"."
Stepping into this underground ruin so grand it beggared belief, even Sui Meng—well-traveled and iron-willed—could not help the flicker of emotion rising from his depths, nor the indescribable shock.
It was not its scale that stirred him…
Though that was impressive indeed, with colossal pillars seeming to bear the weight of a world and a soaring vault that vanished into shadow—architecture far beyond human norms. What truly moved Sui Meng was the grief and extinction thick in the air, almost made substance in every corner of this place.
He could not help but think of his time in Universe 18 (StarCraft).
The Xel'Naga ruins there were likewise vast and majestic, saturated with god-grade science and the gravitas of a creator.
But their atmosphere was cold, aloof—the "husk" left after gods slumbered or departed—lacking the warmth of "feeling."
After all, in that universe the Xel'Naga were regarded as creator deities, and in the end, the Xel'Naga chose to "fuse" with his father, Emperor Samuel Young—becoming part of his strength and knowledge, and a cornerstone of the Empire itself.
In a sense, in Universe 18, his father had replaced the Xel'Naga—becoming the embodiment of that universe's supreme law.
Here, in the Tavorantis ruins before him, all was different.
There was no divine transcendence, only a civilization's elegy.
As the War Maiden had sensed, every cold stone and carved line seemed to weep in silence for splendor past, struggle thereafter, and at last, that desperate self-sacrifice.
Such immediate sorrow—of an entire sapient race coming to an end—struck the heart far harder than any god's hall.
Halsey, by contrast, slipped quickly into her "analysis mode" after an initial look.
She raised a hand to adjust her specialized analyzing monocle and examined the flowing, alien carvings and structural lines on the walls.
"An astonishing artistic style," she said, voice colored by professional appraisal. "The lines are full of motion, an exaltation of nature—or their understanding of harmony between ocean and energy—yet beneath it a geometric precision shows a highly rational turn of mind.
To choose, at the end of all hope, to freeze themselves with such resolve only to halt a greater catastrophe…
That spirit—giving all for a principle beyond one's own continuance—is deeply instructive."
She shook her head slightly, a rare respect in her tone. "Among the many xeno-civilizations I've seen across the multiverse, most drown in their own survival, expansion, or twisted creeds. Tavorantins who, at the brink of their own end, seem still able to consider impacts at wider scales—such examples are vanishingly rare."
The column continued down the broad, slanting main hall.
They soon reached a section of special note.
A cavernous corridor with mirror-smooth walls on either side.
More striking still: both walls were covered in murals that stretched on without end. Though age had dimmed their colors, figures still stood out, accompanied by ranks of complex, unknown characters.
This was clearly no idle ornament—it was an epic hall, carefully compiled to record history.
"Hold."
Halsey lifted a hand at once to halt the group.
Her gaze locked to the murals like iron to a magnet, a treasure-hunter's gleam in her eyes.
"Cortana, initiate high-resolution scans and build a holo model. We need an on-site decryption of these mural sequences and the writing system. This is likely the Tavorantis civilization's 'own account' left for those who come after."
"Understood, Doctor. Bringing multispectral imagers online and syncing a symbol-comparison database."
Cortana moved at once. Fine beams of scanlight projected from her fingertips and began to capture every detail of murals and script inch by inch.
Seeing this, Sui Meng issued corresponding orders.
He turned to the Xianzhen Honor Guard behind him and spoke with crisp clarity: "Spread in combat formation and cover all entrances to this corridor. Do not touch anything here—walls or floor included."
His eyes passed over the seemingly quiescent murals and likely hidden mechanisms. "No life doesn't mean safe. Sometimes, a dead thing that's slept for millennia harbors traps or unknown workings far deadlier."
With the commands given, Sui Meng remained where he was, standing with Halsey and Cortana, eyes on the ancient murals.
He did not take part in decryption.
He was honest with himself: archaeology, linguistics, and connoisseurship were not his strengths.
He thought of brothers he'd never met, scattered through other universes.
Magnus, whose hunger for knowledge and mysteries was unending; or Luo Jia, adept at reading true meaning in faith and symbol. Were they here, they might have drawn out the truth behind these silent records more swiftly.
As for himself, his mother, the war goddess Athena, had trained him with laser focus: develop his psionic potential, drill unending tactical evolutions, and mold a mind for grand strategy.
How to break a fortress. How to command a battle. How to bring one's might to bear to turn a war. These were his domains.
The "soft sciences" requiring fine perception and deep stores of knowledge—literature, archaeology, decryption—had never been on Athena's syllabus for him.
For now, his best choice was to keep silent, secure the experts' working space, and stand ready for any surprise that might arise during decryption.
Meanwhile, the work moved quickly. Only Halsey's occasional whispers disturbed the corridor's hush.
Cortana stood still, but her core raced. She matched the high-definition images of murals and text against her vast cross-civilization language banks at stunning speed.
"Initiating preliminary semiotic comparison…"
Cortana's voice rang clear in the quiet. "Running similarity screening against 17,439 known scripts… No exact matches found.
The writing system is highly unique, but some geometric symbols show weak relation to early logical notation—suggesting this civilization may have touched high-dimensional information processing."
Halsey, meanwhile, embraced a more intuitive, associative approach.
She paced the mural line slowly, eyes like probes tracing each panel, her mind running hot—seeking resonance with artists from a million years past.
"Note the narrative order…"
She pointed to a mural set at the corridor's start. It showed slender beings with three-fingered hands riding streamlined craft from a dying, cracked world to a blue ocean planet.
"Migration. No doubt. They came from a home on the brink. Tavorantis was the refuge—the new hope. Such a background carves deep impressions in the arts of a civilization:
the hunger to live—and a reverence for the new home."
Her gaze moved to the next set.
The scenes showed those beings building cities in the ocean, harnessing unknown energy tech to ride currents, and cultivating exotic sea life.
"They adapted to and mastered the seas. Their science was advanced. The architectural styling—see the domes and helical forms—brims with fluid-dynamics insight yet marries an elegant practicality. This is not a civilization of forceful expansion, but of adaptation and construction."
Cortana added timely data: "Using wall-material isotopic decay, crystal lattice stress accumulation, and micro-impact crater density in composite models, the build date of this core ruin is estimated at roughly 1.65 to 2.05 million years ago. Error is driven primarily by unknowns in this world's geology."
Deeper down the hall, the murals' content changed.
A new set midway down drew every eye.
There, the Tavorantins seemed to find, in the deep sea, a massive, glowing double-helix object—a Primordial Marker.
"Key node identified." Excitement edged Halsey's voice at the secret uncovered:
"They found it… See the Tavorantins' posture—full of awe and curiosity. They took this unknown thing from the star sea as a kind of… benefaction? At least a prize of greatest value."
Murals showed the Tavorantins carefully studying the Marker, measuring its energy output, and even attempting to replicate similar, smaller double-helix structures—distributing them across the world.
"They saw the Marker as power," Cortana concluded, tying image to partial script. "The annotations repeat roots tied to 'source of energy' and 'eternal power.' Their large-scale replication was likely aimed at meeting colonial energy needs and further developing their new home."
Here the narrative seemed to break off—or turn elsewhere.
Murals further on became more "abstract": the motions of stars, scenes of grand rites, or unknowable philosophy. No clear records of what followed from Marker use—and no depictions of corpse-mutants, massacres, or the final freeze.
"Peculiar." Halsey frowned lightly. "The record breaks—or is deliberate avoidance.
By rights, a 'discovery' and 'use' of this weight should be followed with detail—unless what came next was too inglorious to carve; or else this section here predates the full disaster."
Cortana pulled details via Wu Ji from the Earth Federation's databases: "Federation secret files focus on their own Marker research and the process of locating Tavorantis. On the Tavorantis civilization's own history—especially its early history—they made almost no substantive headway.
They likely never fully deciphered this hall's account of the Tavorantins as 'colonists' and 'Marker finders.'"
Sui Meng listened without speaking, but the key points fixed in his mind.
The Tavorantins were not the creators of the Marker. Like humanity in this universe, they were the Marker's "discoverers" and "victims"—and fell into ruin earlier.
That made the Marker and its hidden masters' threat older, more "insidious," and widespread.
Tragedy was staging the same opening act across worlds and ages.
After concentrated analysis and consolidation, Cortana's core succeeded in building a basic parsing frame for the Tavorantis language.
"Lang model initialized. Based on context linkage and pictorial reference, vocabulary fill has reached threshold for basic reading," she reported to Halsey and Sui Meng. "The current hall's murals decode as a chronicle of migration and of initial discovery and energetic application of the Marker, ending at the stage of large-scale replication."
With the key "linguistic" unlocked, they moved on. The Xianzhen kept formation and watch as they advanced along the grand hall into the deeper ruins.
They passed under a huge arch and the view widened into a vast space.
This seemed to be the habitation zone of the Tavorantis underground city.
Unlike the strongly narrative murals of the earlier hall, these walls, pillars, and even floors bore more "lived" carvings and marks—but still circled the Marker.
Murals showed Tavorantins using Marker energy to light cities, drive immense submersibles, and cultivate luminous crops unseen elsewhere;
they recorded artists crafting sculpture and painting inspired by the double-helix form;
they suggested a social structure reshaped around the management and allocation of Marker energy.
The Marker's influence—like an unseen catalyst—had penetrated every facet of post-colonial life. From productivity to culture, all bore its trace.
At last they reached the living district's heart—
an immense circular central plaza.
Tiered stands rose around it. The paving gave off a faint ghostly glow, etching complex geometry—all of it directing attention to the raised round platform at center.
An altar—or a display plinth.
But now, that focal plinth stood empty.
Around it lingered the traces of a mighty energy field. Even after a million years of ice, fine sensors and sensitive minds could still faintly sense it.
The "double-helix mystery device" that had broadcast "signals" to the Tavorantins—their revered source of energy and hope—the Primordial Marker—was gone.
"It seems that while Grand Device 01's pulse can precisely locate and annihilate all organics tied to the Marker—corpse-mutants and manifest blood moons alike…"
Halsey studied the vacant plinth and said, "it cannot physically destroy the Marker itself.
The essence of this thing may lie beyond ordinary matter. At most, the pulse forcibly suppresses its activity—cuts its bonds to other biomass—dropping it into a kind of 'dormancy.'
Presumably, the Primordial Marker found by the Tavorantins is long since lost."
Agregar a seguimiento
______
(≧◡≦) ♡ Support me and read 20 chapters ahead – patreon.com/Mutter
For every 50 Power Stones, one extra chapter will be released on Saturday.