Pei Yongxin strapped the holographic projector camera to his head, adjusted the signal, and left the lead car to inspect the other carriages. He could clearly feel the train vibrating, rising and falling like a boat on water. The speed was steadily decreasing, and it would come to a complete stop in a few minutes, but Pei Yongxin's pace was as usual.
Weapons were deactivated, and the soldiers sat by the windows, their faces tense, watching the scenery outside. Their expressions were like prisoners of war who had surrendered their arms, waiting for the enemy to decide their fate.
"The rescue team is on its way. Everyone, tidy up your appearance. Those who are sweating, go wash your faces. I'm inspecting each carriage now. Anyone found to be slovenly will do push-ups back at the base," Pei Yongxin shouted through the broadcast, holding the microphone.
The soldiers busied themselves, tidying their uniforms and washing their faces.
The tension on many faces vanished instantly, like prisoners of war being marched off to hard labor; at least they wouldn't be shot before the labor ended.
Pei Yongxin walked forward slowly, his heart pounding at the sight outside the train.
All the windows were covered in blue. The blue was countless toads, clinging tightly to the glass without a single gap. The entire train seemed to have sunk to the bottom of the sea at dusk. From the outside, the entire train must have transformed into a toad hill, with dozens or hundreds of tons of toads piled up majestically on it. Toads from both sides kept jumping up, and toads kept losing their grip and falling off. The outside was filled with rumbling sounds as countless toads writhed.
Occasionally, a toad would explode, spraying blood out of a window, crushed by its own kind. Pei Yongxin stopped at a window for a few minutes, watching as some toads' heads bulged, their eyeballs protruded and slowly became bloodshot, their yellow eyes quickly turning blood red, and then, with a pop, they exploded like crushed cherry tomatoes, turning into blind toads.
"Officer!" a female soldier said, her expression fearful. "If the toads keep increasing, will the train windows..."
She didn't dare to finish. Everyone was extremely tense at this moment; who would dare to say anything ominous?
If the window glass broke, countless toads would flood in, filling the entire carriage like liquid, drowning and crushing everyone. If they could crush the window glass, they could certainly crush the bones of everyone inside, and eventually, all the bodies would look like they had been run over by a steamroller.
"Relax, these window panes can't even be blown open by a mortar," Pei Yongxin said calmly. "If you want to get a toad inside, shoot at the window for half an hour first."
After a jolt, the train finally stopped. The entire carriage was buried by toads, and the situation outside was completely unknown.
Pei Yongxin suddenly had a strange feeling.
The sense of time disappeared.
The expressions of the other soldiers in the carriage also became peculiar, as if they vaguely sensed something.
Pei Yongxin returned to the lead car to check the control console.
The situation on the screen hadn't changed.
He clicked on the screen, wanting to view the pressure data for each carriage.
He clicked, but the screen didn't respond.
Pei Yongxin clicked repeatedly, waited for a minute, and a small "Loading" circle popped up on the screen.
He frowned. He had never seen this happen before. The network speed of military equipment was incredibly fast, loading in milliseconds.
Pei Yongxin took out his phone and called the division commander.
A bizarre thing happened. The phone, which normally unlocked in half a second, took a minute to open.
It was as if the signals for all electronic devices had frozen.
Pei Yongxin suddenly thought of something and let go of his phone, dropping it.
The phone hit the ground with a clatter, without any delay.
Pei Yongxin didn't pick up the phone. That feeling suddenly intensified – the sense of time had vanished.
...
Above Meteorite Star, a Nebula-class spaceship.
The bathroom light was on, and the sound of rushing water could be heard. The glass was covered in a layer of steam, revealing only the blurry figures of two people inside, one leaning against the edge of the bathtub, the other standing behind.
On the marble countertop outside the bathroom, a phone suddenly rang.
"Whose is it?" Cen Yemeng's voice.
"Mine, probably," Jiang Ye's voice.
The bathroom door opened, and Jiang Ye walked out, panting, and picked up the phone. "Hello? Hmm? Okay."
"What's wrong, husband?" Cen Yemeng asked.
"Something very strange has happened," Jiang Ye said. "I'm not washing anymore. I'm going to the study to take a look first."
Jiang Ye went into the drying room, dried himself with warm air, and then put on a bathrobe and headed for the study.
Cen Yemeng soon followed, wearing a white silk bathrobe, and naturally sat on her husband's lap, hugging one of his arms like a koala clinging to a tree.
The couple read the urgent letter from Meteorite Star together. The sender was a female division commander stationed at the capital city's station.
[To the Commander, I am reporting a bizarre situation. I am currently in a state of extreme shock and may express myself incoherently. Please forgive me, Commander. I will submit a more detailed report later, and the relevant investigation team is also working on it.]
[At 4:40 AM today, the No. 6 armed train departed the capital city's defense perimeter and proceeded at full speed along the railway line, carrying out its daily mission, which is to clear beast tides and repair the railway.]
[At 5:50 AM, the No. 6 train activated its "Poison War" mode. Simultaneously, the train's officer, Pei Yongxin, contacted me, stating that a blue toad-like creature, about the size of a human head, had ambushed the train from the grass, and its sheer numbers had completely covered the train. I immediately dispatched a rescue team of 60 flap-wing aircraft equipped with flamethrowers to provide support.]
[At my request, Pei Yongxin also used a holographic projector camera to film the situation inside the entire train. The soldiers were all in normal condition, and the train windows were covered with blue toads. The filming was interrupted at 6:18 AM, and the signal was still normal at this time.]
[By 6:20 AM, the train's signal suddenly disappeared.]
[We used various means to contact the No. 6 train, and a very strange thing happened. We could access the No. 6 train's signal, but upon connecting, there was no response at all. It felt as if the No. 6 train had become a vegetative state; you could feel its pulse, know it was alive, but it wouldn't respond when you spoke to it. The entire train had become a corpse with body heat and respiration.]
[At 7:00 AM, the rescue team arrived and witnessed a mountain of blue toads completely enveloping the entire train, reaching a height of ten meters at its peak, with scattered toads continuously arriving from the nearby grass.]
[The rescue team used flamethrowers to fiercely burn the blue toads, causing large areas of toads to peel off and turn into charcoal.]
[At 7:30 AM, the train's outer shell was finally exposed. The outer shell appeared to be intact. Mechanical soldiers from the rescue team parachuted to the vicinity, advancing towards the train while burning the toads.]
[At 7:20 AM, the toads on the train's surface were finally cleared.]
[However, the scene inside the train left the rescue personnel stunned.]
[The last two carriages were completely filled with excrement, all human feces, emitting an unimaginably foul odor. The feces in the second-to-last carriage had almost fossilized, oozing white salt and hardening like steel. The front half of the feces in the third-to-last carriage was still fresh.]
[All the equipment on the train had undergone severe aging. The genuine leather seats were cracked and peeling, many machine parts were damaged, and a thick layer of dust had accumulated on the windowsills, as if accumulated over a long period.]
[The soldiers were all still alive, huddled together in the front four carriages. However, the male soldiers' beards had grown to their chests, all their hair had grown several times longer, their faces were emaciated, their wrinkles had increased, and they looked like savages with extremely poor mental states.]
[According to the rescue personnel, after only two hours had passed, the soldiers in the No. 6 train had entered a state of collective stupor. Several of them were crying and screaming uncontrollably, forcing the rescuers to inject them with sedatives.]
[Pei Yongxin claimed that it was impossible for only two hours to have passed; they had been trapped inside the carriage for at least two years, had eaten all their reserve food, and had used up all their oxygen. If the rescue team had arrived a week later, everyone on this train would have starved or suffocated.]
[Pei Yongxin also produced a piece of evidence: an infant wrapped in a military uniform swaddling.]