Cold.
That was the first thing Jace Tan felt when he regained consciousness.
Not ordinary cold, but a chill that sank into his bones and blood.
It was as if his whole body had been submerged in liquid nitrogen, every cell screaming in protest.
The cold did not come from the surface of his skin.
It seeped outward from inside him, as though his bones had frozen into pillars of ice.
He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids were as heavy as lead.
A mechanical hum buzzed in his ears, mixed with the gurgle of flowing liquid.
He wanted to move, but his body would not obey.
His limbs felt locked in place, stiff and heavy, as if they no longer belonged to him.
Fragments of memory flashed through his mind.
The blinding headlights of a Dayun truck, the thunder of steel coils rolling loose, the terrified screams of passersby, and then…
darkness.
How long had that darkness lasted?
Seconds?
Days?
Years?
“I’m…
still alive?” The thought startled even him.
As the last of the cryogenic fluid drained from the chamber, the hatch let out a hiss of depressurization, then slowly opened upward.
Icy mist spilled out, freezing into frost across Jace’s face.
He struggled to sit up, only to be seized by a violent coughing fit that nearly choked him.
It felt as if his lungs had been filled with broken glass, every breath stabbing with pain.
He looked down at his hands.
These were not his hands.
Or rather, not completely.
The fingers were thicker, the knuckles more pronounced, and his palms were covered in heavy calluses.
He turned his wrist over.
A strange scar marked the skin there, like something had once pierced straight through it.
He touched his face.
The shape of his features was unfamiliar: higher cheekbones, a squarer jaw.
His skin had an unnatural toughness to it, not quite like the skin of a living person.
“Where…
am I?” he muttered.
His voice was hoarse and unfamiliar, like someone else was speaking.
Jace staggered out of the sleep pod, his bare feet touching the cold metal floor.
A strange steadiness, like finally standing on solid ground, mixed with the weakness of someone who had been bedridden for far too long, surged up from the soles of his feet and left him dazed.
He looked around.
It was a laboratory, not very large.
Three other sleep pods stood nearby, their hatches sealed shut, with faint human silhouettes visible inside.
The laboratory walls were cold metal, covered in pipes and wires that crawled across the space like blood vessels.
A grid of lights covered the ceiling, but only a few emergency lamps were still working, giving off a dim green glow that stained everything a sickly color.
The air smelled of disinfectant and metal, along with a faint, lingering stench of rot, as if something had been decaying here for a very long time.
Confusion.
Deep, overwhelming confusion.
Jace remembered who he was, or rather, who he had been.
Just an ordinary gaming geek, twenty-six years old, single, renting a room in an urban village.
His biggest hobby was playing games.
That day, he had just bought a late-night snack and was crossing the street when he ran into a driver hauling steel coils in an ordinary flatbed truck.
There was a saying among truckers, wasn’t there?
Don’t haul pipes if you’re broke, don’t haul green-channel cargo if your life depends on it, and don’t haul steel coils unless you’ve got a death wish.
He had even thought of that at the time.
He just never expected the random passerby who died would be him.
But what was this place?
He looked down at himself.
He was wearing a blue-and-yellow jumpsuit.
A Vault suit.
His heartbeat began to quicken.
He walked toward the nearest control console.
It looked ancient, like a piece of technology from the last century, with a bulky CRT monitor, rows of physical buttons, and rust along the edges.
The screen was dark.
He reached out and pressed a few buttons, but nothing happened.
He tried several different combinations, his fingers trembling over the keyboard.
Not from the cold, but from fear.
On the third press of the power button, the screen finally flickered several times, let out a buzzing electrical hum, then slowly lit up.
Dark green text appeared line by line against the black background:
Vault-Tec Corporation
Experimental Monitoring System
Please enter access authorization
Vault-Tec?
Jace’s heart lurched so hard it nearly jumped into his throat.
As a veteran player of the Fallout series, he knew that name far too well.
Vault-Tec Corporation, one of the largest companies in pre-War America, the builder of nuclear fallout shelters across the entire United States.
That logo, the blue-and-yellow gear, he had seen it thousands of times: on game startup screens, on Vault doors, on the back of every Pip-Boy.
But that familiarity brought no comfort.
Instead, a bone-deep chill crawled up his spine.
Because he knew even better the truth hidden behind those cheerful propaganda posters.
The so-called Vaults were, for the most part, never meant to save people at all.
They were underground hells built for all kinds of inhuman sociological experiments.
Under the banner of “protecting the American people,” Vault-Tec had locked ordinary people beneath the earth and observed how they reacted under extreme conditions.
What if…
what if he had crossed over into a Vault designed specifically to treat people like lab rats?
Memories from the games surged up like a tide: Vault 12, where all residents were forcibly exposed to radiation and eventually became rotting Ghouls; Vault 68, which contained only one woman and more than a thousand men; Vault 69, the exact opposite, with one man and over a thousand women; Vault 106, where neurotoxic gas drove everyone into insane hallucinations and made them slaughter one another; and…
He didn’t dare think any further.
Had he opened his eyes in the Wasteland only to find himself already cast as a “test subject,” doomed to die on an operating table?
The thought made him dizzy, and he had to brace himself against the console to stay upright.
The screen flickered, and new text appeared:
Access Level: Guest Mode
Welcome to Vault 111
Current Date: October 23, 2287
External Status: Radiation Levels Safe
Vault 111.
The year 2287.
Jace stared at the screen, his mind going blank.
The Great War had broken out in 2077.
Which meant it was now…
210 years later.
He leaned against the console and took several deep breaths, then several more.
This was not a prank.
Not a game prop.
Not someone’s cosplay setup.
The console was too real.
The worn buttons still showed traces of use, yellow burn marks stained the edges of the aged screen, and the operating system responded with genuine lag.
And the date…
2287.
He really was in the world of Fallout.
He had really crossed over.
But why?
How?
That flatbed truck…
had it not been an accident?
Or was there some other reason?
Was this some joke played by a higher being?
Or a hallucination in the last moments before death?
Jace forced himself to calm down.
Fear would not solve anything.
Panic would only get him killed faster.
That was the first rule of survival he had learned from the games.
He turned back to the screen and began checking the system logs.
As a veteran player, he knew what to look for.
Resident Status Report:
Nora Conard: Deceased
Nate Conard: In cryosleep (vital signs stable)
Test Subject 73: Awake
Nora was dead.
Shaun had been taken.
Nate was still alive, frozen in cryosleep.
The timeline was clear now.
The Institute had come here decades ago.
To obtain pure human DNA untouched by radiation, they had sent the mercenary Kellogg.
Kellogg had killed Nora when she fought back, taken the infant, and left Nate behind.
Maybe he had seen no need to kill him.
Maybe he had wanted to keep him as a backup test subject.
Or maybe…
it had simply been cruelty.
And as for Jace himself, Test Subject 73.
His fingers trembled over the console as he found his own experimental record and opened it:
Test Subject 73: Member of Chinese Special Forces (Prisoner of War)
Source: Prisoner of war captured from the front lines of the 2077 Sino-American War
Experiment Type 1: High-Intensity Radiation Simulation Drug Test
Objective: Attempt to create artificial Radiation Resistance for battlefield soldiers
Result: Drug failed to successfully simulate radiation effects.
Test subject did not acquire expected Radiation Resistance
Side Effects: Abnormal cellular regeneration rate.
Significantly reduced metabolic rate
Notes: Subject 1 modification failed.
Repurposed as waste material for long-term tolerance testing of new cryogenic hibernation technology
Each line made his stomach sink.
Member of Chinese Special Forces.
Prisoner of war.
2077.
The Sino-American War.
In Fallout’s backstory, the United States and China had fought a long war before ending in a deadlock in Alaska.
So the original owner of this body had been a soldier on that battlefield.
Captured, shipped to the American mainland, sent into a Vault, and then used as a test subject.
High-intensity radiation simulation drug testing.
Most likely an attempt to create controllable, lucid Ghouls.
Jace thought of his skin’s unnatural toughness and pale color.
Then he thought about how this body had slept for so long that it should have been starving, yet he felt no hunger at all.
“Abnormal cellular regeneration rate.
Significantly reduced metabolic rate.”
Ghoul.
Classic Ghoul traits.
The rotting, deranged humanoid monsters that wandered the Wasteland.
But not all Ghouls were monsters.
Some retained their sanity.
Their bodies had simply changed.
They did not need to eat much, they were immune to radiation, and they recovered from injuries faster than ordinary people.
Jace raised his hand and looked at his pale palm.
The veins beneath the skin were clearly visible, but the skin itself…
he pinched it hard, then let go.
It bounced back normally.
He did not know whether to feel lucky or terrified.
He kept reading and found another crucial piece of information in the logs:
Technical File: Pip-Boy 3000 Mark IV Prototype
Source: Vault 76 Technology Sharing Program
Location: Deep Tech Storage Room B-12
Notes: Early test model from Vault 76, containing unreleased features.
This device is the result of cross-Vault technological collaboration and has not been officially deployed.
Vault 76!
Jace’s eyes lit up.
As a veteran Fallout player, he knew exactly what Vault 76 meant.
That was no ordinary Vault.
That was where the gods went to war.
Vault 76 opened in 2102, 185 years before Vault 111.
The Vault Dwellers who came out of it wore power armor, wielded legendary weapons, could take on Deathclaws one-on-one, and could bathe in radstorms.
They were “America’s best and brightest,” the elite originally tasked with rebuilding the nation.
The Vault 76 kids were all superhuman.
Vault 76 itself was practically a Fallout myth, and its technology was far beyond that of other Vaults.
Their Pip-Boys definitely had to be something special.
If this prototype really came from Vault 76, its value was impossible to measure.
Special functions?
Unknown risks?
In the Wasteland, risk often meant opportunity.
No risk, no reward.
Without an edge, survival would be hard.
Jace closed the technical file and stood in front of the console for a long time.
He found the surveillance feed for Nate’s cryopod.
The screen switched to the chamber.
A black-haired man lay inside, his body still carrying a certain anger even in sleep.
His wife was dead.
His son had been taken from him.
He still did not know that, in the fate he was supposed to have, he would become the protagonist.
He would become the Sole Survivor, cross the Commonwealth wasteland in search of his son, get dragged into the conflicts between the Institute, the Brotherhood of Steel, The Railroad, and the Minutemen, and decide the fate of the entire Commonwealth.
But now?
Jace had woken up early.
He knew many things.
He knew the truth about the Institute.
He knew the location of The Railroad’s secret base.
He knew when the Brotherhood of Steel would descend from the sky in their airship.
He knew every corner of Diamond City.
He knew which quests were worth doing and which traps to avoid.
He could change a lot of things.
Or…
make everything worse.
He did not know what to do.
In the game, he had clear objectives, clear moral choices, and the chance to try again.
Die once, reload a save.
Make the wrong choice, reload again.
But here, there was none of that.
Only one chance.
Only one life.
Jace took a deep breath and turned toward the laboratory door.
It was an airlock door, with a red handwheel beside it.
He grabbed the wheel and turned it with all his strength.
The grinding of the gears sounded especially harsh in the quiet laboratory.
The door opened.
Outside was a corridor, darker and colder than the lab.
Emergency lights gave off a faint green glow, one every few meters.
Some had already gone out, while others flickered.
The pipes along the walls were stained with rust, and the occasional drip of water echoed through the empty space.
The air smelled of dust and metal, along with a damp, musty odor.
Jace took his first step out.
His bare foot touched the metal floor, and the cold bit deep.
He did not know where he was going, or what he was supposed to do.
He simply walked, step by step, through this unfamiliar place in this unfamiliar body.
He did not know what Vault 76’s Pip-Boy would bring him.
He did not know what was waiting at the end of the corridor.
He did not know what this world would become when Nate woke up.
But he knew one thing.
This confusion could not last forever.
The Wasteland was waiting.
Danger was waiting.
And he, a player from another world, a transmigrator occupying the body of Test Subject 73, a half-Ghoul with none of the original owner’s memories, had to find his own path.
At the far end of the corridor, deeper in the darkness, something was waiting for him.
Jace clenched his fists and kept walking.