drill-tipped spears spun at insane speed, releasing a violent hum that made the air around them vibrate. They were only five centimeters away from Oliver’s chest, throat, spine, and kidney. An absolute attack. Mathematically, there was no opening to evade it. If this were chess, Oliver had already been checkmated three moves ago. “Muscle calculation...” Oliver whispered. His glowing golden eyes tracked the spinning drills as if time itself had slowed. “You’re reading my intentions from the tension in my muscle fibers, huh?” The Gear Knight in front of him gave no answer. Its drill continued forward, aiming straight for Oliver’s heart. But Oliver possessed one thing that didn’t rely on muscles. Something that obeyed neither physics nor the biomechanical laws of this mechanical world. He had Glitch. At the very last millisecond before the drill tore through his white shirt, Oliver didn’t jump. He didn’t duck. He didn’t block. He disappeared.
Chapter 111. Falling Into the Machine
The sky was a deep shade of purple, like a bruise on the skin of a god that had just gotten the hell beaten out of it. And from the center of that cosmic bruise, a black-and-gold portal exploded open. "FUUUUCK!" Oliver's scream overpowered the howl of the wind. He shot out of the portal like a cannonball, free-falling toward the ground hundreds of meters below. "Hey, Lady! Ever heard of using a parachute?!" Oliver shouted at the purple sky. The wind slammed against his face, making the black suit freshly rendered by Lady Luck's system whip violently around him. The land beneath him started coming into focus. But it wasn't soil. It wasn't asphalt. It wasn't ocean. It was a Machine. A colossal city made entirely of bronze gears, brass pipes, and towering steam spires. There were no roads, only conveyor rails and iron bridges connecting one gigantic gear to another. Everything rotated. Everything moved against everything else. But strangely... it all sound
Chapter 110. The New Hand
The sound of the shuffling made no sense. Srrrtt... Srrrtt... Srrrtt... Normally, when you shuffle playing cards, they sound crisp, like stiff paper snapping against itself. But in Lady Luck’s hands, the sound was more like cosmic tides crashing against the shore of existence. Every time her slender fingers, polished with dark crimson nail lacquer, bent the deck, Oliver could hear the echoes of billions of civilizations breathing, warring, and dying. Oliver leaned back against the plush leather chair. His silver, half-glitched eyes studied the cards carefully. They were not paper. They were Reality. Every nearly transparent card contained an entire galaxy. In one, Oliver saw a swirling green nebula orbiting a planet made of steel. In another, he saw a massive continent floating above the clouds. In yet another, a cyberpunk city drowned beneath endless acid rain. “One deck, infinite possibilities,” Lady Luck said. Her voice was smooth as silk, but it car
Chapter 109. Meeting at the Crossroads
Time is a joke that stopped being funny a long time ago. Oliver had stopped counting his steps after he hit seven million. Or maybe seven hundred thousand. His glitching brain had already started refusing to store useless data. He dragged his feet across an endless ocean of white pixel-sand. Above him stretched a sky with no end in sight. There was no sun to mark day or night. Only a gray static glow that made his eyes ache. Every so often, he passed floating dimensional doors suspended in the air. A door to a Cyberpunk world. A door to a Steampunk world. A door to a universe where the sky burned neon green. But he did not dare touch those doors anymore. He was done being rejected, slammed around, and banned by local universal IPs. "Cosmic homeless man," Oliver muttered with a dry laugh. His voice came out hoarse and fractured, echoing softly inside his own skull. "Lucyan really knew how to deliver a fucked-up ending. Death would've been way better than walking on this white t
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