On the Brink of Bankruptcy

No one responded. It was as if his "family" was also weeping over their master's poverty. The car door slid open behind him. Under the soft glow of the lights, there were no luxurious compartments or attentive attendants—only a torn-open ceiling, where dangling cables sputtered sparks. Across the car's bulkheads, behind jagged, battered iron plates, lay components covered in rust. Beneath the floorboards yet to be fastened down at his feet stretched an intricate, tangled maze of machinery. It felt just like stepping into the colossal workshop of a shipyard. Everywhere the eye could see, there was nothing but problems and trouble. "What a nightmare." Ji Jue sighed, casually hanging his bag on a screw protruding from the wall, before slumping into the tattered cockpit seat and taking in the scene. No matter how many times he looked, it made his scalp tingle. Amidst the ticking of his wristwatch, a pop-up window materialized, followed by a seemingly endless string of damage alerts: [Central Dispatch Center Unresponsive] [Spiritus Fuel Reserves Critical] [Front Conduction Mechanism Unresponsive] [Constellation Navigation System Unresponsive] [Lower Hold Damage Alert] [Emergency Maintenance Overdue Alert]… Alerts, alerts, alerts. Nothing but fucking alerts. On the entire Doomsday Express, the only component that actually met the passing grade was the core Myriad Phenomena Engine. That was perhaps the sole silver lining. Yet the watch's prompt followed immediately: *Dear customer, your engine hasn't received maintenance in over two hundred years! Overload operational mode has been locked down; currently, it can only sustain low-power operation. Oh, but don't you worry... you don't even have any fuel anyway, hahahaha!* The fuel hold was completely empty! Every line was clearly an official, formal report, yet no matter how Ji Jue looked at it, he couldn't shake the feeling that every word dripped with sheer contempt for a dead-broke second-hand vehicle owner. The summary display at the bottom of the watch face read: Express Integrity: 41%. It had originally been 40%. That solitary one-percent gain was the hard-earned fruit of Ji Jue toiling around the clock for days, patching and mending without rest. At best, it was just knocking things into place, welding a few fissures, and slapping on a couple of patches—purely superficial work. If he actually tried to run it, a single lapse in attention would probably send it tumbling back down. It might even plummet further. There was no helping it. Reaching forty-one percent in the first place had only been possible thanks to Quancheng, where the President had thrown open the depots at no cost and provided emergency repairs, combined with Ji Jue's Deus Ex Machina and All-Domain Circulation Control permissions. He had miraculously cobbled together a framework from scratch out of a mountain of mismatched parts. Back when he had Celestial Rail's spiritus, permissions, and endless supplies, everything went swimmingly. Yet from the moment the President severed this Doomsday Express from Celestial Rail and handed it to Ji Jue for private use, the hard times began. Deprived of unlimited spiritus, omnipotent authority, and a myriad of precious instruments, Ji Jue was left to clean up all the lingering side effects of that hasty emergency maintenance and overhaul. The internal spiritus circuits wound like an incomprehensible labyrinth. He had only just mapped out the outermost periphery, and hadn't dared touch anything yet. It was a colossal mountain of spaghetti code he had slapped together while running wild on cheats. Its only merit was that it functioned; its only drawback was... Aside from barely functioning, it had no merits whatsoever. God only knew if fixing one bug would spawn another hundred thousand. Lacking the expertise, he simply lacked the guts to touch it. If the Express's spirit had a shorter temper, it would have pointed right at his nose and cursed: *You're the worst conductor I've ever had!* Thankfully, Brother Engine was an absolute sweetheart. Even battered to this sorry state, it bore no resentment. *Conductor, you're the best! Big hugs!* *It's okay. Even living in a tiny partition is already amazing! Don't listen to the nonsense people say out there. No rush, take your time. I'll make noodles for you. As long as you let me follow you, I'll do anything...* During that brief activation before, even without sufficient spiritus fuel and lacking void rails, it had autonomously shut down the vast majority of its internal systems and downgraded itself into the most energy-efficient train state possible. Before its fuel hold ran completely dry, it had shifted itself into Mooring Mode. It had spared Ji Jue worries to the absolute greatest extent. In Mooring Mode, the train hibernated in a state of virtually zero consumption. Meanwhile, the engine's last ounce of power warped and shaped the boundary membrane, tucking the entire train inside an artificial, ultra-miniature Border Realm. It sealed off completely, keeping outside interference and prying eyes at bay. With Ji Jue's current spiritus reserves, it had taken him a long time of hoarding to barely anchor the mooring zone in the basement beneath this workshop. It was essentially carving out a private pocket of space in his own basement, with his wristwatch, Non-Offensive, and his own soul acting as the keys through triple verification. It truly lived up to its status as a treasure of the Celestial Rail Group; even parking the damn thing required such grand ceremony, nearly sucking Ji Jue dry in the process. From then on, the Doomsday Express had broken away from the Central Dispatch Center, ceased responding to any commands, and entered an offline cruising state. Its sole owner, operator, and administrator was Ji Jue—a temporary worker who had been abruptly promoted to conductor by the President back in Quancheng. This was the President's parting gift to Ji Jue. Even after breaking free of the entire Celestial Rail system, the conductor of the Doomsday Express still retained his authority—and in fact, gained even more. That included the hidden mana bar he had always relied upon: the Reserve Spiritus Depot. Yes, after Ji Jue's meticulous investigation, earnest analysis, and solemn research, he had discovered that the Reserve Spiritus Depot directly linked to his watch was none other than the train's fuel hold! In other words, whenever Ji Jue drew upon his reserve spiritus in the past, he had essentially been shoving a rubber hose into the gas tank and crouching outside, sucking with all his might. It had felt entirely too much like thievery. Now things were much better—he could sit right inside the train car and suck. At the very least, it looked far more dignified. Aside from having nothing left to suck, it was practically flawless. Fortunately, that was the easiest problem to solve: he just had to save up, drop by drop, letting water wear away the stone. By Ji Jue's calculations, as long as he spent no extra spiritus and didn't squander his reserves, his natural spiritus regeneration would allow him, after about a year of hoarding, to run the Doomsday Express at minimum consumption for... about one minute. That was Celestial Rail for you: even free-to-play players could get by through welfare and pure, unadulterated grinding! Still, if he was in a hurry, it didn't matter. Brother Engine wasn't picky. In an emergency, besides pure spiritus, it also accepted phlogiston. The recipe was right in Ji Jue's hands. All it took was a quantity of Sovereign Virtue essence, a few materials whose price tags would make your heart skip a beat, and some purified phlogiston as a carrier. After transformation and processing, voilà—fuel! Ignoring Master Ji's own labor and the effort required to harvest the Sovereign Virtue essence, a single liter of fuel worked out to just under eight hundred thousand. An absolute steal! Alas, the Doomsday Express was no Little Niuma that could keep running on mere fried chicken legs. When it actually got moving, fuel consumption was measured by the ton... Just thinking about it made Ji Jue's vision swim with dark spots. What kind of extreme return-to-poverty scheme was this?! Burning money like this, you might as well just burn my blood! Yet burn it he must... Going from a corporate lackey to an independent operator meant he now had to shoulder all profits and losses himself. That seemingly omnipotent corruption extraction of the past had, in reality, been the most trivial facet of the behemoth linked to Non-Offensive and his All-Domain Circulation Control authority. Even if he lacked outside permissions now, it hardly mattered. Those were only necessary when interacting with the world beyond; inside the Express, the conductor's authority was absolute and indisputable. As the conductor, Ji Jue naturally fell within the Express's domain, but to wield that power, he had to fire up the engine. That included Ji Jue's beloved Emergency Survival Protocol, which was essentially an exclusive conductor privilege: when necessary, the Myriad Phenomena Engine would run on overload, forcibly elevating his tier to trigger a qualitative leap in his abilities. That burned money too—and far from a trivial amount. Under forced overload, even ignoring the wear and tear on the engine, he didn't even have the courage to calculate the fuel cost. The only upside was that Ji Jue wouldn't have to slit his own throat anymore... Beyond that, the wristwatch listed a vast array of functions and permissions that were either currently useless or impossible to initiate without proper support. The most useful and easily triggered among them for Ji Jue right now was the very first: [Return Order]. When necessary, the engine would start, triggering a transfer program that warped the boundary membrane to open a void, instantly returning the user to the train. A one-click recall to base. It only burned about a dozen liters of fuel—which worked out to roughly ten million Federation currency. The moment Ji Jue realized that his first thought upon seeing an eight-figure sum was *wow, what a bargain*, he knew he had zero hope of ever getting rich in this lifetime. Not ending up destitute in the gutter was already a victory. Even if he gritted his teeth, stomped his feet, and kidnapped Tong the Vegetable along with his silly sister to extort a few billion from the Tong family, it still wouldn't fill this bottomless pit! Over these past few days, he had poured virtually all the money he had earned in Quancheng into this abyss, and had barely managed to patch up the inner cabin. To outsiders, Master Ji was rolling in dough, spending lavishly without batting an eye, his VIP card at the Balance Chamber of Commerce on the verge of upgrading to diamond status. But who could have guessed that within two days, he might exhaust every loan he could squeeze out of friends and family, resort to shady online lenders, and end up on the government's credit blacklist? Scrounging up fuel was driving him out of his mind. Otherwise, he wouldn't have run off to do odd jobs in Beishan District before his sick leave was even over. How much he earned wasn't the point. What mattered was ripping off criminals to recover some capital, while taking down a few extra felons to extract Sovereign Virtue essence using his Dissociation Art. Today's big score had truly pulled him back from the brink. Not only had he netted a sizable haul of dirty money, but he had also scavenged the Shoushan copper needed to patch the engine's missing components. Operating on the principle that everyone needed a full stomach for it to count as a real feast, Ji Jue hadn't hogged the illicit loot Yue Ting left behind. He handed it over to Tong the Vegetable's silly sister, and his thirty-percent cut was credited to his account before he even reached home. In Yacheng, having the Tong family help launder money was overwhelmingly convenient—quick, simple, completely free of cuts, perfectly clean to spend, and entirely tax-free! Arriving alongside it were the proceeds from the antiques Tong Hua had consigned to the Balance Chamber of Commerce through the Tong family's channels. There were simply too many rich bastards these days; a dozen-odd vases, oil paintings, and clocks from the Eternal Empire had managed to fetch tens of millions. Looking at the mountain of unliquidated junk piled high in the warehouse, Ji Jue's eyes practically turned green. Unfortunately, dumping too much at once would only crash the market. Heavyweight collector's pieces like the Emperor's Imperial Guard ceremonial armor required patient searching for suitable buyers. As for the rest, he could only release them in batches, maintaining a steady, fine stream. Ji Jue had never imagined that one day, when an immense sum was wired into his account, the thought in his heart would actually be: *Thank god, I won't starve to death anytime soon!* Before the money could even stay warm for a few minutes, it had all been converted into materials at the Balance Chamber of Commerce, plugging the final deficit. Counting the Sovereign Virtue essence he had saved up, he should have enough to brew around ninety liters of fuel. In the most literal sense, thousands in gold had scattered to the winds. Brother Engine had treated him with nothing but loyalty and devotion; he couldn't very well cast it aside. Even though the Doomsday Express couldn't be driven for the time being, serving only as a warehouse and a recall point. Setting aside whether it could one day recover its former glory of bridging reality and traversing realms once fully repaired, Ji Jue anticipated that once he broke through the Metamorphosis tier to reach Regeneration, his soul would be strong enough to bear the load of the train's mooring. When that day came, he would be able to carry it on his person. At that point, to him, it would no longer be just a warehouse or an extortionately expensive train. It would be a portable workshop!