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

She sat so still, she might have been part of the wreckage.

Liam knelt a few feet away, watching the girl—Passenger Zero—as she traced invisible symbols into the air with her fingertip. The air shimmered faintly where she moved, like glass heated just enough to warp.

"I don't understand," Liam said. "You were part of the train before I was? Before anyone?"

The girl—Zero—nodded once. "I wasn't chosen. I was built."

That chilled him more than it should have.

She shook her head. "Not quite. I'm what the engineers called a Living Test Layer. They uploaded a real child's mind—me—into the system to see if the memory net could hold a soul without shattering."

Liam stood slowly, disbelief and rage curling in his gut. "They sacrificed you?"

"They called it a simulation," she whispered. "But I never stopped feeling. Not after the transfer. Not even now."

The lights overhead flickered—and the entire carriage shifted.

Not physically. But its presence warped. Liam felt the pressure in his skull first, then saw the window across from Zero ripple and transform.

Beyond the glass was a new view: a train car that shouldn't exist.

It wasn't attached to any known part of the Eclipse line. No doors. No designation. Just a floating, rotted piece of corridor adrift in a vacuum of digital noise.

Zero blinked. "A memory the train doesn't want to keep."

A hiss echoed from the wall. The window solidified again—and something moved inside that forgotten carriage. A shape. Human, but not alive. Drenched in static, jerking like a corrupted recording.

Liam narrowed his eyes. "A looper?"

"No," she said. "Worse. That's who you were before you chose to forget. The original Liam Drex—fragmented and discarded."

Neith was sprinting through a corridor three cars away when her wristboard lit up.

INCOMING: Passenger Manifest Update

Name: DREX / ZERO - [MERGED PATHWAY DETECTED]

"What the hell does merged mean?" she whispered.

A voice echoing through the speaker above—Liam's voice, but older, colder, as if spoken through broken code.

> "You can't rewrite what you've become. Even gods can't unpull the trigger."

Chapter 27: The Carriage That Shouldn’t Exist