Volume 10: Ancient Battleship Chapter 491: Console
Following the traces on the ground, the reconnaissance team moved forward steadily along the wall on the right side of the power room.
The further they went, the deeper the marks on the ground became. They were formed by the long-term rolling of heavy equipment. Ke Lan could even imagine what this power room looked like when it was filled with various scientific research equipment.
"I was thinking, could it be that the Alphas were defeated in the battle, and in order to prevent the battleship from being captured by the enemy, they deliberately sank it here?" Layton muttered, "And then the Alpha civilization was exterminated, so this super battleship was forgotten here?"
"Impossible." The Hound rejected it outright. "This is a battleship, not a 'spark ship' used to preserve the foundation. The fight has come to a life-and-death moment. Are they still keeping this trump card for the next life? Besides, this ancient battleship was not originally built by the Alpha Civilization. They themselves probably haven't studied the technology inside thoroughly. What's the point of hiding it... Maybe the enemy that destroyed them is the Third Civilization that built this battleship. That would be interesting."
"Let's take a step back and say that even if they wanted to hide this battleship in order to make a comeback," Ke Lan continued, "then do you think that a civilization that could destroy the Alphas would not be able to find this battleship sunk in the magma? Even though we on Earth have found it, that civilization's exploration capabilities can't be worse than those of Earthlings, right?"
"Unless it's a civilization whose technology tree is off..." Ivan said half-jokingly, "Everyone is like Superman in superhero movies, relying solely on physical strength to crush opponents, blowing up a battleship with one punch, swallowing planets alive, and tearing wormholes apart with bare hands, but they are not interested in the development of technology. That's a possibility."
Doctor Maozi shrugged his shoulders and made a funny expression. "I've only seen this kind of setting in old fantasy novels, where a breath can shatter the galaxy, and a move can crush the road into dust... I liked this kind of novel when I was a kid, but now when I think about it, it's really awkward and funny."
"Hey, maybe that great god those Alpha people worship really has this ability—" Before Layton could finish his words, the Valkyrie One, which was leading the way in the front, suddenly stopped, and he almost bumped into the butt of the mecha.
"What's wrong? Did you find anything?" Layton immediately drew out his weapon and carefully leaned half of his body out from the side of the machine. The other people in the team also made similar reactions.
"There are strange symbols on the ground." Valentina's voice sounded in the team channel . She controlled the mecha and made way.
"Symbol?!" Leighton took the first step forward. He just glanced at the ground, then immediately stood up, turned his head and looked at Ke Lan.
"It's Alphatext!"
As a relic hunter who has been dealing with this kind of things for many years, although Layton cannot understand the content of the Alpha text, he can still distinguish the characteristics of this text - as for Valentina who has just entered the industry, she is still a little short of the mark and can only see that this is some kind of symbol with special meaning.
"Ke Lan, come over here and take a look!" Leighton called out immediately.
This was the first time they discovered written information left by the Alpha civilization inside "Yaguna Kator", and the team happened to have Ke Lan, a "special talent" who could read the Alpha language.
What's that idiom? Layton muttered, "Yes! That's it - "God helps me!"
Ke Lan walked up quickly. He only glanced at the scribbles-like words and his breath was choked. Fortunately, he reacted in time this time and Aya, who was following behind him, did not notice the problem.
If these strings of Alpha characters are to be translated into Chinese, they can be simplified into three words.
Control-station!
Ke Lan suddenly felt a strange feeling in his heart, as if "after searching high and low for something, he finally found it without any effort"... He actually found the control console just like that?
He turned around and glanced at the other team members. Aya and several of his agents all looked confused, while Hound and others had a hint of inquiry in their slightly expectant eyes - they also wanted to know what these Alpha words meant immediately, but because there were "outsiders" present, they couldn't speak directly.
Except for a few people from the God Hunter Group, the Security Bureau agents did not know that Ke Lan had the ability to read Alpha text, and Ke Lan was unwilling to kill all of them to silence them - if he really did that, then what was the difference between him and the group of people in the heretical sect.
"I've seen this string of characters before." Ke Lan thought for a moment and changed his words.
"Have you seen it?" Aya was stunned and asked quickly, "Where?"
"In the core control area of a Class B relic, on the central control hub, there is a string of characters. The style and order of each character...if I remember correctly, they should be exactly the same." Ke Lan began to show off her acting skills.
"You mean... the mechanism that controls this power room is right here?" Aya widened her already large eyes. "But... there's nothing here? Moreover, the words of the Alpha civilization, even if they look exactly the same, can have very different meanings!"
This is trouble... After hearing the second half of Aya's words, Ke Lan licked his palate with his tongue in annoyance, thinking about how to get away with this matter.
He had thought that a government servant like Aya, who was busy carrying out various tasks all day, would not know much about Alpha script, but who knew that she actually knew quite a lot about these things - you know, ninety-nine percent of the people on the Ark only knew that Alpha script could not be deciphered, but no one could tell the specific reason.
The text of the Alpha civilization is like an encrypted file. The "ghostly scribbles" that humans can see are actually just the password to open the file. The content contained in the file has nothing to do with the password at all.
These passwords are like those shaken out by a random number generator, with no rules or patterns at all. For example, the same password "123456" may open a file saying "Hey, good afternoon, have you eaten?" the next time you enter the same password, but it may open a different file saying "I ate a person alive, I'm sorry."
This thing doesn't make sense to you at all, so it is almost impossible to decipher the language of Alpha civilization with human logical thinking.
The ability that Ke Lan obtained is actually more like a "master key", which can directly see the "essence" hidden inside the "appearance" of the characters.
This should not be considered a type of text, but should be considered a higher-level information carrier.
"Ah, this..." Ke Lan really wanted to say that this might be a coincidence, but the probability of this coincidence was too low, and even he himself found it hard to believe it.
"Although I don't think the control console of the power room is in this place, I still think we should explore the surroundings carefully. After all, this is the only text clue we have found so far." Who knew that before Ke Lan could think of what to say, Aya took the initiative to cooperate.
Come to think of it, a clue that was finally discovered, even if it had nothing to do with the console, a normal person would have been more cautious... Ke Lan thought to himself, it seems that this time, he made a low-level mistake.
Fortunately, this mistake was not fatal.
The mistake he made was somewhat similar to Park Sangyou's lie before - they both fell into a preconceived misunderstanding: Ke Lan knew the true meaning of these characters, and in order to let others know, he had to make up a reason that now seemed untenable... But in fact, he didn't have to do that. He just needed to play dumb and give a little hint, and in the subsequent exploration, others would naturally discover the meaning of these characters.
"Damn it, I must never make this kind of low-level mistake again." Ke Lan secretly warned herself in her heart, "Fortunately, Aya didn't think too much about it, and fortunately she is not an enemy of the opposing camp..."
At this time, Aya was already kneeling on the ground, her upper body bent over, her long legs slightly apart, and her hands carefully groping on the ground around the characters.
"The trace analysis program just reported an error. There seems to be something wrong with this floor."
Hearing Aya say this, Ke Lan also focused his attention on the heads-up display, and saw that the calculated data of the analysis software kept jumping back and forth, and a few "ERROR" characters would pop up from time to time.
(Note: ERROR: error)
"What does this mean? Under what circumstances will this software usually report an error?" Ke Lan asked.
"When encountering optical camouflage." Aya replied. Suddenly, her body trembled and her hands stopped moving.
"I found it." She turned around and said to Ke Lan.
"What did you find?" Ke Lan immediately focused his attention on her hands, and saw that the index finger and middle finger of her left hand were directly stuck in the ground, and the surrounding space was slightly distorted - it looked like a penetration bug in a 3D game, or like a negative example for novice photo-editing workers.
"Here, there is a groove... covered by optical camouflage. In terms of size... it is five centimeters long and three centimeters wide... just enough to fit an energy crystal!"
"It's the energy supply slot!" Leighton reacted immediately.
"Put a crystal in there and try it." Ke Lan said.
Aya thought about it, took out a piece of the lowest level crystal, aimed it at the "invisible" groove, and pressed it down carefully.
Anyway, it's just a first-level crystal. Even if it is a teleportation mechanism, the energy inside the crystal is not enough to activate the teleportation device.
At the moment when the energy crystal was pressed into the groove, the seamless ground in front of the characters suddenly cracked, and a dark gray stone pillar slowly rose up from the underground.
At the top of this stone pillar, there is a metallic sphere the size of a football suspended.
The expression on Ke Lan's face suddenly changed subtly - this was not the first time he had seen this thing!
Among the memory fragments that emerged in the abnormal space, Ke Lan only remembered three pictures. The first one was the strange square, the second one was Park Sangyou embedding the super-pure crystals into the grooves on the tunnel wall... and the third picture was a pair of hands pressing on a round ball emitting soft white fluorescence.
Although the suspended metal ball in front of him did not glow, Ke Lan was sure that it was definitely the same sphere he saw in the memory fragment!
As for whether the hands pressing on the sphere were human, he had some doubts - in the first picture, those creatures whose lower bodies were made up of a large group of tentacles, half human and half octopus, had almost no difference from humans above the waist, and their hands were naturally no different. So Ke Lan was not sure whether those hands were human or those "monsters".
"Could this thing really be the control console of the power room?" Leighton murmured. He wanted to reach out and touch the metal ball, but just as he was about to touch the metal ball, he suddenly turned his head to look at Ke Lan, then retracted his hand.
Layton admitted that he was scared at that moment... After all, only Ke Lan knew what those characters meant. Even if this thing was really a "console", it should be decided by Ke Lan how to deal with it.
The thing that Layton hated most in his life was when an amateur who didn't understand the equipment pretended to know his job and gave comments, and some even interfered self-righteously - and in this situation, he became the amateur who knew nothing.
"Ke Lan, do you know what this thing is?" He poked Ke Lan carefully and asked softly.
"It should... be the control console we are looking for." Ke Lan deliberately pretended to be uncertain, but secretly took advantage of Aya's inattention and gave everyone in the hunting group an affirmative look.
"Control panel... Isn't this too much of a coincidence?" Aya looked at the stone pillar and the metal ball in disbelief, then glanced at the characters on the ground. "Didn't they say... that the characters of the Alpha civilization have no reference value to each other?"
"Maybe it's really a coincidence." Ke Lan curled her lips and said, "You should have heard of the 'infinite monkey theory', right? Let countless monkeys type on countless typewriters at will. One day , these monkeys will type out all of Shakespeare's works... It's just a string of repeated characters. I think the probability of this should be much higher than that of typing monkeys."
"..." Aya pursed her lips and did not comment on Ke Lan's theory. She stood up and walked around the stone pillar, looking at the details of the stone pillar while taking a full-scale image of the stone pillar with the device in her hand, and then uploaded it to the tablet.
The height of the stone pillar, including the suspended metal ball, is about 1.3 meters, just reaching the chest of an adult, which makes people subconsciously want to put their hands on the metal ball.
"This thing is a bit like the 'floating steering ball' that was popular for a while when we first landed on Alpha. But that thing was easily disturbed and not very stable, so it was eliminated soon... Until now, everyone still thinks that mechanical transmission steering wheels are more reliable." Layton said on the side.
(Note: Steering ball is a device that replaces the steering wheel to control the vehicle. It comes from Liu Cixin's "The Wandering Earth". The protagonist and others in the movie use this thing to drive.)
