Chapter 625: Drawing a Line Under a Century-Old Grudge

Chapter 625: Bringing a Century-Old Grudge to a Close

The monolithic door, resembling a magistrate’s ledger of judgment, parted to reveal a minuscule crack.

The ice shards carried out by the gentle breeze caught the light, glinting with a malice sharper than any blade.

Standing before that towering portal, a man clad in heavy exoskeleton armor stared dumbfounded at the scene before him, unable to squeeze out more than a fractured exclamation for a long while.

"Holy shit..."

Frozen statues littered the thousand-square-meter expanse, curled figures clinging to the earth, preserved in the final postures of their dying seconds.

Some had pressed their foreheads against the ground in a desperate prayer; others clung to one another for warmth; there were mothers and fathers shielding their infants, and entire families of three holding hands.

This was the hundredth floor beneath Vault 100, the absolute lowest level. Its ceiling formed the floor of the central atrium, while its own floor was the bedrock of the entire shelter.

Perhaps because it served as a storage area, this floor boasted the highest single-level clearance in the entire vault.

Ten-Punch Superman had originally expected to unearth some grand treasure on this floor, or at the very least stumble upon some valuable scrap, but he never anticipated plunging headfirst into a mass grave the moment the doors opened.

In this single warehouse alone, at least one or two thousand corpses lay still, and there were several more identical storage bays flanking this one.

Those, in all likelihood, harbored the same grim reality.

The soles of his boots crunched against the frosted ground.

Involuntarily, Ten-Punch Superman slipped through the gap in the door and stepped into this freezing vault where the temperature plummeted dozens of degrees below zero, raising his flashlight to sweep the surroundings.

More than shocked, he was utterly bewildered, murmuring softly to himself.

"...What on earth happened here?"

Following him into the icy tomb, a player wearing an exoskeleton knelt on the ground, carefully inspecting a frozen form prone on the floor and snapping a picture of the corpse's face.

After a brief moment, he reached a conclusion.

"Most of the people here probably died of oxygen deprivation... They didn't freeze to death; it looks more like they were frozen after they had already died."

On a few others, glaring gunshot wounds were visible, and some even lacked arms or legs, making it obvious they had been dragged in here post-mortem.

"...Is there a difference?"

Dusting off his hands as he stood up, the player sighed.

"Not really..."

To be completely fair.

It was the first time he had ever seen so many dead people outside of an active battlefield.

The sheer psychological impact of this sight was fundamentally different from encountering corpses in the heat of combat. After all, on the battlefield, there was never any time to ponder how a person had met their end.

"...The signal couldn't have originated from here; there's no way anyone is alive in this place."

Casting one final glance at the rows of flash-frozen corpses, Ten-Punch Superman averted the beam of his flashlight and turned to look at the teammate behind him.

"Let's get out of here."

Nobody wanted to linger in this place, so the player nodded in agreement, retreating from the ice vault alongside him, obligingly pressing the door-close button for the ancient popsicles left behind.

The two continued to scout several adjacent warehouses.

Ten-Punch Superman quickly discovered that, just as he had anticipated, the conditions in these freezing vaults were identical, each packed to the brim with frozen corpses.

Floor B100 showed absolutely no signs of a firefight, leaving the question of who had stuffed these people into the cold storage to suffocate a complete and unsolved mystery.

Just as the pair finished exploring the final vault, a player who had gone to scout the opposite side returned from ahead, waving to them from a distance.

"This floor seems to be mostly a warehouse district. The north side is cold storage for food, and the south side looks like it holds engineering machinery and daily supplies, though the resources over there have been picked completely clean. Only one warehouse is different—it was converted into a workshop. We even found a generator, storage batteries, and some gadgets I can't make heads or tails of."

Hearing this, Ten-Punch Superman's interest was instantly piqued.

"Let's go take a look."

Following behind the player, the group quickly moved from the northern warehouse district to the southern sector.

The area here was far vaster than the previous section, and its layout was considerably more labyrinthine. Massive metal racks loomed like walls, requiring ladders to reach the very top tiers.

The moment he stepped into this zone, Ten-Punch Superman caught the faint scent of machine oil, immediately discerning the uniqueness of this particular warehouse.

If the warehouses they had previously searched resembled a morgue, then this place felt like a reclamation yard overflowing with scrap.

Several 'Scarab' engineering armors sat like crabs stripped of their shells, their internal components cannibalized almost entirely, their claws and heads drooping listlessly beside scaffolding constructed from steel pipes.

Not far away lay a heap of dust-laden coils and jerry-rigged machinery; a veritable panoply of equipment, most of which the players could not even begin to comprehend the function of, was laid out here.

The survivors who had lived on this floor had pushed their ingenuity and technical expertise to the absolute limit. They had poured the secretions of Ghost-Face Chafers into glass vats as tall as a man to purify electrolytes, creating disposable chemical batteries to power these makeshift apparatuses.

Not only that, but they had subsequently dismantled machines salvaged from other floors, transforming the entire warehouse into a miniature workstation completely independent of the vault's main power grid, modifying a series of precision components—including integrated circuits—on crude workbenches.

These bizarre devices certainly looked impressive, yet what baffled Ten-Punch Superman was that he had absolutely no clue what these people were actually trying to fabricate.

"What were they making?"

The teammate beside him hesitated.

"Maybe... just like in *Oxygen Not Included*, they were trying to set up a closed-loop material cycle inside this vault?"

"How could something like that be possible..."

"It's not entirely out of the question. At least they haven't touched the corpses in the adjacent freezing vaults... well, maybe they haven't. At any rate, looking at it from this perspective, their remaining supplies were still quite abundant, meaning they at least still had options."

This was indeed a novel line of reasoning.

The people here had restored power and even brought the cold storage back online, meaning they had clearly resolved the most critical issue of energy.

They had frozen the corpses, and those bodies remained perfectly preserved to this day; furthermore, the insects outside had not been hunted to extinction. Evidently, they had achieved their objective before their nutrients ran dry. The only perplexing riddle was: where did everyone finally go?

Surely they didn't do all that frantic work just to go back into the ice vault and lie down?

Staring at the dissection table piled high with chitinous carapaces, Ten-Punch Superman scratched the back of his head through his helmet, feeling a massive headache coming on.

He knew next to nothing about archaeology, yet at this moment, he felt as though he were standing squarely in the middle of an archaeological dig site.

What made it particularly intriguing was that, according to the game lore, the technology of the Prosperity Era far surpassed that of the real world. Consequently, he could not utilize real-world experience to deduce the motives of these survivors or guess what they were trying to achieve.

Stepping up to a dissection table, Ten-Punch Superman reached out and picked up a bowl-shaped insect shell from the surface, discovering a line of small characters etched into it.

Using the VM's translation function to extract the text, a pale blue floating window projected onto the inner side of his exoskeleton helmet's tactical visor.

"...In memory of 77,274 residents, including 645 Overseers."

He read it aloud in a low voice.

An Agility-build player walked up to his side, peering curiously at the insect shell in his hand.

"What's that? A final testament?"

His username was Rest In Peace, a player who had joined the game during the Beta 0.4 version and had integrated into the Storm Corps at that same time.

"Most likely," Ten-Punch Superman replied, placing the insect shell back on the table. He pulled up the previously recovered Overseer logs to take a glance, then scanned the graffiti-like murals adorning the surrounding walls.

"Roughly guessing, a conflict or a war must have erupted here previously. The vault residents fought a battle against the Overseers, and then the Overseers drove them down to the lowest level, cutting off their power supply? However, they also cut off the supply of goods to the upper levels, and so the two sides ignored each other's existence for quite a long time..."

In truth, there was hardly any need for guesswork.

Their entire descent to this place had been marked by the scars of heavy firefights, particularly the corridor on Floor B51, which was riddled with a dense constellation of bullet holes.

Just to contest the Overseer’s office, the two factions had discarded over a thousand corpses in a single hallway, all of which could be identified by the thermal-regulation coats worn by the vault residents.

Of course, compared to those in the neighboring warehouse, the horrors there were but a mere drop in the bucket.

"Never mind what they actually did—have you found that anomalous life signal yet?" A Strength-type player walked over, clearing his throat. "This place gives me the creeps. Let's finish the mission and get out of here as fast as we can."

His nickname was Unconscious, and he had entered the game during Beta 0.1. Before joining Storm Brigade, he didn't know Buried at Peace, but their IDs were strikingly similar, often mistaken for a couple's names.

He had no idea where Old Man Springwater had scraped together so many top-tier items.

"Not yet," Ten-Fist Superman shook his head, walking over to a wall carved with murals and snapping a few photos.

Buried at Peace muttered something under his breath.

"No more precise coordinates? Just 'on this floor'... That hint is way too vague."

Another player shook his head.

"The surveillance and sensors on B100 have been dismantled—actually, from B51 downward, it's all the same. The life signal was picked up by a sensor on B51, but we can't pinpoint its exact location. We can only faintly sense its presence."

Studying the mural's details closely, Ten-Fist Superman discovered another line of text on the wall. The handwriting seemed to match the person who had carved into that insect shell.

Following the rust-stained, mottled grooves, he read aloud in a low voice.

"...The Treefolk did not come from the Unnameable Tree; like the tree itself, they have always come from us. And the arrogance of the Other is also the sin of our arrogance."

"Order was meant to be our fortress of refuge, yet we forged its bricks into swords for brother to slay brother."

"We have forgotten where we are going, forgotten where we came from, and forgotten why we built this fortress in the first place—until we became its puppets."

"We shall all die."

"And I shall spend the rest of my life completing our tombstone."

"—The Gravedigger of Vault 100."

No name was left at the signature, only a string of numbers.

A flash of insight struck Ten-Fist Superman. He thought this might be a cycle count recording time, so he converted the number into units and deduced that the last words had been written in the 60th year of the Wasteland Era.

"So... all those survivors died in the end?"

Staring at the century-old mural on the wall, he furrowed his brow slightly, then glanced at the mountain of machinery piled nearby.

Could all this be nothing more than grave goods?

Instinctively, he felt it couldn't be that simple.

Just then, a shout came from a teammate searching nearby.

"There's a cryopod over here!"

Hearing that, Ten-Fist Superman rushed over.

At the end of a row of shelves tangled with various pipes and cables stood a machine covering about a dozen square meters. In the center of the machine was a cryopod, and to its right, a shattered glass jar.

Judging by the fragments scattered on the ground, the jar had been broken from the inside—something had crawled out.

According to the feedback from the VM's life-signal radar, that vague life signal was coming from this very cryopod!

Joy instantly lit up the faces of the group.

There's a living person inside!

"I'll open it!"

Ten-Fist Superman stepped forward, pulled a data cable from his VM, plugged it into the cryopod's interface, and pressed the power button.

The hacking mini-program prepared by the research team immediately kicked in, quickly gaining control over the cryopod's systems.

Clearly, when it came to cracking open a fridge, that guy Yin Fang was a pro.

Without hesitation, Ten-Fist Superman pressed the open button. But as a stench of rot wafted out with a hiss of escaping air, he instantly knew something was wrong.

Dozens of ghost-faced insects squirmed through the gap in the pod's door, chittering as they scurried toward the players standing before the cryopod.

"Holy shit!"

Buried at Peace flinched in fright, reflexively pulling the trigger. Three sharp gunshots tore apart the bugs crawling at his feet, shattering the silence of the warehouse.

"Cease fire! Don't damage anything here!"

Slapping a bug that lunged at his face to the ground, Ten-Fist Superman stomped it into a smear of pulp.

Once the swarming insects were dealt with, he looked into the open cryopod. Inside lay a mutilated skeleton.

The corpse's hands were pressed against its chest, clutching a broken half of a glass jar. Inside, tiny insect shells and shattered egg fragments could be seen.

Based on various clues, this person had apparently willingly climbed into the cryopod with those eggs. But instead of activating the freezing program, they had only started the negative-pressure program.

After completing some ritual, they had ended their own life in some manner, leaving their body to the insects.

Ten-Fist Superman stared blankly at the remains, at the eggs crammed into the skeletal frame, unable to speak for a long time.

The life signal they had detected earlier—vaguely humanoid—had made them hope for a survivor. But instead, it was just a nest of bugs!

How the hell was that possible?

As he stood there stunned, a piercing alarm suddenly blared.

No one knew what had happened. Everyone quickly looked around, only to see the warning lights above flashing red in sync with the siren, unsettling their minds.

"...What's going on?" Buried at Peace glanced around warily.

At that moment, the VM strapped to Ten-Fist Superman's left arm—still connected to the cryopod—flickered with static snow.

Then, as if possessed, the UI of the research team's mini-program was replaced by the face of an old man, his features blurred by pixelation.

Noticing the change on his arm, Ten-Fist Superman immediately stared at the old man on the screen and asked warily.

"Who are you?"

Even as he spoke, his right hand had already gripped the data cable, ready to physically disconnect at any moment.

The old man, floating in a sea of static, gazed at him calmly. A fragmented voice drifted out from behind the pixelated, blurred face.

"I am the 'Tree,' the administrator of this place."

Hearing this unexpected name, Ten-Fist Superman froze, then blurted out instinctively.

"...The Tree?! I thought you were dead!"

The old man continued calmly.

"AI has no concept of life or death. My purpose for existence is to serve the residents living here. Until they no longer need me, I will continue to fulfill my duty."

Ten-Fist Superman wanted to press further, but there were more pressing matters.

"What's with that sound outside? Did we... violate some taboo?"

The Tree answered his question in a flat, unemotional tone.

"That is the announcement that my mission is nearing its end."

Before the man before the screen could ask for details, it continued.

"The reactor is running normally. The life-monitoring sensors have been restarted. The detection program continues. The number of active resident life signals has remained below 3,000 for 24 consecutive hours. The Vault's shelter protocol will enter its final phase: initiating the dome self-destruct sequence, guiding the surface ruins and earth structures to collapse into the shaft."

The players who understood the last sentence were instantly stunned.

"What the hell?!"

"Self-destruct?!"

Sensing the emotional turmoil of the crowd, Tree continued calmly.

"Don't panic. What you are about to witness is the final fate of this shelter, designed from the moment it was built."

Ten-Fist Superhero stared blankly at the figure on the screen.

Not panicking? Yeah, right...

How could he not panic!

It was the Wasteland Era, year 213!

The timeline had deviated by over a hundred years from the plan!

If that dome self-destruct program actually executed, who knew what the outcome would be—it might even bury the entire shelter.

In short,

this was a program designed two hundred years ago. How could it still be reliable after two centuries?

And worse, the countdown wasn't twenty-four hours—it was ten minutes! They didn't even have time to evacuate with the black box!

The progress bar had already been more than half full for a long time!

At the critical moment, he instead calmed down and looked at the old man on the screen.

"Can you stop it? The current situation no longer meets the conditions for initiating the dome self-destruct program!"

Tree replied in a flat, emotionless voice.

"Request denied. Administrator privileges not detected. Shelter protocol cannot be modified."

Hearing the first half, Ten-Fist Superhero's heart sank, but at the last sentence, hope flickered again.

The reason for the denial was modifying the protocol, not the request itself.

In other words—

as long as he didn't modify the protocol itself, only reinterpreted the existing terms, he still had a chance to convince this stubborn AI!

His thoughts raced.

Suddenly, he noticed the corpse in the hibernation pod clutching the insect eggs, and a path opened in his mind.

The answer had been left long ago...

Looking at Tree on the screen, he took a deep breath and spoke seriously.

"I have a question about the judgment rule for the disappearance of resident life signals."

Tree responded as expected.

"What question?"

Ten-Fist Superhero stared at the virtual image on the screen and said word by word.

"Am I a resident of Shelter 100?"

Tree answered coldly.

"Registered biometric information not detected. Judgment: negative."

Ten-Fist Superhero: "So only if 'residents of Shelter 100' number 3,000 can the dome self-destruct program be prevented from executing."

Tree: "Correct. That is one of the basic conditions. Additionally, the average daily population must remain above 5,000 for 180 consecutive days."

Ten-Fist Superhero: "Then I want to ask—what about the children of Shelter 100 residents? Can they also be counted as residents of Shelter 100?"

Tree: "Of course. As long as a biological inheritance relationship between different life forms can be proven, they can obtain shelter resident status—"

Seeing the countdown had only minutes left, Ten-Fist Superhero interrupted, speaking rapidly.

"Then I beg you to open your eyes and look again—how many people are in this shelter!"

Tree: "Zero."

Ignoring its cold, merciless answer, Ten-Fist Superhero didn't give up. He continued to argue, grasping at straws.

"Open your eyes wider! They haven't disappeared—they're all still here. During the time you slept, they changed their life form! The bugs you see are the continuation of their lives, and the evidence is right in the hibernation pod before me! What was the biometric information of the last resident of Floor B100 before he entered, and what was it after the pod opened? Isn't that enough to prove their identity?"

Ten-Fist Superhero knew he was sophistry.

But this argument wasn't something he made up—a witness had already thought of it for him over a hundred years ago.

That guy who called himself the Tomb Keeper.

The rituals he performed weren't meaningless, and the legacy he left wasn't meant to be buried with him.

He had long foreseen that one day someone would unearth this grave, and that those people would restart the dormant reactor.

To undo the mistake caused by their shared foolishness, to stop the dome self-destruct program, he designed his own death, exploiting a loophole in the shelter's biometric identification program to turn himself into a bug.

This was his last time using a bug in the shelter's rules.

But this time, it wasn't to fight the "Tree People"—it was to save the home he had once hated and desperately wanted to escape.

Tree thought for a moment.

Under the gaze of the players, it slowly nodded.

"Supplementary clause updated."

"Judgment result revised. Current resident count: six hundred seventy-nine thousand..."

The piercing alarm stopped in the last minute before the countdown ended. Ten-Fist Superhero and his teammates all breathed a sigh of relief.

Recovering, he couldn't help but marvel inwardly.

He never expected the shelter's ghost-faced bugs to be so numerous... over six million.

But no matter what, this immediate crisis was over. As for how to deal with this mess later, he'd leave it to the administrator to figure out.

There should be a way to retrieve the administrator privileges from that tree.

Just then, the old man on the screen, whose features were blurred by mosaic, suddenly smiled faintly.

Though he couldn't see the curve of his lips, Ten-Fist Superhero was sure he hadn't misread it.

"It's up to you now."

After dropping that meaningful monologue, before anyone could react, the static snow on the screen vanished.

As if it had never existed...

Rest in Peace was stunned.

"What did he say?"

Ten-Fist Superhero was also stunned.

"Sounds like... 'It's up to us'?"

Out Cold was baffled.

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know..." Ten-Fist Superman took a deep breath and looked at his teammates. "Anyway, I'll log off for a bit and report the situation outside. Don't touch anything here for now—there might be other weird things hidden inside."

The mission was already complete.

He didn't want any more complications.

The other teammates exchanged glances and nodded in agreement.

"Yeah."

Ten-Fist Superman sat down on the ground and closed his eyes.

At the same time, on the official forum of another world.

The moment he logged in, he saw a string of red dots floating over his private message box. Clicking in, it was a window where Darkest Me had been frantically @-ing him.

Darkest Me: "Holy shit, what are you guys doing down there?"

Ten-Fist Superman: "Oh that, don't worry. We just took care of it."

Darkest Me: "???"

Ten-Fist Superman: "Also, we finished the last side quest... but unfortunately, no survivors. The hibernation pod was stuffed with bugs. That person ended his own life."

Darkest Me: "Ended his own life? Wait, didn't they turn into bugs? (Shocked)"

Ten-Fist Superman: "Turned into bugs? Is that so? But it felt more like ordinary neural connection devices to me."

Darkest Me: "Ah, well..."

Ten-Fist Superman: "According to the last survivor on B100's final words, he dragged his comrades' corpses into the freezer, then lay down in the hibernation pod himself. But he didn't start the freezing process—instead, he chose to end his own life... Maybe in his final moments, he controlled a robot or a bug to go out and see the outside world, turning into a bug just like you said."

Darkest Me was silent for a long time before replying.

"...That's too absurd."

Ten-Fist Superman sighed and typed back.

"Yeah, I think so too. But that's how it ended for them... Our mission is done. Time to pull out."

All he knew was the perspective of the "Worker Ant" side; he didn't grasp the full picture of the crisis that had struck this shelter over a hundred years ago.

Perhaps one day, the story of this shelter would appear on the *Wasteland OL* forums, just like the shelters other players had uncovered.

But.

Probably no one should count on the damn devs to do it themselves...