Volume 2: The Undersea City Chapter 89: Underground Maze
"We are lucky. Ruins of Alpha civilization of this scale are usually full of traps , but there doesn't seem to be any traps here..."
"Perhaps it is because of the existence of that monster that Alpha has relaxed defenses here..."
After about two minutes of silence, a cry of surprise suddenly rang out.
“Jesus!…What…what is this?!”
The recording ends here and the indicator light turns orange.
Ke Lan's cheeks twitched slightly, and a classic Chinese curse was stuck in his throat - there were two types of people he hated the most in his life. The first type was those who only said half of what they wanted to say, and the second type...
"This is really bullshit, why is this information incomplete?"
The information Ke Lan wanted - including how the team came to the island, how they discovered that the stalactites in the cave could restrain the seeds of erosion, and why they chose to commit mass suicide - these things were not mentioned in the recording. As for the information mentioned in it, even if Ke Lan didn't get the black box, he could basically guess it...
Not only that, there is no clue at all about the underwater stone pillar with a giant eye carved on it drawn in Collins' diary, and the same sentence "leave the bed" that appeared in three different places at different times. Even if Ke Lan wanted to investigate, he didn't know where to start.
"I have absolutely no clue..." Ke Lan squatted down in frustration, but when his eyes swept over the remains again, he discovered an abnormality that he had not noticed before -
Ke Lan suddenly jumped up from the ground and subconsciously drew his gun!
Among this pile of remains, there is one skeleton...the bones at its chest and ribs are completely black!
Although the side effects of some drugs can also cause the dead body's bones to turn black, the blackness is not so thorough... These black bones are like they were soaked in ink...
Ke Lan had only seen the same black skeleton in one place, and that was in the bottom cargo hold of the Pioneer icebreaker!
But this black skeleton just lay quietly on the ground - it did not "come alive", which made Ke Lan feel a little relieved, but he couldn't help feeling a little scared: if this black skeleton was the same as the one encountered in the cargo hold, he would probably have been killed by a sneak attack long ago.
Black skeletons... underwater cities... secret words of unknown meaning... these visions were connected by an invisible thread. Ke Lan felt that she was getting closer and closer to the truth... but the closer she got, the stronger the feeling of uneasiness that came from her biological instinct became...
He walked to the black skeleton, put the flashlight in his mouth, put on a pair of gloves, and carefully dug the skeleton out of the pile of bones.
Only the sternum, ribs and two-thirds of the spine of this skeleton turned black. Its skull, limbs and pelvis still retained a pale color, and the finger bones did not mutate into those terrifying bone claws.
"Why does it feel very similar to the second remains on the coastline... The mutation process also stopped halfway..."
Ke Lan checked the scene several times but did not find anything similar to stalagmites.
"It's different from the cell assimilation mechanism of the Seed of Corrosion... This mutation should be interrupted by the death of the infected body. It doesn't have a 'core' as the main body like the Seed of Corrosion... But the black skeleton we encountered before was also incomplete - the head was cut in half horizontally. As a human, it must be dead, but why is the situation of that skeleton completely different..."
Ke Lan rubbed his temple vigorously.
"Is it because of individual differences? Or did the black skeleton get damaged after it had completed its mutation and turned into that appearance?"
" I feel like the second possibility is more likely..."
"It would be great if I had the analytical instruments found in biological laboratories..." However, Ke Lan changed his mind and felt that even if he was given the instruments, he would not be able to use them - that kind of high-tech precision equipment would probably take an ordinary person a long time to figure out how to start it unless they were professionals who had received years of training.
He used a knife to scrape off a few pieces of bones as samples and put them away together with the black box. Then he walked around the camp twice. After making sure that there was nothing new, he continued to walk deeper into the cave.
Due to the sudden interruption of the recording, Ke Lan is now unable to confirm whether this cave leads to the remains of the Alpha civilization that is suspected to be a biological laboratory... After all, from the information revealed in the recording, the rock well they found is not at this end of the island... If the ruins and the cave are connected , then the length of this cave is a bit too exaggerated.
If calculated based on the distance on the ground, it would be at least twenty kilometers.
And this is the straight-line distance. If the underground situation is a little more complicated, this number is far from enough...
Finally, what Ke Lan was most worried about happened - more than 300 meters away from the camp, four forks in the road appeared in his sight.
An underground maze... This is very common in karst landforms, but it is also what Ke Lan least wants to see...
He walked past the four forks in the road one by one, but did not find any signs like the one at the entrance of the cave.
If this was an ordinary cave, he might be able to judge from the traces that the entrance was the one the team had passed through, but this was a karst cave. Decades had passed and the surface of the rock had long been eroded beyond recognition. Even if there were footprints, they could not be seen at all.
Getting lost underground is no small matter. The dark and cramped space will greatly weaken your sense of direction, and at the same time eat away at your physical strength, patience, and reason bit by bit... As time goes by, you will soon fall into an atmosphere of anxiety and fear... The more this happens, the more difficult it will be to find a way out.
Even the most experienced relic hunters would never take it lightly when facing an underground maze.
Many hunters never came out after entering the maze.
