Vault 100, Level B40.

My blackest team finally made their way through the mountain of obstacles and metabolites and arrived at the dust-free warehouse where the black boxes were stored.

Looking at the coordinates of the mission that were close at hand on the map, all players breathed a brief sigh of relief.

This is less than 200 meters in a straight line, which is simply longer than a kilometer off-road, especially those bugs that suddenly emerge from the shadows are still challenging their SAN values from time to time.

"I'm going to open the door.

Leaning on the side of the warehouse door, I was the darkest, gesturing to my teammates on the other side, and then punched the mechanical button that opened the door manually.

With a loud leaking sound, dry air is blown out of the door, blowing the dust that sticks to the crack of the door outward.

A few barrels quickly slammed into the door, and the glow of the flashlight quickly swept through every corner of the dark room, and as I confirmed that there was no threat, a trace of surprise appeared on my darkest face.

He had expected it to be heavily guarded, and even prepared for a hard fight, but the reality was the exact opposite of what he had envisioned.

The bell behind everyone teased unceremoniously.

"Positive pressure sealing is the basic configuration of the dust-free workshop, I thought you should know when you see the wind blowing, there is no possibility of unclean dirt mixing in here."

With that, it crawled into the house on its own, operating the spider robot to stretch out a leg and press the switch on the inside of the wall.

White lights illuminate the entire pitch-black room.

I turned off the tactical flashlight in the darkest embarrassment and pressed down the muzzle of the gun in my hand.

It's weird....

Where did the feeling of uneasiness come from?

However, the strange feeling in his heart did not last long, and was replaced almost instantly by the surprise that followed.

I saw that in the wide warehouse, near the side of the freight elevator, there were black boxes of different sizes and boxy.

Seeing those black boxes, the eyes of the players who followed me instantly glowed green, and they all let out cries of surprise.

"! One two three...... Twenty-nine!?" "Awesome!"

Although the current version of the Black Box does not support private player holding, every time a new Black Box is collected, all players on the entire server will benefit from it.

All novelties produced by the Black Box can be purchased for credits, and items that can be purchased will be cheaper or lower in the purchase threshold due to the newly unlocked Black Box.

And even putting aside the impact on the overall strength of the alliance, players will personally receive generous rewards of silver coins and contribution points for recycling black boxes.

The only uncertainty now is how many of these black boxes are still usable.

Vault 100 peaked at a population of more than 80,000, and the consumption of supplies was no less than that of ordinary settlements.

A dust-free working environment and professionally trained operators can extend the life of a black box, but the life of any black box is not permanent.

All I can do now is pray that these treasures of pre-war civilization will not be spoiled by the inhabitants of Vault 100.

Otherwise, they won't be ruined!

Leaving five teammates to guard the door, I took the remaining four into the warehouse and determined the function of the black box through the translator on the VM.

Actually, it's okay if you don't use a translator.

The design concept of the black box itself assumes that the user is completely illiterate, and even a completely illiterate gorilla can make it work according to the instructions printed on the black box.

After some careful inspection, there were a total of twenty-nine black boxes, and twenty-two were left that could function normally.

However, what is surprising is that the small pieces that are broken are worthless and can be replaced, such as the luminous panels of the dome and the filter elements of the ventilation system, and almost all the "big pieces" that are really valuable are left.

One of the most surprising players is undoubtedly the one

A black box that produces the Type 5 "Light Cavalry" and Type 6 "Heavy Cavalry" exoskeletons!

These two sets of police equipment are not only handsome, but also have excellent comprehensive performance, although they are not suitable for high-intensity battlefields, but the problem is not big!

It's OK to weld a steel plate on your chest!

Due to the many advantages, these two sets of equipment have always been limited in quantity, and only released in small quantities with each version update.

At present, only the Enlightenment faction in the entire wasteland has installed these two pre-war equipment on a large scale.

I still remember the battle in the Great Desert before, when the Alliance captured 200 sets of "Five Forms" from the Enlightenment Society at one time, and the administrators were overjoyed.

If you move these two black boxes back, you can't brush the favorability of the camp boss to the sky?!

Look at who dares to say that Lao Tzu's face is black in the future!

However, the most surprising thing is not only the black box that produces the "Type 5" and "Type 6" exoskeletons, but the two big ones that are closest to the freight elevator.

One is a plasma engine capable of producing 50 tons of high thrust, and the other is an aviation-grade metallic hydrogen battery capable of producing up to 10 tons of hydrogen! Finally understood the functions of these two black boxes, and I immediately muttered to myself with joy.

"Good fellow! This time, I'm going to have to open the eyes of the mosquito dude's little ass!"

Previously, the alliance recovered the technology related to the "big plane" from the wreckage of the company's killer whale transport plane, but until now it has not fully eaten it.

Even after the alliance absorbed the engineers of the Great Stone Military Industry, the technological generation gap was prohibitive.

Under the production conditions of the Boulder Military Industry, the maximum thrust provided by the single-engine plasma engine is only about five tons, which is at the same level as the helicopter propeller before the era of prosperity.

As for the killer whale transport plane, a large aircraft with a take-off weight of more than 100 tons, there is no need to think about it, and twenty of them have to be connected in series with the plasma engine produced by the Boulder Military Industry!

Now with these two black boxes, plus the electronic control system recovered from the killer whale transport plane, the alliance can also get together a large plasma aviation plane of its own!

It is no exaggeration to say that this is the richest grave-digging operation that the Coalition has ever reaped from the relics of the pre-war era since Vault 79!!

"These two black boxes were barely used, after all, there were no engines and batteries of this power in the shelter, and there were not so many surplus materials. My master used to be optimistic that future people who would unveil this coffin in the future would treat it as an antique collection, but it looked

Child...... You're really not kidding, not only do you not have a hundred colonized planets, you don't even fly out of the atmosphere.

Seeing my darkest expression that I had never seen before, I paced to the bell next to him and complained slowly.

But I didn't feel offended at all, but hehe

Laughed and mocked back.

"What about you? I didn't even go out of the house." The bell chuckled.

"That's hard to say."

Seeing its weird smile, I couldn't help but be slightly alert.

"What do you mean?"

Not caring about his alert expression, Bell said slowly in a storytelling tone.

"Didn't you say before that you saw Quack outside? It's what you said about the ghost-faced worms, which means that they succeeded in the end, hahaha, what a group of persevering people, no wonder my master admires them so much.

The bell seemed to be in a good mood.

If there is such a thing as emotion in this AI. I was the darkest, but I was stunned.

"It worked...... What do you mean?"

"It's literal," Bell said with a smile in a relaxed tone, "and they managed to get out of the prison without opening the door to the vault. It's a pity, it's a pity that my master is dead, otherwise he would have laughed as much as I did.

The doors of the shelter were not opened. But left from the shelter?

I looked at the bell with the blackest incomprehensible sound of metal grinding like laughter.

Could it be this refuge

Are there other exports? "Can this be done?"

"How could you ask such a question?" Bell chuckled, "They've been living in the Vault for over fifty years! Most people are born in a shelter! They know every light bulb here

As for every screw, anyone who is literate can memorize the rules of the shelter backwards...... It's easier for them to find the hole in this shelter than it is to breathe."

I was the blackest, and I couldn't help but be dumbfounded.

He had thought that the defense of the Vault was absolute, but when he thought about it, defense and destruction were relative concepts in themselves.

How can there be anything truly unbreakable in this world?

Even a wall that can defend against a nuclear attack will have to be chiseled through it for 10,000 years with an awl. What's more, the people here have a weapon sharper than an awl - knowledge.

Suddenly, he seemed to realize something, and his Adam's apple moved unconsciously, and the hand holding the rifle trembled slightly.

"What do you mean, don't those bugs ......?"

"If the windows in the cell aren't big enough, then the arms are sawed off, and if the sawing off arms is not enough, then just the heads are sent out...... Ventilation system? What a brilliant idea."

The bell chirped twice and said to himself, but the metallic sound, which was quite relaxed and pleasant a second ago, now has a faint loneliness.

Or regret.

Listening to its monologue, I understood it all.

Why did this guy take care of his diversion when he asked him where those people had gone....

To escape from this cage.

After equipping Quack with weapons, they transformed themselves into Quack, and through perseverance, they managed to break out of prison by drilling a "crack" in the Vault's ventilation system just enough for them to leave.

They had left the vault many years ago.

The ghost-faced insects that are active outside the shelter are the most direct proof of this.

Although it is difficult to say whether they can still be called them, and they carry a fraction of the souls of those inhabitants.

At least none of the bugs I've encountered outside look like nuclear engineers or biologists.

Thinking of the honeycomb tower in the patio made of shedding carapaces, I squeezed a sentence out of my mouth with the darkest difficulty.

"So...... That past conflict was won by the majority of the Vault's inhabitants?"

"Win?" Confused by this, the bell turned to look at him, "Do you think someone has won?"

I took a deep breath and asked a different question.

"That...... What about the overseers here? Where did they go?" Bell smiled and said lightly.

"Ah, they, except my master, all the overseers who survived the calamity have returned to the bosom of the tree. I haven't seen them since, maybe they're still reminiscing about the past on some board, maybe they've left here like the bugs, who knows? I'm just a museum guide.

I looked at it in the darkest of stunned eyes. "The bosom of the tree?"

Bell said in a teasing tone.

"Yes, they think they come from the Great Tree and deserve to be buried under its roots...... This may be a little difficult for you to understand. In short, they uploaded their minds to the Vault's servers, giving up their bodies and becoming one with the Vault forever."

"But my master doesn't think they've succeeded, he thinks they're more like they committed suicide after leaving a memory, and he chose to end his life in a human way."

At this point, the bell opened up the conversation and told everything that happened more than a hundred years ago.

Due to the scarcity of resources and the uneven distribution of resources, the conflict between the "tree people" and the "worker ants" has accumulated for a long time, even though the living standards of both sides are continuing to decline, the tree people are used as distance "trees" sensors

part of the module, the rate of descent will still be slightly slower.

The trigger for the crisis was the climate recovery event of 50 years of the Wasteland Era.

Just five years after the dissolution of the War Construction Committee, the inhabitants of Vault 100, with their enthusiasm for rebuilding the wasteland and their yearning for a better life, re-emerged the ideology of the Prosperous Era, and while preparing for the return to the surface, they formed an autonomous industry committee of workers and engineers, intending to say goodbye to the past after returning to the surface, and bury everything in Vault 100 in a coffin and bury it in the earth.

However, the sixty-three year deadline had not yet arrived, and the actions of the worker ants had caused panic among the treants.

They have spent their lives carefully pruning the branches and leaves of this great tree, fulfilling their responsibilities as defenders of order and blocking the "nests" that the worker ants have drilled into the trunk.

Even if the fate of the tree's eventual collapse was predetermined from the beginning, and it would end the Vault's mission after fulfilling its shelter duties, and become a foundry well to continue to contribute to the rebirth of human civilization, the Treants did not want their mission to collapse with the tree.

They tried to consult the worker ants, hoping to keep it for the sake of the tree for so many years of hard work.

It's not that hard to have holes in any man-made rule, and you can find it if you are patient.

There is one condition that needs to be met to activate the dome's self-destruct procedure

That is, the number of detectable inhabitants in the shelter is maintained at an average of less than 5,000 per day for 180 consecutive days, or less than 3,000 for 24 hours.

Only in this case will the Great Tree determine that the inhabitants of Vault 100 no longer need to rely on its guidance, that they are capable of living outside of its own sensors, and that it will use the remaining resources to send the children on their last journey.

However, in turn, they can take advantage of this as well.

As long as the worker ants stay with them, make sure that at least five thousand people live in Vault 100, and make Vault 100 think that its children still need it so that it doesn't leave them.

However, this commanding request was mercilessly rejected by the worker ants who were happy on their heads.

Almost all of the autonomous committees have refused to communicate with the Tree People about this matter.

It's a matter of course.

The worker ants had endured the tree's cold, merciless orders for far too long, and even though they knew in their hearts that it was necessary for survival, there was no reason for them to keep it when they didn't need it anymore.

Let it die with this shelter.

Becoming a casting well was originally part of its fate.

The Vault should not be the end of human civilization, and the ultimate fate of any Vault is to be torn down and used as raw materials for reconstruction.

As for the tree people, if they are so reluctant to give it up, then it is better to go down with it.

Perhaps it was the hard-line attitude of the Worker Ants that made the Treants feel threatened by liquidation, and the Treants interfered with the organizations that the Workers had formed spontaneously, including but not limited to cutting off water and electricity, and cutting off supplies, and doing everything in their power to cause trouble for the activities of these organizations within the limits of the rules.

Although the contradictions between the two sides have intensified, they have been restrained so far.

What really lit the fuse was something that happened outside the shelter.

In the 52nd year of the wasteland era, the climate recovery lasted for two years, and the Xizhou Lake

The ice was loosened before the doors of Vault 100.

Melting snow and sprawling lake water poured into the deserted urban area of Xizhou City, and even into underground traffic tunnels.

While the climate recovery is a joyful thing, if the ice and snow on the surface continue to melt, their shelters may be soaked in water before 60 years into the Wasteland Era.

Some people think that the doors should be opened immediately, and at least some people should be allowed to go out, and the area where the backfill may occur should be reinforced.

However, it was only the inhabitants of the Vault who wished to do so to no avail, and had to be made up of tree people

Communicate this appeal to the Vault's administrators, an AI called a tree.

Of course, the Treants couldn't do that, and instead of causing them to panic, the water pouring into the tunnel made them overjoyed.

Even though some overseers felt the need to work with the residents to fill the gap, most made a decision that would have been in their own hands—to downplay the crisis that threatened to flood the shelter into a trivial drizzle.

As long as the "tree" is convinced that its designers have taken into account the possibility of Xizhou Lake water filling into the tunnel, and that there is no need to make any additions to the already perfect rules, then it will continue to carry out the original plan according to the established rules.

Conversely, this can even be exploited to make trees misjudge that the climate recovery will be faster than expected, so that they can make wrong decisions based on the wrong feedback factors and extend the lockdown period.

Thus sixty-three years became seventy years.

It's only been seven years, but for the first-generation residents, who are already 90 years old, it will mean that their funerals will take place in the shelter, and they will probably never see the day the cogwheel door opens.

And for the shelter residents who are in the middle of their youth, these seven years are enough

It means that his youth will be exhausted in the Vault, and his life plans and preparations for the past few years to rebuild the wasteland will be reduced to chicken feathers.

Vault 80,000 is still too small, and Vault 100 is so crowded that the slightest emotion can become explosives stuffed into a powder keg.

The first riots were quick to take place, and ended with the deaths of 879 ordinary residents and 37 overseers.

The blood calmed everyone down for a while.

All the corpses were put into nutrient recovery units and turned into fertilizer and nutrients for the ecological cycle.

Although there have been cases of natural deaths of shelter residents in the past, and the remains of the shelters have been recovered by the shelter's ecological recycling system, this is undoubtedly the most common.

So much so that most people, who were reluctant to know, were forced to learn where their food came from.

Rumors then spread that the overseer's body was not sent to a nutrient recovery unit, but was secretly cremated by their family.

No matter how much the tree people deny it, it has lost its meaning. With the development foreseeable by all, the contradiction between the tree people and the worker ants has been further intensified.

In the 56th year of the Wasteland Era, the lake had almost flooded the gates of the Vault, and just as the Treants were plotting to sink the Vault forever, a second organized uprising broke out.

Engineers at the biological research station spent three years modifying the genes of the quacks, and the farm's staff released them through deliberate irregularities, attracting the attention of the treemen. While the tree people jumped up and down to kill the bugs, all the workshops in the entire vault revolted at about the same time.

Due to the large amount of mechanical equipment and even biological weapons that were invested in this battle, the aftermath of this riot also exceeded all expectations.

In total, more than 77,000 people disappeared or died in the riots, including 645 overseers.

In the end, only 111 overseers survived, and the owner of the bell, the overseer named Craig, was among them.

The battle between the two sides is not limited to gunfights and scuffles with engineering equipment, but also includes a range of regular weapons.

For example, during the battle, the Tree Man tried to use the power of the tree to drop hypnotic gas into a densely populated area of worker ants to suppress the riot.

However, their plan was discovered in advance by the worker ants responsible for repairing the exhaust pipes, and deceived the air detection device in the residential area with a few milligrams of ozone, passively activating the ventilation system of the shelter and discharging the gas into the wasteland.

Seeing that they were about to lose all hope, the worker ants also tried to use the power of the rules to move some residents to the cold storage where food was stored, trying to trick the life detection device of the shelter to achieve the self-destruction condition of the dome of "less than 3,000 residents in the shelter in 24 hours" without leaving the house.

Remove the roof of the shelter.

However, their plans were soon discovered by the Treants.

Seeing the life signals detectable in the Vault drop at an incredible rate, the Treants frantically unplugged the power supply – taking advantage of a hole they had discovered a long time ago but had not fixed it, and had the Vault's fusion reactor actively overloaded.

I'm afraid that the designers of Vault 100 could not have imagined that people would be playing so big more than fifty years later.

However, thanks to this hole card, Vault 100 did not become a reservoir in Wasteland Era 56.

However, it was precisely because they cut off the power that more than 50,000 residents who did not die in the fighting ended up dying in cold storage.

With fewer than 3,000 surviving residents of the entire Vault, it would be impossible for the Tree People to start the reactor, which would cause the entire Vault to collapse within 24 hours.

And those who survive will not be able to reproduce quickly within 180 days

5,000 people, even if they abandon ethics and normality in order to survive, it will take ten months for a newborn to be born.

Not to mention that the chemical batteries were barely enough to keep the ventilation system running, and the rattle that spread throughout the Vault was squeezing out their only resources for survival.

As the bell said, no one won this war, not even at all.

After paying a heavy toll on the Treants, the Treants have given up on reconciling with the Worker Ants, who do not expect the Treants to sacrifice themselves for their own sake.

Both sides operate in the areas under their control, truce in complete silence, lick their wounds and wait for the other to lose their last breath.

It wasn't until the 61st year of the Wasteland Era that the last human life signal disappeared from the Vault, and the Vault became a world of "Quack".

And the last life signal to disappear is Craig. That is, the owner of the bell.

「...... My master entrusted me to bring this absurd memory to you who have entered the interstellar age, I hope you can use it, don't be foolish to think that you can solve the problems that you can't solve yourself to the AI and everything will be fine, but unfortunately you have not entered the interstellar age, it seems that you will not be used."

"So...... Some of the inhabitants have turned themselves into bugs, and some of them have turned themselves into data?" Standing next to me the darkest grave chasing ghost who had not yet come out of the story, he couldn't help but complain, "What kind of prison is this, it's a mental hospital!"

My darkest look was a look of deep understanding.

He thinks so.

Everyone here is crazy.

The overseer disparaged the residents as "worker ants", while the worker ants in their mouths called them "tree people".

In order to keep the shelter running forever, the Treants did their best to buy time for the lake that flooded the doorway, and in order to get a glimpse of the world outside the shelter, the worker ants did not hesitate to turn themselves into real insects, tearing the future to shreds.

They chose all the craziest options they could, so that in the end no one came out of the vault intact. At that moment, a shrill alarm suddenly sounded outside the warehouse, and it suddenly pulled me back to reality.

"What's going on?!"

Looking at the surprised crowd, the bell said with a look of nonchalance.

"This siren sounds familiar, it seems to have happened before...... Ah, I remember, I should have told you before, in order to thwart the Worker Ants' plans, "The Tree People' voluntarily shut down the fusion pile, didn't you turn it on again?" Maybe the vital monitoring program and the dome self-destruct program have been restarted again, it's not a big deal."

Hearing this, my darkest face instantly turned blue. It's not a big deal....

It's not more than a hundred years ago!

A self-destruct program that allowed the superstructure to fall into the patio just enough more than a hundred years ago, and who knows what the impact will be today, more than a hundred years later!

Not to mention anything else, the tower that the ghost-faced insect built in the patio can't make the pouring earthwork directly bury them!

"But why didn't there be any problems when the fusion reactor started?" The grave ghost immediately realized that something was wrong, and stared at the bell anxiously as he asked.

Bell just smiled, still with the same nonchalant expression.

"What's so strange about that? By the end of the tree's mission, you have taken control of the Vault, and it is not difficult to terminate the Dome self-destruct process with administrator privileges

It's as easy as you push open the door to the vault."

I was the darkest in my mind.

"Wait, why did the self-destruct procedure be triggered when control of the Vault has been handed over to us?"

Bell looked at him playfully.

"Maybe your boss is trying to kill you? Haha, of course, this possibility is too small, and I'm more inclined to think that you triggered an unfixed bug on this mountain of, causing some of the settings to be rolled back before the rules were changed. It's a common tactic used by the Treants and the Worker Ants to settle their personal grievances, often blindfolding the trees."

I ruled out my own problem first, after all, he only touched the black box a few times.

Immediately after that, he thought that he would speed through the B51 floor manager's office, and immediately went to B100 to be a branch ten-punch man.

Not daring to hesitate, he immediately reached out and pressed it on his helmet, shouting at the communication channel.

"Super brother! What's going on over there? Super Brother?!" There was a loud current sound in the communication channel.

There was not the slightest response!

My face changed slightly, and I immediately gave the grave next to me a look.

"I'll go down!"

「OK。」

Immediately understood his plan, and the grave ghost hunted a gesture of understanding.

Without delay, I turned off the rifle and leaned to the side, lay down on the ground, closed my eyes and went straight off the line.

Looking at this guy who was yelling at the communicator one second ago, and lying on the ground to sleep the next second, the bell circled around him in surprise

Two laps.

"Oh no, you can sleep?"

I, who has been offline, naturally didn't react at all, and didn't pay attention to what it said.

Looking at this fuss AI, the ghost hunter who was guarding the grave on the side smiled.

"What is this, It."