Volume 16 Tower of Babel Chapter 867 New Memory Fragments
…
The layout of buildings in the upper city is much more reasonable than that in the lower city and the bottom nest, and the streets are also wider and cleaner... Hundreds of thousands of years have passed, and there is not even much dust on the ground.
However, this point was soon explained - after Ke Lan and Sanshisan turned an intersection, they saw an automatic cleaning robot approaching from a distance. The shape of this robot was like a giant ladybug lying on the ground. Wherever it passed, the garbage and dust on the ground would be sucked into the robot's abdomen, and then a gel preparation for road maintenance would be sprayed from the tail to fill the cracks in the road surface caused by disrepair.
The white paint on the surface of the robot has peeled off in large areas, revealing the rusty metal shell underneath... But you have to know that more than 500,000 years have passed since this automatic cleaning robot was manufactured. Not only has it not turned into a pile of rotten iron, but it can still be started and work as usual. This in itself is enough to make people astonished.
This robot seemed to have a built-in sensing device. When it was only ten meters away from Ke Lan and Sanshisan, it began to slow down, then stopped, and began to emit a "beeping" warning sound. The warning light on the top also began to flash a glaring red light as a warning.
"No wonder the streets are so clean... But then again, this thing should have been manufactured hundreds of thousands of years ago, right? If the managers of the upper city have already lost control of the hive, then how are the robot's daily maintenance, energy consumption, and replenishment of road-repair gel solved? Is it all automated?" Thirty-Three walked around the automatic cleaning robot, admiring it.
"Maybe." Ke Lan moved away from the front of the automatic cleaning robot. The warning sound soon disappeared, and the robot returned to normal operation and continued to move along the street.
"Should we search the upper city area?" Sanshisan asked Ke Lan as he watched the robot disappear around the corner of the intersection.
"The residential area is too large, and it will take a lot of time to search." Ke Lan thought about it and rejected the proposal. Although the "Neto" on this floor seemed to have disappeared and no longer made any sound, Ke Lan always felt that the other party seemed to be planning something... As time passed, the inexplicable sense of uneasiness in Ke Lan's heart was constantly growing.
"Maybe we can just search those iconic buildings. That shouldn't take much time," Thirty-Three suggested.
"Iconic building...which one are you referring to?" Ke Lan asked back.
“Uh, this…”
Thirty-three looked around and was stunned.
Although the buildings in the upper town are all luxurious... the biggest problem is that in this eastern half, the mansions of each "family" are almost identical in luxury, and it is difficult to find outstanding buildings that serve as landmarks.
On the other hand, in the western half of the area, which is controlled by the family with a gear-shaped thorn shield as its emblem, there are many unique buildings.
"Let's search a nearby house first. If we don't find anything, we'll head straight to the forest area." Ke Lan made the decision.
The two pushed open the gate of the nearest manor, and faced an artificial lake covering an area of at least two acres. Although the lake had dried up and the lake bottom was covered with a thick layer of dust as there was no automatic robot to clean it regularly, Ke Lan could still imagine the sparkling scene of this artificial lake in the past.
Just looking at this artificial lake, this manor is much more magnificent than the main house of the Williams family that Ke Lan had copied before - no matter how powerful the Williams family is, it is difficult for them to build such a scenic lake simply for viewing in the West Third District where every inch of land is valuable.
"I can sense that there is a load-bearing frame made of Nino alloy buried at the bottom of the lake." Thirty-three sighed, "What a luxury! Our warships have to use Nino alloy in a certain proportion. These people actually use so much precious material in such a meaningless place... just to prevent the lake from sinking."
Instead of taking a detour, the two chose the shortest straight line and crossed directly across the bottom of the lake.
On the other side of the artificial lake was a row of four-story villas. These villas were like the outer walls of a castle, enclosing the largest main house in the center...but now more than half of these villas had collapsed, and the height of the ruins was less than half a floor. Ke Lan's sight went straight past the ruins and saw the main house at the innermost part, which had been eroded by time and only a frame was left.
The interior structure of the main house was clearly visible. Both the furniture and daily necessities once used by the owner of the house had disappeared... Compared with the nest city itself, which was full of unreasonable things, these dilapidated buildings brought Ke Lan back to reality.
This "sanctuary" is at least 500,000 years old.
Even though this place is protected from wind and rain, such a long time is enough to turn most things into dust.
It was surprising enough that archaeological work in the old era could find a document dating back a thousand years... As for relics from five hundred thousand years ago, even if the text was carved directly on steel, the steel would rust and rot without an excellent preservation environment... not to mention those recorded on stone, bamboo slips, cloth or papyrus.
Even with the iteration of technology, people began to use more advanced data carriers, but the most commonly used electronic storage devices on the Ark had been left there for 500,000 years without maintenance and had long been demagnetized. It was simply impossible to extract the documents once stored in them.
Not to mention all of it, not even a single character will be left.
"Weird...too weird..." Sanshisan's eyes swept over the skeleton-like house frames and shook his head repeatedly, "Ke Lan, don't you think there is something very weird?"
"Yeah, it's very strange." Ke Lan nodded and agreed, "The upper city is indeed more luxurious than the lower city and the bottom nest, but just from the scale of the ruins... If we change it to the degree of preservation of the buildings, this place is much more dilapidated than the other two floors."
"This is what the ruins from 500,000 years ago should look like." Thirty-Three whispered, "As for the Lower Town and the Bottom Nest, if I must say, I don't think they've been there for even a thousand years... They're so well preserved that even the beds made of thin iron pipes are still there... After 500,000 years, that kind of thing should have corroded away without even a slag left."
"Could it be that time has stopped flowing?" Ke Lan muttered. He had long known that the Alpha civilization had mastered the technology to control the flow of time... Apart from anything else, the nameless island was a good example, so they could not send out the bottom nest of the hive city and the completely different flow of time between the lower city and the upper city.
Ke Lan subconsciously looked down at the mechanical watch on his wrist. The second hand was ticking, and the hour and minute hands were where they should be. He compared it with the watch worn by Thirty-Three and the electronic timer, and was basically sure that there was nothing unusual with the time after they entered the nest.
What's more, when he was in the bottom nest and the lower city, Ze Luo's power was not restricted. If there was any abnormality in the speed of time flow, Ze Luo, who was extremely sensitive to time and space, should be able to detect the problem at the first time.
But Ze Luo didn't find anything wrong.
Unless, the abnormal power that separated everyone in the Gray Mist Forest reappeared, erased Ke Lan, Sanshisan, and even Ze Luo's memories of the abnormal flow of time, and even tampered with the time of all timers in an extremely incredible way...
"No...that kind of power should only be effective on ordinary people, otherwise, I would have been hit by it at that time." Ke Lan thought for a moment and denied this possibility.
If even his own memories were wiped out, there would be no point in delving into this matter - that kind of power was simply not something he could resist, and that feeling of powerlessness was like the Alpha civilization facing the "great god" they believed in.
"Could it be that the Lower Town and the Bottom Nest were rebuilt once later?" Thirty-Three guessed, "In the old era, people would repair and rebuild some ancient monuments to use as museums or tourist attractions... Maybe the Alphas repaired the Lower Town and the Bottom Nest tens of thousands of years ago and reinforced them? As for why the Upper Town has not been rebuilt, perhaps it has something to do with what's above our heads now?"
Thirty-three pointed to the dome directly above him, and the meaning of his words was self-evident.
Although the two never looked up from beginning to end, they knew in their hearts that there must be something on the dome... Just one glance would lead things in an uncontrollable direction.
"Forget it, let's not dwell on this for now... It seems that these mansions are all the same and there is no value in searching them." Ke Lan said, "Let's go straight to the forest."
The two retreated back to the street along the same route, and then took the shortest route to reach the artificial forest in the center of the upper city.
Compared to the dilapidated buildings, this forest looks full of vitality. A large number of trees and shrubs that Ke Lan couldn't even name were piled up on top of each other, burying all the forest trails marked on the original map... From the outside, it doesn't look like an artificial forest at all, but a completely undeveloped virgin forest.
In half a million years, climate and geological changes are enough to transform a barren land into a dense rainforest. Perhaps this forest is no longer the same as the original artificial forest... There is nothing much to say about this, but there is one thing that makes Ke Lan a little concerned.
These trees were not illegal structures of the bottom nest, they were alive. Logically, such a wildly growing forest would cover most of the upper city in just fifty years, not five hundred thousand years. But now it seemed that no matter how much these plants grew, they did not cross the boundary drawn on the ground, and even the crown of the trees did not exceed the boundary.
It's like there is an invisible space barrier that limits their growth space.
But after actual exploration, Ke Lan discovered that there was no spatial barrier at the boundary between the forest and the residential area. He went back and forth at the boundary without encountering any hindrance.
"Don't you think this place is very similar to the core area of the Gray Mist Forest? No matter how thick the fog is, it won't invade that square even a little bit... It's the same here. No matter how dense these trees are, they won't cross the line even a little bit."
"Maybe some kind of restrictive measures are still in effect, just like the automatic cleaning robot that is still in operation." Ke Lan responded.
"Speaking of which, that robot is quite strange. The building is rotten like that, but the chip inside the robot is still working... I think we should follow the robot to investigate, or just dismantle it..." said Sanshisan.
"Let's explore the forest first... I think we might find more in the western half."
As Ke Lan spoke, he walked into the forest... However, after taking a few steps, an electric current suddenly burst out from the depths of his mind, and the familiar feeling surged up again.
"Wait a minute." Ke Lan raised his hand to signal Thirty-three to stay where they were. "This place... another memory fragment has been activated in my brain!"
"This forest can also trigger your memory fragments?!" Although Thirty-Three was a little surprised, there was a hint of joy on his face. Compared with the "Neto" who liked to tell riddles and the "Neto" who kept asking them to look up, Ke Lan's memory fragments were much more reliable - since entering the nest city, the most important and detailed information they had obtained was provided by Ke Lan's memory fragments.
"What did you see?" Thirty-Three asked anxiously.
"A man with a crude weapon."
The memory fragments triggered by Ke Lan this time were similar to Ze Luo's "déjà vu". He could clearly "see" that thirty meters away from him, under a big tree that was so thick that four or five people could hug it, there was a young man leaning against it, panting.
Although that location is now filled with a large number of bushes, Ke Lan can still see a phantom, passing through the real bushes and staying at that location.
Unlike Ze Luo's "sense of vision", the character in Ke Lan's memory fragments did not have that kind of blurring fog. He could clearly see that this was a human being who looked exactly like an Earthling. Judging from his figure and appearance, this young man was probably between eighteen and twenty-five years old. He was wearing a set of pure white clothes and pants that were a little weird compared to the ordinary residents of the Ark, but very ordinary compared to the strange costumes at fashion shows. In his hand, he was holding a hunting knife that seemed to be a modified Gurkha saber. He leaned against a tree trunk, gasping for breath.
