The gunfire and explosions inside the underground parking garage finally subsided.
A man clad in animal pelts with a string of teeth hanging around his neck was dragged out from the garage entrance, flanked and hauled along by two players.
Even though he was covered in blood and his hands were bound, his mouth still sputtered and clamored with unintelligible gibberish.
Unfortunately, his efforts were doomed to be in vain; the surrounding players couldn't understand a single word he was saying.
As a war criminal, he would be sent to Dawn City to face trial under the laws of the New Alliance.
And after that, what awaited him was the gallows of justice.
Apart from Fox Fang, all 282 marauders putting up stubborn resistance were killed.
It wasn't that no one wanted to surrender, but that there had been no chance to do so at all.
Brutal close-quarters combat was like a churning meat grinder. Especially in pitch-black conditions like an underground parking garage, let alone taking prisoners, just avoiding friendly fire was already a feat; no one held back in the slightest.
Both the Death Corps and Ape Fang's tribe spearheading the assault suffered considerable casualties.
Watching his men emerge from the underground garage covered in dirt and soot, Ape Fang's face was full of visible heartache.
In that brutal clash just now, his tribe had lost at least twenty percent of its numbers, leaving behind two hundred corpses...
Yet the moment he saw Fox Fang's wretched fate, whatever heartache remained in his chest vanished into thin air.
This was a necessary sacrifice.
It was all worth it...
Unlike the conflicted Ape Fang and the cannon fodder who had survived by the skin of their teeth,
the players emerging from the underground garage, despite suffering substantial casualties themselves, presented a completely different picture.
"Shotguns are the GOAT!"
"For real! Absolutely overpowered in CQB!"
"The LD-47 is a bit lacking in close quarters. It overpenetrates unarmored marauders way too much."
"It's not that bad, right? Either way, you spray a burst, and if one shot doesn't kill them, two will drop them."
"We need to get Dog Mosquito to make a shotgun later. Damn it, replenishing ammo for looted gear is such a pain!"
"+10086."
The surviving players excitedly swapped battlefield experiences and quickly reached a consensus on one matter.
The New Alliance needed to add a shotgun to its standard-issue arsenal, specifically for clearing trenches and underground bunkers!
And chlorine gas grenades.
While those things weren't exactly humane, who cared in a game? Whatever worked best was the way to go.
Besides, without them, their gas masks were purely decorative and served no purpose at all.
While the players were busy bragging, Piltover Paratrooper of the Jungle Corps walked over, grabbed a buddy, and asked:
"Where's Big Eyes? Why didn't he come out with you guys?"
At the mention of Big Eyes, everyone instantly burst out laughing.
"Big Eyes?"
"Hahaha!"
"You mean that dumbass who roasted himself? Hahahahaha, stop, let me laugh for a second."
Watching Construction Site Youth and Brick squatting on the ground wheezing with laughter, Piltover Paratrooper froze for a second, then his expression changed abruptly.
"Holy shit!"
"My flamethrower!"
The players who had been holding in their laughter broke into full-blown guffaws upon hearing that...
While the Piltover bro mourned his flamethrower, soldiers of the Second Corps were busy moving loot and slaves from Sixin District to the southern part of the city.
Upon seeing the photos sent by Chu Guang, Yin Fang had dropped a hasty "Don't touch it," and immediately rushed over all the way from Shelter 404 in Qingquan City.
With no direct transportation available, he had first taken the train, then hitched a ride in Qingshi County on a truck hauling construction supplies, finally arriving in Xizhou just before nightfall.
At the edge of Sixin District, at the entrance of the only villa complex not submerged by the lake water.
Before the raft even came to a steady stop, Yin Fang jumped off.
The air reeked of rot, flies buzzed along the roadsides, and the entire area smelled like rotting flesh soaked in a foul gutter.
Taking in the bloody graffiti and totems made of human bones, Yin Fang shivered instinctively and couldn't help muttering,
"...Can people really live in a place like this?"
"It's not like you haven't seen marauders before." Standing beside him, Chu Guang had already switched on the air-filtration system of his power armor, completely immune to the foul stench around them.
"I've seen them, but now I have a whole new perspective..." Glancing enviously at Chu Guang's power armor, Yin Fang cleared his throat and continued, "Where's the thing?"
"Follow me."
With that, Chu Guang led the way, taking Yin Fang back to Gold Fang's villa and heading straight down to the basement storage room.
The spoils inside the villa had already been cleared out, but this basement storage room alone remained untouched.
A vast assortment of parts was scattered throughout the room; among them were half-dismantled bionic androids and an assortment of bizarre trinkets.
Yet the most eye-catching of all was undeniably the apparatus sitting right in the center of the warehouse, shaped like a gas canister.
Its casing was orange, made of an unrecognizable material. Chu Guang had studied it for a long time without figuring out what on earth it was used for.
The moment Yin Fang laid eyes on it, however, a look of sheer joy broke across his face.
"A fuel rod's gas canister! It really is! Thank God, thank goodness you didn't mess with this thing!"
A fuel rod's gas canister?!
Hearing this, Chu Guang paused for a moment and asked nervously,
"Will it explode?"
"Explode? What are you thinking? Triggering a fusion reaction isn't that easy, not to mention this is a fuel rod for a third-generation reactor. It is safe from every perspective... and of course, extraordinarily precious."
Yin Fang stepped forward and crouched in front of the canister-like apparatus. Finding an interface port, he hooked up a modified VM touchpad console to it.
After a few inputs, the screen lit up.
"103.9 kilograms... Incredible!" Gazing at the characters and digits displayed on the touchpad, Yin Fang's voice trembled with excitement.
"103 kilograms of what?" Chu Guang asked reflexively.
"Helium-3! 103 kilograms of helium-3!" Yin Fang leaped up from the ground, turning to look at Chu Guang with intense excitement. "We're rich!"
At Yin Fang's words, Chu Guang instinctively held his breath.
Though he didn't have much of a concept of what over a hundred kilograms of helium-3 meant, he certainly understood Yin Fang's proclamation that they were rich.
Swallowing hard, he asked,
"What does... 100 kilograms of helium-3 mean?"
"What does it mean?" Yin Fang took a deep breath, trying his best to calm down, and continued, "Put it this way: with a decent reactor, a single kilogram of helium-3 can generate roughly one billion kilowatt-hours of electricity! What do you think that means?"
"One billion?!"
One ton of coal could generate around 3,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
So one billion kilowatt-hours... 330,000 tons of coal?
100 kilograms of helium-3 roughly equaled 33 million tons of coal?
Of course, this comparison was hardly precise, serving merely as a rough reference for easy comprehension.
Looking at the gas canister—no, the fuel rod—in front of him, Chu Guang felt his head spin.
Fortune had arrived too suddenly.
For a moment, he didn't even know what expression to make.
Yin Fang was the same, reaching out to stroke the canister, his face tinged with sheer obsession.
"Such abundant, pure helium-3... In all my years as a prospector, this is the first time I've ever seen anything like it. Getting hold of helium-3 is brutally hard; Earth-Moon transport flights have been suspended for more than two hundred years... Where on earth did they get something this good?"
As he spoke, Yin Fang looked expectantly at Chu Guang, clearly hoping for an answer.
Unfortunately, Chu Guang didn't know how to answer either.
"...There's no point asking me. I'd like to know where it came from too." Chu Guang had an exceedingly strange expression on his face as he said this.
According to intelligence gathered from prisoners, the Fang Clan's primary trading partner was the Bugra Free State.
Backed against the Great Rift Valley and situated at the transport hub of the River Valley Province's northern plains, virtually anyone could trade there in theory, making it almost impossible to pinpoint the specific seller.
Then again, what the hell was a marauder doing buying something like this in the first place...
Right then, Chu Guang noticed a booklet lying on the ground nearby and reached down to pick it up.
A line of text was printed across the cover: *Battle for the Galaxy*.
What the hell was this?
Reading the title, Chu Guang paused, then flipped through the pages, his brows furrowing slightly.
"..."
A comic?
And a mecha-themed one at that.
Glancing at the bionic android parts scattered across the floor and the iron framework propped against the wall, Chu Guang suddenly realized something, and his expression turned subtle.
Good grief.
Was this bastard trying to build a Gundam?!
Looking closer, that iron framework wasn't some storage rack at all; it was clearly a mechanical leg and arm laid sideways.
Only because the craftsmanship was so thoroughly abstract had he failed to recognize it right away.
At this thought, an image couldn't help springing to Chu Guang's mind.
A disheveled man holding a pre-war comic book, standing in front of an underdeveloped baboon, hawking junk he'd salvaged from God knows where:
'Brother, I see great potential in your frame. Here is a secret martial arts manual. Since fate has brought us together, I'll let you have it for a mere million dinars.'
All one could say was that one had the gall to sell it, and the other was foolish enough to buy it.
"What is it?" Seeing Chu Guang staring blankly at the corner, Yin Fang asked curiously.
Chu Guang shook his head.
"Nothing..."
Since there were people who worshipped black boxes as deities, mistaking a pre-war comic book for a "blueprint of lost technology" wasn't entirely outside the realm of possibility.
Turning his gaze back to the orange canister, Yin Fang said with visible envy,
"100 kilograms of helium-3... In the Academy, they'd even trade Tier-A technical archives with you for this."
Chu Guang said, "I wouldn't trade it anyway. Compared to Tier-A tech that I can't even use yet, what I need right now is energy."
Yin Fang nodded. "Indeed. I wouldn't recommend selling it either. Given your current manufacturing capabilities, managing to produce Tier-D technology is already a miracle. It's better to stay pragmatic."
The higher the technological threshold, the higher the cost, the more complex the manufacturing processes, and the broader the supply chain required.
Given the New Alliance's current state, the top priority was developing productive capacity; cutting-edge technologies were secondary.
A Tier-D technology like solid hydrogen wasn't necessarily less practical than a Tier-A technology like metallic hydrogen.
Still, what Chu Guang really wanted to retort was: who said it was a miracle that the New Alliance could make Tier-D technology?
According to the Academy's classification standards for pre-war technology, Type-A3 aerospace aluminum alloy counted as Tier-C.
In other words, the New Alliance's industrial capabilities could already produce Tier-C technology!
Even if it was only one thing.
"This canister was probably dismantled from a fuel rod... Though I don't know which idiot took it apart, fortunately all the components are here. Putting it back together shouldn't be much of an issue."
Surveying the materials strewn about, Yin Fang continued,
"Now all that's left is figuring out a way to find that reactor, and Shelter 101... Just to be clear up front, I don't know how to repair that thing. I'm only a prospector, not a nuclear engineer."
Chu Guang smiled and said,
"No need to worry about that. I've already dispatched people to look for it."
"Is that so? That's great then."
Yin Fang let out a sigh of relief.
What gave him the biggest headache on regular days was that whenever this Administrator ran into a technical issue, regardless of whether it fell within his area of expertise, he would dump it all on him to find a solution.
What was he supposed to do?
Even within the same language, reading and writing were entirely different matters, let alone an intricate, systemic engineering undertaking like a controlled fusion reactor.
"...Reassembling the fuel rod will take some time. Could you get a few people to help haul these parts outside?" Yin Fang glanced around, pinching his nose with a frown. "The smell in here is overpowering. I really don't want to work in this godforsaken place."
It wasn't just the smell.
The atmosphere was practically a haunted house—the kind where you could set up a booth at the entrance and start charging admission. No sane person would want to linger here.
"No problem."
Chu Guang nodded. With a flick of his index finger, he opened the map and casually highlighted a batch of lucky players nearby, issuing a quest to help move supplies.
It required ten players in total, rewarding 10 silver, 10 contribution points, and 50 event points upon completion.
The moment the quest pop-up appeared, it was snapped up in an instant.
Chu Guang suspected these fellows hadn't even read the quest description before blindly accepting it.
Opening the quest details to check:
Good grief—nine out of the ten were Agility-types.
Now that was fast!
"...Someone will be over shortly to help you. I have some other business to attend to, so I won't stay long."
Just as the words left his mouth, a pale blue pop-up window suddenly appeared before Chu Guang's eyes.
[Quest: Recover the VM of Shelter 101's Administrator (Requirement: device serial number and DNA verification records must match the database entry)]
[Reward: 3,500 DNA Sequences.]
3,500 "activation codes"!
Seeing the final line of quest rewards, Chu Guang clenched his fists in excitement.
The 3,000 activation codes granted when Floor B4 unlocked were almost all distributed.
With these 3,500 newly added DNA sequences, the player cap for Wasteland OL would rise from 3,500 to 8,000! More than double!
At the thought, Chu Guang couldn't help remarking:
"Tomb-raiding really is the proper way to get stronger!"
Yet this surge of excitement didn't last long. Barely half a minute later, Chu Guang calmed down.
Based on the current intel, Shelter 101 was evidently not some abandoned, ownerless ruin from ages ago, but an active, functioning shelter.
Which meant their Administrator was still alive.
So that brought up a question:
How was he supposed to politely borrow the "vital signs monitor" from a living, breathing Administrator?
In a sense, that thing was equivalent to a person's black box.
Not only did it store DNA data, but it also almost certainly held work logs and the user's personal privacy—the equivalent of a 21st-century smartphone.
Putting himself in the other person's shoes, if someone tried to borrow his phone, Chu Guang would be a hundred percent unwilling. Even if everything inside were wiped clean, there would always be ways to recover it.
This quest probably wasn't going to be that simple...
...
In a pitch-black tunnel, a group holding flashlights advanced, searching as they moved forward.
Two hours earlier, the members of the Ox and Horse Squad had received a follow-up quest to [Fusion Reactor], following the NPC Wang Zhong to find the entrance to Shelter 101.
Lü Bei of the Guards Corps accompanied them as the New Alliance's representative to negotiate with Shelter 101.
The five players fanned out around them, shielding the two NPCs in the center of the formation.
However, the quest was unexpectedly easy, with virtually no troublesome threats encountered along the way.
The most dangerous mutant they ran into was merely a polypod beast that had wandered in from who knew where.
In most cases, all they encountered were mutated rats and cockroaches...
Particularly the former.
Practically the entire city of Xizhou had become a domain of rats.
These little critters had very low combat strength; a single grenade could blow away a whole swarm of them.
When encountering stragglers, there wasn't even a need to shoot—melee attacks easily dealt with them.
Kicking the corpse of a mutated rat aside, Ye Shi said with exasperation,
"We should've brought Brother Qiangren Suonan along."
Scratching his head, Jieyan said,
"Bringing him wouldn't help either. By the time he tamed all the rats in this tunnel, we'd have cleared the whole map twice over."
Qiangren Suonan had shared a guide on the official website: to tame a mutated rat, one first needed to beat it bare-handed until it rolled over on its belly to surrender.
By the same logic, a Deathclaw player could theoretically tame a Deathclaw too.
Provided they beat it into submission first.
Unable to make sense of their conversation, the guide, Wang Zhong, assumed they were growing impatient and hurriedly spoke up:
"Just ahead! We're almost there!"
Walking beside him, Lü Bei reassured him,
"No rush. Think carefully and do your best not to take a wrong turn."
"Don't worry, my lord! I've walked this path many times. I could find it with my eyes closed!" Wang Zhong vowed earnestly.
The group continued forward and finally arrived at their destination.
Wang Zhong stopped before an iron door and reached out to knock.
There was no response from behind the iron door.
Looking anxious, Wang Zhong knocked again.
Watching the NPC's actions, Ye Shi lowered his voice and whispered,
"How about we just blow the door open for him?"
Hearing this, Fang Chang gave a light cough and said,
"This damn quest is tagged 'Unique.' If it fails, our faction reputation will tank. I advise you not to borrow trouble."
Jieyan scratched his head.
"Why do I feel Brother Ye Shi has a point? Didn't all those shelter residents retreat back into the shelter? This door isn't even the shelter entrance, so how could there be anyone—"
Before he finished speaking, the iron door let out a sudden creak, opening a crack outward.
A face peeked out from the gap.
Seeing Wang Zhong standing at the door, the man was taken aback and said in surprise,
"Wang Zhong? You're still alive?!"
Wang Zhong grinned excitedly.
"What kind of talk is that? What do you mean 'still alive'? Is a dead man talking to you?"
"Sorry... my wording was poor." The man lowered his head, went silent for a moment, and asked, "Why did you come here?"
Wang Zhong said with a smile,
"I've come to bring good news—those barbarians have been wiped out!"
"Already... wiped out?"
Astonishment showed on the man's face, as if he couldn't quite believe it.
Right then, he noticed the unfamiliar faces standing beside Wang Zhong, and his expression instantly grew wary.
"Who are these people..."
"Lü Bei, Commander of the New Alliance Guards Corps."
Stepping forward with a military salute, Lü Bei took the initiative to introduce himself.
Wang Zhong, standing at the door, chimed in immediately:
"They're the ones who helped us drive out the marauders, and they even cured my wife's illness! Now they're leading us in rebuilding our homes. Oh, and the leader of the New Alliance is the Administrator of Shelter 404. Don't worry, they're all very good people!"
When Wang Zhong said this, it came straight from the heart.
Before the New Alliance arrived, they had lived hand-to-mouth, never knowing where their next meal would come from.
Ever since the New Alliance had taken over, not a single person in their settlement had starved to death.
However...
that was merely his own perspective.
Staring at the soldier beside Wang Zhong, the man behind the door was filled with suspicion. He didn't seem to believe a word, and fell silent.
For a moment, the atmosphere turned awkward.
Just then, Fang Chang stepped forward with a friendly smile, greeting him in broken Human Alliance language.
"...We are residents of Shelter 404, from the same era as you. It is a pleasure to meet you once more... compatriots."
He had rehearsed this line in his head for quite a while to get it all out, but he still ended up stammering.
Standing off to the side, Lao Bai couldn't help facepalming, while Kuang Feng, who had remained quiet the entire time, let out a sigh.
The guy already didn't believe you were from a shelter, and you still had to flaunt your half-baked Human Alliance language.
If you can't speak it well, just keep your trap shut!
Ye Shi muttered in an undertone,
"...If I'd known, we should've worn our starter sets."
Kuang Feng nodded.
"Indeed, an oversight on our part."
Perhaps their hidden Charisma stat wasn't high enough, causing the dialogue check to fail.
Yet right at that moment, a miracle occurred.
The man scrutinized Fang Chang for a while. For whatever reason, some wire must have crossed in his head, because he actually bought the nonsense.
"...You do indeed resemble those people, even though you aren't wearing blue coats."
"Those people?" Fang Chang was slightly taken aback.
"The shelter residents, of course." The man swung the door open. "Allow me to introduce myself. I am Tris, a resident of Camp 101, an employee hired by Shelter 101..."
"...and one under their protection."
Chapter 333