Volume 2: The Undersea City Chapter 81 The Second Remains
Ke Lan only felt that a bunch of seemingly plausible clues were tangled together in his mind, like a ball of wool with no end. He wanted to analyze it, but couldn't find a place to start.
Every clue seems to point to the city on the bottom of the sea, but the information currently available about that city is basically zero... As for the hatchery that Ke Lan mistakenly entered, it is shrouded in heavy fog.
What exactly happened to the advance agents of the Security Bureau, what happened to these soldiers of the exploration force decades ago, and what happened to him when he was unconscious... As long as he could figure out these three things, many problems could be solved, but the problem was... the dead couldn't speak, and he, who had lost consciousness, was not much different from a dead person.
After putting Collins' mission log and the blank photo into his pocket, Ke Lan took the bottle of anti-radiation medicine that had long expired and continued along the coastline. The best way to figure out the situation was to find a place that was high enough. However, all Ke Lan could see was an endless expanse of desolate Gobi desert, without even a single thing to serve as a landmark. If he went ahead and walked in, he would easily get lost.
The light from the stars shone through layers of clouds, forming a faint shadow under Ke Lan - Ke Lan's watch was broken , but at least an hour had passed since he woke up, but the angle of the shadow had never changed. The trick of relying on the shadow to judge the direction was completely impractical in this strange place.
"Why does it seem like it's always noon... It's impossible for the polar day phenomenon to occur in this place?" Ke Lan looked up at the sky and muttered to himself.
The compass didn't work, the positioning device didn't work, and there were no plants in this place - none of the conventional means of determining direction could be used.
"The coast... the Gobi Desert... the vertical distance is at least 20 kilometers, and the horizontal distance is unknown, but it will be greater than 20 kilometers..." Ke Lan tried his best to recall the Alpha Star topographic map he had seen before, but in his impression, there seemed to be no ...
First of all, the north coast can be ruled out. About one-third of the northernmost part of the Central Sea is permafrost, with glaciers thousands of kilometers long extending all the way to the land. Even the ramming horn of the Pioneer cannot break through the thick ice.
The possibility of the south coast is not high either. It is the largest swamp wetland on the entire Alpha planet, home to a large number of dangerous indigenous creatures. Human exploration of this swamp area has reached less than 5%.
As for the west and east coasts, although the environment is not as extreme as the north and south, it is also an area of undulating hills. If there is such a large area of wasteland embedded in the middle, it will be very conspicuous on the map. However, there is no such "embedded wasteland" on any map that Ke Lan has seen.
Moreover... considering the distance between the Pioneer's anchor point and the coast, Ke Lan has no chance of relying on the ocean current to reach any coast in just a few hours, not even the nearest west coast.
Ke Lan estimated that he was most likely drifted to a deserted island.
After walking for about twenty minutes, the second set of human remains appeared in Ke Lan's sight...but compared to Sergeant Collins, this set of remains looked even more horrifying - all four limbs of this set of remains had been removed, and a half-meter-long stalagmite pierced through his chest, nailing his torso to the ground.
The top of the stalagmite was covered with an old-fashioned tactical helmet. Ke Lan was not unfamiliar with this scene. Many soldiers who died outside and whose bodies could not be cremated or transported back to the Ark were generally buried on the spot. Their simple tombstones looked like this - a piece of wood or a stone pillar. If neither was available, a gun could be inserted into the ground instead. Then the deceased's helmet was covered on top, and the name of the deceased, date of death, and information such as the unit to which he belonged were engraved on the side of the helmet.
But the body exposed in the wilderness has not been buried at all. Instead, the tombstone has nailed the body to the ground. This behavior seems like it was done by the enemy of the deceased.
