The next day.
The eastern shore of Ling Lake.
"Ready!"
A shrill, booming voice echoed along the edge of the woods.
"Fiiire!"
A fuse was lit.
A thick iron tube bolted to a wooden stump roared, erupting in a burst of fire and white smoke. The projectile became a black blur, tracing a graceful arc through the sky before splashing heavily into the lake hundreds of meters away.
After a brief pause, a pillar of water shot skyward and cascaded down in all directions. A muffled rumble like spring thunder rolled across the surface of the lake, accompanied by rippling waves.
"Fuck!"
"Who the hell is shooting cannons over there?!"
"Fucking Mosquito!"
"All my fish got scared off!"
The anglers who were shooting the breeze along the shore with fishing rods propped up erupted in curses, but Mosquito was far too elated to hear them.
Ever since he solved the problem of synthesizing nitric and sulfuric acid, his little workshop had been able to produce small amounts of nitroglycerin. Adding a bit of plant fiber yielded nitrocellulose, which could then be dissolved and gelatinized with a mixture of ethanol and ether to produce high-grade smokeless gelatin powder.
Although he had not yet unlocked the drying process to turn it into solidified grains, it was already far superior to plain black powder!
That single shell packed the explosive equivalent of at least thirty—or perhaps even fifty—kilograms of black powder!
"Hahahahaha, nice! I finally fucking did it!"
Mosquito pumped his fist in excitement, only to smack it right into a tree trunk. It did not hurt much, but he nearly snapped his wrist.
What a pity there was so little sugar in the warehouse; it was too expensive even to eat, or else he could have combined sugar and potassium fertilizer to brew up something even more badass.
One shot was not enough.
Using fire tongs, Mosquito pulled out the scalding cartridge case, loaded another round, adjusted the barrel back to its previous angle, and lit the fuse.
Another thunderous boom shook the air.
This shell traveled even farther than the last, sailing an extra hundred meters.
The roar of the explosion reverberated across the lake.
The nomads coming down to the water to fetch their supply were startled out of their wits by the thunderous din, standing frozen in place as they stared at the towering spout of water rising from the lake.
"Wh-what is that?"
"A giant gun?!"
"I-it's probably called a cannon... I've seen them in larger survivor settlements. They use cannons like that to fight huge mutants."
"That firepower is terrifying. No wonder they can hunt split-claw crabs!"
Unlike the stunned and awe-struck nomads, the anglers finally lost their tempers. Grabbing their fishing rods, they stormed away from the water's edge in search of the culprit.
"Fuck!"
"Can't you shoot your fucking cannon somewhere else?!"
"You scared away all my fish!"
"Yeah! Fish are already damn hard to catch in this game, and now we won't catch shit!"
Seeing the furious mob of anglers bearing down on him, led by Stop Bullshitting, Mosquito hurriedly pushed his little cannon cart and beat a hasty retreat.
...
Elsewhere.
In the department store not far south of the abandoned tire factory.
Five players were in the midst of a fierce battle against the mutants prowling Floor B2 of the underground parking garage.
The radiation source was behind a door beside the freight elevator in Section B1 of the garage, and this was already their umpteenth attempt running this dungeon.
After repeatedly kiting, luring, charging, and focusing fire, the Cow and Horse Squad had gradually wiped out the Gnawers Elaina pulled out, and even managed to trap the "dungeon boss"—a Crawler—using a pre-laid snare.
Coordinating with his teammates, Fang Chang drew Daybreak to full power and released a shot that drove an arrow straight through the Crawler's skull, finishing it off.
Leaning against a concrete pillar, Ye Shi let out a long breath. He tossed aside the woodchopper's knife with its blunted, notched edge, wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve, and cursed under his breath.
"Fuck! We finally cleared the damn thing! Once you clear a dungeon in this game, the mobs aren't supposed to respawn, right? Don't let another pack crawl out in a minute."
Lao Bai and Gale Force both glared at him.
"Don't jinx it!"
"Shut your mouth."
Ye Shi shrank his neck and clamped his mouth shut.
"They shouldn't respawn. If a few more waves came, we'd probably go broke," Fang Chang said, walking over to the Crawler. He pulled out the arrow embedded in its forehead, took one look at it, and tossed it away.
It was clearly beyond reuse.
"Are you guys sure there aren't any more monsters down there?" Elaina emerged from the side with a peculiar expression, resting his right hand against the wall.
Ye Shi chuckled at him. "Don't sweat it, bro. It's totally cleared."
Gale Force gave a thumbs-up. "Waiting on your news."
Elaina said, "Damn! Aren't any of you scared?"
Lao Bai replied matter-of-factly, "What's there to be scared of? It's not a horror game."
Elaina was speechless.
That made so much sense he did not even know how to counter it.
After lingering by the doorway for a while, Elaina finally carried a crowbar and breaching explosives inside.
It was a corridor of modest width, likely some sort of auxiliary warehouse before the war.
A suffocating stench of rot filled the air. The floor was slick with the bodily fluids of Gnawers and Crawlers, and unidentified fungi grew along the corners of the walls.
Such a foul environment would probably make even mutant cockroaches steer clear.
Even though the last Crawler had already been lured out and killed, Elaina was still nervous as hell.
The atmosphere here was far too eerie.
He could not help recalling several horror games he had played.
And they called this a relaxing, lighthearted game for casual retirees?!
Fuck!
Fortunately, none of what he feared came to pass.
Guided by the glow of his VM and the scanned map, Elaina reached the end of the passage without incident.
There stood a rusted alloy door. In front of it lay a corpse clad in a hazmat suit, though nothing remained of it but bones.
The protective suit bore no marks of biting or tearing; it appeared he had died long before the Gnawers overran the place, at least several decades earlier.
"The radiation level is getting higher... Looks like the source is behind this door."
The fellow on the ground was likely the owner of this miniature shelter. A backpack cast aside beside him was still stuffed with canned food, puffed food wrappers, and unidentifiable decayed scraps and mushrooms—supplies he had scavenged from the outside.
Yet for some reason, he had died right at his own doorstep.
"Don't blame me, bro."
Though deeply reluctant, Elaina steeled himself, stripped the relatively intact protective suit off the skeleton, and slipped it onto himself.
The air filtration system was broken.
Still, that did not matter.
He only needed to block some of the gamma rays. Between the resistance and recovery bonus granted by his Constitution stat, holding out should not be too big a problem!
After setting the explosives by the door and lighting the fuse, Elaina sprinted toward the corridor's exit.
Boom!
Dense smoke from the blast filled the corridor in an instant. Once the smoke cleared a bit, Elaina made his way back to the door.
The alloy door had barely budged, but the concrete wall beside it had blown open, exposing the rebar framework inside.
"Good grief... that's sturdy."
After a tremendous effort, Elaina managed to clear away the concrete rubble around the breach using his crowbar, thrust his arm and the tool inside, and unlatched the sliding deadbolts one by one.
Fortunately, there were no additional security mechanisms.
With a series of groans and squeaks, the heavy alloy door finally swung open, and a waft of stale, murky air rushed against his face.
Stepping into the room, Elaina held his breath, turned off the faint glow of his VM screen, and lit the lantern he had brought along.
The flame flickered uncertainly before steadying, illuminating the surrounding space.
All signs pointed to this place indeed being a miniature shelter.
Or at least, it once was.
The shelter was not large. Compared to Shelter 404, it was practically pocket-sized.
Unlike a massive official facility like Shelter 404, however, this small shelter had an exceptionally compact layout.
Leave alone an airlock with dual gates and pressurization; it did not even have an entryway foyer.
Just past the open alloy door sat rows of moss-covered shelving racks facing directly outward.
Carrying the lantern inside, Elaina examined the shelves closely and found that above each glass container arrayed across them hung a long strip light fixture connected in series.
"Could this be... hydroponics?"
This must have been a cultivation zone, presumably meant for growing vegetables and staple crops while simultaneously improving the air quality inside.
After all these years, however, the water in the culture troughs had long dried up, leaving behind only a crust of dead moss, a few withered scraps, and curled plant fibers.
He could not even tell what had once been grown here.
Checking the radiation reading on his VM, Elaina held his lantern and ventured farther in.
Directly behind the cultivation area stood rows of proper storage shelves.
And what was displayed on those shelves made his eyes go wide.
Copper ingots, steel ingots, aluminum ingots, lead... along with a vast array of metals he could not even identify with his scavenging experience, all neatly stacked.
Beyond that were copious amounts of non-metallic materials: fiberglass, graphite powder, rubber goods, hydraulic fluid, lubricants, adhesives, and more.
There were even unknown liquid and powdered chemicals!
Unlike the junk scattered across the wasteland ruins, these materials had perhaps undergone anti-oxidation treatment, as they were remarkably well preserved—at least looking completely usable.
In addition to these manufacturing supplies, Elaina found some half-finished tools and parts on the final row of shelves, along with five gleaming gold ingots and ten silver ingots!
At the sight of them, his eyes practically popped out of his head.
"Holy shit..."
A fortune!
The owner of this shelter was clearly loaded, very likely the proprietor of the department store itself, or at least a major shareholder!
What was more, the guy's crisis awareness and hands-on skills had been extraordinarily sharp.
Right behind the shelves stood a DIY workbench.
Beyond basic tools like screwdrivers and wrenches, it featured guide rails, guide plates, a mold-balancing mechanism, and hydraulic overload protection. Alongside the bench hung various interchangeable cutting tools and machining modules.
The entire workbench made virtually no use of high-tech electronics, meaning its functions would not be affected in the slightest even in an EMP strike.
Maintenance would be practically effortless!
Even in a power outage, hand cranks could substitute for electric motors to drive parts of the machining modules!
Compared to high-tech tools that became useless junk the moment civilization collapsed, these durable, practically immortal "primitive tools" inspired far more security.
Looking at it, Elaina had only one thought:
This workbench was miles ahead of the one owned by the weapon shop proprietress!
"We're rich, we're rich... Work first, though."
Not lingering any longer, Elaina pressed on in search of the radiation source, passing through the door behind the workbench.
Behind it was presumably the living quarters.
Judging by the rising radiation readings on his VM, the source was almost certainly inside.
Cautiously stepping into the living quarters, Elaina immediately spotted a hibernation pod set against the wall directly across from the door.
The pod's hatch was wide open and appeared to have been broken for ages.
Judging by the open lid and the parts and tools scattered nearby, someone had tried to fix it and failed, likely triggering a severe electrical failure that cut off power to the shelter and shut down the ventilation system, suffocating the inhabitants to death.
Beside it, Elaina found a single bed with two skeletons lying flat on the sheets.
From their shape and size, both were adult females, though their exact ages were impossible to tell.
Combining the corpse found by the entrance and the sole incubation pod in the room, Elaina concocted at least four different theories in his mind as to who the shelter's owner had been.
Yet none of that mattered.
To a player eager to clear a dungeon, the stories of the dead were of no consequence.
After a meticulous search, Elaina soon located the radiation source making his VM beep erratically on a generator-like apparatus.
It was a pitch-black cylinder slotted into a circular recess.
Deducing from the lore of Wasteland OL, this was probably some civilian model of a fusion battery.
Or perhaps a "fuel rod" for a cold-fusion generator?
Whatever the lore made it out to be, it was clearly broken, leaving behind only a ruined casing and unruly radioactive residue.
Strictly speaking, nuclear fusion was supposed to be clean, as its primary byproduct was helium.
However, "clean" was not synonymous with completely harmless. It merely meant that compared to fission waste, whose radioactive residue endured for hundreds of thousands of years, the waste from controlled fusion was far easier to manage.
After all, any material exposed to prolonged high-energy neutron radiation could develop induced radioactivity. It was just that the dosage was much lower and the hazard lasted on the order of centuries, dissipating after a few hundred years.
To put it more plainly: as long as you did not grab a damaged nuclear battery with your bare hands, you would not usually suffer too much.
In this regard, Wasteland OL was quite realistic.
Take right now, for instance.
Elaina had barely held the battery in his hand for a moment before feeling like he was about to die...
"No joke, I think I can still be saved."
Having carried the radiation source outside and chucked it away, Elaina stood before the Cow and Horse Squad, blood streaming incessantly from his nose as he spoke with utter gravity.
Gale Force took one look at him and shook his head.
"You're a goner."
To be standing and talking while bleeding like that from the nose was something possible only in a game.
In reality, he would have collapsed unconscious on the floor long ago.
"Hear that? Even the physics teacher says you're done for," Ye Shi chuckled, patting his shoulder and winking. "Stop fighting it, bro. While you can still take a few steps, hurry back and finish yourself off. We'll loot the dungeon for you. Don't worry, you won't get shortchanged on your cut!"
Elaina pulled a long face.
"I just want to know—does recovering the corpse reduce the respawn cooldown?"
Fang Chang smiled as well.
"Not a chance. Didn't you read the lore compendium on the official website? The respawn cooldown isn't a death penalty. Still, you're pretty lucky; at least your VM didn't break, or you'd have to buy another. By the way, if you're worried about not making it back to base, you can leave your VM with us. That way, if you drop dead halfway and your body and VM aren't recovered, it won't turn into a huge mess."
Elaina cursed, "Fuck! You don't care about me at all, you only care about the VM! Is there not a shred of warmth left in this cold world?!"
Ye Shi rolled his eyes. "Isn't trying to save you from wasting money caring about you—"
"All right, shut your trap," Lao Bai cut off Ye Shi's babbling with a cough. Turning to Elaina, he said reassuringly, "We can give you an extra five percent of the dungeon loot. That should cover your losses for the three-day cooldown. Next time there's a chance to team up, we'll call you again. How does that sound?"
Five percent was no small amount. After all, the Cow and Horse Squad had discovered the dungeon, dealt virtually all the damage, and burned through plenty of ammo and supplies.
As a random player brought in midway through, Elaina's agreed-upon share was originally only ten percent, so bumping it by five was more than generous.
Lao Bai's words finally made Elaina feel that a glimmer of warmth still lingered in this cold world.
Wiping away a smear of nosebleed with a tragic air, Elaina unfastened his VM and placed it solemnly into Lao Bai's hands.
"Tell Xiaoyu for me... that..."
Halfway through the sentence, he collapsed onto the ground with a thud.
Ye Shi could not hold it in and snorted with laughter like a pig.
Gale Force turned his head away, his shoulders shaking uncontrollably.
Staring at the splash of blood on his sleeve, Lao Bai's forehead lined with black lines. Finally, he let out a sigh.
"I'll take him out to the covered wagon first."
"We can haul him back together in a bit."
Chapter 118