Li Lei felt like a sardine stuffed inside a tin can, his limbs locked down tight by alloy restraint rings.
He struggled to roll his eyes, peering out through the palm-sized blast window in front of him.
The Ember Space Station, which had seemed as majestic as a mountain moments ago, was now shrinking rapidly in his vision, turning into an unremarkable polyhedron against the sea of stars.
Meanwhile, the brownish-gray planet occupying his entire field of view slammed into sight with an overwhelming, suffocating pressure.
The massive planetary surface was murky and unclear, its atmosphere resembling a layer of filthy oil slick wrapping tightly around unknown perils.
“Bzzt—”
The public comms channel suddenly erupted.
“Let me out! What kind of crap setup is this?”
Keyboard Warrior No. 1 vented frantically, “I can’t move! I can’t move at all! The UI shows the oxygen recycling system is still booting up? Why do I feel like I can’t breathe? This is a bug, right? This is definitely a bug!”
No one paid attention to his hysteria.
The starry sky outside the viewport vanished.
In its place was a sea of blazing red.
That was plasma generated by hypersonic friction against the atmosphere, greedily licking the outer shell of the drop pod like living magma.
The temperature gauge inside the pod began rising wildly, the flashing red warning lights painting the narrow space like a vision of hell.
“It’s hot! So burning hot!”
Breaking Bad looked at his arm in horror.
Even though it was a holographic virtual body, fine beads of sweat were now oozing out across the simulated skin.
He tried to wipe it away, but the restraint straps held him completely immobile.
“These sweat droplets… are still flowing?” Breaking Bad’s eyes widened, staring at a drop of sweat sliding down his pores and gathering at his elbow.
“They even modeled thermoregulation mechanisms? What kind of god-tier algorithm is this?”
If this were an ordinary game, the edges of the screen would probably just flash red accompanied by a health-loss sound effect.
But this thing wasn’t.
The dry, parched sensation of skin baking, the burning pain in the throat as if swallowing hot coals—it was so real it made one want to gouge out the chip in their brain.
“Hahaha! Badass! This is so damn badass!” The source of this chapter is g.com.
Just as half the people were screaming in terror, a burst of wild laughter suddenly came through the channel.
Hardcore Lao Wang had his face pressed almost directly against the partially melting viewport glass.
He didn’t care about the close-at-hand flames at all; his eyes were fanatical, like a madman’s.
“Brothers! Look at the turbulence in those flames!” Lao Wang’s voice cracked with excitement.
“This isn’t a looped texture! Definitely not! Look at that newly shed thermal tile—the trajectory of its burning ash perfectly matches the fluid solver for Navier-Stokes equations! Every single second requires astronomical computing power!”
“Even the top Hollywood VFX studios like ILM would take a month or two to render a single second of this footage! But this game is doing it in real-time! Real-time!”
Lao Wang’s words acted like a shot of adrenaline injected directly into everyone’s veins.
The original fear was replaced by an indescribable sense of awe.
Although these players were in dire peril, the subconscious knowledge that “this is a game” allowed them to rapidly transition from victims to connoisseurs.
Since they wouldn’t actually die, this was a multi-million-dollar exclusive visual effects show.
“These devs are legit. They’re really burning cash here.” Li Lei gritted his teeth hard, resisting the ever-increasing G-forces.
His retinas began to engorge with blood, dark spots blurring the edges of his vision, but his mouth curled into a grin, revealing a row of sharp white teeth.
This thrill of repeatedly dancing on the edge of death made every pore in his body open up.
“Now *this* is a real man’s romance! A ten-thousand times better than those garbage games where you just chop monsters to level up!”
“Whoosh—”
The red blaze outside the viewport abruptly dissipated.
The drop pod smashed straight through the thick cloud layer.
The view opened up dramatically, revealing the desolate world below in all its unreserved glory.
There were no lush green hills or clear waters—only vast expanses of brownish-gray wasteland and dried-up riverbeds twisting like scars.
In the distance, a massive eye of a storm was slowly spinning, kicking up sandstorms thousands of meters high that obscured the sky and sun.
Even more alarming was that in the low orbit of this planet, there were no wrecks of satellites or starships—only a dead, heavy desolate void.
[Altitude Warning: 2,000 meters.]
[Retro-rocket ignition sequence initiated.]
“Everyone! Grit your teeth!” Li Lei roared into the channel.
Before the words were fully out, a massive counter-force slammed into his chest like a sledgehammer.
BOOM!
BOOM!*
The retro-engines at the base of the pod crudely blasted out several streams of blue fire.
This violent deceleration gave zero thought to passenger comfort.
The intense overload caused several people’s cervical vertebrae to snap with sharp cracks; a few even passed out on the spot as redout set in.
This wasn’t a landing.
This was a calculated crash.
*BOOM—*
The ground trembled violently.
Twenty metal cylinders slammed onto the ground one after another like meteorites, trailing long plumes of exhaust.
Dust erupted into the sky like a tsunami, and a hail of gravel battered the pod’s outer shell with a dense clatter.
The shock-absorption system in the seats was compressed to its absolute limit, transmitting the massive impact up the spine and eliciting painful groans inside the pod.
[Landing confirmed.]
[Equalizing pod pressure…]
Li Lei shook his buzzing head vigorously.
The hatch door hissed open automatically.
Staggering out onto the solid ground, Li Lei narrowed his eyes, raising a hand to block out the blinding glare.
Behind him, the remaining players were either supporting one another or crawling out of their pods on hands and knees.
Some held their chests and dry-heaved; others sucked in cold air while rubbing bruised arms.
But when they raised their heads, all complaints died in their throats.
In the sky above, two suns of unequal size were slowly sinking into the horizon.
The blood-red sunset painted the entire wasteland a dark crimson, and the undulating black mountains in the distance looked like the spine of a sleeping giant beast.
The wind howled like the weeping of ghosts.
That desolate, majestic alien atmosphere was real enough to make one tremble.