novelhk Chapter 4 Accumulation
Chapter 4 Accumulation
With a stable food source, Liu En's life entered an almost obsessive rhythm.
Every morning, he would get up from the pump station floor, eat breakfast, and then start working. The first thing he did was dig himself a real home.
The pump station was just a temporary outpost. He pried open a terracotta plate in the pump station floor and dug down bit by bit with a short knife. Below was a layered substructure—first a layer of abandoned pipes, then a long-collapsed mineral transport tunnel. He found a relatively stable gap between the pipe layer and the transport tunnel, about forty meters below the surface pump station.
Then he began to modify the void. Atoms were retrieved from the warehouse and, under the control of the consciousness field, were layered and assembled. The walls were built first; thick terracotta steel grew out of nothingness, enveloping the entire space in a single, unified form. A layer of PVC insulation was laid on the floor, then covered with terracotta steel panels. The dome was arched. The entrance was a vertical shaft, less than half a meter in diameter. At the bottom of the shaft was a hydraulically operated terracotta steel cover, locked from the inside.
The underground bunker was small, only a dozen square meters. In one corner, a makeshift bed was constructed of PVC, covered with a mattress and blanket reconstructed from coarse cloth. On the other side was a workbench, upon which sat a homemade light panel emitting a steady, cool white glow. Next to the workbench was a rudimentary stove, its heat source a modified heating module derived from the laser gun's energy pack interface, upon which rested a metal pot. The chimney was a long, thin pipe, extending vertically upwards into the abandoned ventilation system of the surface pumping station.
This bunker was his fortress, his workshop, his home.
From that day on, his life entered a fixed rhythm. Every day before dawn, he would climb out of the shaft, seal the cover, put on his clothes, and disappear into the smog outside. He would spend the entire day outside, moving between different areas, breaking down everything that could be broken down. Before dark, he would return to the pumping station, go down into the bunker, organize information, eat, and sleep. Day after day.
He went to the abandoned factory area to the north. He had been there before, but that time he had only dismantled a small portion of the surface. This time, he ventured deep into the heart of the factory and found more industrial equipment wreckage. An entire production line lay abandoned in a huge workshop; conveyor belts, motors, controllers, robotic arms—all covered in dust, but the information about their material composition remained intact. He spent a long time dismantling the entire production line, adding a large amount of metals and rare elements to the warehouse, and hundreds more pieces of information about the material composition of industrial automation and precision manufacturing to the database.
He turned towards a residential area to the east. Calling it a residential area was a stretch of half-collapsed apartment buildings, likely the dwellings of bottom-dwelling workers centuries ago; now only twisted metal frames and broken terracotta panels remained. But he found something else in those ruins—human skeletons, mostly completely skeletal, scattered throughout the collapsed rooms and passageways. Liu En hesitated for a long time, but finally squatted down. He dissected the skeletons. Atoms were stored in the database, information was stored in the database.
He found even more weapons. This time it was at an abandoned checkpoint—likely the former territory of a gang that had been wiped out, leaving behind a large amount of battle debris. There were many laser guns of various models, several live-fire rifles, and fragments of some energy weapons he couldn't identify. He analyzed and disassembled everything he could get his hands on. The stockpile of weapon-grade materials in the warehouse exploded, and the weapon catalog in the database expanded from a single model to multiple different laser gun variants.
He discovered a nearly intact communication base station. Located on a high platform within the lower hive, its antenna pointing towards the upper levels of the hive, it had long since ceased operation. The base station was enormous, several meters tall, and its interior was filled with circuit boards, signal processors, power modules, and cooling systems. He spent a considerable amount of time analyzing the base station, obtaining a vast amount of information about the material composition of electronic communication and signal processing. He also extracted an undamaged Low Gothic operating manual from the base station's data storage.
Day after day. His footprints expanded from an initial radius of a dozen kilometers to much farther places. The material reserves in the warehouse grew to the point where he became too lazy to keep track of them. The material composition information in the database swelled from a few hundred records to tens of thousands.
His equipment was also constantly being upgraded. His coarse cloth clothes had been replaced by a set of standard body armor from the Planetary Defense Force—found in an abandoned armory. He thoroughly analyzed the body armor in the database, and then used ceramic steel and bulletproof fiber stored in the warehouse to reshape a perfectly fitting set, which he wore, covered by a dark gray coarse cloth cloak.
He wore a gas mask—also from that armory, a standard military model, full-face coverage with double-sided filters. A laser gun hung at his waist, a ceramic steel dagger was concealed on the inside of his forearm, and a spare dagger he had crafted was tucked into his boot. A cloth bag containing spare parts hung from his belt.
He began to be less afraid of people. He learned to distinguish the types of footsteps—solo pedestrians, small groups, caravans, gang patrols. He knew who to avoid and who to take a slight detour. He even once walked past two bottom-nest inhabitants without hiding, simply keeping his head down and concealing himself with his hood and cloak. The two men walked past him without even glancing at him.
Every day ended in that underground bunker. He would first remove his gas mask, disassemble the filter canister for inspection—no need to replace it, he could regenerate the filter material at the atomic level. Then he would take off his bulletproof vest and cloak, hanging them on the hook next to the workbench. Then he would start eating. Roasted ant beef, fried Grox steak, and a paste made from synthetic starch blocks.
After finishing his meal, he sat down at his worktable and began organizing the day's findings. This was the most crucial step. The material composition information he had collected during the day was just raw data; he needed to categorize, summarize, and connect it in a quiet environment. Not for the sake of understanding—he didn't need to understand it to use the information—but so that he could quickly find it when needed. The database's automatic classification function was powerful, but some connections needed to be established by him.
One evening, while organizing information, he discovered a peculiar piece of data. It had been extracted from a nearly flattened, unusable device. The device itself was completely deformed, most of its parts shattered, but a small memory chip remained intact. The data in the memory chip was encrypted, and he tried various decoding methods with a translator without success. But he didn't give up—he searched repeatedly in the database, finding several similar encryption algorithm fragments from other devices. After numerous comparisons and trials, he finally cracked one of the simplest layers of encryption.
Inside was a map. Not a map of the bottom hive, but a map of this planet. It marked the distribution of hive cities, the locations of major industrial areas, and coordinates he couldn't understand. The map was highly accurate, but the data was severely incomplete; most areas were marked with gray "no data." However, one small area was complete—a location within that area was repeatedly marked, with a few lines of text written next to it in High Gothic.
Liu En used a translator to translate the text word by word. "...Abandoned...Outpost...Eighty-Sixth Outpost...Mechanical Guild...Withdrawn from M37..."
Outpost 86. The Mechanicus. Abandoned thousands of years ago. This Mechanicus outpost is likely located somewhere in the Bottom Nest, or at least somewhere on this planet. The fact that it's abandoned thousands of years ago means that a large amount of equipment and supplies may still remain. The Mechanicus's technological level far surpasses that of the Bottom Nest junkyard.
He searched his memory of the terrain. The location of Outpost 86 was marked on the map, roughly southeast of the pumping station, and he estimated it would be several days' walk away. It was beyond his current area of operation. With his current physical condition and equipment, a round trip would likely take a long time, and he would have to pass through at least two gang-controlled areas and a structurally unstable zone.
But he remembered the direction. Liu En stored the map data completely into his database, marking it in his mind as a "long-term goal." Then he turned off the light on his workbench and lay down on his bed.
In the darkness, he listened to his own breathing. The bunker was completely silent—the thick terracotta and plastic steel shielded him from all external noise. This absolute silence, which had once unsettled him, had now become his daily ritual for falling asleep. The material reserves in the warehouse were already considerable. The database contained tens of thousands of pieces of information on the composition of materials.
Liu En rolled over, his consciousness sinking into that dimensionless space, and looked at the map again. The gray "no data" area was like an unknown ocean, and the dot marked "outpost" was a lone star, twinkling in the darkness. He closed his eyes, silently planning the route in his mind. He would go and take a look once he was ready.