After placing the wooden cup filled with water and the potatoes inside the train, An Bai used the remaining time to continue collecting pine resin.
Time flew by, and daytime soon passed.
An Bai also collected quite a lot of pine resin during this time, conservatively estimated at 80 jin.
Before night descended, An Bai transported all the pine resin into the train and closed the iron door.
He lay on the bed to rest, his stomach growling.
However, he had no appetite at that moment and instead kept browsing the chat records to learn more information.
The number displayed in the manual had already fallen from three billion people to 2.98 billion, a full twenty million fewer!
Even the number of people online in his Regional Channel had dropped from 1,000 to 994.
It seemed that this world was even more dangerous than he had imagined.
“Help! There’s a bear outside!” said someone whose ID was Brother Qiang.
“Brother Qiang, did you chop down a tree?” someone teased.
“That’s not the point! It keeps circling my train, and there’s drool all over the ground.” Brother Qiang was nearly crying.
“Don’t panic. It can’t break through the iron door,” someone else consoled him.
“It left.” About ten minutes later, Brother Qiang finally spoke again.
【Railway Survival Tip: night is more dangerous than daytime. Newcomers, please hide inside your own train during night】
“Damn, why say that only now? A girl I just added was killed by something unknown because she didn’t enter the train before night.”
“Her avatar has gone dark.” someone complained tearfully.
“Sigh, my condolences.” The atmosphere in the chat suddenly grew heavy.
“Everyone, let’s just lie in bed and stop moving around. We’ll attract nasty things.”
An Bai happened to glance out the window and immediately felt that something was watching him.
Although it was pitch-black outside and he could not see anything.
He decisively lowered his head to avoid actually attracting nasty things.
He even closed the manual, since it emitted a faint glow of its own.
Just like that, An Bai lay down on the bed and fell asleep.
.....
He was awakened by the roar of the steam engine. By the time An Bai woke up, it was already Polar Night.
Under the steam engine’s power, the train began slowly accelerating. Its speed eventually reached 5 m/s before it stopped accelerating.
“It’s so slow. Even riding a bicycle is faster than this lousy train.” An Bai was somewhat speechless.
In fact, everyone’s trains had an initial speed of 5 m/s.
He opened the chat channel, and sure enough, another round of cursing began.
【Train level unlocked】, and the familiar Mechanical Voice rang out.
Immediately afterward came a ding.
【Survivor Andersen’s train number 1567 is a Level 1 train】
Level: 1
Speed: 5 m/s
Protection: 10
Power: steam engine
Area: 8 square meters（2×4）
Height: 3 meters
Durability: 720 kilometers
“I asked many people, and most of their trains have the same performance, except for this durability.” After a while, someone spoke.
“What do you mean?”
“Most people have a durability of 720 kilometers. In other words, once the train travels 720 kilometers, it is completely scrapped.”
“No kidding. I know that.”
“Some people’s trains have less than 720 kilometers of durability.”
“Why do some people have less than 720 kilometers?”
“I know this. When a train takes damage, its durability decreases,” Brother Qiang explained.
“How much durability does Brother Qiang’s train have?”
“That stinking bear reduced my durability to only 600 kilometers.” Brother Qiang looked as though he might cry and laugh at the same time, then sent a helplessly tearful expression.
“I only kicked the train once, and its durability dropped to 650 kilometers.” Someone whose ID was Captain Sea Cucumber spoke.
“You kicked it right in the main artery.” Zhao Dahu replied.
“666. As expected of the national team.”
Most people faced difficulties with an optimistic attitude. This was a protective mechanism that humanity had evolved through its long survival.
The chat atmosphere also became cheerful again under the influence of certain people.
Even An Bai joined in and exchanged a few words with them.
The train moved slowly across the earth shrouded in Polar Night.
Unlike night, Polar Night was black like a “black hole.” Even if light appeared now, it would have great difficulty breaking through Polar Night’s “blockade.”
And on an empty stretch of ground beside the railway track, unnoticed by everyone, another railway track had appeared out of thin air at some unknown point.
This railway track ran parallel to the one used by the survivor trains, leading together toward an unknown destination.
The only difference was that no train was traveling along that railway track.
Perhaps there was one, but who knew?
.....
The train had been moving slowly for about seven hours, and An Bai, along with the vast majority of survivors, gradually adapted to the rhythm.
Compared with the terror of monsters blocking the door during night, the moving train, accompanied by the roar of the steam engine, gave people an inexplicable sense of security.
“It’ll stop in another hour. I wonder where the train will stop.”
“I hope it stops somewhere rich in food.”
While the train was moving, An Bai used the steam engine to heat a half-cooked Potato and replenish a little energy.
Judging from the chat channel, many people were so hungry that they could not sleep.
Food and water were highly sought-after goods at present, and some people had used them to earn considerable supplies from others.
Beep beep beep...
【Survivors, good evening in Polar Night. There is a fork in the tracks approximately 900 meters ahead. Please use the control lever to control the train’s direction】
After it finished speaking, the situation at the fork in the tracks was transmitted in real time to everyone’s eyes in video form.
Directly ahead at the fork in the tracks, five people were tied to the railway track, while one person was tied to the railway track on the left.
All six people in the video looked genuinely human, and one little girl was crying so hard that tears streamed down her face.
The person tied on the left was a kindly old woman, which made him think of his grandmother.
【Chat channel temporarily disconnected from the network】
As the Mechanical Voice faded, the World Channel and Regional Channel both became 460, and people could no longer speak there.
Seeing this, An Bai’s expression darkened. It seemed the behind-the-scenes operator wanted the survivors to solve the problem themselves.
Nine hundred meters was not far; they could reach it in less than three minutes.
“Which one should I choose? Someone will die no matter which one I choose.” An Bai looked conflicted.
From a utilitarian perspective, most people would hope that only one person died, but would that be fair to the person who died?
To the person who dies, you are a murderer! Your actions are deliberate!
If circumstances allowed, what he wanted most was for the train to brake so he could get off and rescue them himself.
Before crossing over, An Bai had been a surgeon. Although he had long since grown accustomed to life and death, a trace of responsibility still remained in his numb heart.
He had not yet fully adapted to the identity of a “Survivor.”
The reason the trolley problem had endured for so long was that it involved multiple fields, including ethics, morality, philosophy, and sociology.
Everyone focused on different aspects when considering such a problem.
Those three minutes felt extraordinarily long to An Bai. His hand hovered above the train’s control lever, trembling slightly.
If Old Fan came over, he would probably jump off the train without hesitation, flipping the entire table over on you.
An Bai gave a self-mocking smile, but in the end, his hand did not move.
He let the train run over the five people. Although the train was isolated from the outside world, their screams still reached An Bai’s ears.
An Bai took a deep breath and tried his best not to think about it.
The video stopped transmitting the moment the train ran over the people. The behind-the-scenes operator had, at least, done one good thing.
✦✦✦