Chapter 527

Claudia, Mianyue, and Wanli Fengdao's bodies all lay flat against the wall, their lungs completely empty.

Li Cheng reached out and closed their eyelids, took a deep breath, and stood upright.

He swapped in Wanli Fengdao's bottled lung, held a four-dimensional box in his left hand, an ice pick in his right, and had two high-pressure gas cylinders clipped to his waist, each gauge showing less than 50% gas remaining.

It was time to move.

Li Cheng took a deep breath and stepped into the tunnel.

The surrounding air was thick and stagnant, pressure visibly elevated, his brain stabbing and numbing as if plunged into ice water.

This numbness stemmed directly from the laws of Dreamland, unrelated to actual atmospheric pressure; even if Li Cheng donned a pressure suit, it could not alter or reverse it.

He advanced slowly along the tunnel wall, the digits on his Casio F91W wristwatch visibly speeding up before his eyes.

Clang-clang-clang.

The hammering ahead grew clearer; Li Cheng gasped heavily, changed his gait—from lifting his feet to drag them along the ground—slowed thinking delayed motor commands from the brain,

lifting the foot left it suspended in air for too long, so dragging it saved energy.

His limbs grew heavier, double vision appeared; Li Cheng decisively removed his left lung and replaced it with a new gas cylinder.

Found it.

The astronaut faced away from Li Cheng, gripping an ice pick, striking the metal dome with steady, rhythmic force.

The ice pick's blade reflected a faint arc of light—not radioactive luminescence, but the glow of high-frequency vibration cutting.

Metal fragments rattled down; the astronaut sensed movement behind him, glanced over at Li Cheng, then turned back and kept swinging. Inside his suit, the speaker emitted a calm voice: "Only you left?"

His suit was more advanced, better at maintaining pressure differential; to Li Cheng's ears, the words sounded sped up by double.

"Only me."

Li Cheng nodded, already prepared—he did not open his mouth, mimicked Wil's motion, rotated the ice pick's handle to the designated setting, activated high-frequency cutting mode, and began swinging at the wall,

while simultaneously using the assembled doll's built-in AI broadcast speaker to speak his scripted lines at the same double speed:

"The path to the gold mine leads only to you and me. Ten years from now, your son drives a Bentley to high school; your father-in-law smiles every time he sees you; in 40-degree heat, your villa stays as cool as 20 degrees; you drink Feitian Maotai with breakfast; model mistresses beg to marry you every night—all because you stayed with me and bought the bottom."

"The road to the gold mine is now only between you and me. Ten years from now, your son is driving a Bentley to high school, your father-in-law beams with joy every time he sees you, your villa stays a cool twenty degrees even when it's over forty outside, you drink Feitian Maotai with breakfast, and bikini models and mistresses throw tantrums every night begging you to marry them—all of this simply because you didn't run, and instead bottom-fished with me."

If the astronaut came from Earth, he'd surely retort: "Bro, are you talking about crypto or CS skins?"

The astronaut didn't understand; he kept silently chiseling the wall.

Li Cheng pressed the speaker button again: "So is your current personality Wil—or the Lv40 transcendent from tens of thousands of years ago?"

"That's like asking if an eight-year-old and an eighty-year-old are the same person."

The astronaut paused, then said coldly: "I am both Wil and the Lv40 transcendent you speak of. In your language, my ID is 【Yutian Di】."

Li Cheng raised an eyebrow, chiseling as he casually replied: "So you're a Transformer, huh?"

"What's a 'transformer'? Never heard of it."

The astronaut said indifferently: "The town beneath this dome was my homeland, buried in the farthest corner of the Killing Ground.

I was the smartest engineer of my race, the first to realize our world was dying.

Heat death was inevitable; the only path to survival was to carve through the dome before the end."

He swung the ice pick, shearing off a large slab of metal: "In my final moments, I invented high-frequency vibration cutting, using the ice pick to chip at the dome, excavating tunnels.

I succeeded. The instant the tunnel broke through, air surged violently—the high-pressure gas trapped beneath the dome rushed outward.

All machinery driven by pressure differentials restarted. The villagers' brain blades resumed high-speed rotation.

All the machines driven by air-pressure differentials started up once more. The vanes in the townsfolk's brains likewise resumed their high-speed operation.

Brains already reset could not return to normal computation; even with renewed airflow, only zombies awakened."

The topic was too heavy—even Li Cheng didn't joke about "Are robot zombies sweet or savory zongzi?"

Instead, he asked seriously: "Then what?"

The astronaut said calmly: "As the sole survivor of my kind, I sealed the metal dome, wandered endlessly, became a Chosen One, learned of the Killing Ground's existence—and realized my people were likely mechanical races designed, then abandoned and stored by the Killing Ground."

Li Cheng couldn't help asking: "Does the Killing Ground actively create races?"

"Then where do you think those security guards come from?"

The astronaut glanced at him: "I grew stronger, gradually abandoned my original body, became a giant mechanical lifeform powered by nuclear fusion, became what you call Lv40—until my life's end."

Li Cheng's heart stirred; the enemies he'd faced all had increasingly bizarre survival methods.

There was Gouchen, the doll assembler; Joker's Relic Crystal soul-transfer rebirth technique; countless iterations of cloning schemes.

Even Li Cheng himself—if he wanted to cling to life—could upload his consciousness to a server backup using the assembled doll and the Glove of Compassionate Soul-Giving, then import it into a cloned body when needed.

It was hard to imagine an Lv40 transcendent had no last-resort survival method.

He was about to ask, when the astronaut suddenly stopped his chiseling, leaned against the wall, and slowly sat down.

"After I died, perhaps my will was too strong—I split into two parts: one became a mechanical python, the other became the original Wil.

The former followed instinct: hunting, feeding.

The latter returned repeatedly to Dreamland, relived childhood memories, and tried… to rewrite the ending."

The astronaut's speech slowed further; he too was nearing gas depletion, using his still-functional right hand to laboriously swing the ice pick.

"Rewrite?" Li Cheng kept chiseling, stunned: "What do you mean?"

"A Chosen One once told me: Dreamland is… a component of the hidden 【Wish Room】."

The sentence remained unfinished; the astronaut's head drooped, silence fell.

"Leave it to me."

Li Cheng removed his last high-pressure gas cylinder from his waist, replaced his empty right lung, picked up Wil's ice pick, and swung both in unison, striking hard.

Metal shards flew; only Li Cheng's heavy breathing remained.

Fifty centimeters, one meter, two meters.

Crushed debris piled higher beneath his feet; breathing grew as labored as a torn bellows.

Four meters, six meters.

His mind spun out of control, wandering at random, as if he had eaten half-cooked mushrooms, and all manner of bizarre, phantasmagoric visions floated before his eyes.

*New Three Kingdoms* was voted the greatest TV drama of the twenty-first century; Optimus Prime was arrested on charges of soliciting prostitution after hailing a ride-hailing car on a phone app; the principal, to spare the self-esteem of students who couldn't afford spiked running shoes, scattered nails all over the track.

This was not a hallucination from exhaustion, but the result of unstable air pressure causing the blades in his brain to spin out of order.

The ice axe fell heavily, his limbs had not a scrap of strength left, Li Cheng's head tipped forward, pressed against the seemingly never-penetrable metal wall, and his body slowly slid down.

Clang, clang, clang—

From behind the dome, a sudden dense sound of hammering rang out; a strong light illuminated the darkness, stabbing Li Cheng's retinas.

In his blurred vision, the liquid metal of the grey rain slipped through the narrow crack, entered the tunnel, and gently propped him up.

The pressure balance shattered in an instant; a raging gale swept from the castle into the tunnel, curved around Li Cheng's body, and blew into the beach world behind the crack, where the average air pressure was even lower.

The pressure gauges on both the left and right air tanks at his lungs had dropped to zero, but Li Cheng no longer needed to breathe. He spread his arms and let the gale pour through his windpipe and flood into his brain.