Chapter 623: Sorry, Poor Souls Who Never Saw the New World

Chapter 623: A Pity They Never Lived to See the New World

Every design concept of Vault 100 was meant to serve the reconstruction of the surface. To that end, the vault featured an exaggerated atrium structure and a dome that simulated day and night, while most residents lived in dormitory-style apartment blocks.

Now it had become a nest for ghost-faced insects.

Fortunately, these bugs had not formed a hive-like society and were not commanded by a unified hive mind.

Otherwise, the Alliance players, upon first entering the vault, would have been instantly "crunch"ed by tens of thousands of ghost-faced insects.

They did not immediately begin searching Vault 100.

Wo Zui Hei first reorganized the hundred reinforcements summoned from the surface via the spring. He had Kakarot lead sixty men to set up light machine guns at the edge of the atrium, while he himself took twenty brothers from the Strength and Constitution factions, donned K-10 "Iron Wall" exoskeletons, and headed for the fully enclosed elevator shaft.

Ling Dang, riding a quadrupedal robot, stayed close by his side, watching as the group threw ropes into the elevator shaft. One leg stepped into the shaft.

Wo Zui Hei was startled by its sudden movement but quickly realized it hadn't fallen in—it was clinging firmly to the wall.

The soles of its four feet seemed coated with some special adhesive material, allowing it to climb straight up and down the nearly vertical elevator shaft.

"That mount of yours has some tricks."

Surprised by the little thing, Wo Zui Hei reached out his right hand to see if it could hold him too.

But Ling Dang, as if it had eyes in the back of its head, merely swayed its body lightly and easily dodged the outstretched hand.

"Don't bother trying. I can't carry you. You'd better watch your own footing—the deeper you go, the more of those little darlings there are."

Wo Zui Hei instinctively shone his flashlight downward. Fortunately, no ghost-faced insects were visible on the vertical shaft walls.

Relieved, he shot a glare at the figure riding the spider robot, then, while staying alert to dangers in the dark, grabbed the rope and slid deeper into the elevator shaft.

Finally, they reached Level B40.

Wo Zui Hei reached out and knocked hard twice on the door. The tightly sealed alloy door soon let out a creaking metallic sound as, under the remote control of some administrator, it slowly slid open to both sides.

The moment the door opened, a fluttering of wings rushed toward them.

"Chirp chirp chirp—"

"Damn!"

Startled, Wo Zui Hei kicked his legs back, swinging away, and grabbed the assault rifle hanging on his chest, firing a burst of shots.

A dozen ghost-faced insects dropped dead instantly, but inevitably a few slipped through and charged into the elevator shaft.

To avoid ricochets hitting their own people, several players who had descended with Wo Zui Hei immediately drew daggers and short clubs, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the ghost-faced insects that lunged at close range.

To be fair, these bugs were indeed exceptionally aggressive, and the stingers on their abdomens were like nail guns.

But against the "turtle-shell" defense of the K-10 "Iron Wall" exoskeleton, the chitinous stingers fell a bit short.

"These things aren't as tough as I imagined—just damn disgusting."

One Strength-type brute, pulling off a bug that clung to his helmet, twitching its stinger like a teddy bear, grimaced and smashed it against the wall, turning it into a splatter of dark green goo.

Another player beside him wiped the slime off his dagger and chuckled.

"Right? Our captain's sanity is almost drained."

"Hahaha."

"Shut up and get to work."

Wo Zui Hei rolled his eyes, raised his right fist, and waved it forward, leading the nine men behind him as they swung one by one into the corridor beyond the elevator door.

The corridor was littered with shed insect skins and dark, lumpy metabolic waste.

Scattered documents, tables, chairs, and cabinets used as barricades in the middle of the hall, along with torn, shredded clothes, were everywhere.

Wo Zui Hei made a forward advance gesture, then pressed a button on his helmet.

"The warehouse on B40 is ours... Chao Xiong, take the others and continue down to B51 to retrieve the data."

The voice of Ten Fist Superman came through the comm channel.

"Roger!"

The team of twenty split into two groups. The ten still in the elevator shaft followed Ten Fist Superman to explore deeper, while Wo Zui Hei led his ten men forward.

Their target was the black box in the warehouse area on Level B40.

Ling Dang, riding the quadrupedal robot, pondered for a moment, then crawled into the B40 corridor, pattering along the ceiling above the group.

Wo Zui Hei ignored it, occasionally firing shots to kill ghost-faced insects that spread their wings as if to pounce, while carefully inspecting every corner of the corridor.

Several lights here were broken.

The entire corridor flickered between light and dark, like a scene straight out of a horror movie.

And the headache was that the main corridor was almost blocked by barricades and arthropod remains, forcing them to detour through what seemed to be a residential area.

Stepping over a toppled cabinet, Wo Zui Hei suddenly noticed a teddy bear lying against the wall. The bear was broken in half.

Its stuffing was gone, and judging by the bullet holes left on the floor, its owner had likely been riddled with bullets along with it, and soon after, the body became food for the bugs.

The player behind him clicked his tongue.

"The fighting here was pretty intense."

A few other players muttered quietly.

"Was it for the black box?"

"Doesn't seem like it..."

Wo Zui Hei also thought it unlikely.

If it were for the black box, the combat zone wouldn't have needed to extend two hundred meters from the warehouse entrance, nor would they have had to clear every single room.

It didn't look like a struggle for something.

Rather, it looked like a "cleanup."

Staring at the rows of open doors, Wo Zui Hei suddenly had a thought and looked up at the "guide" hanging from the ceiling.

"By the way, why did you design the vault as a hollow shaft? Wouldn't a solid structure save more space?"

Ling Dang, following above their heads, spoke slowly.

"Vault 100 is a vault, not an apartment. From the day it was designed, its fate was already decided: it would eventually be swept into the trash heap. Just like a chick must eventually peck its way out of its shell—if it doesn't, it will never see the real sun."

Wo Zui Hei: "What's the connection?"

Ling Dang let out a sharp, creaky laugh.

"Of course there is. The massive atrium structure was prepared for the day it would collapse. When the reconstruction plan reaches its mid-phase, the 'Tree' will actively blow up the dome, causing the upper structure to fall into the atrium along a funnel-shaped box structure, forming an upward opening."

"In this way, the vault will become a natural casting pit, swallowing all the garbage above our heads."

Stunned by this astonishing design concept, Wo Zui Hei was speechless.

"A casting pit?"

Ling Dang's voice carried a hint of pride.

"Exactly—a pit that casts everything. It's a vertical production base. In the envisioned plan, raw materials would cascade like a waterfall from the pit's mouth to its bottom, transforming into what we need the moment they hit the ground, then be lifted by elevators to the surface. And in the final phase of the plan, we would use it to build a starship whose dimensions almost perfectly match the atrium's inner diameter, using it to catch up with the footsteps of the Zhiyuan and colonize even more distant worlds."

Wo Zui Hei stared at it, dumbfounded.

"You've even planned for this kind of thing," said Lingdang, a hint of teasing in her tone.

"Of course, after all, the 'Tree' is omnipotent—it can make plans a thousand years ahead. It's just a pity that most people can't keep up with its rhythm."

Wo Zui Hei: "..."

A player muttered in disbelief, "I thought only nuclear engineers lived here."

Lingdang laughed heartily. "Nuclear engineers? Ah... well, of course there are, but what kind of fusion reactor needs thirty thousand people to maintain? There are experts from every field here, along with their descendants."

Wo Zui Hei asked instinctively, "Where are they?"

For some reason, Lingdang suddenly fell silent. Though it soon resumed speaking, it deftly steered the conversation elsewhere, avoiding the topic.

Wo Zui Hei felt there was something off about this creature, but since control of the shelter had already been transferred, he wasn't too worried.

Just then, the communication channel crackled with the intermittent voice of Brother Juquan Chao Ren.

"The VM in the administrator's office has been recovered... Damn it, there must be at least a few hundred bugs here. How much longer will you be?"

Wo Zui Hei glanced at the map on his VM. The entrance to the warehouse was just ahead.

According to the surveillance footage provided by the administrator, there were still about thirty or forty Ghostface Beetles waiting for them.

"We're almost there too."

Juquan Chao Ren: "Need help?"

Wo Zui Hei looked around. "No, those little bugs can't hurt us. The only trouble is the terrain—it's too damn complicated. Those obstacles are more trouble than the bugs."

Juquan Chao Ren: "Alright, be careful... We've already copied the data from the VM into the shelter's server. Since we have some time, we're planning to check out that 'side quest' on floor B100."

Control of the shelter had been seized by the administrator before they even set foot inside, which was why they could maintain contact with the outside world. As long as the data from the VM was uploaded to the shelter's server, everything—including the administrator's logs—could be synced externally.

What puzzled Wo Zui Hei, though, was why the administrator of Vault 100, who wasn't even human, would have something like a VM (Vital Monitor). And even more suspiciously, the administrator itself was an AI living in the server, yet its logs weren't stored in the shelter's server but on an offline mobile storage device.

Too strange.

But no matter what, retrieving the black box was the top priority.

"...Roger that. Floor B100 is yours. You be careful too." After a casual remark, Wo Zui Hei ended the call and turned to his teammates behind him.

"Brother Chao's team has it handled. We need to speed up too!"

The group replied with enthusiasm, "Roger!"

...

Over a hundred little players of the Storm Corps were still digging through the ruins of Vault 100 beneath the Fourth New District, huffing and puffing like grave robbers.

Meanwhile, far away in Camp 101, Chu Guang, who had been peeping through the surveillance feeds, had already obtained the logs recovered from the administrator's office by his little players, thanks to Xiao Qi.

Unlike the administrator logs recovered from other vaults, the logs of Vault 100 were less like a personal, emotional "last testament" and more like an instruction manual stuffed inside a TV box—something no one would ever bother to read.

The log began with a concise explanation of Vault 100's functions, including the management authority held by the "Tree," the resources the vault was entitled to, the obligations it bore, and the rules residents had to follow.

Chu Guang skimmed through the verbose content, extracting key points and roughly grasping the "game rules" of Vault 100.

Simply put, if the vault were a prison, the "Tree" was the warden, and the "Supervisors" were the guards. The former managed, the latter enforced.

The number of Supervisors was determined by the vault's population. Apart from the initial three hundred Supervisors, one additional Supervisor slot was created for every hundred new residents.

Vault 100's goal was clear: after sixty-three years of isolation, execute the Wasteland Reconstruction Plan. While sheltering survivors upon detecting a nuclear strike was part of the plan, the vault bore no obligation to save anyone.

Thus, Vault 100's starting point was almost the polar opposite of the overcrowded Vault 117.

The "Tree" unhesitatingly executed the predetermined "Shelter Protocol." After completing the intake of 30,300 residents, it ordered the Supervisors to expel all unregistered residents beyond the gates.

Inventory records from the warehouse system showed that tranquilizer guns were drawn on the day the vault sealed—the expulsion was hardly peaceful. But those weren't peaceful times anyway, so debating it was meaningless.

After entering the vault, the thirty thousand residents spent three uneasy days. On the fourth day, they were told that the world had been destroyed in a nuclear war, that all old orders—including the Human Federation—had ceased to exist, and that it would take at least sixty-three years for the outside world to become habitable again.

Reading this, Chu Guang felt a flicker of doubt. This contradicted what he had learned from Yur's memories and the logs of other vault administrators.

The war hadn't lasted just three days but three full years. Until the end of the Three-Year War and the establishment of the Post-War Reconstruction Committee, the world hadn't truly become a wasteland; the Human Federation's organizations and institutions had still been struggling to function.

But his confusion was soon resolved.

This, too, was part of the "Tree's" decision.

A Supervisor registered under the bio-information number "Craig" had left three lines of annotation beside this passage:

[This was the wisest decision. The Great Tree convinced the restless residents with just three sentences. Under its will, we showed them evidence of the apocalypse—the hellish scenes of Qingquan City after the nuclear strike. After seeing the truth, they quickly abandoned all unrealistic fantasies and accepted the unpalatable biscuits, canned food, and freeze-dried vegetables, as well as the fact that there were no more android servants to attend to them.]

[What puzzles me is, what was so hard to swallow about biscuits and freeze-dried vegetables? What had they been eating before? Unfortunately, the 'Tree' deleted all visual records of the old era. I've only heard fragments about the Age of Prosperity from my grandfather, and both he and I firmly believe that era is gone forever.]

[To keep moving forward on this thorny path, we can only believe with devout faith.]

"Craig."

Chu Guang murmured the name, then suddenly thought of something. "Xiao Qi, pull up this person's file."

"On it!"

Xiao Qi, perched on his shoulder, responded eagerly and soon displayed the file on one side of the holographic screen.

Chu Guang looked directly at the column for the date of employment.

According to the file, Craig was appointed as a Supervisor in Wasteland Year 53, at the age of twenty-four.

Interestingly, that was the year after the waters of West Lake flooded the tunnel, when the wasteland's climate had begun to show signs of recovery, just seven years before the vault was scheduled to unseal.

Things were slowly getting better.

New Supervisors being appointed meant the vault's population was growing, so the environment couldn't have been too terrible.

Curious about the vault's history, Chu Guang shifted his focus from the "Tree's" report to this Supervisor named Craig. He asked Xiao Qi to organize the annotations Craig had added later, arranging them chronologically and cross-referencing them with the administrator's logs.

He soon discovered that Craig's perspective offered a starkly different view from the "Tree's" straightforward records.

[... The consumption of supplies for thirty thousand people is astronomical, especially given the material demands of residents from the Age of Prosperity, which are beyond our current imagination. The Great Tree could monitor their physical and mental health, but it couldn't assign a personal health assistant to each one. We had to first lower their expectations for the future, then gradually acclimate them to a new way of life.]

[So my grandfather, under the Great Tree's instructions, used the example of those who had been expelled to warn the lucky ones who remained: Vault 100 has no obligation to shelter anyone. It belongs to all who suffer, but to no one in particular. If they didn't want to struggle like the wretches huddled in the garbage heaps of the subway station, they must unconditionally obey the 'Tree's' commands—and unconditionally obey ours.]

[In the first fifty years, we achieved remarkable results. The Great Tree's correctness and our devotion stood the test of time. The 'Crunch' we created could fully recycle almost all metabolic waste. The 'Wolf Spider' robots and 'Beetle-type' engineering armor we designed could climb up and down nearly vertical tunnels, replacing engineering equipment that couldn't adapt to the vault's environment for high-difficulty construction—something even the Great Tree hadn't anticipated.]

【As it turns out, our creativity is enough to make the AI of the Prosperity Era drop its jaw in astonishment—if it had a jaw to drop.】

【Please don’t laugh out loud; I’m being serious about this. You, who were born with hundreds of colonized planets at your disposal, can never understand the desperation of resource scarcity. It’s like tens of thousands of people crammed into an isolated space station, where we have to use limited resources and space to meet everyone’s basic needs—at least ensuring that most people’s living standards don’t decline too quickly. And even in such dire straits, we still created a series of incredible technological achievements.】

【To this day, I still remember the joy I felt the day I became a Supervisor. It was like a child growing up overnight and becoming the all-powerful hero from the stories they’d read since childhood. Soon, like my forefathers, I would lead those clever and capable residents to create even greater, more astonishing miracles.】

【Yet reality and ideals always seem to clash. Those clever residents believe they are wiser than the “Tree,” and they show no respect for us Supervisors. They even curse us as servants of the AI, calling us “Tree-People,” saying we have nothing human about us except our appearance.】

【If I think about it carefully, perhaps from that moment on, I should have noticed where the real problem lay. We had already drawn a clear line between us and them long ago. From the very beginning, we and those “worker ants” were never the same kind of people.】

【This shelter is like a prison. The worker ants’ sentence is sixty-three years, while ours is forever. The identity of Supervisor was bestowed upon us by the shelter. We did the dirtiest work and enjoyed some special privileges. But once this shelter fulfills its mission and collapses as designed, everything will vanish into thin air.】

【When that time comes, the worker ants won’t punish an AI. Instead, they will settle scores with all of us. After all, the records of our initial exile of the survivors can never be erased—not even the Administrator can alter them.】

【So you can imagine how anxious we felt as the sixty-three-year deadline drew closer. And how joyful we were when the waters of West Lake flooded into the subway station, lapping at the edges of the gate. We had already perfected this shelter to last forever, and it would only improve further. All we had to do, like those cunning worker ants, was exploit a bug the “Tree” never anticipated, making it decide that the shelter’s door should open a little later.】

【In fact, we succeeded. We extended the sixty-three-year deadline to seventy years. Until we find a way to escape unscathed, we will keep stretching that time as long as possible—ideally turning that number into forever. But none of us expected the once-docile worker ants to react so violently, even going so far as to plant poison needles under the belly of the adorable “Gubeng” and turning the pincers of the “Beetle-Type” into shields and blades.】

【An absurd farce erupted, catching everyone off guard. But if you think about it, perhaps we were the most absurd of all. We were so busy dealing with the daily crises of managing the shelter that we completely forgot the purpose for which this shelter was built.】

【As you, standing in this museum, can see, we were forever trapped in this cage.】

【We can never leave.】

【—Craig, a pitiful soul who never got to see the new world, the last warden of Prison 100, the last Tree-Person to survive.】

After reading Craig’s notes to the end, Chu Guang was momentarily speechless.

He didn’t find the man pitiable in the slightest, but the ending for this shelter was indeed absurd enough.

Just then, Xiao Qi, perched on Chu Guang’s shoulder, let out a soft exclamation.

“...Strange.”

Chu Guang looked up from the holographic screen.

“What now?”

This shelter was prone to occasional malfunctions, and this wasn’t Xiao Qi’s first error report.

But this time, a peculiar expression flickered across its face.

“The fault log shows a communication module overload. The data we transmitted triggered some threshold, and the connection between Shelter 100 and the outside world was protectively severed... But that’s odd. The amount of data we used wasn’t very large—unless someone deliberately set that threshold extremely low.”

The shelter itself was a massive Faraday cage, capable of blocking even high-energy particles, let alone the faint radiation of electromagnetic waves.

The players’ communication devices couldn’t directly connect to external radios; they had to exchange information with the outside world through dedicated channels.

It was the same whether the door was open or closed.

In other words, once that channel was blocked, the entire shelter would become a black hole of information for a certain period.

Simply put, their signal had likely been deliberately cut off.

Looking at Xiao Qi’s subtle expression, Chu Guang’s own expression grew equally subtle.

Good grief...

Here we go again!