Although Luo Shu had anticipated that the Sanctuary would implement countermeasures, he hadn't expected their response to be so swift.
This could only prove one thing: faced with Luo Shu's retaliation, the Sanctuary had chickened out.
They couldn't come up with a more proactive strategy, so they could only resort to the passive measure of proactively disarming the nukes.
But passive as the measure was, it shattered Luo Shu's dream of sitting at home and remotely nuking various sites.
He could have been lounging at home with his feet up, casually counting how many pages the Anomalous Item Pictorial had added today, but now that was impossible...
From now on, he'd have to toil away, running all over the world again.
Sigh, I'm just the laborer for the King of Anti-Memes...
But even running around the world, Luo Shu couldn't return to the old days of staying at one site for several days, slowly clearing out all the anomalies.
The reason was still the threat of the Memetic Longinus, which limited his public activity to just one hour a day, severely restricting his freedom of movement.
Therefore, he still wanted to continue using the method of nuclear detonation to efficiently clear out Sanctuary sites.
It didn't matter if the Sanctuary disarmed the nukes at ordinary sites; Luo Shu could bring his own.
So now the question was: where to get nukes?
The old AI searched the web for a long time but couldn't find any trace of those nukes.
The Sanctuary was also afraid of Luo Shu and didn't dare leak even a whisper of information.
Since he couldn't get the Sanctuary's nukes, Luo Shu turned his attention to the New Continental government.
It just so happened that the New Continental military government had targeted him multiple times recently; they could be considered enemies now. Stealing a few nukes from them probably wasn't too much.
After some thought, Luo Shu knew where to get the nukes.
There were two nuclear weapon test sites in the New Continent: one on the mainland and one in the Pacific.
The one in the Pacific was on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It was too far from the New Continent and had been abandoned, so it could be disregarded.
The one on the mainland, however, was very familiar to Luo Shu.
That's right, it was Area-14's neighbor, the Nevada Test Site, southwest of Zone 51.
Originally, it was actually the old site of Area-14. It was nuked due to a containment breach of Anomalous Item-682, the Hard-to-Destroy Reptile, leaving behind the famous Sedan Crater.
At that time, the New Continent had long occupied Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands for nuclear tests, drawing international condemnation, so they simply took over the old site of Area-14 to serve as a new nuclear test site.
From then on, besides the massive Sedan Crater, the deserts of the Nevada Test Site gained numerous smaller craters.
Viewed from space, the surface of the Nevada Test Site resembled the moon, covered in "craters." There had to be nukes there!
So, after finally resting at home for a week, Luo Shu set out again.
This time, he first followed his usual route through the Gulf of Mexico, then cut across Mexico before heading north from the desert region of the Gulf of California. After passing through California, he arrived in Nevada.
To avoid densely populated areas along the way, he stuck to deserts, wilderness, and towering mountains.
As a result, the journey took him several hours longer than his previous trip to Area-14.
After nearly twenty hours of arduous travel, he finally passed through the treacherous Death Valley in California and reached Nevada.
The Nevada Test Site was located on the Nevada side, near California, hidden in an unnamed valley.
This unnamed valley ran north-south, shaped like a giant abalone, with the fully enclosed Nevada Test Site nestled between two arc-shaped mountain ranges.
The observation base for the test site was located on the western ridge of the valley, overlooking the entire valley.
The middle of the valley was densely dotted with hundreds of nuclear blast craters of various sizes.
At the northernmost end of the valley was the famous Sedan Crater, with a maximum diameter of 390 meters and a depth of 98 meters, created by the detonation of a 440-terajoule nuclear device 194 meters underground.
What exactly does 440 terajoules mean?
1 terajoule = 1000 gigajoules = 1000 million kilojoules = 1000 billion joules...
Well, I suppose you still don't have a clear concept of this number.
Let's put it another way.
From a military perspective, 1 terajoule is roughly equivalent to 240 tons of TNT explosive yield. Therefore, a 440-terajoule nuclear device equals 100,000 tons of TNT yield, or 100 KT.
The "Little Boy" dropped on Hiroshima by the New Continent was designed for a yield of 20 KT, with an actual detonation威力 of 15 KT.
In other words, the thing the Sanctuary used to nuke Area-14 was equivalent to six "Little Boys"!
But unfortunately, Anomalous Item-682 is a higher-dimensional projection. No matter how powerful that nuke was, it couldn't terminate the Hard-to-Destroy Reptile.
Bathed in an ocean of energy, the little lizard reconstructed its body in minutes.
Alright, Luo Shu's purpose here wasn't to pay homage to past events but to find the Nevada Test Site's nuclear arsenal.
But obviously, the nuclear arsenal wouldn't be located under the Sedan Crater.
Opposite the Sedan Crater, at the southern end of the valley, was a dry lake called Yucca, just like the Groom Lake above Zone 51.
On the southeastern side of Yucca Dry Lake was a small airport dedicated to the Nevada Test Site.
The moment Luo Shu saw Yucca Dry Lake, he immediately understood where the Nevada Test Site's nuclear arsenal was hidden. The layout here was practically copied from Zone 51.
Over at Zone 51, there's also a small air force airport called Homey next to Groom Lake.
So, without a doubt, the Nevada Test Site's nuclear arsenal was hidden beneath Yucca Dry Lake.
What Luo Shu needed to do now was find the entrance to the underground nuclear arsenal, infiltrate it, and steal eight or ten small tactical nukes for use on Sanctuary sites.
Near Yucca Dry Lake, next to the airport, was a T-junction.
The eastern vertical leg of the T led to the airport. The horizontal leg's southern end was a dead end, while its northern end extended towards the nuclear testing grounds covered in craters.
Luo Shu guessed blindly that the arsenal should be near the dead-end road, though it was hard to say exactly which section.
But this wasn't something to rush. There would only be one chance to steal the nukes.
Once the military and the Sanctuary were alerted, there would be no next time.
So Luo Shu hid patiently on the mountaintop south of Yucca Dry Lake.
This was over a kilometer from the airport, so there was no worry about being detected by someone infected with the Memetic Longinus.
After waiting several hours, a military transport plane landed at Yucca Airport.
Immediately afterward, a section of the dead-end road sank downward, transforming into a descending ramp.
A military truck emerged from below the ramp and turned right, heading towards Yucca Airport.
Having pinpointed the entrance's exact location, Luo Shu didn't hesitate to act.
He had to infiltrate the arsenal while the entrance was open; forcing open that ramp from the outside would be nearly impossible.
He entered an unobservable state and charged down from the ridge in his pickup truck Transformer's ground-effect vehicle form.
Over ten minutes later, after that military truck finished unloading and drove back into the underground arsenal, Luo Shu followed behind it in his pickup truck Transformer, sneaking in.
Inside the underground arsenal, the layout was strikingly similar to Zone 51—a massive underground facility containing a refinery for producing enriched uranium, an assembly plant for putting the nuclear devices together, and numerous dormitories.
A mechanized infantry regiment was directly stationed here.
However, these were all ordinary people. No matter how many there were, they posed no threat to Luo Shu.
Well, not entirely without threat. If Luo Shu were to exit his unobservable state, these people would transform into Lances of Longinus, launching attacks into his mental world.
Now that he had found the underground arsenal, finding the nukes themselves wouldn't be difficult.
Luo Shu habitually went for the underground arsenal's host system first, obtaining the complete base data and, from it, the location of the nuclear storage warehouse and all access permissions.
Now only one final question remained: how many nukes should he take?