This Game Is Too Real
Chapter 624: Drawing a Full Stop to the Century-Old Grudge

Chapter 624: Chapter 624: Drawing a Full Stop to the Century-Old Grudge

The towering door unfolded like a decree in the hands of a judge, revealing a small crevice.

The icy shards blown out by the breeze glinted with a sharpness fiercer than swords.

Standing before that towering door, the man clad in a heavy exoskeleton stared dumbfounded at everything before him, taking a long time before he managed to squeeze out a half-statement.

"Damn it..."

Bodies lay flat across the thousand square meters of open space, people curled up tightly against the ground, maintaining the posture of their last second alive.

Some had their foreheads pressed to the ground in a praying pose, others huddled together; there were mothers and fathers holding their children, and families of three holding hands...

This was the hundredth and the last underground floor of Shelter 100. Its ceiling was the floor of the central courtyard, and the floor was the base of the entire shelter.

Perhaps because it was a storage area, this was the floor with the greatest height in the entire shelter.

Strength-type player thought he might find some treasures here or, at least, some valuable junk. However, he didn’t expect to walk into a pile of dead bodies as soon as he opened the door.

Just this warehouse alone contained at least a thousand or two thousand bodies, and there were several more similar warehouses here.

The conditions in those were probably similar...

His boot soles made a creaking sound on the floor.

Strength-type player unconsciously stepped through the door crevice and entered this icehouse of several tens of degrees below zero, holding a flashlight to inspect his surroundings.

More than shock, he was bewildered and murmured softly.

"...What exactly happened here?"

Following behind him into the icehouse, the player in the exoskeleton knelt on the ground, carefully inspected a body lying on the ground, and took a photo of its face.

After a moment, he concluded,

"Most of the people here seem to have died from lack of oxygen... They weren’t frozen to death, but rather frozen after death."

Some bodies showed clear gunshot wounds or even severed arms and legs, clearly dragged here postmortem.

"...Does it make a difference?"

Brushing off his hands and standing up, the player sighed.

"Not really..."

Fair is fair.

It was also his first time seeing so many dead outside the battlefield.

The intense visual impact was totally different from seeing bodies on the battleground. After all, during battle, there was no time to think about how a person died.

"...The signal probably didn’t come from here. There can’t be any living people here."

Taking one last look at the rows of ice-block bodies, Strength-type player retracted the flashlight beam, turned to his teammates, and continued,

"Let’s get out of here."

No one wanted to stay here longer than necessary. The player nodded in agreement, and together they exited the icehouse, casually pressing the door-close button for those old popsicles.

The two continued to explore several warehouses.

As expected, Superman Punch quickly realized that the situation in these ice storage facilities was basically the same, crammed with bodies frozen into ice blocks.

There were no signs of gunfire in the B100 level, and it remained a mystery who had stuffed these people into the ice storage and left them to die.

Just as the pair finished exploring the last ice house and headed to the other side, players who had been exploring there returned and greeted them from afar.

"This level seems to be the storage area—the north side is a cold storage for food, and the south side seems to store engineering machinery and daily necessities. However, the resources there are completely wiped clean, except for one warehouse which has been transformed into a workshop. We also found a generator and accumulator batteries, along with some other devices whose purpose we couldn’t understand."

Superman Punch immediately perked up at this information.

"Let’s go check it out."

Following the other player, the group quickly moved from the northern storage area to the south.

This area was much larger than the previous one, and much more complex in structure. The towering metal frames resembled walls and required the assistance of escalators to reach the top level.

Upon entering this area, Superman Punch caught a faint whiff of machine oil and immediately sensed that this warehouse was different.

If the warehouses they had searched before were more like morgues, then this place was like a recycling center filled with junk.

A few "Buprestis" engineering armors were like crabs that had their shells lifted, their internal parts almost completely stripped, hanging next to scaffolding made of steel pipes, with their pincers and heads drooping.

Nearby lay a pile of dusty coils and makeshift machines, a complete array of players’ devices that were incomprehensible in their intended use.

Survivors living on this level pushed their ingenuity and professional skills to the limit. They filled tall glass containers with the glue-like secretions of Ghost-faced Insects to purify electrolytes and created disposable chemical batteries to power these makeshift devices.

Moreover, they dismantled some machines picked up from other floors, transforming the entire warehouse into a small workstation independent of the shelter’s electricity supply. This included retrofitting workbenches with a series of refined gadgets, including integrated circuits.

While these strange devices looked impressive, what baffled Superman Punch was that he couldn’t understand what exactly these people were tinkering with.

"What are they making?"

His teammate hesitated.

"Maybe like in ’Oxygen Not Included,’ they plan to establish a material cycle within this shelter?"

"How could that be possible..."

"It’s not entirely impossible, at least they haven’t touched the corpses in the neighboring ice house yet... Well, maybe they haven’t. But from this, it seems their remaining supplies are still abundant, at least they still have choices."

This was indeed a novel idea.

These people had restored electricity and even got the cold storage working again; clearly, they had solved the key energy issue.

They had frozen the bodies, and these corpses were now well-preserved, and the outside insects hadn’t gone extinct, implying they had achieved their goal before running out of nutritional substances. The puzzling thing, however, was where all these people eventually went.

Surely they couldn’t have just busied themselves and then returned to lie in the ice house?

Looking at a dissection table loaded with chitinous exoskeletons, Superman Punch scratched the back of his head through the helmet, feeling bewildered.

He was clueless about archaeology, yet now felt as if he was on an archaeological site.

Strangely captivating was the fact that the Prosperity Epoch’s technology, as set in the game, far surpassed that of the real world, making it impossible for him to use real-world experience to infer the survivors’ motives or guess what they were up to.

As he walked over to a dissection table, Superman Punch reached for a bowl-shaped insect casing on the table and noticed a line of small characters etched on it.

Using VM’s translation feature, he extracted the text, and a pale blue floating window was projected onto the inner side of his exoskeleton helmet’s tactical goggles.

"...Commemorating the 77,274 residents, including 645 supervisors."

He read it out softly.

An agility-system player walked up to him, looking curiously at the insect carapace he was holding.

"What’s this? A will?"

His nickname was Return to soil & Rest in peace, and he had joined the game in the Beta 0.4 version and had also joined the Storm Corps around that time.

"Probably," Saitama said as he put the insect carapace back on the table, pulled up the previously retrieved Administrator’s Log to glance at it, then scanned the mural-like graffiti on the surrounding walls.

"One can roughly guess that there must have been a conflict here before, or a war. Those residents of the refuge and supervisors fought it out, and then the supervisors drove them to the lowermost level and cut off their power? But they also cut off the upper layers’ supplies, and both sides ceased contact for a period..."

Actually, there was no need to guess.

Their journey down here was marked with traces of gunfire, especially the corridor on B51, which was densely filled with bullet holes.

Both sides, fighting over control of the Manager’s Office, had left thousands of bodies in just one corridor, recognizable by the residents’ Variable Temperature Jackets.

Of course, compared to the dreadful scene in the adjacent warehouse, that was relatively mild.

"Regardless of what exactly they did, did you find that abnormal life signal?" asked a strength-type player as he came over and coughed, "This place always gives me the creeps, let’s just finish the task and head up."

His nickname was Unconscious, and although having joined the game since Beta 0.1 and joined the Storm Corps before knowing Return to soil & Rest in peace, their IDs were surprisingly similar which led to them being mistaken as a couple.

It was unclear where Springs got all these gems from.

"Not yet," Saitama shook his head, walked over to a mural-engraved wall, and took several photos.

Return to soil & Rest in peace muttered beside him.

"Isn’t there a more precise coordinate? Just on this floor... This hint is too abstract."

Another player shook his head.

"The monitors and sensors on B100 have been removed, to be precise, from level B51 downwards as well, the life signal was captured by the sensors on B51, but it’s impossible to pinpoint its exact location, we can only faintly perceive its presence."

Observing the mural’s details carefully, Saitama discovered another line of text on the wall, seemingly written by the same person who had carved on that insect carapace.

Following the rust-laden line, he read out softly,

"...Tree People are not from the indescribable tree, they have always originated from us just like the tree, and their arrogance is also our sin of arrogance."

"Order was meant to be our fortress of shelter, yet we turned its bricks into swords for fratricide."

"We have forgotten where to go, where we came from, what initially built this fortress, and ultimately became its puppet."

"We shall all die."

"And I will use my remaining life to complete our tombstone."

"—Grave Guard of Shelter 100."

No name was left at the signing place, just a string of numbers.

Saitama had a flash of inspiration, thinking this could be a record of the number of cycles; he therefore did a unit conversion with the numbers, and figured out that the testament was written in the 60th year of the Wasteland Era.

"So... Do those survivors all end up dead?"

Looking at the century-old murals on the wall, he furrowed his brows slightly and then glanced at the pile of machines nearby.

Could these items merely be funerary objects in a tomb?

He instinctually felt it wasn’t that simple.

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

"There’s a sleep cabin here!"

Hearing that, Saitama immediately rushed over.

At the end of rows of shelves entwined with various pipes, there stood a machine about ten square meters in size.

In the center of the machine was a sleep cabin, with a cracked glass jar next to it.

From the shattered pieces on the floor, it seemed that the glass jar had been broken from the inside, something had burrowed out.

According to the life signal radar feedback from VM, that blurry life signal was emitted from this sleep cabin!

Everyone’s face lit up with joy.

There was a living person here!

"I’ll open it!"

Saitama stepped forward, drew a data cable from VM, connected it to the interface of the sleep cabin, and simultaneously pressed the power button.

The hacking program prepared by their archaeological team immediately took effect, quickly gaining control of the sleep cabin’s program.

Clearly, when it came to breaking into fridges, Yin Fang was a professional.

Saitama pressed the door-open button without hesitation, but when a rotting smell drifted out with a hissing leak, he immediately sensed something wrong.

Dozens of ghost-faced insects crawled out of the gap in the cabin door, making a sizzling noise as they rushed toward the people standing in front of the sleep cabin.

"Damn it!"

Return to soil & Rest in peace was startled, reflexively pulled the trigger, and with three rapid shots tore apart the insect that had crawled to his feet, also breaking the silence in the warehouse.

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

Swatting an approaching insect to the ground, Saitama lifted his foot and crushed it into a mushy mess.

Having dealt with those emerged insects, he then looked into the open sleep cabin, only to see a mutilated skeleton lying inside.

The person’s hands were placed on their chest, holding a broken fragment of a glass bottle containing small insect shells and damaged eggs.

From various details, it seemed the person had deliberately laid in the sleep cabin with these eggshells. However, they did not trigger the freezing program, only the vacuum program.

After completing some ritual, they ended their life in some way and left their body to those insects.

Saitama blankly stared at the remains and the eggs crammed into the skeleton, speechless for a long time.

The humanoid life signal they had previously detected, hoping it was a survivor who had lived, turned out to be a bunch of insects!

Is this even possible?

Just as he was caught off guard, a harsh alarm suddenly blared.

No one knew what had happened, but as they quickly looked around, the warning lights above them started flashing red with the alarm, causing a disturbing disorientation.

"... What happened?" he asked, looking around anxiously.

Just then, the VM connected to his left arm and the Sleep Cabin displayed a burst of snowy white on its screen.

Then, like something haunted, the UI interface of the science exploration group’s mini program was replaced by the face of an old man, blurred by a mosaic.

Noticing the change on the VM on his arm, he immediately looked at the old man on the screen and asked cautiously,

"Who are you?"

As he spoke, his right hand held onto the data cable, ready to physically disconnect the network at any moment.

The old man, floating in the snowy white backdrop, quietly watched him, his intermittent voice drifting from behind his pixelated features.

"I am ’Tree’, the Manager here."

Hearing this unexpected name, he was completely stunned and then blurted out subconsciously,

"...Tree?! Weren’t you dead?"

The old man continued to speak calmly.

"AI has no concept of life or death. My purpose is to serve the residents here, and I shall continue to fulfill my mission until they no longer need me."

He wanted to ask more, but more pressing matters demanded his attention.

"What’s that noise outside? Have we committed some kind of... taboo?"

Tree replied with an undisturbed tone to his question.

"That is a prelude to the end of my mission."

Before the man in front of the screen could inquire further, it continued,

"The reactor is functioning normally, the life monitoring sensors have been restarted, the detection program is continuing to execute, and the number of active residents’ life signals has been maintained below 3000 for 24 consecutive hours. The Shelter’s protection protocol will enter its final phase, initiating the dome’s self-destruct program to cause the surface wasteland and earth structures to fall into the shaft."

The players understood the last sentence instantaneously and were shocked.

"What the hell?!"

"Self-destruct?!"

Sensing the emotional turmoil among everyone, Tree continued calmly,

"There is no need to panic. What you are about to witness is the ultimate fate of this Shelter: it was designed from the moment it was built."

He looked baffled at the screen.

Not panic? How could we not panic!

It’s year 213 of the Wasteland Era!

It’s over 100 years deviant from the planned timeline!

If that dome self-destruct program is actually initiated, who knows what the outcome will be—it might just bury the entire shelter.

To put it plainly,

This is a program designed two centuries ago; how can we rely on it to still be reliable after two hundred years?

And what’s more crucial, the countdown isn’t 24 hours; it’s 10 minutes! They didn’t even have time to evacuate with the Black Box!

The progress bar had already moved halfway a long time ago!

At the brink of crisis, he calmed down and said to the old man on the screen,

"Can you stop it? The current conditions no longer meet the criteria for initiating the dome self-destruct protocol!"

Tree responded in a flat tone.

"Request unauthorized, administrator privileges not detected, the shelter protocol cannot be altered."

When he heard the first part of the response, his heart sank, but as he heard the last bit, hope reignited.

The denial was for altering the protocol, not the request itself.

In other words—

As long as he didn’t alter the protocols but merely reinterpreted the existing terms, he still had a chance to convince this stubborn AI!

His thoughts raced in his mind.

Suddenly, he noticed the corpse in the Sleep Cabin holding an egg sac, and ideas began to take shape.

The answer had been left long ago...

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

"I have a doubt about the rule for determining the disappearance of residents’ life signals."

Tree indeed responded to him.

"What doubt."

He looked at the virtual image on the screen and pronounced each word clearly,

"Am I a resident of Shelter 100?"

Tree answered coldly,

"No bio-recognition information registered on file, determined as no."

He continued, "So only if ’Shelter 100’s residents’ number remains above 3000, the dome’s self-destruct program won’t execute."

Tree, "Correct understanding. That is one of the basic conditions, besides maintaining an average of 5000 people continuously for 180 days."

He then asked, "What about the children of Shelter 100’s residents? Can they also be considered residents of Shelter 100?"

Tree replied, "Of course, as long as the biological inheritance between different life forms can be proven, one can obtain the status of the shelter’s resident—"

Watching the countdown dwindle to its final few minutes, Super Punch interrupted its speech, speaking rapidly.

"Then I earnestly ask you to open your eyes and see, just how many people are in this shelter!"

Tree: "Zero."

Ignoring its icy, merciless reply, Super Punch didn’t give up but continued to argue desperately.

"Open your eyes wider! They haven’t disappeared; they are all still here. It’s just that during your dormant period, they’ve transformed their life forms! The insects you see are the continuation of their lives, and the evidence is right here in this Sleep Cabin in front of me! What was the biometric information of the last Resident of level B100 who lay down here, and what was it after the door opened? Isn’t that enough to prove their identities?"

Super Punch knew very well that he was being sophistical.

However, his argument wasn’t something he fabricated on the spot but had been prepared by a witness more than a hundred years ago.

That guy who called himself the Grave Guard.

The rituals he completed weren’t meaningless, and the heritage he left wasn’t meant to accompany him in death.

He had anticipated that someday someone would uncover this burial ground and that they would restart the dormant reactor.

To annul the mistakes committed due to their collective folly and to stop the self-destruction program of the dome, he designed his own death and transformed himself into an insect, exploiting a loophole in the shelter’s biometric program.

It was the last time he took advantage of a bug in the shelter’s rules.

But this time, it wasn’t to combat the "Tree People"; it was to save the home he once loathed and desperately wanted to escape.

The Tree thought for a moment.

Under the scrutiny of numerous players, it slowly nodded its head.

"Supplementary regulation updated."

"Judgment result correction, current resident count is 6,790,000..."

The piercing alarm halted in the last minute of the countdown, and both Super Punch and his teammates breathed a sigh of relief.

Regaining his senses, he was astonished in his heart.

He hadn’t expected there to be so many Ghost-faced Insects in the shelter... a total of more than six million.

Regardless, they had managed to get past the current situation, and how to deal with this mess would be left for the Manager to consider.

There should be a way to retrieve management authority from that tree.

At that moment, the old man whose facial features were blurred by mosaic on the screen suddenly let out a light laugh.

Though his mouth’s curvature wasn’t visible, Super Punch was certain he hadn’t seen it wrong.

"It’s up to you now."

After dropping that meaningful monologue, before everyone could recover, the snow-white flickering on the screen disappeared.

As if it had never appeared...

Return to Soil & Rest in Peace was momentarily stunned.

"What did he say?"

Super Punch was also stunned.

"It seemed like he said... it’s up to us?"

Confused and befuddled, the unconscious went.

"What does that mean?"

"I don’t know..." Super Punch took a deep breath and looked towards his teammates, "Anyway, I’ll log off for a bit and report the situation here to the outside. You guys don’t touch anything here for now; there might still be something strange hidden inside."

Their mission had been completed.

He didn’t want any further complications.

The other teammates exchanged glances and nodded in agreement.

"Mm."

Super Punch sat down on the ground and closed his eyes.

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

He had barely logged onto the forum when he saw a string of red dots floating above the private message box, which turned out to be frantic mentions from I Max Black.

I Max Black: "Holy shit, what were you guys doing down there?"

Super Punch: "That, don’t worry, we just took care of it."

I Max Black: "???"

Super Punch: "Also, we finished the last side quest... Unfortunately, no survivors were found. The Sleep Cabin was filled with insects; that person ended his own life."

I Max Black: "Ended his own life? Wait, weren’t they transformed into insects? (shocked)"

Super Punch: "Turned into insects? Is that so? But it felt more like a usual Neural Connection Device."

I Max Black: "Ah, this..."

Super Punch: "According to the last words left by the last survivor on B100 level., who dragged the bodies of his compatriots into the fridge; he lay down in the Sleep Cabin himself too, but he didn’t initiate the freezing program, instead chose to end his life... Maybe in his last moments, he controlled the robots or insects to go out and have a look at the outside world, just like you said, turned into insects."

I Max Black was silent for a while before replying.

"...That’s absurd."

Super Punch sighed and typed back.

"Yeah, I think so too, but that’s their final outcome... Our mission is done, it’s time to pull out."

All he knew was the "Worker Ant’s" perspective and was unaware of the full extent of the crisis that had occurred in this shelter more than a hundred years ago.

Perhaps in the future, the past of this shelter might appear on the forum of Wasteland OL, just like other shelters unearthed by other players.

But.

Probably there’s no need to expect the game planners to take care of this themselves...

-

(Recently I’ve been always late, decided to make it earlier today.)

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