Chapter 800: Hell Is Always Strikingly Similar

Chapter 800: Hell Is Always the Same

In a pitch-black tunnel.

A dozen or so Valorian soldiers in protective suits shone their flashlights, carefully searching every shadowed corner as they cautiously advanced.

The air was thick with a suffocating oppression, as if the darkness hid covetous eyes—the envy of the dead for the living.

The space was so silent that any faint sound seemed jarringly out of place, so the group unconsciously minimized conversation, speaking only when necessary.

An hour had passed since Fafnir’s thousand-man squad discovered this tunnel, and a full hour since this exploration team had delved into the ruins.

Yet still, they had not reached the tunnel’s end. Many couldn’t help but wonder if they were walking in circles.

Not that they could be blamed.

After all, the tunnel stretched on like a black hole.

The deeper they went, the stronger the unease in their hearts grew.

As if staying too long meant never getting out again…

“Damn… where did those diggers find this cursed tunnel?”

“Who knows…”

“A settlement ruin from over a hundred years ago… I just want to know what’s the point of exploring this? You think there’s still someone alive in here?”

“Enough, shut up!”

Telling ghost stories now did nothing but scare themselves. The soldier who’d been scolded by the captain gave an awkward laugh and fell silent.

The others instinctively clamped their mouths shut, and the bottomless tunnel returned to its spine-chilling stillness.

At last, it was time for the routine report.

The Valorian soldier at the front of the line took a deep breath, unclipped the walkie-talkie from his shoulder, and spoke in a low voice.

“This is ‘Sled’… All clear down here. No suspicious targets found so far.”

After a brief crackle of static, the superior’s voice came through the comm channel.

“Continue searching.”

“…Yes, sir!”

Clearly.

The higher-ups wouldn’t let them return empty-handed.

Until they found something valuable enough, they had to keep searching this endless tunnel.

The Valorian squad leader ended the call, signaled to his teammates, and led the demoralized group deeper into the tunnel.

After passing through a tangle of twisted rebar and crossing a half-collapsed ventilation duct, the space ahead suddenly opened up.

Seeing the change at last, the men’s faces lit up with excitement. They quickened their pace and soon arrived at a small plaza, roughly a hundred square meters in size.

At the center of the plaza stood a square stone tablet, surrounded by rows of crooked chairs.

Most of the chairs were empty, but nearby lay remnants of clothing and several fully weathered skeletons.

Fighting back his unease, the Valorian captain shone his flashlight at the tablet, his gaze sweeping the area with the beam.

“This is ‘Sled’… We’ve found a plaza. Looks like a gathering place for local survivors.”

He paused, aimed the light at the tablet, and saw rows of tiny inscriptions. He continued.

“There’s a stone tablet in the center of the plaza. We’ve found some engraved writing—seems to be names of local residents… Wait, there’s a line at the bottom.”

Squinting at the faint characters, he managed to read them aloud.

“‘Our world has ended; we shall begin a new cycle’… I don’t get it. Some weird religion?”

The command post responded.

“Does the tablet have any geographic info about this settlement? A name, perhaps?”

“Nothing found… Until we confirm a name, I’ll call this place ‘Stele Town’ for now.”

A look of curiosity crossed the Valorian captain’s face as he circled the tablet with his flashlight.

His attention fixed on the stone, he didn’t notice his feet until a crisp *crack* came through his boot sole. He looked down and belatedly realized he’d crushed a human skull.

And then he saw the sight that would haunt him forever.

Behind the tablet, the ground was littered with bones, thick as weeds. The skull he’d stepped on was just one among countless others. In this cramped space, human remains were piled into a small hill…

This was nothing like a settlement.

It looked more like a cult’s sacrificial site.

What the hell happened here?!

Even though he’d seen mountains of corpses on battlefields, he couldn’t help but feel a chill at this grotesque death.

“Damn…”

He swallowed hard and instinctively stepped back until his shoulder hit the tablet.

He wasn’t alone. The other Valorian soldiers who’d followed him into the tunnel also saw what lay behind the tablet, and their hands and feet went cold.

The command post seemed to sense the anomaly below. A hurried voice came through the earpiece.

“This is command. What have you found?”

“Dead people…”

“Dead people?”

“Yeah… Dead people everywhere. From behind the plaza’s tablet to the streets buried in trash, there must be thousands of skeletons lying here. It feels like…”

The Valorian captain swallowed again, his eyes sweeping the desolate ruin, and said in a hoarse voice.

“It feels like hell…”

…

At the same time the Valorian soldiers were exploring that hell, a few kilometers away at the refugee camp set up by the Alliance, two vertical takeoff Orca transport planes slowly landed on an open field near the camp.

Over ten thousand survivors were stranded there. Haibei City, still under the siege of the Celestial Domain, was hardly a suitable place for resettlement—supply delivery and sanitation were both nightmares.

So the Alliance Army Command issued new orders to frontline units: move the survivors to a coastal area a hundred kilometers away for resettlement.

There, the Alliance had a temporary camp and a makeshift dock for cargo ships to unload supplies—more than enough to accommodate ten thousand survivors.

However, since the Alliance’s domestically developed “Overlord” transport planes required runways for takeoff and landing, the refugee transfer had to be entrusted to the corporate air fleet.

Watching the long line of survivors waiting on the tarmac, the pilot in the cockpit clicked his tongue and said to the Alliance soldier handling the handover.

“No offense… Did you guys fish these folks out of hell?”

People missing limbs were everywhere; it was hard to find a single intact person.

And that wasn’t all.

Many bore festering scars, twisted and grotesque, too painful to look at.

“Pretty much. After all, we just crawled out of hell ourselves.”

The Murder Dagger curled the corner of his mouth, smiled at the startled pilot, and casually cracked a joke.

"Mutants like their food alive, often gnawing half and tossing half; what they can't finish, they throw back into the dungeon to keep... These survivors who've eaten the Nectar Fruit hardly need to worry about infection—the rotting flesh grows alongside their new skin, and in the end, you get the thing you saw."

The pilot in the co-pilot's seat let out a dry heave, and after a long moment, lifted his pale face to glare at the Murder Dagger standing by the cockpit, protesting.

"...Enough, stop talking!"

The description made him physically ill.

The Murder Dagger shrugged, tossed the personnel list into the cockpit, and patted the pilot on the shoulder with a grin.

"There are still over seventeen thousand targets to relocate, and the Wraith prisoners are also being handed over to us... It's a tough job. Anyway, it's all yours—good luck!"

Watching the soldier turn and walk away, the two pilots in the cockpit exchanged a glance and couldn't help muttering to each other.

"I suspect these people are mentally unhinged... Otherwise, how could they not feel the slightest discomfort?"

"I completely agree with you..."

After wrapping things up here, the Murder Dagger patted the cockpit canopy and turned to attend to other matters.

While the company's transport planes were busy moving survivors to the coastline, two Viper transport planes carrying researchers from the Alliance Scientific Expedition Team flew in from the coast and landed not far from the Orca transport.

A group of researchers in white lab coats quickly disembarked and, escorted by a squad of heavily armed players, hurried toward the entrance of Vault 20.

The entire vault was still under the control of the Alliance's Burning Legion; the nearby streets had been fitted with new surveillance equipment, and drones were patrolling around the clock.

Until the inspection of the vault's stored data was complete, the vault would not be opened to other members of the Commonwealth.

Chu Guang wasn't the only one following the latest developments in the investigation. Fang Chang, equally intrigued by Vault 20, was also keeping a close eye on the scientific team's progress.

And just as he was waiting for the results, Old Bai, returning from patrol, brought him an unexpected piece of news.

"I've got good news and bad news—which do you want to hear first?"

Hearing this teasing preamble, Fang Chang gave a light cough.

"Just start with the important one."

Old Bai grinned.

"Remember those Wraiths from before? They actually dug up something from that position we abandoned."

Fang Chang was stunned for a few seconds, then looked at Old Bai in disbelief.

"Really?"

Old Bai nodded.

"War Buddy gave me the info—it should be accurate."

Fang Chang pressed on.

"And the good news?"

Old Bai's grin widened.

"What you just heard is the good news. As for the bad news... unfortunately, our allies weren't so lucky—they found nothing but corpses."

Fang Chang frowned.

"...Nothing but corpses?"

Old Bai nodded and continued.

"That's right. The tunnel they dug into seemed to be the entrance to some settlement, but it had been abandoned for over a century. Inside, there was nothing but the corpses of the local survivors."

Watching Fang Chang sink into thought, Old Bai paused, then went on.

"But speaking of that settlement, it's really strange. According to the Wraiths who went down to investigate, the whole place looked like it had been buried in an instant."

"A large number of survivor corpses were gathered in the square at the settlement's entrance. There were no signs of resistance... It was as if the survivors had accepted their fate. They carved their names on a stone tablet, wrote a prophecy of doom at the end, and calmly awaited their final death."

"The whole ruin reeks of something sinister. And even weirder—War Buddy told me that the Wraith soldiers who came back from below were all mentally shaken. They seemed spooked, paranoid... Normally, that's odd. They're battle-hardened warriors; they wouldn't be scared by a few corpses."

Fang Chang nodded in agreement, then after a moment's thought, proposed a possibility.

"Could it be the influence of a psychic interference device or some kind of bacteria?"

Old Bai shook his head.

"That's unclear. Actually, I was thinking it'd be great if we could get a few 'casualties' from the Legion for our research. But the problem is... we got this intel through unofficial channels. If they don't volunteer the info, it's hard for us to bring it up."

Fang Chang sighed.

"True... But the clues the Wraiths dug up do corroborate some of the scientific team's conclusions."

Old Bai's interest piqued.

"The scientific team has results?"

Fang Chang nodded slowly.

"According to their investigation, the Vault 20 overseer's log was deliberately deleted—after some catastrophic experiment."

Old Bai frowned.

"Catastrophic experiment?"

Fang Chang nodded and continued.

"Vault 20's main research focus was outer space development. Based on two technical approaches they designed for 'returning to space,' they considered two plans in the twenty years after Year 51 of the Wasteland Era."

"The first plan was to use limited resources to build a non-orbital space elevator, retracing the steps of the old Union step by step. The second plan was to take a different path—transmitting consciousness to still-functioning Union-era space equipment in orbit, achieving salvation from the outside in... a kind of roundabout leapfrogging."

"According to the scientific team's findings, Vault 20 likely abandoned the first plan during the feasibility assessment phase and bet everything on the second plan from the start... That's why we can't find any specific experimental records for the first plan on the vault's servers—they never even tried it."

Old Bai frowned.

"So you're saying... that non-orbital space elevator plan was unworkable?"

"Not exactly," Fang Chang shook his head. "How can you say something is unworkable if you've never tried it? If it were a technology fundamentally impossible, it wouldn't have appeared as a proposal in this vault."

Old Bai asked, puzzled.

"Then why did they just give up?"

Fang Chang paused, recalling what he'd heard from the NPCs earlier, and continued.

"The scientific team's opinion is... the residents of Vault 20 at the time judged that the material and time costs of the first plan exceeded their capabilities. If they forced it, they might have spent fifty years or more."

Old Bai mused.

"Fifty years... That doesn't sound unacceptable."

"To us, it does. But to them back then, it was too long... From their perspective, it's not hard to see: if returning to space took that long, restoring the Union's golden age would take who knows how much longer."

He paused, then went on.

"The scientific team speculates that, for various reasons, they likely chose the second plan as their main direction—pinning all their hopes on the cheaper but more uncertain technology of consciousness projection."

Old Bai couldn't help asking.

"So... did they succeed?"

Fang Chang let out a soft sigh.

"Didn't I say? The overseer's log was deleted after a catastrophic experiment."

After a brief pause, he continued.

“What they did during the twenty-one years from Year 51 to Year 72 of the Wasteland Era, we can no longer know. But if the corpses the Varlants dug up were left by them, then the outcome of that experiment is self-evident… The residents of Vault 20, in their haste to achieve results, brought about a catastrophic finale, turning the entire experiment into a desperate mass suicide.”

Listening to this cruel deduction, Old Bai’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. Finally, he shook his head and managed only one sentence.

“They were truly insane…”

Fang Chang nodded, was silent for a moment, then said.

“Indeed, they were another group of madmen. They belong to a different era than the Torch, but their madness is strikingly similar.”

“So much so that it’s hard not to suspect that the Torch might have drawn inspiration from Vault 20’s experience, and thus committed so many outrageous acts…”