Chapter 625: Ending the grudges of a hundred years ago
Chapter 625: Put an end to the grudges of a hundred years ago.
The towering gate was like a folded paper in the hands of a judge, revealing a small crack.
The ice fragments blown by the breeze shone with a colder light than a sword.
Standing in front of the towering gate, the man wearing a heavy exoskeleton stared at everything in front of him in amazement, and it took him a long time to utter half a word.
”Wo Shi…”
Ice sculptures were spread out on the open space of thousands of square meters, and the curled people were close to the ground, maintaining the posture of the last second before their death.
Some people put their foreheads on the ground to pray, some people snuggled together, there were mothers and fathers holding their children, and there were also families of three holding hands…
This is the 100th and last underground floor of Shelter No. 100. Its ceiling is the floor of the central atrium, and the floor is the bottom of the entire shelter.
Perhaps because it is a warehouse area, this is the highest single-story floor in the entire shelter.
Ten Punch Man thought he could find some treasures on this floor, or at least some valuable garbage, but he didn’t expect to find a pile of dead bodies as soon as he opened the door. There were
at least one or two thousand bodies lying in this warehouse alone, and there were several similar warehouses here.
Those might be in similar situations… The soles of his
boots made a creaking sound when they stepped on the ground.
Ten Punch Man unconsciously passed through the crack in the door and walked into the ice warehouse with a temperature of dozens of degrees below zero, holding up a flashlight to check the surroundings.
Rather than being shocked, he was more surprised and muttered to himself.
”…What happened here?”
Following him into the ice warehouse, the player wearing an exoskeleton squatted on the ground, carefully examined the ice sculpture lying on the ground, and took a photo of the face of the corpse.
After a moment, he came to a conclusion.
”Most people here should have died of lack of oxygen… They were not frozen to death, but more like they were frozen after death.”
Some people had obvious gunshot wounds on their bodies, and even broken arms and hands and feet. It was obvious that they were dragged here after death.
”…Is there any difference?”
The player clapped his hands and stood up, sighing.
”Not really…”
To be frank.
It was also the first time he saw so many dead bodies outside the battlefield.
The strong visual impact was completely different from the feeling of seeing corpses on the battlefield. After all, when on the battlefield, there was no time to think about how a person died.
”…The signal should not be sent from here. There can’t be any living people here.”
After taking a last look at the rows of frozen corpses, Ten Punch Man retracted the flashlight, looked at his teammates behind him and continued.
”Let’s go out.”
No one wanted to stay here any longer, and the player nodded and retreated from the ice storage with him, and pressed the button to close the door for those old popsicles.
The two continued to visit several warehouses.
Ten Punch Man soon discovered that, as he expected, the situation of these ice storages was basically the same, crowded with frozen corpses.
There was no sign of a firefight on the B100 floor. Who stuffed these people into the ice storage to suffocate to death has become an unsolved mystery.
Just when the two had finished exploring the last ice storage, the player who had gone to explore the other side came back from the front and greeted the two from a distance.
”This floor is probably the warehouse area. The north side is a cold storage for food, and the south side seems to be filled with engineering machinery and daily necessities, but the resources there have been licked clean. Only one of the warehouses is different. It has been converted into a workshop. We also found generators and batteries, as well as some incomprehensible things.”
Ten Punch Man immediately became interested after hearing this.
”Let’s go and take a look.”
Following the player, the group quickly came to the south from the warehouse area in the north.
The area here is much larger than the previous area, and the structure is much more complex. The tall metal brackets are like walls, and you need to use an escalator to climb to the top floor.
As soon as he walked into this area, Ten Punch Man smelled a faint smell of motor oil and immediately noticed that this warehouse was different.
If the warehouses they searched before were more like morgues, then this one was like a recycling station full of garbage.
Several “蟞-style” engineering armors were like crabs with their shells removed. Their internal parts were almost completely dismantled. They were parked next to the scaffolding made of steel pipes with their claws and heads drooping.
Not far away, there was a pile of dusty coils and patchwork machines. All kinds of equipment that players couldn’t even understand their uses were available here.
The survivors living on this floor used their intelligence and professional skills to the extreme. They poured the mucus of the ghost face insects into a glass jar as high as a person to purify the electrolyte and made disposable chemical batteries to power these makeshift equipment.
Not only that, they later dismantled some machines picked up from other floors, transformed the entire warehouse into a small workstation that did not rely on the shelter’s electricity, and modified a series of sophisticated gadgets including integrated circuits on the simple workbench.
These strange devices looked really powerful, but what puzzled Ten Punch Man was that he had no idea what these people were tinkering with.
”What are they making?”
The teammate next to him hesitated.
”Maybe… like in Oxygen Not Included, they plan to recycle materials in this shelter?”
”How is such a thing possible…”
”It’s not completely impossible. At least they haven’t touched the bodies in the ice storage next door… Well, maybe they haven’t touched them. Anyway, from this point of view, they still have a lot of remaining materials, at least there is room for choice.”
This is indeed a novel idea.
The people here have restored electricity and even made the cold storage work again. Obviously, they have solved the most critical energy source.
They froze the bodies, and those bodies are now intact. The bugs outside have not been eaten to death. Obviously, they have achieved their goal before the nutrients are exhausted. The only confusing thing is, where did those people go in the end? It
’s impossible that they just went back to the ice storage after busying themselves for a while, right?
Looking at the dissection table full of chitinous shells, Ten Punch Man scratched the back of his head through his helmet and felt a headache.
He knew nothing about archaeology, but at this moment he felt like he was at an archaeological site.
But what is intriguing is that, because the technology in the Prosperous Era is far superior to that of the real world, he cannot use his real-world experience to infer the motives of these survivors and guess what they are trying to do.
As soon as he walked to the side of a dissection table, Ten-Punch Man reached out and picked up the bowl-shaped insect shell on the table, and found a line of small words engraved on it. He
used the translation function of VM to extract the text, and a light blue floating window was projected on the inside of the tactical eyepiece of his exoskeleton helmet.
”…In memory of 77,274 residents, including 645 supervisors.”
He read it out in a low voice.
An agile player walked up to him and looked at the insect shell in his hand curiously.
”What is this? Last words?”
His nickname is “Rest in Peace”, which was added to the game in Beta 0.4 version, and he also joined the Storm Troopers at that time.
”I guess so,” Ten-Punch Man put the insect shell back on the table, retrieved the previously recovered administrator log and glanced at it, and then looked around at the graffiti-like murals on the surrounding walls.
”Let’s speculate that there should have been a conflict or war here before. The residents of the shelter had a fight with the supervisors, and then the supervisors drove them to the lowest level and cut off their power supply? But they also cut off the supplies on the upper level, and the two sides didn’t talk to each other for a while…”
In fact, there was no need to speculate at all.
The way they came down here was full of traces of fighting, especially the corridors on the B51 floor, which were full of bullet holes.
In order to fight for the administrator’s office, the two sides left thousands of bodies in just one corridor, which could be identified by the temperature-changing coats of the residents of the shelter.
Of course, compared with those in the warehouse next door, the tragic situation there was nothing.
”No matter what they did, have you found the abnormal life signal?” A strength player came over and coughed, “This place always makes me feel creepy. Let’s finish the task quickly and go up.”
His nickname is unconscious. He entered the game in Beta 0.1. Before joining the Storm Troopers, he didn’t know Ru Tu Wei An. However, their IDs were so similar that they were mistaken for a couple’s name.
I don’t know where Brother Quanshui got so many top-notch items.
”I haven’t found it yet.” Ten Punch Man shook his head, walked to the wall with murals, and took a few photos.
Ru Tu Wei An muttered to the side.
”Are there no more precise coordinates? It’s on this floor… This hint is too abstract.”
Another player shook his head.
”The monitoring and sensors of B100 have been removed. To be more precise, this is the case from B51 down. The life signal was captured by the sensors on the B51 floor. We cannot determine its exact location. We can only faintly sense its existence.”
Carefully observing the details of the mural, the Ten Punch Man found another line of words on the wall. Judging from the handwriting, the person who carved the words on the insect shell seemed to be the same person.
Following the rusty lines, he read it out in a low voice.
”…Tree people are not from an indescribable tree. Like the tree, they come from us from beginning to end, and the arrogance of others is also the sin of our arrogance.”
”Order should have been a fortress to protect us, but we turned its bricks and stones into swords that kill each other.”
”We have forgotten where we are going, where we came from, and why we built this fortress in the first place, and finally became its puppets.”
”We will die eventually.”
”And I will spend the rest of my life completing our tombstone.”
”——Gravekeeper of Shelter No. 100.”
There was no name left at the signature, only a string of numbers.
Ten Punch Man suddenly had an idea, thinking that this might be the number of cycles for recording time, so he converted the units of this line of numbers and concluded that the time when the will was written was 60 years in the Wasteland Era.
”So… all those survivors died in the end?”
Looking at the century-old murals on the wall, he frowned slightly and glanced at the piles of machines next to him.
Could it be that these things were just burial objects in the tomb?
He instinctively felt that it was not that simple.
At this moment, a shout suddenly came from the teammates who were searching not far away.
”There is a hibernation capsule here!”
Hearing the voice, Ten Punch Man immediately rushed over.
At the end of the rows of shelves wrapped with various pipelines, stood a machine covering an area of about a dozen square meters.
In the center of the machine was a hibernation capsule, and on the right was a broken glass jar.
Judging from the fragments scattered on the ground, the glass jar should have been broken from the inside, and something drilled out from it.
Judging from the feedback from the VM’s life signal radar, the vague life signal was emitted from this hibernation capsule!
Everyone’s faces instantly showed joy.
There are living people in here!
”I’ll open it!”
Ten Punch Man took a step forward, pulled out the data cable from the VM, connected it to the interface of the hibernation capsule, and pressed the power button at the same time.
The small hacking program prepared by the scientific expedition team for them immediately took effect, and soon obtained the control authority of the hibernation capsule program.
Obviously, Yin Fang is a professional in prying open the refrigerator.
Ten Punch Man pressed the button to open the door without hesitation, but when a rotten smell came out with the sound of air leakage, he immediately realized that something was wrong.
Dozens of ghost-faced insects drilled out of the gap of the hatch, making a hissing sound and rushing towards the people standing in front of the hibernation capsule.
”Wo Shi!”
Ru Tu Wei An was frightened and pulled the trigger reflexively. The three gunshots instantly tore the insects crawling to his feet and broke the silence in the warehouse.
”Cease fire! Don’t break anything here!”
He slapped the bug that pounced in front of him to the ground, and then raised his foot to stomp it into a puddle of mud.
After finally dealing with the bugs that had jumped out, he looked at the open hibernation capsule and saw a mutilated skeleton lying inside.
The man put his hands on his chest, holding a broken half glass bottle, in which tiny insect shells and broken eggs could be seen.
According to various details, this person should have taken the initiative to lie down in the hibernation capsule with these insect eggs. However, he did not start the freezing program, but only started the negative pressure program.
After completing a certain ritual, he ended his life in some way and handed his body to the bugs.
Ten-punch man stared blankly at the remains of this guy and the insect eggs that filled the skeleton, and couldn’t say a word for a long time.
They had detected a life signal suspected to be humanoid before, and thought there were survivors, but they didn’t expect it to be a bunch of bugs!
Is this possible?
Just as he was stunned, a shrill alarm suddenly sounded.
Not knowing what happened, everyone looked around quickly, only to see that the warning light above their heads suddenly flashed red along with the alarm bell, making people feel uneasy.
”…What happened?” Ren Tu Wei An looked around vigilantly.
At this moment, the VM on the left arm of Ten Punch Man, which was connected to the hibernation capsule, suddenly turned white.
Then, as if haunted, the UI interface of the scientific expedition team’s applet was replaced by an old man with blurred facial features.
Noticing the changes in the VM on his arm, Ten Punch Man immediately looked at the old man on the screen and asked vigilantly.
”Who are you?”
While speaking, his right hand had already grasped the data cable, ready to physically disconnect from the network at any time.
The old man floating in the white snow looked at him quietly, and an intermittent voice floated out from behind the blurred facial features.
”I am ‘Tree’, the manager here.”
Hearing this unexpected name, Ten Punch Man was stunned, and then subconsciously said.
”…Tree?! Aren’t you dead?”
The old man continued calmly.
”AI has no concept of life and death. The meaning of my existence is for the residents living here. Before they no longer need me, I will continue to fulfill my mission.”
Ten Punch Man wanted to continue asking, but there was something more important at the moment.
”What’s the situation with the sound outside? Did we commit a taboo?”
The tree answered his question in a calm tone.
”That’s a preview of my mission coming to an end.”
Without waiting for the man in front of the screen to ask in detail, it continued.
”The reactor is operating normally, the life monitoring sensor has been restarted, the detection program continues to execute, the number of active life signals of residents has remained below 3,000 for 24 consecutive hours, and the shelter protocol will enter the final stage, activating the dome self-destruction program to guide the surface ruins and earthwork structures into the patio.”
The players who understood the last sentence were shocked instantly.
”What the hell?!”
”Self-destruction?!”
As if sensing the emotional fluctuations of the crowd, the tree continued calmly.
”Don’t panic, what you are about to see is the final fate of this shelter, which was designed from the moment it was built.”
Ten Punch Man looked at the guy on the screen with a confused face.
It’s ok to not panic…
How can I not panic!
It’s the 213th year of the Wasteland Era!
It’s more than 100 years away from the planned time!
If the dome self-destruction program is really executed, who knows what the final result will be. It might just bury the entire shelter.
To put it bluntly. This is a program designed two hundred
years ago
. How can we expect it to still be reliable two hundred years later?
What’s more terrible is that the countdown is not 24 hours at all, but 10 minutes! They don’t even have time to evacuate with the black box! The progress bar has already gone more than half a long time ago!
At the critical moment, he calmed down and said to the old man on the screen.
”Can you stop? The current situation does not meet the conditions for starting the dome self-destruction program!”
Shu answered in a calm voice.
”Request violation, no administrator authority detected, the shelter agreement cannot be modified.”
When he heard the first half of the sentence, the mood of the Ten Punch Man sank to the bottom, but when he heard the last sentence, he rekindled hope.
The reason for requesting a violation is to modify the agreement, not the request itself.
In other words –
as long as he does not modify the agreement itself, and only reinterprets the original terms, he still has a chance to convince this stubborn AI!
Thoughts raced through his head.
Suddenly, he noticed the body holding the eggs in the hibernation capsule, and his mind was instantly opened up.
The answer had been left a long time ago…
Looking at the tree on the screen, he took a deep breath and said seriously.
”I have doubts about the rules for determining the disappearance of residents’ life signals.”
The tree really responded to him.
”What doubts.”
The Ten-Fist Man looked at the virtual image on the screen and said word by word.
”Am I a resident of Shelter No. 100?”
The tree replied coldly.
”No registered biometric information was detected, so the judgment is no.”
Ten-Punch Man: “So only if there are 3,000 residents of Shelter No. 100, can the dome self-destruction program not be executed.”
Tree: “You understand correctly, this is one of the basic conditions. In addition, the average number of people must be maintained at more than 5,000 for 180 consecutive days.”
Ten-Punch Man: “Then I want to ask, what about the children of the residents of Shelter No. 100? Can they also be counted as residents of Shelter No. 100?”
Tree: “Of course, as long as you can prove the biological inheritance relationship between different life forms, you can obtain the status of a resident of the shelter–”
Looking at the countdown with only a few minutes left, Ten-Punch Man interrupted it and spoke quickly.
”Then I beg you to open your eyes and take a look at how many people are in this shelter!”
Tree: “Zero.”
Ignoring its cold and ruthless answer, Ten-Punch Man did not give up, but continued to argue as if a dead horse was alive.
”Open your eyes wider! They haven’t disappeared, they are still here, but they changed their life forms during your sleep! The bugs in your eyes are the continuation of their lives, and the evidence is in this hibernation capsule in front of me! What was the biometric information of the last resident of floor B100 before he lay down, and what was the biometric information after the door was opened? Isn’t this enough to prove their identity?” Ten
Punch Man knew very well that he was making up excuses.
However, this set of arguments was not made up by him, but a witness had thought of it for him more than a hundred years ago.
The guy who claimed to be a gravekeeper.
The rituals he completed were not meaningless, and the legacies he left behind were not for them to be buried with him.
That guy had long anticipated that someone would uncover this tomb one day in the future, and that those people would definitely restart the dormant reactor.
In order to undo the mistake made by their common stupidity and to stop the dome self-destruction program from executing, he designed his final death and used the loophole in the shelter’s biometric identification program to turn himself into a bug.
This was the last time he used the bug in the shelter’s rules.
But this time it was not to fight the “tree people”, but to save the home that he once hated so much and wanted to escape at all costs.
The tree thought for a while.
Under the gaze of the players, he nodded slowly.
”Supplementary regulations updated.”
”The judgment result was revised. The current number of residents is 6.79 million…”
The shrill alarm stopped at the last minute of the countdown, and Ten Punch Man and his teammates beside him breathed a sigh of relief.
After recovering, he couldn’t help but be shocked.
I didn’t expect that there were so many ghost-faced bugs in this shelter… more than 6 million.
But anyway, this level is finally over. As for how to deal with this mess in the future, it will be left to the administrator to consider.
There should be a way to get the administrator’s authority back from the tree.
At this time, the old man on the screen, whose facial features were blurred by mosaics, suddenly smiled gently.
Although he couldn’t see the arc of his mouth, Ten Punch Man was sure that he was not mistaken.
”Leave it to you.”
He threw a meaningful monologue, and before everyone came back to their senses, the white snowflakes flickering on the screen disappeared.
As if it had never appeared…
Ren Tu Wei An was stunned.
”What did he say?”
Ten Punch Man was also stunned.
”It seems to say…Leave it to us?”
He was unconscious and confused.
”What do you mean?”
”I don’t know…” Ten Punch Man took a deep breath and looked at his teammates, “Anyway, I’ll go offline first and report the situation here to the outside. Don’t touch the things here for the time being, there may be other strange things hidden inside.”
The mission has been completed.
He didn’t want to cause trouble.
The other teammates looked at each other and nodded in agreement.
”Yeah.”
Ten Punch Man sat on the ground and closed his eyes.
At the same time, the official website of another world.
As soon as he logged onto the forum, he saw a string of red dots floating on the private message box. He clicked on it and saw that it was the small window where I was madly tagging him.
I was mad: “Fuck, what are you doing down there?”
Ten Punch Man: “That, don’t worry, it’s already been done.”
I was mad: “???”
Ten Punch Man: “In addition, we have also completed the last branch… It’s a pity that we didn’t find any survivors. There are a bunch of bugs in the hibernation capsule, and that person ended his life.”
I was mad: “Ended his own life? Wait, didn’t they turn into bugs? (Shocked)”
Ten Punch Man: “Turn into bugs? Is that so? But I feel that it’s more like an ordinary neural connection device.”
I was mad: “Ah this…”
Ten Punch Man: “According to the last survivor of the B100 floor, he dragged the bodies of his compatriots into the ice storage, and finally lay in the hibernation capsule himself, but he did not start the freezing program, but chose to end his life… Maybe at the end of his life, he controlled the robot or bug to go out and take a look at the outside world, just like you said, he turned into a bug.”
I was silent for a long time before replying to him.
”…This is too absurd.”
Ten Punch Man sighed and typed back.
”Yes, I think so too, but this is their final outcome… Our mission has been completed, and it’s time to withdraw.”
He only understood the perspective of the “worker ants” and did not know the full picture of the crisis that occurred in this shelter more than a hundred years ago.
Perhaps in the future, the past of this shelter will appear on the forum of “Wasteland OL”, just like the shelters discovered by other players.
However.
Maybe we can’t expect the dog planner to do this himself…
–
(I’ve been late recently, so I’ll be early today.)
(End of this chapter)
