“Hiss—” Lu Yuan frowned.
The thing pressed against his back was ice-cold, and it jolted him awake in an instant, yanking him brutally out of sleep.
Wrong.
His dorm bed did not feel like this.
The moment his eyelids opened, a rusted metal ceiling hung overhead, and the pale fluorescent tube above it flickered twice, buzzing with electricity.
Lu Yuan’s pupils contracted.
He pushed against the floor, trying to sit up, and his right palm pressed down onto something warm and soft.
“Mm...”
A muffled nasal sound came from beneath his hand.
Lu Yuan looked down.
Lin Shiyu was curled up beside him, her face turned toward his side, the roundness of her face still clouded with sleepy confusion.
She wasn’t wearing any clothes.
Nothing at all.
His hand was resting against her waist, and his fingertips had sunk into a thin layer of soft flesh. Her skin felt slick in a way that was almost unnatural.
For less than half a second, Lu Yuan’s mind went blank. Then he snatched his hand back.
He retreated half a step, his back bumping into the leg of a metal seat, and his knee struck the iron floor.
It hurt.
But that pain made him fully awake.
He quickly swept his eyes across the carriage.
It was more than ten meters long and just over three meters wide, a standard old green train car. No curtains, no bedding on the luggage racks, dim lighting, and a floor made of cold sheet metal.
Dozens of people were lying scattered all over the floor.
All of them were girls.
All of them were naked.
Lu Yuan recognized them. They were from Class 7, Senior Year 3, his classmates.
The closest was Lin Shiyu, lying on her side with her small body curled into a ball, short hair spread across the sheet-metal floor, her two legs stacked and clamped tightly together, probably because she was cold.
Her chest was neither big nor small, rising and falling faintly with each breath. Her waist was so narrow it looked like one hand could wrap around it, her lower abdomen was flat, and below that was a bare stretch of skin without a single hair, unnaturally clean.
Two steps farther away was Su Yao.
She was lying on her back, long hair spread all over the floor, one arm resting across her lower abdomen and the other hanging at her side.
With a height of 168 centimeters, she had long legs and a slim waist; her chest was full and upright, the shape almost too beautiful, with her nipples a pale pink, clearly visible under the stark white light.
A sparse triangle of fine hair covered the area between her thighs, the color very faint.
Farther still was Shen Nian.
She was asleep on her stomach, one arm tucked under her head, her tan back exposed. Her waist tapered in sharply, the curve of her hips was absurdly lifted, her round buttocks taut and firm, her long legs strong, the lines of her muscles smooth.
She usually wore her school uniform with a binder, so you couldn’t tell. Now that he could see her from the side, the breasts pressed beneath her body looked much fuller than he had expected, pushed into a distinct curve.
Near the middle of the carriage, Gu Siyu and Meng Wanqing were pressed close together.
Gu Siyu was curled on her side, her ponytail undone, her glasses askew. Her build was lean and neat, with everything in the right place without being exaggerated, and her legs were clamped together tightly.
Meng Wanqing was leaning against her, her plump body taking up a fair amount of space. In terms of size, her chest absolutely ranked in the top three in this carriage, the two white, soft mounds spread out and swaying with her breathing. There was a thin layer of flesh at her waist, and the skin on the inner sides of her thighs was so pale it reflected the light.
Lu Yuan looked down at himself.
He was naked too.
And hard.
He took a deep breath, forced his gaze away from all those bare white bodies on the floor, and stared up at the ceiling.
His mind was working fast.
This wasn’t a dream. The cold against his back, the pain from his knee slamming into the sheet metal - everything felt far too real.
He remembered checking his phone before sleeping. It had been a little past 2:50. Then he lost consciousness, and when he woke up, he was here.
Everyone in the class was here. No clothes. A train heading somewhere unknown.
He didn’t keep thinking, because there was movement at the other end of the carriage.
“Mm... so cold...”
The class counselor, Chen Jiajia, rolled over and flung an arm onto another girl’s stomach. The girl was startled awake and mumbled groggily, “Quit it...”
Then Chen Jiajia opened her eyes.
Her gaze first landed on the ceiling, then shifted sideways, just in time to lock onto Lu Yuan standing two meters away.
They stared at each other for one second.
Chen Jiajia’s eyes instinctively slid downward and landed right on the thing standing up between Lu Yuan’s legs.
She froze.
Then froze again.
“Ahhhhhhh——!!”
The scream exploded inside the sealed metal carriage like someone had thrown in a grenade.
Chen Jiajia screamed and scrambled backward.
“Pervert! Lu Yuan finally couldn’t hold it in and is being a pervert!!”
Lu Yuan: “...”
He didn’t move, and he didn’t bother explaining.
It was useless.
Sure enough, the scream detonated through the whole carriage and woke everyone else up.
“Who’s screaming? It’s the middle of the night...”
“Huh? Why am I lying on the floor?”
“Fuck, where are my clothes??”
The girls opened their eyes one after another. The first few seconds were still dazed, but once they realized their own state and the state of the people around them, the whole carriage instantly descended into chaos.
“Fuck?? Where are our clothes!”
“Lei Lei, you fucking look at yourself first, you’re not wearing anything either!”
“Who touched my ass!!”
Screaming, cursing, crying - it all tangled together in a scene as chaotic as a fight in a wet market.
But all of those sounds cut off for a single instant.
Because everyone had seen Lu Yuan standing in the corner of the carriage.
A naked man.
One meter eighty-two tall, standing straight, short black hair, expression calm, even cold.
Nothing was covering him.
The thing between his legs was rigid and jutting upward, brazen in angle, fully exposed under the pale light.
The gazes of more than thirty girls in the carriage all snapped onto him at once.
Some covered their mouths, some covered their chests, some crouched down, and two of them even buried their faces into the backs of the classmates beside them - but their eyes still kept darting toward that direction.
A few bolder ones stared for several seconds, their faces reddening all the way to their necks, but they still couldn’t look away.
The timid ones covered their eyes and peeked through their fingers.
Shen Nian was the first to react.
She sat up from the floor, one hand shielding her chest and the other pointing at Lu Yuan as she cursed, “Lu Yuan, get your face to the wall, you fucking bastard!”
Lu Yuan glanced at her. She usually wore a binder with her uniform, looking like a clean-cut boy. Now that everything was gone, everything that should be exposed was exposed.
Tan skin ran from her neck all the way to her ankles. Her waist was absurdly narrow, and the two breasts that had been restrained by the binder were now free, full and upright. Her nipples were a darker shade, standing faintly erect in the cold air.
There were faint muscle lines across her abdomen, then a flat lower stomach, and below that, nothing but bare skin, just like Lin Shiyu.
“I said face the wall! Did you hear me?” Shen Nian’s ears were bright red, and murder had seeped into her voice.
Lu Yuan withdrew his gaze and turned to face the carriage wall.
He could hear rustling behind him, the girls shielding each other and looking around for something, anything, to cover their bodies with.
Then they discovered there was nothing.
Aside from the metal seats and handrails, this carriage was clean enough to look like someone had licked it.
“כולם quiet!”
Gu Siyu’s voice cut through all the noise.
“Don’t panic yet. Calm down and figure out what the hell is going on.”
The carriage gradually quieted a little, but the sobbing never stopped. Then another voice rose up, steadier than Gu Siyu’s, carrying the pressure unique to an adult.
“Gu Siyu is right. Everyone calm down now.”
Their homeroom teacher, Zhou Wei, stood up from the middle of the carriage.
She was in her early thirties, with a sharp short haircut. At school she was known for being strict, and even now, naked and exposed, she held on to a cold, composed expression.
Her figure was well maintained, her skin fair, her chest a size larger than most of the students’, her waist tight, her thighs firm and long.
But when she rose, her gaze involuntarily swept toward the corner of the carriage.
It passed over Lu Yuan’s back, then downward.
He had stood there facing them for so long just now that she had seen that size and hardness clearly.
Zhou Wei dragged her gaze back and lowered her voice a little.
“Everyone sit where you are and don’t move around. Gu Siyu, count heads.”
“Okay.” Gu Siyu answered and started counting people.
Zhou Wei took two steps and stopped three steps away from Lu Yuan.
“Lu Yuan.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t turn around yet.”
“Got it.”
Zhou Wei paused for a second. Her eyes drifted down toward his waist again before she quickly looked away.
She cleared her throat. “Were you the first one to wake up?”
“Yes.”
“What did you see?”
“Everything outside the carriage was black. The train was running through a tunnel.”
Zhou Wei frowned and was about to ask more when the fluorescent tube overhead suddenly flickered twice.
A cold mechanical female voice rang out from nowhere in the carriage -
[Welcome to Metro Survival!]
[There are six billion people in this survival event. You have been assigned to trains in group units, up to 50 people per group, and the trains will never intersect or collide.]
[Note: the train will stop at least once every day. At the station, you will need to gather supplies and search for survival equipment.]
[At the station, you may encounter other survivors, or monsters, and so on and so on!]
“Welcome aboard. Please do your best to survive.”
The fear that had just been forced down in the carriage exploded again.
“What does that mean!”
“What do you mean, do your best to survive?!”
“What the hell place is this? I want to go home!”
“Waaah——” someone finally broke down and started crying.
The crying spread like an infection, and several girls huddled together and sobbed.
“Stop crying! Is crying going to solve anything?” Gu Siyu shouted.
No one listened to her.
Zhou Wei took a deep breath and raised her voice even higher. “Shut the fuck up, all of you!”
Most of the crying in the carriage was forcibly crushed down.
“Crying won’t solve anything.” Zhou Wei’s gaze swept over everyone. “The most important thing now is figuring out where we are, where this train is going, and what that sentence means.”
Her voice was shaking, but she kept it under control.
Facing the metal wall, Lu Yuan could see the rust patches and welding marks on the surface. The train was moving, and the vibrations from the wheels and rails were transmitted through the floor, faint but steady.
Su Yao’s voice came from behind him, very close - maybe only a step or two away.
“Lu Yuan.”
Her voice was about the same as usual, low and slightly hoarse, but without a trace of tears.
“Mm.”
“...Can you not turn around?”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
Su Yao said nothing else.
She should be right behind him. Lu Yuan could feel a small patch of warmth on his back, warmer than the rest of the air - her breath.
Too close.
His right hand clenched at his side.