Chapter 248: On the Brink of Bankruptcy

No one answered. It was as though even the train components were shedding tears over their owner’s poverty.

The carriage door opened behind Ji Jue. Beneath the soft lighting, there were no luxurious compartments or attentive service to be found. Instead, sections of the ceiling had been ripped open, leaving cables dangling overhead and spitting sparks.

Behind broken metal panels lining the carriage were components covered in rust. Beneath the still-unfinished floor, a maze of exposed mechanisms and wiring stretched out in all directions. It felt less like stepping onto a train and more like walking into the enormous workshop of a shipyard. Everywhere he looked, there was something broken.

“What a mess.” Ji Jue sighed, casually hung his bag from a screw jutting out of the wall, then dropped into the battered driver’s seat and stared at the scene before him. No matter how many times he saw the place, it still sent a chill down his spine.

As the watch ticked away, a window appeared before him, followed by an endless stream of damage warnings.

[Central dispatch center unresponsive. Spirit matter fuel reserves critically low. Forward transmission mechanism unresponsive. Furnace of stars navigation system unresponsive. Lower hold damage warning. Emergency maintenance overdue.]

Warnings, warnings, and more fucking warnings flooded his view.

The only part of the entire Doomsday Express that could still be considered functional was its core, the Myriad-Phenomena Engine. At least that was one bit of good news.

Another notice from the watch followed.

[Dear user, the engine has not undergone maintenance in more than two hundred years. Overload operation has therefore been restricted and locked. At present, the engine can only function in low-power mode. Oh, but don’t worry... because you don’t have any fuel anyway. Hahahahaha.]

The fuel tank was empty!

They all looked like perfectly proper written reports, but no matter how Ji Jue read them, he could practically feel the mockery between the lines aimed squarely at some broke idiot who had bought a secondhand vehicle he couldn’t afford to maintain.

At the bottom of the watch interface, the final summary read: Doomsday Express Integrity: 41%

It had originally been at forty percent. That measly one percent increase was the result of Ji Jue working himself ragged these past few days, patching and repairing it without rest.

And even then, all he had really managed was some hammering, welding a few cracks shut, and slapping on a couple of patches. He had done nothing more than surface repairs. If he actually got the train running, one careless mistake would probably send that number right back down again, and there was every chance it would end up even worse than before.

There was no helping it.

The Doomsday Express had reached forty-one percent integrity because, back in Spring City, President had opened the supply stores without caring about the cost and ordered emergency repairs. On top of that, Ji Jue had access to Deus Ex Machina and Total Network Control, letting him cobble together parts from many incompatible models until he somehow managed to build the basic framework from scratch.

When he had Skyrail’s endless supply of spirit matter, unrestricted authority, and all manner of precious equipment at his disposal, naturally everything had gone smoothly. But ever since President had severed this Doomsday Express from Skyrail and handed it over to Ji Jue for his own private use, the hard days had begun.

Without unlimited spirit matter, near-omnipotent system access, and all those valuable instruments, Ji Jue now had to deal with the mess left behind by all those rushed emergency repairs and improvised rebuilds.

The spirit circuits inside were like a tangled labyrinth. Even now, he had only just managed to make sense of the outermost layers, and had not even dared touch them yet.

This was basically a mountain of shitty code he had created while running cheats and doing whatever the hell he wanted. Its advantage was that it worked. Its only drawback was... That was also its only advantage.

Who the hell knew whether fixing one bug would make another hundred thousand pop up? With his skill level, Ji Jue simply didn’t have the guts to mess with it. If the spirit of the train had been any less easygoing, it probably would have been pointing a finger at Ji Jue’s nose and yelling, “Out of every captain I’ve ever had, you’re the worst one yet!”

Unfortunately, Mr. Engine was simply too good-natured. Even in such a battered state, it never complained.

Captain, you’re amazing! Cuddles!

It’s okay. Even having a tiny little room of our own is already amazing. Don’t listen to what people say. There’s no rush, we can take it slow. I’ll even cook noodles for you. As long as I get to stay with you, I’ll do anything.

During its brief activation earlier, the train had not only shut down most of its internal systems on its own due to the lack of spirit matter fuel and a Void Track, but had also downgraded itself into the most energy-efficient train configuration possible.

Before its fuel reserves ran completely dry, it switched itself into standby mode. That had spared Ji Jue a great deal of trouble.

While in standby mode, the train would lie dormant with almost no energy consumption. At the same time, the boundary membrane shaped by the engine’s remaining power wrapped the entire Doomsday Express inside an artificial micro-rift and sealed it off completely, shielding it from outside interference and prying eyes.

With the amount of spirit matter Ji Jue had, even after saving up for quite a while, he had only barely managed to anchor the docking area beneath this workshop. It was basically like carving out a separate pocket of space beneath his basement. His watch, Pacifier, and his soul formed a three-part authentication system that served as the key.

As expected of one of Skyrail Corporation’s prized assets. Even parking the damn thing had to be this extravagant. It had practically drained Ji Jue dry.

From then on, the Doomsday Express was completely cut off from the Central Dispatch Center. It no longer responded to any outside commands and had entered an offline cruising state. Its sole owner, user, and administrator was Ji Jue, the temporary employee whom President had hastily promoted to captain not long ago in Spring City. This was the gift President had given him.

Even after being severed from Skyrail’s entire system, the captain of the Doomsday Express still retained his permissions. If anything, he now had even more, including the hidden mana bar he had always relied on: the spirit matter reserve vault.

Mm.

After Ji Jue carefully checked everything over, analyzed it from every angle, and conducted a serious investigation, he finally discovered that the spirit matter reserve vault directly connected to his watch was the train’s fuel tank!

In other words, whenever Ji Jue had drawn on the reserve spirit matter before, it was basically like crouching beside the train and siphoning fuel out of the tank with a rubber hose.

It really did feel a little too much like stealing gas. At least things were better now, because now he could sit inside the carriage while he sucked it dry. At the very least, it looked considerably more respectable.

Aside from the fact that there was nothing in the tank to suck out, it was practically flawless. Fortunately, that was also the easiest problem to solve. He just had to save up bit by bit, day after day.

According to Ji Jue’s calculations, as long as he did not spend any extra spirit matter or squander his reserves, then with his natural recovery rate, roughly one year of saving would be enough to keep the Doomsday Express running at minimum power for... about one minute.

That was just how Skyrail worked. Even broke free-to-play players could still enjoy the game as long as they lived off freebies and grinded hard enough! And if he was in a hurry, that was fine too. The engine was not picky. In an emergency, aside from pure spirit matter, it could also run on combustibles.

Ji Jue even had the recipe in his hands. All he needed was a certain amount of Supreme Benevolence essence, a selection of materials expensive enough to make his heart skip a beat just from looking at the prices, plus purified combustibles as the carrier. After conversion and processing, he could turn them into fuel!

Ignoring the value of his labor and the difficulty of obtaining Supreme Benevolence essence, the total material cost came to less than eight hundred thousand Fedra per liter. What incredible value for money!

Unfortunately, the Doomsday Express was not Horsey. It could not survive on chicken drumsticks alone. Once it truly started running, its fuel consumption would be measured in tons.

Just thinking about it left Ji Jue speechless. Was this thing designed to bankrupt him or what?! If it was going to burn money this fast, it might as well burn his blood instead!

Unfortunately, he had no choice but to pay. Now that he had gone from being someone else’s lackey to running his own operation, he had to shoulder his own profits and losses.

As for the seemingly all-powerful aberration extraction he had relied on in the past, it was, in essence, only the tiniest fraction of what Pacifier could access through the vast system behind it and the authority granted by Total Network Control.

Even without those permissions now, it didn’t really matter. Those procedures had only ever been necessary for controlling things outside the train. Inside the Doomsday Express, the captain’s authority was absolute. And as the captain, Ji Jue could also benefit from the Express’s power, but if he wanted to make use of that authority, he first had to start the engine.

That included Ji Jue’s beloved Emergency Survival Protocol. At its core, it was a privilege exclusive to the captain. In a critical situation, the Myriad-Phenomena Engine would enter overload operation, forcibly elevate the captain’s level, and trigger a qualitative transformation in his abilities.

Of course, that burned money too, a lot of money. Even if he ignored the damage the overload would do to the engine, Ji Jue still didn’t have the courage to calculate how much fuel it would cost. The only upside, perhaps, was that he would no longer have to slit his own throat to activate it.

Aside from that, the watch still contained a massive pile of functions and permissions that were either completely useless to him for now or impossible to activate without the necessary support systems.

Of all of them, the one most useful to Ji Jue and the easiest to activate was the very first: Return Command. In an emergency, the engine would start up, activate the transfer sequence, warp the boundary membrane, and open a void passage that instantly pulled the user back into the train. Basically, he could teleport back in the blink of an eye.

The fuel also cost only a little over ten liters. Converted into money, that came to just around ten million Fedra.

When Ji Jue realized that his first thought upon seeing a figure in the tens of millions was actually, Wow, that’s cheap, he knew there was no hope of him ever becoming rich in this lifetime. At this point, simply avoiding bankruptcy would count as a win. Even if he gritted his teeth, kidnapped Mr. No-Fun and his sister, and tried to extort billions from the Tong family, it still would not be enough to fill all these holes!

Over the past few days, Ji Jue had poured almost every cent he had earned in Spring City into this bottomless pit. And even then, he had only barely finished patching up the interior compartments.

To everyone else, he looked filthy rich, throwing money around without a care, buying whatever he wanted without blinking. At the rate he was spending, his Balance Chamber of Commerce VIP membership was almost at Diamond tier.

But who would have guessed that in another couple of days, after borrowing from every friend and relative he had, he would be desperate enough to turn to online loans and end up blacklisted for unpaid debt?

Just trying to scrape together enough fuel was already driving him insane. Otherwise, he would never have gone running off to North Mount District for odd jobs before his medical leave had even ended.

How much he earned from the jobs wasn’t really the point. The main point was to rob some criminals and recover a little cash, while killing a few more of them on the side so he could extract Supreme Benevolence essence through the Dissociation Technique.

Today’s haul had finally eased some of the pressure. Not only had he made a sizable amount of ill-gotten money, he had also managed to pilfer some prime orichalcum that could be used to repair the damaged engine.

As for the dirty money Yue Ting had left behind, Ji Jue believed that everyone should get a share. He didn’t keep it all for himself and instead passed it over to Mr. No-Fun’s naive little sister. His own thirty-percent cut hit his account before he had even made it home.

Having the Tong family help launder money in Cliff City was simply too convenient. It was fast, straightforward, and they didn’t even take a cut. Best of all, the money came out looking perfectly legitimate, and he didn’t even have to pay taxes on it!

Another payment arrived at the same time. Tong Hua had used the Tong family’s connections to send a batch of antiques to the Balance Chamber of Commerce for auction. There were far too many rich people around these days. A dozen or so vases, oil paintings, and clocks from the Eternal Empire had sold for tens of millions.

Ji Jue stared at the mountain of junk piled up in his warehouse that he currently had no way to turn into cash with undisguised greed. Unfortunately, dumping too much onto the market at once would only crash the prices. The more valuable pieces, such as ceremonial armor once worn by the Emperor’s Imperial Guard, would take time to find the right buyers. The rest would have to be sold off in batches, little by little, for a steady stream of income.

Ji Jue had never imagined that one day, after seeing such a huge sum of money land in his account, his first thought would be, Thank God. At least I won’t starve to death anytime soon!

The money barely had time to sit in his account before he spent every last bit of it at the Balance Chamber of Commerce on materials, finally filling the last gap in what he needed.

Judging by the Supreme Benevolence essence he had saved up, he should now have enough to make around ninety liters of fuel to start with. Quite literally, every last penny was gone.

Mr. Engine had treated him with nothing but loyalty and devotion. Ji Jue couldn’t bear to cast it aside after taking advantage of it even if, for the time being, the Doomsday Express still could not actually run and only served as a warehouse and a teleport-home waypoint. Whether it would eventually regain its former ability to travel through the mortal world and across the various realms once fully repaired was another matter.

Ji Jue estimated that once he broke through the Metamorphosis Realm and reached the Rebirth Realm, his soul should be strong enough to bear the load created by keeping the train docked. Like that, he would be able to carry it with him wherever he went.

At that point, it would no longer be just a glorified warehouse and an absurdly expensive train. It would finally become a portable workshop he could carry with him anywhere he went.