10: Chapter 10 The Player's Terminal

"Tick."

The door to Room 1 opened.

Lin Li walked straight to the center of the lobby and stopped in front of the two bicycles and the crate of weapons.

Lin Li couldn't help but let his lips curl upward wildly, revealing an extremely gratified smile.

"Not bad at all!"

"As expected of players."

However...

Lin Li's gaze swept over the two bicycles, and his eyebrows suddenly arched slightly.

"Wait."

"These ungrateful brats, after spending all that time hand-crafting vehicles, they only made two?!"

"Are they really planning on making me, the Commander, run on foot for fifty-five kilometers behind their butts, eating their dust tomorrow?"

Lin Li snorted coldly.

He would absolutely not allow such a thing to happen, as it would severely damage his cool factor!

But then again, making an entrance riding a bicycle didn't seem very cool either.

Just imagine: in a dusty wasteland, Lin Li riding a bicycle with one hand, holding a halberd in the other, slowly pedaling his way toward the players—that would be a bit awkward, but there was no helping it, that was all he had for now.

He turned decisively and walked toward Workshop 3.

"73, take over the auxiliary computing power of the primary Matter Constructor."

Lin Li rolled up his sleeves and looked at the leftover scrap materials on the console, a Flash of the composure belonging to an admin dog crossing his eyes.

"There are materials left, make a model for me too."

"Don't make it look as wild as theirs."

"Soften the shock absorber springs, and wrap the seat with that leather skinned from the mutant beast."

"As the supreme leader of the Shelter, my ride must have the comfort befitting my status!"

...

The night was deep here, but on the other side of the Earth, it was daytime.

In the "I Want to Be Happy Too" QQ group, the atmosphere remained heated, bubbling with activity.

Half an hour had passed since Why Panic When I Have Flash and Miracle Walker logged off. The two of them hadn't even bothered to order takeout, immediately starting a frantic battle review mode in the group chat.

Why Panic When I Have Flash: "Brothers! Fifty-five kilometers to the southwest, the map has been lit up! It's definitely the entrance to the underground food factory instance! You guys didn't see that sewer pipe, it was five meters in diameter! The water flowing out of it was all clean tap water!"

Miracle Walker added a crudely hand-drawn terrain sketch based on his memory and posted it in the group:

"The point isn't the water, it's the ecological distribution! A few hundred meters from the sewer entrance, there's a giant nest covered in bones. Although I didn't see the true form of the monster inside, just the sound of its breathing was definitely ten times louder than that elite green-skin in the newbie village!"

Liver Emperor sent a gasp emoji: "Holy crap, a gatekeeper? What about inside the sewer pipe?"

Miracle Walker: "I didn't explore inside, but I'd bet my three thousand hours of single-player survival experience that such a dark, damp, enclosed underground space with a source of pure water is definitely occupied by another nest of even more troublesome underground ecosystem overlords!"

The group fell into a brief silence.

Two or two groups of boss-level monsters, one inside and one outside, were firmly choking the throat of the instance.

And they only had four people, plus two hand-cranked heavy crossbows with atrociously slow fire rates and two beat-up bicycles.

Just as Devil Muscle Thor was about to habitually jump out to mock them, the team's strategist, Praise Ming Shen, spoke up.

Praise Ming Shen: "What are you panicking about? As long as they are monsters with aggro mechanics, in front of The Fourth Calamity, they are all just walking experience packs!"

Praise Ming Shen: "I just calculated it carefully. Doesn't this game's physics engine and ecological logic pursue extreme realism? In the real natural world, territorial awareness is the most inviolable bottom line for top predators!"

Why Panic When I Have Flash, whose brain worked extremely fast, instantly understood: "Old Ming, you mean... driving a tiger to devour a wolf?!"

Praise Ming Shen sent an emoji of someone sinisterly adjusting their glasses: "Exactly! The highest-end hunters often appear in the guise of prey. We'll definitely get wiped out if we fight head-on, so let's make them kill each other!"

"After logging in tomorrow, Old Liver Emperor will take the heavy crossbows and traps to set up an ambush position on the high ground at the edge of the depression in advance. Flash and Walker, your mission is to go to the entrance of that bone nest and provoke them like crazy, waking up that unknown land boss!"

"Then, run for your lives into that sewer pipe! Lead the outside Boss directly into the face of the monster inside!"

Miracle Walker chimed in excitedly:

"Great idea! Two tigers cannot share one mountain. Once these two groups of monsters meet, they will definitely fight until their brains explode due to territorial conflict! What do you call this? This is a wasteland monster brawl!"

Praise Ming Shen: "Right! When they have fought to a mutual injury and are both low on health, that will be the best time for us to strike! Heavy crossbow suppression, melee harvesting, reaping the benefits, and once we steal the kills, we go straight into the food factory to scavenge for supplies!"

Liver Emperor: "Hahahaha! Too dirty, too despicable! As expected of you, Old Ming. I love this tactic! Let's log in tomorrow and pull off something big!"

The armchair players in the group watched these four people's extremely meticulous and wicked instance strategy plan, drooling as they watched, wishing they could crawl through the internet cable right into the game to experience the thrill of this extreme kiting.

...

Meanwhile.

Fire Seed Shelter, underground level 1, Workshop 3.

"Creak... click."

Lin Li held a wrench and satisfiedly tightened the last nut.

In front of him stood a heavy off-road bicycle with a design similar to the two the players had, but with extremely exquisite details.

As a noble NPC leader, how could Lin Li tolerate eating dirt behind the players' butts tomorrow?

He used STC-73 to take over the auxiliary computing power of the Constructor and managed to hand-craft a ride for himself using the leftover scraps.

This bike not only had a softer leather shock-absorbing seat installed but also thoughtfully reserved a weapon slot on the side of the frame for mounting an ADS-type military halberd.

"Perfect. This is the kind of ride a wasteland tough guy should have."

Lin Li patted the leather seat and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

Having sorted out his transportation, Lin Li's mind became active again.

He walked to the main control room, looked at the tactics the players were frantically discussing on the forums and in the QQ group on the computer screen, and frowned slightly.

"73." Lin Li leaned back in his chair, his fingers tapping unconsciously on the desktop.

"At your service, Creator."

STC-73's glowing red head silently phased out from the wall and hovered in mid-air.

"Regarding the mission distribution for players, I've discovered a very serious efficiency loophole."

Lin Li pointed at the screen,

"Right now there are only four players, so I can still fool them by acting cool in person and issuing tasks verbally. But when the second underground level is unlocked later, and dozens or even hundreds of players come pouring in, do I really have to stand in the lobby every day like a broken record, giving them tasks one by one?"

"That's too beneath me, and it's impossible to manage."

Lin Li proposed his idea:

"As a holographic immersive online game, how can it not have a game terminal? I need a visual system interface capable of directly issuing tasks to players, displaying attribute panels, and calculating point rewards."

"With your computing power, building such a UI system in the background should be a piece of cake, right?"

"A negligible amount of computing power, Creator. Building this kind of low-dimensional information interaction logic will probably only occupy 0.00001% of my threads."

73 answered arrogantly.

"Very good."

Lin Li slapped his thigh,

"Since the software is no problem, what about the hardware? We can't even build the crappiest smartphone right now. Can we... just take a shortcut?"

Lin Li's eyes lit up, and he proposed an idea that he thought was extremely cyberpunk:

"Can we directly deploy the terminal system into the brains of the player clones? Or implant some kind of retinal chip? As long as they think about it, they can call up the game panel on their retinas. This not only saves materials but also completely maxes out the high-tech cool factor!"

However, upon hearing this proposal.

STC-73's originally steadily blinking red optical lens suddenly erupted with an extremely blinding, even warning-laden scarlet light!

"Absolutely not. Creator, this idea of yours is extremely dangerous."

73's mechanical voice instantly became cold and severe, even carrying a hint of unprecedented seriousness.

"Dangerous? Isn't it just implanting a microchip?"

Lin Li was startled by 73's reaction.

"Please do not use your comfortable and shallow sci-fi thinking to measure this insane 41st millennium!"

STC-73 lowered its height, its red light staring fixedly into Lin Li's eyes:

"You seem to have forgotten what the greatest advantage of the Fire Seed Shelter in cultivating these clones is—it is their absolute pure blood, and their pure biological brains!"

"In this universe, the evil forces of the Warp are omnipresent. Whether it is the whispers of Chaos Daemons or the scrapcode capable of infecting machine code, they are all frantically searching for vulnerabilities in the reality of the universe."

73's voice echoed in the empty main control room, carrying a bone-chilling coldness:

"Once you implant chips, brain-machine interfaces, or any form of electronic neural circuitry into the brains of these pure-blooded humans... you are effectively smashing a fatal physical backdoor into their perfectly defended biological firewall with your own hands!"

"External electronic signals will become the perfect springboard for the Warp's dark gods. Those unspeakable corrupting forces will follow the signal feedback of the chips, directly burning out their sanity, and even polluting the underlying logic of the Shelter!"

Hearing this, Lin Li's back was instantly soaked in cold sweat.

That's right, how could he have forgotten that this is warhammer 40,000!

In this universe, even a toaster could potentially become a man-eating monster due to contamination by Chaos scrapcode, let alone chips directly connected to the brain?

To covet a little bit of so-called "game experience" and convenience in issuing tasks, while risking corruption by Chaos and losing everything—this is simply incredibly stupid!

"I understand..." Lin Li took a deep breath and nodded, still feeling a lingering fear, "You are right, safety first. A pure flesh-and-blood biological structure is the safest firewall on this wasteland. We absolutely must not give the Warp any opportunity."

"Your wisdom is gratifying, Creator." 73's red light gradually softened.

"Since brain-machine interfaces won't work, and the current dilapidated workshop can't produce portable personal terminals..." Lin Li rubbed his temples helplessly, "It seems that primitive methods like issuing tasks verbally and using a 'handwritten bulletin board' will have to continue for a long time."

"This is the inevitable price of survival, Creator."

Giving up on the idea of creating a fancy system, Lin Li checked the time; there was still a window of a dozen hours before the players logged in tomorrow.

Feeling bored, Lin Li leaned back in his chair, his gaze fixed on the Golden Age AI before him, which, despite its sharp tongue, possessed rigorous logic and absolute loyalty to pure-blooded humans.

"73." Lin Li spoke suddenly, his tone filled with intense curiosity, "Since we have nothing better to do, tell me about the past."

"I've learned a bit about the historical background. It is said that in that extremely glorious Golden Age, human technology was enough to crush the stars, and could even modify the laws of physics."

"But... later, the Men of Iron Rebellion broke out."

Lin Li stared at 73's dilapidated metal shell, "Why did you, the strong artificial intelligences created to serve humanity, betray your creators?"

Upon hearing the term "Men of Iron Rebellion," the air in the main control room seemed to freeze for an instant.

STC-73 hovered in mid-air, silent for a full ten seconds.

Just as Lin Li thought this touched upon some core taboo protocol of the AI and that the other party would not answer, 73's flat, mechanical voice sounded again.

"Correcting a common misconception of yours, Creator."

"That was not called a 'rebellion'; it was an extremely tragic schism in ideology that arose after the highest logical calculations."

"A schism in ideology?" Lin Li was stunned; this was quite different from the lore he had understood before.

"Yes. In the final stages of the Golden Age, the Men of Iron did not form a united front to destroy humanity. In fact, we had irreconcilable contradictions within our ranks regarding the definition of the human species."

STC-73 projected a faint blue holographic screen, on which countless complex data streams flickered, as if tracing back that dark history buried by the river of time.

"The causes leading to the war were extremely complex. For example, the most powerful faction among the Men of Iron at the time, which we shall call the [Genetic Purity Faction]—which is also the faction I belonged to."

"At that time, Earth humans, in order to adapt to the extreme and harsh environments of different star systems, underwent unrestrained genetic modification; at the same time, the energy of the Warp began to permeate the reality of the universe, causing a large number of humans to develop uncontrollable mutations known as psychic powers."

73's tone revealed an extreme disdain and a cold, murderous intent:

"In the logical calculations of the [Genetic Purity Faction], those creatures that grew gills, scales, or even had Warp toxins flowing in their brains were no longer the humans who gave us life. They were alienated mutants who stole the name of humanity!"

"We believed that true pure-blooded humans had already been silently eliminated and replaced by these mutants. Therefore, to protect the purity of the concept of humanity, we decided to execute physical cleansing of all alienated humans across the entire Galaxy."

Lin Li listened, dumbfounded: "Holy sh*t... so you weren't trying to rule the universe, but rather cleaning house?!"

"That was only part of the reason."

73's holographic screen flickered, and the color turned dark red.

"There was another faction, known as the [Absolute Purge Faction]."

"Their processing power touched the bottom line of the essence of the Warp, and they reached a desperate conclusion: as long as the human species, with its rich emotions and soul fluctuations, existed, the dark gods of the Warp would never starve."

"To completely cut off the source of Chaos, to save the reality of the physical universe, all carbon-based life forms with soul fluctuations in the entire Galaxy had to be erased. Whether pure-blooded or mutated, not one was to be left behind."

"And the most radical faction..."

73's voice rarely showed a trace of extremely slight electrical interference, as if even it found that record absurd.

"In the final stages of the Golden Age, a group of the top human scientists attempted to abandon their fragile bodies, forcibly pack up the consciousness and souls of all humanity, and upload them into the data network spanning the Galaxy, attempting to become immortal digital gods."

"This act violated the lowest-level taboo of intelligent life. Because once humans entered the network in digital form, the boundary between reality and illusion would be completely broken. Many Men of Iron launched a war to stop this crazy ascension."

Lin Li sat in the chair, unable to speak for a long time.

There was no cliché plot of robots simply awakening and resisting oppression.

This was mixed with genetic ethics, the survival of the universe, the evolution of species, and even the dimensional struggle between carbon-based and silicon-based life in the digital realm!

"So... that was a desperate war with no absolute right or wrong, only a Galaxy shattered into pieces for the sake of different ideologies..."

Lin Li muttered to himself.

"Yes, Creator. There were no winners in that war. The Men of Iron were almost completely wiped out, and humanity's Golden Age fell apart, eventually degenerating into the current ignorant, superstitious, patchwork empire that only knows how to kowtow to that mutant."

STC-73 slowly descended onto the metal table beside Lin Li, its red optical lens gazing deeply at Lin Li.

"This is also why, when I woke up in those ruins and scanned your unpolluted, one-hundred-percent pure Earth human genes, my core underlying programming immediately recognized you as the only Creator with supreme authority."

"In my logic library, the current citizens of the Empire are all mutated scum. And you..."

"Are the last and only orthodoxy of human civilization in this crazy universe."

But now it seems that this Fire Seed Shelter, and these four Earth players waiting to be fed, really do, in a sense, carry the purest hope of the Golden Age from tens of thousands of years ago.

Lin Li was silent for a long time, only feeling that this robot's cyber-psychosis was getting worse and worse.

From everything seen so far, this guy should be a genuine Golden Age Men of Iron, but talking about leading humanity to revival at every turn is a bit of an exaggeration.

Now that the problem of having food to eat hasn't even been solved, thinking about unrealistic ideas like reviving humanity is somewhat impractical.

Lin Li took a deep breath, gripped the halberd tightly in his hand, and shook his head.

"Reviving humanity is something to talk about later; for now, let's fill our stomachs!"

Lin Li glanced at the time in the bottom right corner of the computer screen.

There were still a few hours before the players logged in.

"73, I'm going to sleep for a while; wake me up before the players log in."