After so inquiries, I found out where Lilina and the little doll had gone—they really did chase each other quite far. In fact, the two girls ran all the way to a nearby Ice-Rock Planet... Well, let’s not discuss the commotion caused by the children of the Immortal Family fighting. The key issue is that they discovered ruins composed of hotown material on that Ice-Rock Planet, and there were even corpses inside!
The little doll didn’t have the ability to identify hotown material since she hadn’t installed those bizarre radars in her body, but Lilina, being sowhat of a "responsible adult" (we won’t discuss how much water that statent holds), had gotten a detector from Taville for identifying hotown material. Therefore, she could be one hundred percent sure that on a planet twelve astronomical units away from here, there exists a place that seed like an ergency landing point—where a group of Xyrin Ancestors had crash-landed, and their corpses are preserved to this day.
I knew this sounded unbelievable. It’s been an unfathomable ti since the creators of the Xyrin Apostle went extinct, a span even the Divine Race finds long. No worldly material could survive for such an epochal period, let alone mortal bodies that decay into ash within a few years. After all, the creators were rely a mortal race, regardless of their achievents, they were no stronger than any vassal race of the New Empire—but one must face the facts: the Hotown World has continued to exist beyond its theoretical lifespan. During this period, there must be so unknown factors leading to this situation, and perhaps the sa factors acted upon the creators.
Right on the spot, I tucked the little doll and Lilina under my armpits, transporting directly to the engineering base, and then sprinted all the way to find Sandora. By the ti we arrived, Lilina was rolling her eyes, and the little doll was biting my wrist, her expression suggesting she planned to hang there all day... Maybe I should have chosen a more stable way to bring the two over.
Sandora was in the lounge discussing issues with Bingdisi when I charged in like a whirlwind, and the two of them were imdiately surprised. Bingdisi looked at holding two irritable little girls and showed particular concern: "Were you and Qianqian indulging outside and got caught by these two naughty kids?"
: "..." This female hooligan must be a diamond; her sole existence values just to annoy people?
"The two little ones have made a significant discovery," I said, setting Lilina on the ground and raising my hand to show the little doll biting my wrist and swinging in mid-air, "They discovered the creators’ tomb on the nearest planet. Maybe a group of creators scattered and wandered to this world, and their corpses are even still there."
No sooner had I finished speaking than a blue silhouette flashed past in front of my eyes, followed by a gust of wind. When I realized it, both Sandora and Bingdisi had disappeared, leaving only the automatic doors swaying in their wake. Just a few seconds later, Sandora rushed back at the sa supersonic speed, grabbing my arm—actually, she grabbed onto the little doll’s head on my arm: "Where is it?"
Sandora was dragging a still bewildered Bingdisi with her other hand. This female hooligan had been tragically yanked out at supersonic speed monts ago, and I distinctly heard a loud crash as she must have hit sothing. Now she was lying on the ground, half alive, being dragged by Sandora. The female hooligan looked up at the equally dazed Lilina and rcury Lamp, miserably saying: "Oh hell... you two really are a pair! Can you not drag into this?!"
Sandora casually flipped up the pretending-to-be mortally wounded Bingdisi, replying absent-mindedly: "Oh, I forgot I was dragging soone." Then she tossed her good buddy to the side and succinctly told Lilina: "Lead the way!"
She didn’t ask the little doll because the latter was still hanging from my wrist, occupying her mouth and unable to communicate. We called on Qianqian, who was coming back with the kids, then headed to the experintal area to pick up a Taville and a bunch of expert assistant technicians and engineering soldiers to accompany us. We all boarded the engineering ship from the base, and in the blink of an eye, we were over the planet twelve astronomical units away from here.
This is a barren, icy, lifeless solid planet where geological activity has ceased. The most prominent characteristic of this Constant Star System is that all its celestial bodies are far from the sun. Even after advancing twelve astronomical units from the asteroid belt toward the sun, that constant star still appeared as a cold orange speck in our view. The excessively distant location resulted in an average temperature on the planet surface below us of close to -200℃. The planet surface mainly appeared in a yellow-brown color, the hue of the planet’s ancient rocky crust. From outer space, it could be seen that the planet’s terrain was smooth, suggesting that even in its youthful historical period, its geological activities were never intense. In those gentle valleys and geological cracks, one could see white crystals, likely frozen rivers in the severe cold—which probably never flowed—and so solid-state thane hydrates.
A hellishly cold planet; even a Hellenic King would cry from freezing alive here, but compared to the asteroid belt, this place is actually relatively warm...
This planet has a thin atmosphere, primarily composed of helium (other gases have largely frozen into solid chunks on the planet surface or beco liquid), and contains several trace elents unique to this universe, leading to a faintly iron-red hue in the atmosphere on the side facing the constant star—where Lilina and the little doll discovered those things.
The engineering ship, with its massive bulk, hovered like a giant teorite in low orbit. Below the engineering ship, the drone launch tracks and spaceport components began to transform and extend, preparing to comnce orbital-planetary joint mining operations. We ca to the extended platform at the bottom of the engineering ship, looking through the transparent energy barrier at the yellow-brown earth beneath our feet.
I ruffled Lilina’s hair: "Where exactly is it? If you left a mark, we could save so ti."
"Of course, you can count on ," Lilina said confidently, patting her chest, although the place was sothing she and the little doll found by chance while fighting, she had already taken it as a product of her diligent work. "I planted a little sapling below, let find it... oh, found it, that little green dot over there is it."
Lilina pointed at a green speck on the planet surface and said happily, leaving speechless:
A plant visible even from outer space... and Lilina calls that thing a sapling...
The engineering ship locked onto the coordinates and found suitable open terrain next to the marks to set up a ground station. Subsequently, a gigantic cubic device roughly two hundred ters in length was released from low orbit. This cubic device plunged into the thin atmosphere at high speed, stalling abruptly several hundred ters from the ground and slowly unfolding, landing smoothly: it housed a fully-functional ground station infrastructure, including a small multifunctional command center (allowing it to operate normally in both manned and unmanned modes), two multifunctional laboratories with space-expanding devices, an autonomous machine hangar, and three docking ports for the temporary resupply of small flying devices. Of course, it also ca with the vital component standard to every Imperial Workstation: a Transporter. The Transporter ensured rapid material transfer between the ground station and the orbital mother ship, thus the ground station did not carry a space-consuming warehouse facility.
With the onboard engineering mother ship collaborating with several ground stations dispersed on the planet surface, research sampling work can begin in as fast as ten minutes, characterizing the most common planetary working mode of this versatile engineering ship we took. Since Xyrin Apostles no longer needed to mine planetary resources, this type of engineering ship was almost exclusively for scientific research.
After the ground station sent a ready signal, we arrived at the planet surface through the Transporter.
The first thing we saw, naturally, was the "sapling" Lilina planted several kiloters away. It’s hard to explain scientifically how a giant green plant could thrive amidst helium winds at minus 200 degrees Celsius, so let’s exert our utmost to ignore that enormous thing and refocus on the ancestral relics. The short-range radar on the ground station detected the reaction to the hotown material, and when we arrived at the site resembling an oil drilling platform, its hangar dispatched flocks of autonomous machines. The assistant technicians and engineering soldiers who teleported to the ground with us followed these machines, quickly locating the astonishing ruins.
They were situated in a valley five kiloters away and looked like they’d been there for many years.
This is a valley with an exceptionally wide bottom, filled with debris, with ravines crisscrossing the perpetually frozen soil. At the end of the valley bottom, a massive tal structure is slanted and embedded into the ground. It appears to be part of a spacecraft, or perhaps a crashed orbital station fallen from space—I personally lean towards the forr. This colossal object resembles a bundle of irregular cylinders, its surface grayish-black, with no discernible paint or markings. It seems to have fallen directly from a high altitude to the planet surface, judging by the dense radial cracks around it. There are gaping ruptures on its surface, torn apart by a massive impact: these markings are evidence of a catastrophic space fall. This tallic behemoth is incomplete, with its skyward end fractured and jagged, sharp tallic structures and broken pipelines protruding from the crack, trembling slightly in the frigid and thin atmosphere, akin to skeletal fingers clawing out of a grave, attempting to grasp the distant sun in the sky. These evident fracture marks indicate that what lies on the ground is rely a part of the spacecraft (assuming it is one); the other half has vanished into thin air.
"All the holand material reactions on this planet originate from this valley," Taville said, looking at her data terminal. The engineering ship in orbit had released a satellite to conduct a rough scan of the entire planet to confirm the presence of more ancestral relics, but the results are disappointing; this incomplete wreck in front of us cannot be pieced back together.
To be honest, I didn’t initially expect Lilina and the little doll to have discovered such an enormous object! I thought at most they found a few escape pods or slightly larger lifeboats, but this... it far exceeded my expectations. No wonder Little Light described this as a "tomb"; this tallic wreck standing in the cold wind truly resembles a massive and icy tomb.
"This looks like a spacecraft," Bingdisi said, looking up for a long ti, "Different from your spacecraft, right?"
"Do you even realize how old this thing is?" I said casually to her, then followed Lilina towards the massive spacecraft wreckage. "Xyrin People and Xyrin Apostles have undergone countless civilizations’ reincarnations over ti."
"It’s unbelievable... this crucial heritage has been right under our noses for two days," Taville gazed up at the mountain-like black wreckage, the fractured and sharp tallic limbs clearly reflected in her pupils, her voice tinged with a bit of regret: "I was too caught up with the abundant holand materials in the asteroid belt; I should have scanned the entire Constant Star System earlier."
"No... it’s okay," Sandora said absentmindedly, "It’s just a bit late; we’ve still found it. This spacecraft seems to have undergone an explosion from inside out, causing it to split into two, with the ruptures mostly expanding outward. But there’s no Abyssal Aura on the spacecraft; what destroyed it?"
Sandora was rely talking to herself, not expecting any answers, nor could anyone provide them: before us is an ancient secret from a long-lost era, so distant that even the immortal Xyrin Apostles cannot probe those ages. The spacecraft wreckage is as mysterious as the Xyrin Ancestor, evoking an odd illusion in : I felt as though I were gazing through the barrier of ti, looking at ancient history frozen in ti, things that should have beco dust with the passage of ti, now appearing majestically in our sight, bringing a psychological shock that’s beyond words.
Imagine at the mont of Doomsday, witnessing the flash of the Universe’s dawn, and even such a span of ti is incomparable to the cold wreckage in front of us.
Even I feel such awe; naturally, Sandora, who is a bona fide Xyrin Apostle, feels it even more. She gently caressed the cold and broken hull, her voice distant, as if from the world’s end: "Could the first Original Body have been born on such a spacecraft?"
"At least on a spacecraft from the sa era," Bingdisi patted Sandora’s shoulder vigorously, "Damn, I’m getting excited too: even the Divine Race rarely gets to witness such historic monts... where do we enter?"
I turned to look at Lilina (the little doll was still biting my wrist, so she was out of the question), considering she found the corpse, she must have ventured inside this spacecraft and knows the way through.
"I’ll lead the way!" Lilina said proudly, patting her chest, and then led us to the "entrance" of the spacecraft, which was actually a large crack on the spacecraft’s shell. This crack conveniently cut across a corridor inside the spacecraft, allowing access to the spacecraft’s central zone.
Watching Lilina slipping into that dark crack, I could almost picture how she and the little doll chased and played, arriving on this planet, seeing this gigantic wreck, then exploring inside like children hunting for treasure...
A large group followed Lilina into the spacecraft wreckage, where the initial path was very difficult to traverse. However, after clearing obstacles and bypassing a heavily twisted alloy bulkhead, we found the formal corridor, where the way forward suddenly beca spacious. Bingdisi snapped her fingers: "Let there be light," resolving the illumination issue inside this dark wreckage, and the entire spacecraft beca bathed in light, as bright as day.
"Special alloy, maintaining a certain strength under such extre conditions," Taville’s eyes glowed with blue light as she examined and analyzed the material of the wreckage, "There are slting marks, containing nurous impurities. The construction material of this spacecraft must have co from the minerals of the Hotown World, though it differs sowhat from the material found on the Original Body."
"The Original Body was made on the Exile Ark; by then, the Creators should have been capable of extracting resources from other worlds," Sandora replied casually, "Ark’s materials ca from the Hotown World; the Original Body’s materials might have co from other Universes."
"Carefully collect samples; the spacecraft structure is fragile and prone to collapse—don’t let the Autonomous Machines do it; you handle it personally," Taville turned and instructed her assistant technicians and engineering soldiers.
The accompanying personnel began ticulously collecting alloy samples from the spacecraft and released nurous probes. Those tiny probes emitted cheerful chirps, flying into every branch to explore areas we wouldn’t venture into, quickly relaying information back to Taville, with the entire structure and functional layout of the spacecraft forming rapidly in her mind.
This primitive Flying Device’s principles seed quite comprehensible to Taville.
"We should currently be in the spacecraft’s ergency escape passage or an auxiliary passage of sorts," Taville said, "Additionally, we found the control mainfra of the ecological system on the spacecraft; we might fully understand the environnt of the original Mother Star for the first ti ever. The missing parts of the spacecraft should be the propulsion module and the power cabin. I estimate the power cabin’s explosion led to the entire propulsion section and power section being separated. That’s the theory."
The footsteps echoed in the empty corridors, the crisp "tap tap" sound of shoes on the alloy floor. Through Taville’s explanation, we gradually understood this ancient ancestral creation, approaching this behemoth’s heart: the core control section.
There lies the Creator’s corpse. (To be continued. If you enjoy this work, you’re welco to vote for recomndations and monthly tickets on Qidian, your support is my greatest motivation. Mobile users, please visit m.qidian for reading.)
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