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 first wave always carries the truth. And the cost.

The lights across Route Zero dimmed as the bleed reached its crescendo. Then—suddenly—they flared bright white.

Time slowed. Liam felt it first—a crushing pressure on his chest, as if every memory he had was being pulled upward, out of his skull and into the rift.

Kasen's ghost staggered. "It's extracting the archives. Not just yours. Everyone's."

Zero appeared beside them, her face pale and flickering. "That includes me."

"No," Liam said. "We fight it. Now."

She handed him a piece of jagged core tech. "Then you'll need this."

It snapped into his wrist—painfully—and instantly synced. Liam gasped as a flood of fragmented voices poured into his mind. Passengers. Engineers. Failures. He felt the last thoughts of the original crew, saw glimpses of the crash that birthed Route Zero, and saw something worse:

A name burned into the original command line.

> PROJECT: VEIL TRAINING SIMULATION

Liam stumbled back. "We weren't saving people," he whispered. "We were... training them. Over and over. Like pawns."

Kasen grimaced. "They used me to build it. Then killed me when I protested."

In Carriage 34, Neith was bleeding from a cut on her forehead, her blade slick with corrupted data and echo ichor. Around her, passengers fought in clusters, working in harmony despite their foggy minds.

Damir triggered an emergency burst from the railgun chamber. The beam ripped through the largest rift-wraith, scattering its code into thousands of fractured symbols.

Far above, a shape emerged in the rift. Towering. Insectoid. Eyes like starlit graves.

A voice thundered—not aloud, but within their thoughts.

> "YOU RECLAIM. YOU REMEMBER. YOU BREAK THE CYCLE."

And together, they screamed as the rift surged and slammed them both backward into the collapsing train walls.

Chapter 34: The Memory Pulse