The train will depart shortly. May you all endure forever

[The train will depart shortly. May you all endure forever]

"Where am I?"

Thump-thump, thump-thump...

Ye Qiyan woke in a train carriage, pressing his somewhat sore head as he opened his eyes.

"A train carriage?"

Ye Qiyan could not remember what had happened yesterday. His last memory was of staying up late watching anime last night, when everything had suddenly gone black. There seemed to be a gap in his memory.

"Did I stay up so late that I dropped dead and went to hell?"

Just then, the voice he had heard a moment ago sounded again.

[All survivors have awakened.]

[Distributing the basic train rules.]

[1. Do not abandon your train!]

[2. Every 24 hours after departure, all trains will arrive at a new platform.]

[3. You may stop at a platform for three hours upon arrival. You may choose whether to disembark.]

[4. Please collect supplies. Supplies can raise your train's level. Each level increase will trigger a selection of upgrade modules.]

[5. Do not leave your train before arriving at a platform.]

[6. Stay alive.]

[Those are the rules.]

[Please, be sure to follow them!]

[The train will arrive at its first stop in one hour. Please prepare.]

The long string of announcements made Ye Qiyan instinctively pinch his cheek.

"Ow, so this really isn't a dream?"

The ache in his head gradually faded. He struggled to stand up from the cold floor and surveyed his surroundings. Just as he had seen when he first woke, he was in a train carriage. Outside the windows on either side, a wasteland with no end in sight swept backward.

The only thing worth noting inside the carriage was an oval device at the very front, with a screen floating above it that clearly read "Train Control System."

Without questioning it, Ye Qiyan walked over and reached out to touch it.

[Train system at your service.]

[Currently available options: Conductor information, train details, Chatroom, trading platform.]

"Chatroom?"

[Current users: 10000/10000]

["Y-you people, who are you? Let me out! I have money! My sugar daddy is loaded! Let me go back!"]

["My medicine, where's my medicine!"]

["Honey, honey, where are you? It's me, Xiaowen."]

["What the hell is going on? Did I transmigrate?"]

["Hahahaha! Good thing I transmigrated! I finally won't have to go to work and put up with my boss tomorrow!"]

A flood of messages kept scrolling past, and one line suddenly caught Ye Qiyan's eye.

["Heh, what a bunch of idiots. You're pretty convincing, but do you take me for a fool? This has to be your show's attempt at filming some reality TV, right? I've seen a documentary before. They used to pretend to send people into space, and now it's a train. How unoriginal. I'm getting off right now. I don't believe you'd dare let me get hurt!"]

["Dude, calm down! What reality show crew could kidnap ten thousand people?"]

["Let him try. Maybe he's right."]

["The person above is idiot number two."]

In less than a minute, that person never appeared again. Only the Chatroom's user count changed from 10000 to 9999.

Did he die?

Ye Qiyan shook his head and stopped thinking about it.

He closed the Chatroom and swiped the screen over to the train details.

[Level 1 train]

[Carriages: None]

[Speed: 20 kilometers per hour]

[Workbench: Level 1 (can salvage and dismantle resource items)]

[Frame: Level 1]

[Wheels: Level 1]

[Floor: Level 1]

[Upgrade requirements: 100 kilograms of wood, 150 kilograms of metal, 50 mechanical parts]

Speed?

If, according to the train rules, the time it took to reach a platform was fixed at 24 hours, what was the point of the train's speed?

What puzzled him even more, though, was that if they really did all arrive at the same time, ten thousand people meant ten thousand trains. How enormous would a platform have to be to accommodate them?

Ye Qiyan sensed something strange and instinctively looked through the window at the seemingly endless wasteland outside.

"Could something catch up to us if we're too slow?"

He continued swiping and opened his personal information screen.

[Conductor name: Ye Qiyan]

[ID: E-3-1102]

[Train owned: Level 1 train]

[Sanity: 100 (below 80, you will enter a state of mental fatigue; below 50, you will enter a state of self-doubt; below 20, you will enter a state of dissipating reason; below 10, you will enter a state of mental madness; below 1, you will ???)]

[Stamina: 100 (can recover naturally through eating or resting; below 0, you will enter a state of extreme lethargy)]

[Ability: None]

[Talent: Ascension]

[Train modules: None]

"Talent? What's this?"

[Ascension: You may consume stamina or sanity to elevate and evolve anything in existence, without restrictions on category, level, or condition.]

He quickly opened the Chatroom and searched for the keyword [Talent], but found no one discussing it.

If most people possessed similar talents, someone unable to keep their mouth shut would definitely have revealed it in the Chatroom. Since no one had, that meant talent holders were a minority, perhaps even an extremely small minority.

Ye Qiyan fell into thought. Why did he have this? Was it his cheat?

Come to think of it, he really had been somewhat different from other people in his old world. A computer on the verge of being scrapped would suddenly run demanding AAA games after he touched it, or an ordinary car would reach the speed of a sports car when he drove it.

His friends had joked that he could please machine spirits, but Ye Qiyan had simply treated it all as coincidence.

Yet the talent listed in his personal information seemed to be telling him it had not been coincidence.

"Elevate anything? How do I do it?"

As he thought, Ye Qiyan walked over to the workbench inside the carriage. A bottle of water, a piece of bread, and a small knife lay on it.

These were things everyone had. They probably counted as starter perks?

[Poor-Quality Knife] Level 1

Ascension.

Ye Qiyan silently recited the word.

The next instant, an invisible force swept over the poor-quality knife.

The stamina in his personal information also dropped from 100 to 90.

[Sharpness-Enchanted Dagger] Level 2

"It worked!"

As he looked at the dagger gleaming coldly in his hand, Ye Qiyan's eyes shone with excitement.

"This talent can actually do something like this, and it didn't use much stamina, either. That's acceptable."

He swung the dagger. Its keen edge gave off sharp whistles as it sliced through the air. Clearly, after one ascension, the dagger's quality far surpassed what it had been before.

It was hard to imagine what a piece of junk this dagger had once been.

"Wait, if that's the case!"

Ye Qiyan suddenly raised his head and looked around.

More precisely, he was looking at the front of the train.

"The train should be able to undergo ascension too, right?"

The talent's description said that anything in existence could undergo ascension, so the train ought to be included.

Ye Qiyan took a deep breath, his eyes filled with curiosity and excitement toward the unknown.

He walked up to the control console. As though some voice in his heart were telling him what to do, he pressed his hand against the oval device.

"Ascension."