Chapter 169: Chapter 168: Time for My Entrance
Criminals with severe antisocial personality disorder are completely counterproductive to rebuilding human civilization in the Gray Tide apocalypse.
After all, these people are fundamentally selfish. The collective survival of human civilization is far less important to them than their own gratification.
Of course, they could choose not to awaken these felons. But among the other awakened criminals, there would always be some bleeding hearts or others with their own agendas who would inevitably propose releasing them.
And if even one of them were set free, it would create a potential risk, and the other felons would likely be released as well.
It would be like opening Pandora’s box, extinguishing the last embers of human civilization.
The probability was far too high, and the players didn’t dare take that risk.
Most of these felons were heinous criminals, having taken at least one life or committed other major crimes. Killing them was, in a way, justified.
As for garbage thoughts like, ’Do we have the right to take another person’s life?’ or ’Should potential crimes really be stopped by such crude methods?’ or ’What’s the difference between using killing to stop killing and just being a thug?’—the players naturally wouldn’t entertain such notions.
They were no armchair moralists with nothing better to do. In an apocalypse where survival was paramount, anything that ensured the continuation of human civilization was the right thing to do.
Soon, they had smashed the metal hatch, wrapping the shards in strips of cloth torn from their clothing to fashion crude daggers.
Amidst the red-haired woman’s screams, they found the Hibernation Pods of those with the longest sentences. One by one, they began piercing the hatches, stabbing the occupants to death in their sleep.
Among the nearly ten thousand prisoners, petty criminals were still the vast majority; there were only a few hundred felons with sentences exceeding twenty years.
The players had steeled themselves. Each moved like a killing machine, precisely piercing the hatches. They drove the points of their daggers into the throats or eye sockets of the sleepers, thrusting hard to pierce the spine and brain for an instant kill.
Soon, every felon with a sentence over twenty years had been killed in their sleep.
After catching their breath, they started opening the other Hibernation Pods to awaken those with shorter sentences—the potential "good guys."
Of course, whether they were actually good people didn’t matter. As long as they weren’t completely insane and had a strong will to survive, it was enough.
After all, the world’s most powerful nation, the Eagle Country, was originally founded by a group of exiled criminals.
The red-haired woman had recovered from her initial panic by this point. She was even able to chat with them a little, asking what was going on.
After they explained the state of the world, the red-haired woman screamed in terror for a bit before, surprisingly, starting to help them open the other pods.
The doors to the Hibernation Pods were opened one by one, and the long-slumbering occupants began to stir.
It started with terrified screams, but they were gradually calmed down. Once they were lucid enough, they slowly joined the players’ group.
Many even ran off a great distance, but when they couldn’t find an exit, they gradually came to believe the players’ story and returned to join the group.
The group around players like Satoshi Nakamoto and Vasily grew larger and larger.
Finally, the last sleeper was awakened, and they now had a force of nearly ten thousand people.
Though most were still bewildered, half-believing and half-doubting what they were told, full of selfish motives and suspicion, the environment left them no choice but to join.
Hunger and thirst soon set in. Fortunately, there was still nutrient fluid in the Hibernation Pods.
The crowd temporarily subsisted on the nutrient fluid to regain some strength. Then, led by the players, the massive procession set off toward other parts of the supergiant structure.
While Satoshi Nakamoto and Vasily were building their army, players in other parts of the supergiant structure were also demonstrating their own skills.
Some found people calling themselves the Holy Sanctuary People and learned the legends about the descendants of the Gray Tide World’s creator. Others were lucky enough to land near a Tomb City in the Gray Tide Graveyard, where they quickly pieced together the situation and began searching for a breakthrough.
Of course, there were also unlucky players who landed in areas with no living soul for hundreds of kilometers, or found themselves in the Endless Corridor, where they died of hunger and thirst. Still others fell into a Construction Machine charging station and were instantly devoured by thousands of them.
Fortunately, they could resurrect each time they died.
But the experience of death was viscerally real, and each time it honed their willpower.
The passage of time in the game seemed to be under the developer’s complete control, speeding up and slowing down. To the players, however, the rhythm felt fluid and natural.
When they were marching, eating, or resting, time would accelerate. When they needed to have detailed conversations or explore, the flow of time would return to normal.
Needless to say, this was all the work of the developer.
The time and energy required for the Gray Tide apocalypse mission were no less than the previous two game missions.
The virtual reality aspect, in particular, made everything feel incredibly real, and the resulting perceptual and mental drain was enormous.
Finally, after more than ten days in the real world and half a year inside the Gray Tide apocalypse mission, the players in the Gray Tide World gradually converged between the 3000th and 5000th floors, rendezvousing once more.
This also seemed to be the developer’s intent, as everyone was scattered within a radius of a few dozen kilometers.
After all this time exploring, everyone had reached the same conclusion:
According to the legendary clues they’d gathered in the game, to complete the mission and find its control core, they had to find the descendant of the Gray Tide’s creator and get to the very top of the supergiant structure.
But the strength of a few individuals or a single group was nowhere near enough to break through the defensive perimeter formed by the Construction Machines.
Only by uniting the strength of all the players—or rather, all the humans they could find—did they stand a chance.
As for the descendant of the Gray Tide’s creator, they had narrowed down the possibilities through a process of elimination.
The creator’s descendant couldn’t be a native of the Gray Tide Graveyard. That person, or their parents, grandparents, or some other ancestor, must have come to the Gray Tide Graveyard from the outside.
Furthermore, this person had to share certain dominant genetic traits with the creator, such as hair color, freckles, the shape of their nose, and so on.
After slaughtering all the Holy Sanctuary People, they had found a photograph of the creator in the Holy Sanctuary. Several top biologists and geneticists among them had immediately deduced the relevant traits and produced several sketches.
Moreover, the descendant must have never encountered a Construction Machine, otherwise their ability to interfere with or control them would have surely been exposed.
After filtering by these criteria, only fewer than ten people in the entire Gray Tide Graveyard fit the profile.
The players simply brought all ten of them along to make sure they didn’t miss the right one.
On a vast platform on the two-thousandth floor of the supergiant structure, tens of thousands of people stood in solemn formation as the Legion Commander of the Salvation Army delivered a pre-battle speech.
Most held metal rods and carried waterskins. A few wielded crude Electromagnetic Pulse Bombs and Electromagnetic Pulse Guns fashioned from "prehistoric" relics.
Their power was minimal, but they could still technically be called electromagnetic pulse weapons.
After just a few words, the crowd was fired up, ready to reclaim everything that belonged to human civilization.
If they could just fight their way to the top floor and find the Gray Tide’s control core, everything would change!
Even if it meant pitting flesh and blood against steel!
"Forward!" With a wave of the Legion Commander’s hand, tens of thousands of warriors surged up the stairways.
The awakened sleepers and the natives of the Gray Tide Graveyard were all fired up, their fighting spirits ignited by the players.
They would fight those damned Nanomechanical Robots to the death!
At the same time, as the army of tens of thousands snaked its way upward, a small team of just a few hundred people, led by Li Tongchen, Vasily, and Satoshi Nakamoto, broke away from the main force and headed northwest.
They were the true strike team.
While the tens of thousands drew the attention of the Construction Machines, stalling the clusters with their very lives, this small team would escort the creator’s descendant all the way to the top of the supergiant structure to find the Gray Tide’s control core.
In cyberspace, Shen Feng’s consciousness observed the breakaway team and couldn’t help but remark with admiration:
’So ruthless... I guess it’s my turn to take the stage.’
Comments