Twelve minutes before midnight.
Chen Lin stood alone on the endless Gray Wasteland.
It was empty.
There was not even any wind.
Every time he had come in before, he had timed it just right-the moment the door opened, the goods were already on the ground. All he did was rummage through the shelves.
Today was the first time he had arrived early.
Hands in his pockets, he ambled into the Stationmaster's Workshop, propped his legs on the desk, and crossed them.
The Giant Screen on the wall was dark.
He waited.
23:59:47.
23:59:53.
23:59:59.
Bzzzz-
The sound did not come from underground.
It did not come from the walls, or from any physical object.
It erupted from the void throughout the entire space at once, as though someone had seized this world's backbone and given it a savage yank-that low-frequency resonance burrowed up through Chen Lin's bones, all the way into his back teeth.
His legs slid off the desk, and he straightened.
Then he looked up.
The sky split.
The western horizon began to tear-not gradually, but in one clean slash.
That pitch-black spatial breach stretched across the entire vault of the sky, straight and brutal. The space on either side twisted and curled inward as though scorched by intense heat. A color Chen Lin could not name seeped from its black edges-darker than darkness, yet flowing.
It was chaos.
The Giant Screen automatically pulled back to a higher viewpoint, spreading a panorama of the million-square-meter wasteland across the wall.
The rift kept tearing, one end extending east while the other widened west, faster and faster, as though an invisible finger were digging in hard, prying the wound in the sky wider and wider.
Then things began to fall.
Not one item. Not ten.
A flood.
Countless wrecks,