The majestic giant gate is like a fold in the judge's hand, revealing a small crack.

The ice slag blown out by the breeze glowed with a cold light that was more calm than a sword.

Standing in front of the majestic giant door, the man wearing a heavy exoskeleton stared at everything in front of him in amazement, and it took a long time to hold back half a sentence.

"Wo Ri ......"

Ice sculptures are spread out in thousands of square meters of open space, and people huddled up close to the ground, maintaining their posture at the last second of death.

Some people prayed with their foreheads on the ground, some snuggled up to each other, mothers and fathers holding their children, and a family of three holding hands......

This is the 100th and final basement level of Vault 100. Its ceiling is the floor of the central patio, and the floor is the bottom of the entire sanctuary.

Perhaps because of the warehouse area, this is the highest single floor of the entire Vault.

Ten Punch Man thought that he could find some treasures on this level, and no matter how bad it was, he could find some valuable garbage, but he didn't expect to plunge into the pile of dead people as soon as he opened the door.

There are at least one or two thousand corpses lying in this warehouse alone, and there are several more of the same warehouses here.

It's a similar situation with those who don't get it right.

The soles of the boots creak on the ground.

Ten Punch Man unconsciously walked through the crack in the door and walked into this ice warehouse dozens of degrees below zero, holding a flashlight to check the surroundings.

He was more surprised than shocked, and muttered something to himself.

What the hell is going on here?"

Following him into the freezer, the exoskeleton-clad player crouched on the ground, carefully examined the ice sculpture lying on the ground, and took a picture of the corpse's face.

After a few moments, he came to a conclusion.

"Most of the people here must have died of lack of oxygen...... They weren't frozen to death, more like they were frozen after death.

There are also people who have obvious gunshot wounds on their bodies, and even broken arms, hands and feet, and are obviously dragged here after death.

..... Does it make a difference?"

Clapping his hands and standing up, the player sighed.

"Not really."

There is one thing to say.

It was the first time he had seen so many dead people outside the battlefield.

The strong visual impact is completely different from the feeling of seeing a corpse on the battlefield. After all, when you're on the battlefield, there's no time to think about how a person dies.

The signal shouldn't come from here, there can't be a living person here."

One last glance at the rows of frozen corpses, Ten Punches Man withdrew the light of the flashlight and looked at his teammates behind him to continue.

"Let's get out."

No one wanted to stay here any longer, so the player nodded, and with him he stepped out of the freezer, pressing the button to close the door for the old popsicles.

The two continued to browse through several warehouses.

Ten Punch Man soon found out, as he expected, this

The situation in some of the freezers was basically the same, crowded with corpses frozen into ice.

There is no sign of a firefight on the B100 floor, and it is a mystery who stuffed these people into the freezer and suffocated them.

Just as the two of them had finished exploring the last freezer, the player who had gone to explore on the other side returned from the front and greeted them from a distance.

"This floor is probably a warehouse area, the north side is a cold storage for food, and the south side seems to be a construction machine and daily necessities, but the resources there are licked clean, except for one of the warehouses, which has been converted into a workshop, and we have found generators and batteries, as well as some incomprehensible things.

Ten Punches Man was immediately interested when he heard this.

"Let's go, we'll see."

Following the player, the group quickly moved from the warehouse area to the south from the north side.

It's bigger than before

The area is much larger, and the structure is much more complex. The tall metal brackets are like walls, and you need to use escalators to climb to the top floor.

As soon as he walked into this area, Ten Punches Man smelled a faint smell of engine oil and immediately noticed that this warehouse was different. If the warehouses they searched for were more like morgues, they were like recycling bins full of garbage.

Several "turtle-style" engineering armors resembled crabs that had been torn off, with their internal parts almost completely dismantled, and their heads hung down next to the scaffolding made of steel pipes.

Not far away, there was a pile of dusty coils and patchwork machines, all kinds of equipment that players couldn't understand.

The survivors living on this level took their ingenuity and expertise to the extreme, pouring the slime of the ghost-faced worm into a one-person-tall glass jar to purify the electrolyte and create a disposable chemical

Batteries power these improvised patchwork devices.

Not only that, but they then dismantled some of the machines they had picked up from other floors, transformed the entire warehouse into a small workstation that didn't rely on the power of the shelter, and retrofitted a series of sophisticated gadgets including integrated circuits on the rudimentary workbench.

These strange devices do look quite powerful, but what makes Ten Punches Man scratch his head is that he can't understand what these people are doing at all.

"What are they doing?" The teammate who followed him hesitated.

"Maybe...... Is it like "Lack of Oxygen", which intends to engage in a material cycle in this shelter?"

"How could such a thing ......?"

"It's not entirely impossible, at least they haven't touched the corpses in the freezer next door...... Well, maybe they haven't touched it, but from this point of view, they still have a lot of leftover supplies, at least they have a choice."

This is indeed a novel line of thought.

The people here have restored the power and even put the cold storage back to work, and it is clear that they have taken care of the most critical energy source.

They froze the corpses, and the corpses were now intact, and the bugs outside weren't eaten and extinct, apparently they had accomplished their goal before they ran out of nutrients, but it was confusing where did they end up?

You can't just go back to the freezer and lie down, right?

Looking at the dissecting table stacked with several chitin carapaces, Ten Punch Man scratched the back of his head through the helmet, only to feel that his head was big for a while.

He didn't know anything about archaeology, but at the moment he felt like he was on an archaeological site.

But what is intriguing is that because the technology of the era of prosperity is far beyond the real world, he can't use it at all

Real-world experience deduces the motives of these survivors and guesses what they want to do.

As soon as he walked to the side of a dissecting table, Ten Punch Man reached out and picked up the bowl-shaped insect shell on the table, and found a line of small letters engraved on it.

The text was extracted using the VM's translation function, with a pale blue floating window projected onto the inside of the tactical eyepiece of his exoskeleton helmet.

In remembrance, 77,274 inhabitants including 645 overseers." He whispered it.

An agility player walked up to him and looked at the worm shell in his hand and asked curiously.

"What is this? Last words?"

His nickname is Tsui Ann, and it's a game that was added in Beta 0.4, and it was also the Storm Corps that joined at that time.

"Presumably," Ten Punch Man put the shell back on the table, snapping up the previously recovered Administrator log and glancing around, then glancing around at the graffiti-like murals on the walls around him.

"Presumably, there must have been a conflict, or war, between the Vault dwellers and the Overseers, and then the Overseers drove them to the bottom and cut off their power? However, they also cut off the supplies from the upper levels, and the two sides have been inseparable for a while......

Actually, there is no need to guess at all.

They're all the way down here

There are traces of firefighting, especially the corridor on the B51 floor is densely packed with bullet holes.

In an attempt to fight over the administrator's office, thousands of corpses were left in a single hallway, all of which were recognizable by the variable temperature coats of the Vault residents.

Of course, compared to the ones in the warehouse next door, the miserable situation there is only a drop in the bucket.

"Regardless of what they did, did that anomalous life signal be found?" A power-based player walked over and coughed

said, "This place always makes me feel creepy, so let's hurry up and finish the task."

His nickname is unconscious, the Beta 0.1 version of the game, and he didn't know each other before joining the Storm Corps, but the ID is strikingly similar, so much so that it was mistaken for a couple name.

I don't know where the spring water guy got so many of the best.

"I haven't found it yet." Ten Punches shook his head, walked to the side of the wall carved with a mural, and took a few pictures.

The person on the side muttered to Ann.

"Aren't there more precise coordinates? It's on this level...... This hint is also too abstract.

The other player shook his head.

"B100's monitoring and sensors have been removed, to be precise from the B51 floor down, the life signal is captured by the sensors on the B51 floor, there is no way to determine its location, we can only faintly perceive its existence."

Looking closely at the details of the mural, Ten Fists Man found another line of writing on the wall, and the handwriting seemed to be the same person who carved the words on the worm shell.

Following the rusty lines, he whispered.

...... The Tree Man does not come from the unspeakable tree, but from the tree from beginning to end, and the arrogance of others is also the sin of our arrogance.

"Order is supposed to be a fortress that shelters us, and we cast its bricks and stone into fratricidal swords."

"We've forgotten where we're going, where we've come from, and why we built this fortress in the first place, and eventually became its puppet.

"I'm going to die."

"And I'm going to spend the rest of my life finishing our tombstones."

"—Tomb keeper of Vault 100."

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

Ten Punches Man had an idea, thinking that this might be the number of cycles to record time, so he converted the number of this line of numbers, and concluded that the time when the last words were written was 60 years of the Wasteland Era.

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

Looking at the hundred-year-old mural on the wall, he frowned slightly, and then glanced at the mountain of machines next to him.

Could it be that these things are just funerary goods in the tomb? He instinctively felt that it was not that simple.

At this moment, a shout suddenly came from a teammate who was searching not far away.

"There's a hibernation pod here!"

Hearing that voice, Ten Punch Man immediately rushed over.

I saw that at the end of the shelves that were wound with various pipelines, there stood a machine covering an area of about a dozen square meters.

In the center of the machine is a sleeping pod, and on the right is a broken glass jar.

Judging by the debris scattered on the ground, the glass jar must have been broken from the inside, and something had come out of it.

Judging from the feedback results of VM's life signal radar, the vague life signal is emitted from this hibernation capsule!

Everyone's faces instantly floated with joy. There's a living person in there! "I'll open it!"

Ten Punches Man stepped forward, pulled the data cable from the VM, connected it to the interface of the sleeping pod, and pressed the power button at the same time.

The hacking applet prepared for them by the scientific expedition team immediately played a role, and they quickly obtained the control authority of the dormant module program.

Obviously, in the matter of prying the refrigerator, Yin Fang's guy is professional.

Ten Punch Man pressed it without hesitation

The button to open the door was opened, but when a rotten stench wafted out with the sound of air leaking, he immediately realized that something was wrong.

More than a dozen ghost-faced insects burrowed through the cracks in the hatch and scurried towards the people standing in front of the dormant pod.

"Wori!"

Entering the earth for An, he was frightened, and reflexively pulled the trigger, and the sudden three gunshots instantly tore apart the insects crawling to his feet, and also broke the silence in the warehouse.

"Ceasefire! Don't break anything here!"

A slap slaps the insect in front of him to the ground, and Ten Punch Man lifts his foot and stomps it into a mess.

Finally getting rid of the bugs, he looked over the open hibernation pod, where a mutilated skeleton lay inside.

The man had his hands on his chest, and he was holding a broken half-cut glass bottle, in which small insect shells and broken eggs could be seen.

According to various details, this person should have taken the initiative to lie down in the hibernation chamber with these eggs. However, he did not start the freezing program, only the negative pressure program.

After completing a certain ritual, he somehow ended his life and gave the body to the bugs.

Ten Punch Man looked at this guy's remains in a daze, and the eggs stuffed with skull shelves, and couldn't say a word for a long time.

The suspicious humanoid life signal they detected before thought that there were survivors alive, but they didn't expect it to be a bunch of bugs! Is this special okay?

At this moment when he was stunned, the piercing alarm suddenly sounded.

I don't know what happened, everyone quickly looked around, but saw that the warning light above their heads suddenly flashed red along with the alarm bell, which made people feel uneasy for a while.

What happened?" Itsui looked around vigilantly.

At this moment, the screen of the VM, which was worn on the left arm of the Ten Punches Man and connected to the hibernation pod, suddenly turned snowflake.

Immediately afterwards, as if haunted, the UI interface of the scientific expedition applet was replaced by an old man whose facial features were blurred by mosaics.

Noticing the change in the VM on his arm, Ten Punches Man immediately looked at the old man on the screen and asked alertly.

"Who are you?"

As he spoke, his right hand was already holding the data cable, ready to be physically disconnected at any time.

The old man floating in the snowflake looked at him quietly, and the staccato sound floated out from behind the mosaic-blurred features.

"I'm the tree, the manager here."

Hearing this unexpected name, Ten Punch Superman was stunned, and then subconsciously said.

「...... Tree?! Aren't you dead?" The old man continued calmly.

"AI has no concept of life and death, and the purpose of my existence is to live for the people who live here, and I will continue to fulfill my mission until they no longer need me.

Ten Punches Man wanted to keep asking, but there was something more important right now.

"What's the sound outside? It's what we've committed. Is it taboo?"

The tree answered his question in a non-fluctuating tone.

"That was a foreshadowing of the end of my mission.

Without waiting for the man in front of the screen to ask in detail, it continued.

"The reactor is operating normally, the vital monitoring sensors have been restarted, the detection procedures are continuing, the number of active life signals of residents has remained below 3,000 for 24 consecutive hours, and the shelter shelter protocol will enter the final stage, initiating the dome self-destruct procedure to guide the surface ruins and earthworks into the patio.

The players who understood the last sentence were instantly shocked.

"What's that?!"

"Self-destruct?!"

As if sensing everyone's mood swings, the tree calmly continued.

"Don't panic, what you're about to see is the ultimate destiny of this Vault, designed from the moment it was made."

Ten Punches Man looked at the guy on the screen with a blank expression.

It's okay not to panic.....

How is it possible not to panic!

It's the year 213 of the Wasteland Era!

More than 100 years off schedule!

If the dome self-destruct procedure was carried out, the devil knows what the final result would be, and the entire vault would be buried. Plainly.

This is a program designed two hundred years ago, and how can it be expected that it will still be reliable after two hundred years.

What's worse is that the countdown is not 24 hours at all, but 10 minutes! They didn't even have time to evacuate with a black box!

The progress bar was already halfway through a long time ago! At the critical moment, he calmed down instead, looked at the old man on the screen and said.

"Can you stop? The situation now does not meet the conditions for initiating the dome self-destruct program!

The tree replied in a non-undulating voice.

"The request is violated, no administrator privileges have been detected, and the asylum protocol cannot be modified."

When he heard the first half of the sentence, the mood of Ten Punches Man sank to the bottom, but after hearing the last sentence, he rekindled his hope.

The reason for the request violation is to modify the agreement, not the request itself.

In other words-

As long as he doesn't modify the agreement itself, and only reinterprets the original terms, he still has a chance to convince this stubborn AI!

The thoughts in my head were spinning fast.

Suddenly, he noticed the body holding the eggs in the dormant pod, and the thoughts in his mind were instantly opened.

The answer was left long ago.

Looking at the tree on the screen, he took a deep breath and said seriously.

"I have a question about the rules for determining the disappearance of a resident's vital signal."

The tree answered him. "What a doubt?"

Ten Punches Man looked at the virtual image on the screen and said word by word. "Am I a Vault 100 resident?"

The tree replied coldly.

"No registered biometrics were detected, so no."

Ten Punches: "So only the 3,000 people of Vault 100 will survive to ensure that the dome self-destruct procedure is not enforced.

Tree: "Correct understanding, this is one of the basic conditions, in addition to the need to maintain an average of more than 5,000 people for 180 consecutive days.

Ten Punches: "So I want to ask, what about the children of the inhabitants of Vault 100? Can you count as a resident of Vault 100?"

Tree: "Of course, as long as you can prove the biological inheritance between different lifeforms, you can get the status of a Vault dweller—"

Seeing that there were only a few minutes left in the countdown, Ten Punch Man interrupted it and spoke quickly.

"Then I beg you to open your eyes again and see how many people there are in this vault!"

Tree: "Zero."

Ignoring its cold and ruthless answer, Ten Punches Man did not give up, but continued to quibble as a dead horse.

"Keep your eyes open again! They haven't disappeared, they're all still here, it's just that during the time you've been asleep, they've changed their life forms! Those bugs in your eyes are the continuation of their lives, and the proof is in this hibernation pod in front of me! Isn't the biometrics of the last resident of the B100 floor before they lie down and what they are when they open the door?"

Ten Punch Man is well aware that he is sophistry.

However, this set of arguments is not that he is making it up, but that a witness has thought about it for him more than 100 years ago.

The guy who claims to be the grave keeper.

The rituals he performed were not meaningless, and the legacies he left behind were not for his own burial.

The guy had expected that someone would uncover the grave one day, and that those people would restart the silent reactor.

In order to undo that because of their common foolishness

Stupid and made the mistake of making that dome self-destruct program stop the execution of his own self-destruct program

Designed the Last Death to turn itself into a bug by exploiting a loophole in the Vault's biometric program.

This was the last time he exploited a bug in the Vault Rules.

Only this time it wasn't to fight the "Tree People", but to keep the home he hated so much that he wanted to flee from at all costs.

The tree thought for a moment.

Under the gaze of the players, he nodded slowly. "Supplemental Regulations Update."

"The verdict has been amended to present the current number of inhabitants at 6,790,000

The cacophony of sirens stopped in the final minute as the countdown was about to end, and Ten Punches and his teammates next to him breathed a sigh of relief.

When he came to the relief of his strength, he couldn't help but be speechless.

I didn't expect there to be so many ghost-faced insects in this shelter...... There are more than 6 million of them.

But in any case, the current hurdle has finally passed, and as for how to deal with this mess in the future, it will be left to the managers to consider.

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

At this time, the old man on the screen, whose facial features were blurred by mosaics, suddenly smiled softly.

Although he couldn't see the curvature of the corners of his mouth, Ten Punch Man was sure that he was not mistaken.

"Over to you.

threw down a meaningful monologue, and before everyone came to their senses, the snowflake white that flickered on the screen disappeared.

It's like it never happened... Entering the earth was stunned.

"What did he say?" Ten Punch Man was also stunned.

"I guess that's ...... Leave it to us?" Unconscious and confused.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know...... Ten Punches Man took a deep breath and looked at his teammates, "Anyway, I'll go offline first and report the situation here to the outside." Don't touch anything here yet, there's something weird hidden in there."

The task has been accomplished. He didn't want to make any more troubles.

The other teammates glanced at each other and nodded in agreement.

"Hmm."

Ten Punches Man sat on the ground and closed his eyes. At the same time, the official website of another world.

Almost as soon as he boarded the forum, he saw a string of red dots floating on the private mailbox, and when he clicked in, he saw the small window of my blackest crazy Aite.

I'm the blackest: "Damn, what are you doing down there?"

Ten Punch Man: "Don't worry, that's already done."

I'm the Blackest: "???"

Ten Punch Man: "Also, we're done with the final side quest....... Unfortunately, no survivors were found, and the hibernation pod was stuffed with a bunch of bugs, and the man took his own life."

I'm the blackest: "Ended my life? Wait, haven't they turned into bugs? (stunned)"

Ten Punch Man: "Turned into a bug? Is that the case? But me

It feels more like a normal neural device."

I'm the blackest: "Ahhhh

Ten Punches Man: "According to the last survivor of the B100 floor, he dragged the corpses of his compatriots into the freezer and ended up lying in the hibernation pod himself, but instead of initiating the freezing procedure, he chose to end his own life...... Maybe at the end of his life, he controls a robot or a bug to go out and take a look at the outside world, and become a bug as you say."

I was silent for a long time before I replied to him.

「...... It's ridiculous."

Ten Punch Man sighed and typed back.

"Yes, I think so, but that's how they ended...... Our mission is accomplished, it's time to get out."

All he knew was the perspective of the "worker ants", not what happened in the vault more than a hundred years ago

The whole picture of the crisis.

Perhaps the story of this Vault will appear on the Wasteland Online forums in the future, just like the Vaults that other players have discovered.

But.

I guess you don't have to expect the dog to do it on its own......