77: Chapter 77 The forum exploded

The discovery of the Ancient One remains and Lin Qiming's comment about it being a "key" acted like a bomb, detonating a reaction within the player community stronger than any before. However, the most intense reaction wasn't at the Outpost, in the mine shafts, or in the caves, but within the internal game forum that could only be accessed by the players' consciousness.

The post was made less than half an hour after Iron Stomach returned to the Outpost. The poster wasn't Iron Stomach himself—he was currently lying on a temporary bed next to the processing station, wrapping and unwrapping his rib brace repeatedly. The poster was Nightsong. He compiled screenshots of the informational state waveforms recorded on the scanner, a close-up photo of Iron Stomach holding the dark gold chip, and a transcription of Lin Qiming's words in the cave—"A key—the key to what lies further below"—into a post tagged as "Breaking News." The title was unadorned but more than enough to make people click:

[Breaking News] Iron Stomach jumped into a well, fell thirty-eight times, and then found Ancient One ruins. Lin Qiming personally said it's a "key."

Within minutes of being posted, the view count surpassed a thousand—relative to the player base of two hundred, this meant everyone had refreshed it five or six times. In the middle of the night, Iron Stomach was kept awake by various private messages and notification pings, so he simply took more photos of the chip from different angles and posted them individually under Nightsong's thread, adding: "This thing looks better than any scrap I've ever seen. Look at the patterns yourselves; it's not human-made. Use your mouse wheel to zoom in on the details."

Replies began to pile up at an uncontrollable speed.

"Ancient One?" The first reply came from the ID "Warhammer Veteran," on the first floor, consisting of only two words and a question mark. He immediately followed up on the second floor with a whole paragraph: "The Ancient Ones in the Warhammer setting are a creator-level primordial race, tens of millions of years older than humans of the Golden Age. If these ruins really are left by the Ancient Ones, then this isn't some hidden dungeon—it's the entrance to the main storyline. Iron Stomach, you didn't jump into a well; you jumped through the gates of plot progression."

"So Iron Stomach's thirty-eight falls weren't him seeking death, but him pioneering?" another ID replied.

"He's paving the way with his face."

"What he bled out wasn't blood, but our plot progression."

"Wait, did any of you notice the bottom right corner of the scanning waveform image?" Another ID called "Plot Excavator" zoomed in on a section of the image Nightsong uploaded, circling a small segment of the waveform with the forum's simple drawing tool. "This fluctuation frequency is different from the ancient one fragment waveforms we picked up from the scrap heap before. It's slower, more rhythmic. Like a heartbeat. It's not radiation from a single fragment; it's something still operational emitting a signal."

The technical faction immediately began to follow up. Some imported the waveform data into forum analysis tools, attempting to reverse-engineer the possible structure of the signal source. Others began translating the subtext of Lin Qiming's words—what does "key" mean? Where is the lock? What's behind the door? Some started digging through known Warhammer 40K lore, trying to find if the planet name Fenris IV had ever appeared in history. Someone else even started a new thread in the "Bug Report" section with a title so blunt it was almost a provocation: "Requesting Lord Tech-Priest to answer: Are we actually in a real world?"

This post quickly climbed into the top ten of the hot list, but no GM replied. Lin Qiming saw it on the backend and didn't delete it.

At the same time, the Meme Section wouldn't let any trending topic slip away. An entry called "Iron Stomach Fall Method" was being pushed frantically. Someone marked the locations of Iron Stomach's thirty-eight fatal falls on a simple mine map, writing his status at the time and the original death notification from Hephaestus next to each point. The earliest cliff-jumping prompt was "Please confirm if you have purchased the corresponding skill," which later changed to "Your tolerance for falling is increasing at an abnormal rate." The prompt for his most recent fall next to the Ancient One remains became "Your exploration contribution has been recorded. Please continue." Circled on the far right of the map was the fifty merit points he gained in the cave, with someone writing four words next to it in bold: "Falling for Merit."

The Strategy Section also began to see systematic summaries of "body stacking tactics." A player with the ID "Tactical Notes" posted a thread titled "Fourth Calamity Tactical Guidelines V0.1," deconstructing the playstyle formed during the clearing of the bat nest into reusable templates: Bait Group, Obstruction Group, Annihilation Group, and Resurrection Cooldown Planning. The post concluded: "The success of this tactic is built on the foundation of infinite resurrection. It is currently unclear if there's a hidden limit on the number of resurrections, but it is recommended that core player groups reserve a 'first death' quota for some members before every large-scale application to avoid synchronized team-wide cooldowns."

Looking at these words, what flashed through Lin Qiming's mind wasn't pride, but another thought: they had already begun to systematically manage death as a resource. This was a threshold. Once crossed, the Fourth Calamity would no longer be a pack of reckless madmen, but a truly immortal legion with a sustainable tactical system. But the other side of the threshold always came with a price—he glanced at the backend's cumulative corruption value report. Iron Stomach still had the highest individual accumulation, approaching a certain numerical value. Because Grey Mist Walker's first squad strictly executed the command to "treat resurrection as a tactical resource," the entire team's corruption value showed positive growth. Meanwhile, Rat Speaker's remained at zero.

He screenshot the report, archived it in an encrypted directory, and then replied to the "Fourth Calamity Tactical Guidelines" post in the Strategy Section with an anonymous handle: "Tactical resources can be managed, and so can the ledger of souls." Within minutes, a dozen players were asking what that meant, but he didn't reply again. Hephaestus silently added a line to the system log: "The Anchor cannot suppress the occasional urge to warn the players."

In a corner, another post was slowly climbing up, titled "About corruption value, I think something's wrong—". The poster's ID was "Landed and Turned into a Crate." He hadn't appeared in the Outpost's main activity records for many chapters—the first player to jump off the cliff and die, receiving the first death analysis report from Hephaestus. He wrote in the post: "After I died, I checked my attribute panel and found that the 'Corruption' prompt I saw before wasn't a hallucination. Have you guys noticed that when you look at the status bar after resurrecting, a certain spot flashes? It's not experience points, but another set of numbers. The position is very obscure; I tried to screenshot it but couldn't. But every time I die more often, that prompt seems to get brighter."

Most of the replies were banter and jokes from veteran players. "You've fallen so much you've got psychological trauma." "That's just a background effect." "Probably a highlight that comes with the death replay." "Even Iron Stomach hasn't complained about a problem, and you've only died a few times?"

Some people responded seriously. Warhammer Veteran replied with a paragraph below: "In the Warhammer world, there's no such thing as resurrection without cause. All resurrections come with a price. If this game's setting is hardcore enough, then the number of deaths must be tied to something. Maybe the project team originally wanted to make the corruption value visible like a stamina bar but later changed it to be hidden. Or—it was always visible, and we're just opening the panel the wrong way."

Lin Qiming screenshot this reply separately and saved it in a subfolder named "Thresholds · Caution · Discourse" under the encrypted directory. He didn't intervene; he simply had Hephaestus adjust the forum's algorithm—implementing a natural sinking strategy for discussion threads involving corruption values, so they wouldn't be prioritized on the hot list, but without shielding, deleting, or banning replies. This was the mildest way to cool things down and the only way that wouldn't arouse further suspicion.

In the final hours before dawn, the forum's heat gradually shifted from the Ancient One ruins to more practical topics. Someone started a resource point summary thread in the Strategy Section, someone showed off a map of the Outpost they drew in the Creative Workshop, and someone else posted in the Off-topic Section asking, "What does Lord Lin Qiming actually look like?—I feel like he's looking at me every time I get close to him, but I don't dare look up." Rat Speaker didn't post. She stayed in the cave until very late, and when she returned, she was carrying a newborn Giant Rat pup about the size of a kitten, placing it in an old cloth bag next to her bunk. Mao Mao followed behind her, nudging the pup's belly with his nose. The pup sneezed, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

Lin Qiming saw this scene on the backend but didn't record it. He simply closed all the panels, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. Outside the Outpost, Nightsong finished another round of reinforcement at the mine shaft junction, plugging a scrap rod into the last crevice in the rock wall. A pale green glow burned quietly in the darkness, marking the direction toward the deeper caves. On his panel, Hephaestus silently updated the last line of the system log, as if stamping a final seal on the entire day: The Anchor no longer thinks these people are only capable of throwing their lives away.