79: An elevator to the clouds? Are dwarves actually slave laborers of the heavens?

Su Mu's casual lines of announcement were like a depth charge, detonating with a roar above the noisy ruins.

[Main Quest Updated: Find the Path to the Clouds. Clues have been marked in the 'Heavens Punishment' core database.]

All the players who were 'scavenging' suddenly froze.

"New map?"

"Path to the clouds? Are we going to heaven?"

Before everyone could react, on their map interface, inside the massive wreckage of the warship wedged into the lava lake, a never-before-seen icon emitting a ghostly blue light began to flash frantically.

[Phase Teleportation Array]!

"Holy crap! It's inside the ship!"

"Quick, quick, quick! Stop picking up this trash! Something big is coming!"

"Is this... an elevator to the new map?"

Li Qiang was the first to throw away the wing of the half-broken angel statue. Like a bull in heat, his eyes were bloodshot as he brandished his power hammer and charged toward the deepest part of the warship's wreckage.

"Get the hell out of my way! Whoever tries to steal my spot as the first one through is gonna get it!"

Tens of thousands of players, like worker ants injected with chicken blood, followed closely behind, flooding into that steel tomb in a dark mass.

Inside the warship, near the power room.

This was the center of the explosion. Everything was twisted and torn; metal walls had melted and then solidified, forming eerie shapes like stalactites.

Right in the middle of this mess, a massive circular platform over fifty meters in diameter had miraculously remained mostly intact.

The platform was covered in complex and divine golden runes that the players couldn't understand at all, though most of them were now dim, and some had even been erased by the explosion's shockwave.

"It's here!" Wang Wei (Luban No. 7)'s mechanical eye flickered with data streams. "The icon on the map is right here!"

He rushed to a half-destroyed control console, looked at the Celestial script on it, and directly extended his mechanical arm, tearing open the casing in the most brutal way to plug in his data cable.

"Give me some time! I'm trying to crack its core log! This ship's black box should be nearby!" Wang Wei shouted without looking back.

The players gathered around the massive teleportation array curiously, pointing and whispering.

"This thing is the elevator? It looks way more Advanced than the lifts in Black Iron City."

"Wonder how much it costs to start it once? Do they take cards?"

While everyone was discussing, a slight commotion came from behind a pile of twisted metal scrap nearby.

A few ragged, soot-covered surviving dwarves walked tremulously out from their hiding place.

Leading them was a dwarf Elder with a beard long enough to drag on the ground. He wore no mechanical devices and leaned on a simple, ancient runic staff, looking like a scholar.

He looked at this group of lawless players, then at the mechanical Dragon 'pangu vessel' in the distance, which had shut down but still radiated a terrifying pressure, a complex emotion flickering in his cloudy eyes.

"Outsiders..." the dwarf Elder's voice was hoarse and old. "Was it you... who defeated Solin and repelled the 'Messenger' of the Heavens?"

Li Qiang looked back at him and waved his hand impatiently. "Old man, don't block the way. We're busy going to heaven."

"Going to heaven?" The dwarf Elder smiled bitterly, pointing at the massive circular platform. "Where are you going? Back to your masters' side?"

"Masters?" Li Qiang was stunned. "What do you mean?"

The dwarf Elder's gaze swept over every player present. He took a deep breath, as if having made a decision, and began to tell a secret buried for a thousand years.

"That thing isn't some teleportation array; it's a 'lift'... a freight lift used to transport the minerals and energy we mined up to the Heavens."

"We dwarves of Black Iron City have been a group of captive slaves since the day we were born. Our mission is to mine the leyline energy from the deepest parts of this world for the Heavens."

"Solin... he was a madman, but also the only rebel our race has had in a thousand years. He wanted to use 'Mechanical Ascension' to sever the slave brand carved into our Bloodline by the Heavens and lead us to true freedom. But he failed."

The Elder's voice wasn't loud, yet it reached the ears of every player clearly.

The entire noisy scene instantly fell into a deathly silence.

Li Qiang's movement of gnawing on roasted Dragon meat stopped.

Lin Xiaowan's abacus for counting loot also stopped.

All the players were dazed.

A few seconds later, the world channel erupted like a volcano!

[Holy crap! What's the situation? The boss we fought... was a freaking liberator?]

[After all that, Black Iron City is a mine, dwarves are slave laborers, and Solin was the leader of the rebel army?!]

[Then what are we? scabs who helped the slave owners suppress the uprising?!]

[I can't accept this! You're telling me now that the boss I worked so hard to kill was a good guy?! Get out here, Dog Planner! I want a refund!]

A towering rage of being deceived and fooled burned fiercely in the hearts of all players.

What they were angry about wasn't that they had picked the wrong side.

But that they felt they had been used as tools to wipe the asses of those even higher up in the 'Heavens'!

"Damn it!"

Li Qiang slammed the roasted meat in his hand onto the ground and let out a roar.

"I don't care who's the good guy or the bad guy!"

He looked around, his blood-red eyes burning with pure rage and greed.

"Those birdmen from the Heavens used us as tools and now they want to judge us?"

"Brothers! This isn't over! Aren't they high and mighty? Don't they have money?"

Li Qiang stepped on the edge of the teleportation array, hoisted his power hammer onto his shoulder, and issued a new call to war.

"Our next goal is to charge into the Heavens and rob those so-called 'gods' along with their vaults!"

"Ohhhhhhh!!!"

The players' anger was instantly ignited, transforming into the most primal motivation.

Just then, Wang Wei, who had been buried in hacking, suddenly looked up.

"Brother Qiang! There's good news and bad news."

"The good news is, I've figured it out! The core of this teleportation array is still there and can be repaired! We really can go up!"

Everyone showed expressions of excitement.

"And the bad news?" Li Qiang asked.

Wang Wei pointed at a massive, abyss-like empty energy slot reading on the console and said with a bitter face:

"The bad news is, the energy required to start this 'freight lift' once is... an astronomical figure."

"Look, this energy slot is empty right now."