Chapter 91: Chapter 91: The Myth of Arriving Early

In a flash, two days had seamlessly passed.

During the daylight hours, Bai Cheng pushed her locomotive at full throttle, eating up the kilometers across the frozen wasteland. When night fell, she would bleed off speed or bring the train to a complete halt, allowing her employees to cycle through watches and slaughter the local monsters for experience points.

She wasn’t idling either. While managing her manufacturing queues and upgrading various structural components, she spent the majority of her time resting comfortably on the Bone Throne, passively absorbing free experience points. It was peak efficiency, maximizing every single tick of the clock.

Notably, after she pushed the Furnace to its maximum tier, its raw smelting throughput skyrocketed. The Kiln, sharing a similar operational blueprint, received an identical operational efficiency boost. With the structural upgrades to the refining stations completed, Bai Cheng turned her attention toward upgrading her collection of Flowerpots.

Once fully maximized, the pots expanded horizontally, shifting from isolated containers into massive, flat-bed nurseries. When aligned side by side, they were large enough to completely carpet the floor of an entire carriage. This massive expansion allowed for high-density agricultural yields, and with Lü Duo’s vegetative manipulation abilities overseeing the ecosystem, crop failure wasn’t even a mathematical possibility.

In a remarkably short window, Bai Cheng had already achieved absolute self-sufficiency in tomatoes and potatoes. Her only real concern now was tracking down a wider variety of seed types to enrich her mobile botanical garden.

However, character progression over the last forty-eight hours had been painfully sluggish. Despite utilizing every available optimization strategy and hunting round-the-clock, she had only managed to break through a single tier. This bottleneck served as a stark reminder that future rank advancements would demand astronomical amounts of experience.

Bai Cheng brought up her status panel to review her current metrics.

[Conductor Status Panel

Conductor Title: Bai Cheng

Current Rank: Elite Tier 2

Experience Progression: 100%

Strength: 25

Physique: 25

Spirit: 39

Innate Talent: Book of Cheng]

Shaking her head at the steepening scaling curve, she placed her recently upgraded Epic-tier employee card into a secure storage cache and turned her attention back to the primary navigation radar.

[System Notification: Distance to next Station — 70 km]

"Exactly one hour remaining. Just enough time to clean up the carriages."

If a train merge was going to happen, she needed to ensure there was sufficient cargo volume to accommodate the entirety of Yu Nian’s stockpiled logistics. She couldn’t exactly allow her flagship to look like a cluttered warehouse when her teammate boarded. As for that absurd racing wager her friend had proposed, Bai Cheng hadn’t given it a single serious thought.

Right as she began organizing the inventory, a ping echoed from the communications console. It was a direct message from Yu Nian.

Yu Nian: "Xiao Cheng! I’ve officially reached the outer perimeter of the station!"

Bai Cheng typed back smoothly: "Go ahead and pull into the docking bay first. My arrival vector places me there in exactly one hour."

Meanwhile, on a parallel set of tracks snaking through the biting frost of the mountain range, another locomotive was screaming through the blizzard.

Yu Nian stared at her communication log in absolute disbelief. "No way... how is she moving that fast?!"

She had confidently assumed she would be sitting at the station sipping hot water for hours waiting for Bai Cheng to catch up. Instead, it looked like her friend was about to pull in and find her lagging behind.

"I am not losing this!" Yu Nian gritted her teeth, reaching forward to decisively engage the primary overdrive on her train’s Armored Core.

Instantly, a translucent pink energy shroud enveloped the entire chassis of her train. The locomotive’s baseline velocity violently surged, leaping from a standard 60 km/h to a screaming 100 km/h. A journey that should have taken a full hour was aggressively compressed into just over thirty minutes.

Back on the flagship, the newly upgraded Furnace was working at a blistering pace, liquefying the last of the raw ore Bai Cheng had accumulated. Needing to maximize her available storage grid, she systematically channeled the refined metal into structural projects.

Her fuel reserves were completely secure. After two continuous days of transit, her inventory ledger still retained a staggering balance of nearly five thousand pieces of premium charcoal, entirely eliminating the need for immediate foraging. After allocating the necessary refined iron quotas toward her two trailing carriages and the primary locomotive, a surplus of over five hundred iron ingots remained in her fabrication cache, prompting her to queue up additional reinforcement plating.

Suddenly, a brilliant white luminescence washed over the train while it was still in motion, signaling a massive structural evolution.

The aggressive, razor-sharp contours of the original cyan locomotive smoothly retracted. The exterior armor plating shifted, rounding out into a heavy, reinforced configuration engineered entirely for maximum ballistic and environmental defense. The interior volume of the control cabin expanded significantly, gaining both vertical clearance and cabin width.

But none of those structural adjustments brought as much joy to Bai Cheng as the windows. High-grade, reinforced glass had been seamlessly installed across all four observation viewports of the cockpit. Heavy, interlocking steel reinforcement bars still crisscrossed the exterior for anti-monster defense, but the drafty, freezing wind that used to leak into the cabin was officially gone.

The upgrades to the trailing carriages were even more pronounced. Both units had widened to match the footprint of the new locomotive, and Carriage No. 1 had elongated significantly, measuring at least ten meters in length.

Staring at the massive architectural transformation of her mobile base, a profound sense of security washed over her. "Now this actually feels like a proper fortress."

With the massive surplus of raw materials spent on structural upgrades, Carriage No. 2 was now nearly half empty, leaving plenty of room for new cargo. Bai Cheng walked back to the command console to pull up the revised train specifications.

[Locomotive Specifications

Vehicle Class: Steam Locomotive

Current Structure Level: Lv. 4

Armored Core: None Installed

Maximum Carriage Capacity: 4 Slots

Maximum Velocity: 75 km/h

Active Crew:

Employee #1: Chi Yan (Warlord Tier 3)

Employee #2: Zi Yuan (Warlord Tier 2)

Employee #3: Lü Duo (Elite Tier 9)

Next Upgrade Cost: 0/1,000 Fine Leather, 0/300 Fine Wood, 0/500 Bronze Ingots, 0/300 Silver Ingots, 4/4 Train Cores.]

"Why does the system demand such a ridiculous amount of leather every single time?" Bai Cheng muttered, her eyes narrowing at the steep material requirements. The blueprint costs were scaling exponentially.

"Lü Duo is hovering right on the edge of breaking through to the Warlord tier. She’s going to have to carry the hunting load for the next few days."

She glanced over at the wood-elf sniper, who immediately straightened up and nodded with fierce determination. "This subordinate will not fail you, Young Lady! I will train twice as hard!"

Bai Cheng nodded approvingly, switching her screen over to the carriage logistics.

[Carriage Logistics

Carriage #1 (Lv. 4): Core Attribute — [Wild Growth] | Upgrade Cost: 0/400 Iron Ingots, 4/4 Train Cores

Carriage #2 (Lv. 3): Core Attribute — [Glacial Ice Seal] | Upgrade Cost: 0/300 Iron Ingots, 3/3 Train Cores]

"Still burning through iron ingots like candy..." Bai Cheng mused, rubbing her chin. Furthermore, after completing this current wave of structural deployment, her reserve of Train Cores had been entirely depleted.

"I really hope this multiplayer hub has some generous delivery boys waiting for us," she sighed, her focus shifting through the newly installed glass windows toward the tracks ahead.

The clean glass panes clearly reflected the interior layout of her cozy cabin against the dark, frozen landscape outside. At the edge of her vision, the massive, shimmering triangular energy curtain of the station sector was rapidly expanding.

They were crossing the threshold.

She glanced down at her scanner platform, but the local map was completely blank, showing no active tracking signatures of other trains in the immediate vicinity. "That’s strange..."

The moment the locomotive pierced through the triangular curtain, its momentum was systematically suppressed by the station’s safety field. The burning ash barrier parted smoothly, and the train glided forward into a cavernous, pitch-black subterranean vault.

The locomotive’s powerful high-beam headlights snapped on automatically, piercing the darkness to map out the terrain. This was indeed a multiplayer junction terminal. While it wasn’t nearly as gargantuan as the previous promotion station, it still featured seven parallel tracking lanes—perfectly calibrated to accommodate a full seven-man vanguard squad.

Yet, the entire concrete platform was completely dead. There wasn’t a single sign of Yu Nian’s locomotive anywhere in the terminal.

"What is she playing at?" Bai Cheng muttered, thoroughly perplexed.

Pushing the heavy cabin door open, she stepped onto the platform, her presence automatically triggering the overhead lumen arrays to flood the central tracks with clean light. She carefully scanned the surrounding architecture, but her sensors found no hidden transit tunnels or adjacent multi-entrance bypasses. This was the only platform.

Feeling a sudden wave of suspicion, Bai Cheng brought up her chat interface. "Nian Nian, don’t tell me you haven’t even pulled into the sector yet?"

Yu Nian’s response came back almost instantly: "What are you talking about?! I’ve been parked here forever! Where the heck are you?!"

Right as the text popped up on her screen, the deep, mechanical rumble of an arriving steam engine echoed from the dark tunnel behind Bai Cheng’s train. The energy curtain at the entrance rippled and dissolved, and a polished locomotive slowly and awkwardly rolled onto the adjacent tracks.

Up in the driver’s cabin of the arriving train, Yu Nian looked through her windshield and immediately froze. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

Standing right there on the illuminated concrete platform was Bai Cheng—hands firmly planted on her hips, her head tilted at a thoroughly unimpressed angle, tapping her foot in perfect, rhythmic silence.

For a long, deeply embarrassing moment, their eyes locked through the glass.

Yu Nian cleared her throat over the localized comms, her voice dropping an octave in a desperate bid for dignity. "Ahem... Xiao Cheng, look, the factual reality of the situation is that I actually arrived super early. Do you believe me?"