dark_shi

After the world fell, only ruins remained.

Liam Drex was born in the ashes—just another scavenger trying to survive in a wasteland haunted by shadows, silence, and stories of a forgotten god-machine.

Then he found it.

Buried beneath rust and time, the Eternity Engine—the last remnant of an ancient system—chose him. A train that travels not across land, but across realms, pulling its Passenger through trials designed to kill, evolve, or consume.

Each station is a different reality. Each trial peels away his humanity. But the deeper Liam rides, the more the train remembers him.

He’s not just a survivor.

He might be the reason it all ended.

Now bound to the system, hunted by monstrous shades, and haunted by a past even he can’t remember, Liam must climb—realm by realm—into the truth behind the apocalypse… and decide whether to reclaim the world or destroy what remains.

Eclipse Reclaimer: The Infinite Ascent

The alarm blared so loud it hurt. Lights flashed. Panels ripped themselves open. The ceiling convulsed like the train itself was panicking.

A mechanical voice cut through the chaos:

"Protocol Null Initiated. System reboot in 120 seconds. All anomaly traces will be purged."

"What the hell is Protocol Null?!" Sunny yelled, grabbing onto a support beam as the train began to twist unnaturally.

Neith's fingers danced across her wristboard, sweat beading on her forehead. "It's the final fail-safe. When the system detects a causality breach—like you interacting with whatever that was—it wipes the entire chain. The memories, the people, the records. Everything."

Outside the train, the void began to crumble. Not metaphorically—it pixelated, fracturing like corrupted code. In its place, raw data bled through, lightning arcs of blue and red code winding through the collapsing blackness.

Sunny clenched his fists. "How do we stop it?"

"We can override it. But there's only one place with the right command interface." She paused. "The Engineer's Car."

He turned toward the far end of the train—the door sealed with thirteen locks and a radiation warning. No one had ever opened it. Not even Neith.

"That car's been locked since the first jump," she said.

"Well, it's time someone knocked."

Chapter 16: Protocol Null