7: Chapter 7 Wasteland

The heavy armored airtight door slowly closed behind them.

A howling wind, mixed with coarse radioactive grit, slammed mercilessly against the faces of the five.

STC-73 had been left behind in the Shelter to watch the house.

Lin Li walked at the very front of the group, holding a war halberd in one hand.

A black high-collared trench coat covered most of his face, revealing only a pair of eyes filled with vigilance.

Behind him, the four members of The Fourth Calamity looked around like country bumpkins entering a grand mansion, constantly letting out exclamations of wonder at things they had never seen before.

"The lighting and rendering! The particle effects of the sandstorm!"

Miracle Walker even reached out to grab the dust in the air, feeling the realistic sensation of the grit rubbing against his fingertips,

"It's incredible! Just the terrain modeling of this wasteland is enough to crush a whole bunch of 3A blockbusters on the market!"

Lin Li ignored their noise.

He squinted slightly, observing the surrounding environment.

This was not his first time stepping into this wilderness, but the desolate and dead silence that seeped into his bones still made him feel oppressed.

This was the former Outpost 586, now a desolate land on the dark side of the Empire.

The sky presented a sickly dark red color.

The aging star emitted high temperatures, baking the land.

The air was so dry it felt like it was about to ignite; this extreme heat and drought might be the only reason why that group of bloodthirsty greenskins hadn't been able to form large-scale hordes and spread into a catastrophe yet.

Lin Li scanned the surroundings.

To the north, there was an endless range of black mountains, like a barrier of despair, with peaks piercing the red firmament; occasionally, a few radioactive thunderstorm clouds hovered over the summits.

To the east and west, there had once been two wide rivers.

But now, the riverbeds were completely dried up, and the soil exposed to the air took on an eerie purple-black color due to heavy metal pollution.

Only a few low-lying areas remained, with some toxic puddles emitting a pungent smell of sulfur.

To the south was a relatively open alluvial plain, with countless giant metal ruins and armor wreckage left over from ancient wars scattered on the ground.

Lin Li had originally escaped to this place from that even more desolate dead zone in the south, barely surviving by the skin of his teeth.

"Quiet."

Lin Li suddenly stopped, his low voice cutting through the wind and sand.

The four players immediately shut their mouths, gripped their scrap-metal-like weapons, and stared nervously at Lin Li's back.

"Boss Dawn, are there monsters?"

Why Panic When I Have Flash lowered his voice excitedly, his two-handed greatsword hungry for action.

Lin Li didn't speak but pointed the end of his war halberd toward the shadows of the ruins ahead.

A cluster of dark purple berry bushes was growing there.

This thing looked seventy percent similar to the man-eating vines that had almost drained Liver Emperor dry the day before yesterday.

"That is a variant of hops."

Lin Li's gaze was cold,

"Its fruit looks tempting, but extremely sharp poisonous thorns are hidden beneath the roots. Once you get close, it will spring out like a venomous snake and pierce you instantly. At this distance, you wouldn't even have time to react."

Liver Emperor swallowed a mouthful of saliva, subconsciously covering his previously injured arm.

Although he wasn't afraid of death, this game was too painful.

Lin Li continued forward.

After a month of tempering in the wasteland, plus the initial awakening of his pure-blood genes, he displayed extremely seasoned survival skills.

He could judge where quicksand traps were by the subtle changes in the color of the sand under his feet;

He could avoid the acid beetle nests hidden in abandoned pipes by the scents carried on the breeze.

Watching Lin Li walk through the murderous wasteland as if he were taking a leisurely stroll, the worship in the players' eyes grew stronger.

"This NPC's AI is too advanced; he's practically a true wilderness survival master!"

Praise Ming Shen followed behind, making notes frantically in his mind.

This was definitely a must-know survival point for the late game.

Suddenly, Lin Li drew a rusted military knife from his waist.

He crept silently toward the wreckage of a scrapped armored vehicle and picked up a piece of foul-smelling carrion left behind by some unknown creature from the ground.

"Old Ming, give me a javelin."

Lin Li reached out his hand without looking back.

Praise Ming Shen immediately handed one over respectfully.

Lin Li hung the carrion on the front of a steel bar and then, with extreme dexterity, set up a simple trigger-based trap between the metal gaps of the armored vehicle wreckage, using the surrounding waste cables.

After finishing all this, he led the four players to hide behind a rock Shelter a dozen meters away.

"Watch." Lin Li's voice remained flat.

Less than ten minutes later.

A piercing screech came from the dark red clouds in the sky.

A strange bird, the size of an adult calf and covered in hard blue feathers, suddenly swooped down from high altitude!

This Wasteland Blue Vulture had astonishing eyesight, and it immediately locked onto that piece of stinking carrion.

"Boom!"

The Blue Vulture landed heavily, its giant claws gouging deep grooves into the concrete floor.

It looked around warily, and after determining there was no threat, it suddenly lowered its head to peck at the carrion.

"Click."

A crisp sound of a mechanism triggered.

The rusted steel bar hidden in the wreckage gap, under the potential energy instantly released by the old, highly elastic cable, pierced directly through the Blue Vulture's fragile neck with a squelch!

"Holy crap!!! Boss Dawn is awesome!!!"

This textbook-perfect hunting scene made the four players instantly boil with excitement!

"What kind of god-tier trap science is this! Does the physics engine even perfectly simulate the spring potential energy of such homemade traps!"

They rushed out of the Shelter, yelling as they pounced on the mutant Blue Vulture that was still struggling frantically on the ground with tenacious vitality.

To demonstrate their value as The Fourth Calamity, the four of them didn't give the Blue Vulture any chance to breathe.

Flash slashed off the Blue Vulture's wing with his sword, and Liver Emperor held up his shield, firmly resisting the strange bird's counterattack.

Praise Ming Shen's javelin directly burst its eyeball, and finally, Miracle Walker pierced its heart with an arrow.

"Nice! First kill of a mutant Blue Vulture! This is definitely high-quality protein, brothers!"

Why Panic When I Have Flash wiped the bird blood off his face excitedly,

"This bird has so much meat, it's enough for us brothers to eat for several days!"

Miracle Walker's eyes also lit up, "Quick, quick, quick, get a fire started! I want to taste what kebabs in the Warhammer universe taste like!"

Looking at their high spirits, Lin Li, who hadn't made a move, stood where he was, his expression turning extremely ugly.

He didn't stop the players' celebration, just walked up silently and used the tip of his war halberd to pry open a bit of the Blue Vulture's torn flesh.

On the cold tip of the halberd.

The Blue Vulture's blood presented a sickly black-purple color and emitted a faint, pungent smell similar to burning engine oil.

Lin Li's heart sank completely.

He maintained his aloof, "don't come near me" persona, but his voice carried a trace of imperceptible powerlessness.

"This kind of prey... cannot be eaten."

The players' cheering stopped abruptly.

"Cannot be eaten?"

Liver Emperor, holding a piece of thigh meat he had just cut off, froze,

"Boss Dawn, this bird's meat looks quite firm, and there are no parasites. Why can't we eat it?"

"Your eyes cannot see the deepest curse on this land."

Lin Li slowly straightened up, his tone cold and heavy:

"Radiation, and high-energy toxins that seep into the marrow."

"This Blue Vulture is in the middle tier of the mutant food chain. Its body has accumulated massive amounts of Warp mutation toxins and heavy metals. Those genetically mutated trash creatures might be fine eating it, but for us humans..."

Lin Li gave a bitter smile in his heart.

He remembered when he had just transmigrated to this world, starving and panicked, he had casually gnawed on the leg meat of a long-eared ground rat.

If he hadn't been lucky enough to be found by people from that scavenger settlement in the east while dragging his half-dead body, and forced to drink a big bowl of anti-radiation folk medicine mixed with sand and mud, he would have long since died in this wilderness from his internal organs rotting away.

Although the stomachs of these perfect clones were tough, they still couldn't digest this kind of highly toxic waste that could turn stomach acid into strong acid!

The prey they had worked so hard to hunt was just a pile of dangerous, non-combustible garbage!

"Even this can't be eaten?!"

The players were all dumbfounded.

Over the next two hours, the four unwilling players scoured the ruins like a swarm of locusts.

They found some shriveled tuber plants and several kinds of strange-looking, shell-less soft-bodied beetles.

But after Lin Li conducted a simple toxin reaction test with his military knife.

The cruel result was laid out before them.

The vast majority of things on the wasteland were poisonous.

At least the natural ecology of this area was completely unsuitable for pure-blood humans to use as a food source at this stage.

The atmosphere fell into a suffocating silence.

Hunger was like a persistent disease, not only tormenting Lin Li's stomach but also frantically draining the players' stamina bar mechanics.

The dark red sun overhead was still scorching, baking people until they felt dizzy.

"Boss Dawn..."

Miracle Walker, who had been silent all this time, suddenly spoke up.

He raised his head, his eyes flashing with a dangerous glint that only players possessed, one devoid of any moral baggage.

"Since the monsters in the wild can't be eaten..."

Miracle Walker paused, "Why don't we go rob other human NPCs of their food?"

As soon as these words were spoken, the eyes of the other three players also lit up.

"Right! Since this game has other survivor settlements, there must be detoxified food!"

Why Panic When I Have Flash eagerly chimed in: "If we can't beat elite monsters, can't we at least rob a few human NPCs? We are The Fourth Calamity, after all! Just rob them; at worst, we'll lose some faction morality points!"

It was just a game; killing a few human NPCs to grab some food carried no psychological burden.

But as Lin Li listened to these words, his heart gave a violent jolt.

He was a living, breathing human being.

Go rob those survivors who were struggling bitterly on this desperate wasteland?

A trace of intense struggle flashed through Lin Li's mind.

That settlement over ten kilometers to the east had once saved his life.

The people living there were all old, weak, sick, and disabled, barely surviving on various mutant synthetic scraps.

Rob them?

Even if he could bring himself to do it, those pitiful rations would be a drop in the bucket compared to the massive consumption of the Shelter.

After one robbery, they would all starve to death.

As for robbing places further away?

Lin Li knew that in the coastal region further east, there was a large human city fortress.

But such a level of fortress would definitely contain remnants of well-equipped Planetary Defense Forces.

Just by relying on these five novice refugees holding broken melee weapons to rob a landlord? That wouldn't be called robbery; that would be called delivering takeout to their door!

"No."

Lin Li rejected this proposal without hesitation.

He slammed his Warhammer down heavily with the dignity of an absolute superior.

"We are the Spark, the cornerstone of human revival, not those fallen Chaos raiders!"

Lin Li's voice was filled with a sense of sacred inviolability:

"Abandon your foolish and shortsighted ideas."

The food crisis once again fell into an unsolvable deadlock.

By evening, the group returned to the Shelter empty-handed.

"What a pitiful sight."

STC-73's red head floated in mid-air, still maintaining its sharp-tongued, mean style.

"Great Creator, and the four invincible Spark warriors, where is the loot you brought back? Do you intend to fill your noble stomachs with the northwest wind and wasteland radiation?"

Lin Li walked up in a bad mood and kicked the floating iron shell with a "clang," sending STC-73 spinning twice in the air.

"Shut up! Check the database again and see if there is anything edible nearby!"

"Very well, Creator. Your roughness just highlights the impotent rage of carbon-based lifeforms when facing hunger."

73 steadied itself; not only was it not angry, but it actually enjoyed this physical interaction from a high-authority user.

The players also threw their weapons on the ground, dejected.

"This is such a scam..."

Why Panic When I Have Flash clutched his rumbling, hungry stomach and looked with disdain at the half-broken Matter Constructor in the corner of Room 3:

"Boss Dawn, the high-tech equipment in this Shelter is too pathetic! It's one thing that it can't even build a gun, but it can't even synthesize basic food like protein blocks?"

"The game developer is definitely a closeted old pervert, intentionally ramping up the difficulty for us!"

Lin Li listened from the side, cold sweat streaming down.

If I had high-level authority or massive amounts of raw materials to synthesize protein blocks, would I still need to take you guys out to drink the northwest wind?!

Just then, with a clatter.

Liver Emperor, who had been walking at the very back, suddenly threw the dirty, large burlap sack he had been carrying onto the ground.

The mouth of the sack opened, and all sorts of miscellaneous items rolled out.

Old metal gears, half a plastic pipe full of oil stains, a few broken bricks with strange graffiti, and even a pair of moldy, possibly leather-textured broken shoes.

"Old Liver, what's wrong with you? Why are you picking up a pile of trash while out hunting?"

"What do you know! In a wasteland game, trash is treasure! I'm collecting interactable materials along the way; maybe it will trigger some hidden clues."

Liver Emperor said confidently.

As a player specializing in infrastructure building and scavenging, he would absolutely not allow himself to return empty-handed before logging off.

As he spoke, he rummaged through the pile of trash and pulled out a dried, yellowed piece of material residue.

"Look, I even found this."

It was a piece of paper resembling a newspaper or flyer from the old era.

Ming Shen curiously took it and brought it close to look, his brows instantly furrowing.

"This texture... it's like synthetic paper, but what are these scribbles written on it? It doesn't look like English, it has hints of ancient Latin, but the grammatical structure doesn't fit any known mainstream language on Earth at all."

As a hardcore researcher, Ming Shen tried to decipher the information on the paper, but in the end, he could only rub his sore eyes and give up.

"This is simply a complete reconstruction of a whole set of alien rhetoric and a lexicon; the developer really went all out on this setting!"

This sentence indirectly confirmed one thing for the other players: they could not understand the language and script of this universe.

If they encountered NPCs later, they would probably have to rely on a translator.

Watching the few players gathered together, studying a pile of trash and waste paper with great interest, Lin Li just shook his head helplessly.

Just as he was preparing to force this group of hungry players to retreat to Room 2 and barely survive on deep-sea nutrient solution.

"Warning. Weak, valid, high-precision industrial information source detected."

STC-73, which had been kicked into the corner by Lin Li, suddenly emitted a short electronic sound.

It quickly floated toward the pile of trash Liver Emperor had thrown down, and a faint blue high-frequency scanning beam locked tightly onto a piece of non-metallic composite plate fragment covered in dried mud.

"What's going on? Can you analyze something special out of trash?" Lin Li's expression tightened.

"Creator, this is not just a piece of abandoned armor plate fragment."

STC-73's optical lens flashed wildly with waterfall-like data streams, and its mechanical voice surprisingly carried a wave of strong computational fluctuations at this moment.

"This fragment contains a residual secondary asset identity inscription coating."

"Through reverse physical tracking of the inscription and comparison of the half-life of trace elements..."

"I have extracted a silent coordinate axis projection from the microscopic crystal layer on the back of this fragment."

"Coordinates? What coordinates?"

The four players and Lin Li leaned in at the same time, the hunger in their stomachs immediately replaced by curiosity about the impending plot trigger.

"Located 55 kilometers in a straight line to the southwest of our current position."

STC-73 projected a simple wasteland topographic map holographically in the center of the main control room and placed a green highlighted marker on one of the points.

"In the civil industrial records of the Golden Age, that was once the branch facility of the largest fully automated high-wave nutrient paste processing plant on Outpost Planet 586!"

Everyone gasped simultaneously.

A food factory!

"After thousands of years of erosion and the ravages of war, the surface buildings of the factory have 100% been razed to the ground, and it is absolutely impossible for the finished food inside to have survived to this day; it would have long since rotted away in the long passage of time."

STC-73 calmly poured a bucket of cold water.

But soon, its tone changed again.

"However! As the core production area buried deep underground, it absolutely seals away the most intact [Industrial-Grade Protein Conversion Hub]!"

"As long as we can obtain its core motherboard or a small sub-unit and transplant it back to the Shelter, we can completely strip away the deep-seated Warp toxins inside those toxic mutant monsters and convert them into pure, high-calorie protein blocks!"

Lin Li's eyes suddenly erupted with a terrifying brightness.

Not only could he solve the food reserve problem and completely turn this group of players into perpetual motion machine-style laborers.

More importantly, such a large factory must have batteries or other equipment used for power supply. If he could find a spare plasma battery there, the main quest [Restart Base Module] could be completed directly, and the massive amount of equipment on the second underground floor could all be unlocked!

This trip west had an unimaginably high rate of return.

But Lin Li was not blinded by this big pie.

Such an important place, fifty-five kilometers away, across the dangerous wasteland.

This kind of ancient heritage hidden underground must have long since become a breeding ground for various mutant monsters.

Just by relying on their current scrap metal to break in? It basically equals suicide.

The monsters there are definitely harder to deal with than the Blue Vulture seen today!

Thinking of this, Lin Li's gaze slowly fell on those four Calamities.

Players are just clones; if they die, they can revive.

But he wasn't sure if he would revive or end up scooping dung in a Warp cesspit if he died.

"It's too dangerous, can't force it... have to make them willingly go as the vanguard scouting cannon fodder."

Lin Li calculated secretly in his heart, then switched to a cold NPC posture without changing his expression.

He slowly raised the Warhammer in his hand and slammed it onto the metal floor.

"Sparks."

Lin Li's voice echoed in the Shelter again, filled with the irresistible power of a superior.

"Broken embers cannot light a bonfire, and cowardly exploration can never touch the truth. The gears of the great revival have already turned."

"The spark of human civilization's revival has already begun to burn!"

Lin Li's gaze swept across the four players with glowing eyes, and he declared word by word:

"Small skirmishes are not the tone of this universe; I will issue you the first true, formal mission!"

"Objective: The deep underground of the ancient food factory ruins to the southwest! Obtain food or equipment used to manufacture food at all costs!"

"In the future, your achievements will be recorded in history books and become subjects for students; your sacrifices will become the cornerstone of human revival and be remembered by them!"

This grand narrative directly gave the four players an intracranial orgasm, and they excitedly straightened their bodies abruptly, "Loyalty!"