Volume 5: Bottomless Sinkhole Chapter 257 Nine Stone Chambers
"What should we do now? Leave this guy here, or take him with us?" The hound climbed up from Cao Feng's body and asked Ke Lan.
"Let's put it here first..." Ke Lan pointed to the two stone doors on the east and west sides that had not been opened yet, "I think there are stone chambers like this behind these two stone doors. The others are likely inside."
If the stone chamber where Cao Feng is located is taken as the reference point, the south side is the stone chamber where Ke Lan was when she woke up, and the north side is the direction from which the hound came. The stone chambers of Ke Lan and the hound have only one door, leading to the chamber where Cao Feng is lying. If one wants to continue exploring the ruins, only the east and west sides are accessible.
During the following period of time, Ke Lan and Hound moved forward step by step, as if they were playing some kind of chess game, exploring the surrounding stone chambers one by one - just as Ke Lan expected, in these stone chambers, they found several other teammates and two interns from the Polaris Hunting Group.
Leighton and Zhuoligetu were in relatively better and more stable conditions, but when Ivan was found by them, the situation was completely the opposite - he had already rolled off the stone platform onto the floor, his facial expression was extremely hideous, his limbs were waving around randomly, and from time to time, a low, meaningless roar came out of his throat... Ke Lan had no choice but to inject him with the dream date preparation and neutralizer, causing him to fall into a deep sleep.
What surprised the Hound was that Asano Akira, who was usually calm and taciturn, was now deeply trapped in a nightmare - although his performance was not as crazy as Ivan, his heart rate rose to more than 180 beats per second, and he was in a very dangerous state.
"I can understand that Ivan would have nightmares... He must have dreamed that he was controlled by the Seed of Erosion and turned into that disgusting tentacle monster... But I really can't understand Asano Akira. I think he has a pretty good mental state..." The Hound said with some confusion.
"He must have dreamed about that experiment..." Ke Lan said thoughtfully, "That should be the biggest shadow in his heart."
"Experiment? Are you talking about that...secret force?" Hound had also heard of this, but he didn't know as much as Ke Lan, and Asano Akira didn't like to talk much, so he didn't ask about the details.
Everyone has a past that they don't want to talk about, and Hound understands this very well. As long as these things don't affect the team, he won't deliberately expose people's scars.
"He told me that in the troop that participated in the experiment... many people died, and many people went crazy. The closer they were to the 'critical point', the more miserable their fate would be... and he was the worst among the many experimental subjects, so he only lost the ability of the visual center of his brain." Ke Lan sighed, "Although I don't know the details of the experiment, I know that such an experiment is definitely inhumane."
…
In addition to Layton and his three companions, there were two hunters from the Polaris Hunting Group, one male and one female. From their armbands, we could tell that the male hunter was named Martin and the female was named Qin Zhao.
Including Cao Feng, these three hunters are very young. You can tell at a glance that they are no more than 20 years old. They probably just finished the compulsory education stage in Ark and directly applied for the professional training class for relic hunters. In this respect, they are exactly the same as Ke Lan back then.
It’s just that Ke Lan started working on his own after graduating from the training class, while they accidentally boarded the “black ship” called the Polaris Hunting Group.
Even if they don't go crazy after completing this mission, they will be regarded as "cheap consumables" by the Polaris Hunting Group and added to the advance team with the highest casualty rate... Only those who come out alive from the advance team will be accepted as formal members by the hunting group.
Not only the North Star Hunting Group, but most of the big hunting groups with financial backgrounds did the same thing. They ruthlessly squeezed the value of these newcomers and did not even let go of the last piece of rotten meat on the corpse...
Many experienced hunters use the term “cannon fodder” to refer to these trainee hunters. But from another perspective, they themselves have all been “cannon fodder” before… Only those who survive can become true elites.
Compared to these "cannon fodder" hired by the big hunting groups, the starting stage for lone hunters like Ke Lan is even more difficult. Although they are not under the control of the big hunting groups, they also cannot obtain the resources provided by those big hunting groups. Whether it is professional training, relic intelligence or various equipment and consumables, they have to find ways to solve them on their own. If they don't have some part-time jobs, then their life will be even more difficult than that of the "cannon fodder".
"These brats are so unlucky. They are sent to such a hellish place on their first mission." The hound said with some sympathy as he looked at the three trainee hunters lying on the ground.
" They were lucky... I remember there were more than a dozen people caught in the avalanche. I guess not even a complete body was left of them." Ke Lan said.
"Forget it, let's think about how to leave this damn place."
He and his hunting dog discovered a total of nine stone chambers, which were connected to each other, forming two parallel crosses, or in other words, the radical of the Chinese character “艹”.
Apart from the stone doors between these stone chambers, Ke Lan and the hound did not find any other passages - that is to say, these nine stone chambers are a completely enclosed space...
"I think there must be a secret passage. If it is a confined space, how did we get in here? It can't be some kind of space teleportation technology, right?"
"That's hard to say." Ke Lan said with a straight face. The strange experience in the underwater city gave him every reason to believe that the Alpha civilization had mastered mature space technology, but humans had not yet found any evidence related to it.
"If that's the case, we're doomed..." The Hound glanced at the packages piled on the ground. "What we lack most now is food and water. We only brought what's in the emergency kit, and the three kids only had two bags of energy drinks and a few energy bars. Together, they're only enough for nine people for three days... I thought about using explosives to blow up the outer wall of the stone chamber... But from the results of the drilling survey, the outer layer of these nine stone chambers is at least two meters thick, all of which are high-density magmatic rocks. Just for this two-meter-thick rock layer, the amount of explosives required to blast it must be at least one hundred units..."
"Moreover, we are currently unable to determine whether there is a passage behind the rock formation. Even if there is a passage, we don't know which stone chamber it is in and which direction..." Ke Lan continued what the Hound said, "With the resources we have, we can only gather 300 standard units of explosives at most. In other words, we only have three chances."
The Hound frowned and paced back and forth in the stone chamber: "Your estimate is still conservative. Two meters thick is just the limit of our detection. God knows how thick this rock layer is. If it is ten or eight meters thick, even if all the bombs are piled in one direction and detonated, we will not be able to get out."
"When these stone chambers were designed, they probably took into account the possibility that the things trapped inside might escape by violence... I think our thinking may be wrong." Ke Lan said after thinking for a while.
"Wrong idea?"
"Old Dog, have you ever played games like 'Escape the Room' on the Ark?" Ke Lan suddenly asked.
"I haven't played it, but I've heard people mention it. It seems that those who like to play this game are young people... Wait, what you mean is that these stone chambers are actually a secret room, and as long as we solve the puzzle left by the designer of the secret room, we can escape?"
"I think so." Ke Lan nodded.
"But I think it's a bit far-fetched. Are the Alphas so boring? They caught us here and asked us to play a puzzle game?"
"This secret room was definitely not designed for us. We just happened to fall into it... As for whether the Alphas are that boring, based on my experience in exploring ruins, everything they do has a very clear purpose, but we just can't understand it."
"Okay, let's just treat this as a secret room... Have you ever played a secret room escape game, Ke Lan?"
"I haven't played the live-action version." Ke Lan shook her head. "But I have played a lot of video games with this theme. Many of the secret rooms are designed based on the Alpha Ruins that exist in reality. There are paid resource packages available for download in the forum. If you want, I can send you a few next time."
"Only if we can get out." The hound walked around the stone platform. "Although I have never played that kind of game, I have seen pigs run even if I haven't eaten pork. In my impression, there should be some mechanisms in this kind of secret room - such as rotating vases, sliding bookshelves and other things. But the problem is that these nine stone rooms are empty. The only thing that can be considered a 'thing' is these stone platforms..."
As the hound spoke, he suddenly stretched out his foot and kicked the stone platform.
"But there are no clues or mechanisms on this thing, and the bottom is directly integrated with the ground. It's impossible to move it."
The stone chamber where Ke Lan and the hound were located was the one where Cao Feng was first discovered. Now the other seven sleeping people had been moved into this stone chamber, and the stone platform in the stone chamber had been studied by Ke Lan and the hound no less than ten times.
"The stone platforms in the other stone chambers are all the same," the hound shrugged helplessly. "I even drilled several holes. These stone platforms are completely solid. There is nothing inside except stone."
"Perhaps the point is not the stone platform..." Ke Lan pondered.
"Not on the stone platform? Then where could it be? The ceiling? The floor? Or the wall?"
"The arrangement of the stone chambers... Old Dog, don't you think the arrangement of these nine stone chambers is very special?"
"Indeed... put together it's exactly the Chinese character for '艹', which fits my current mood... fuck the Alpha aliens..." The Hound just spit out the swear word, and his expression suddenly froze, "Wait, wait, wait--"
He slowly raised his head and looked at Ke Lan in astonishment: "This radical of 艹... It seems that there is such a character in Alpha script! This is definitely not a coincidence! Ke Lan, what does this radical of 艹 mean in Alpha script?"
"...I can't be sure." Ke Lan shook his head, "Because I can't be sure whether these nine stone chambers are composed of the characters of the Alpha civilization, so I can't understand the meaning. This is the special feature of the Alpha characters. If it is not placed in a special context, it is just a bunch of meaningless scribbles... This is also why I can't teach this language to you."
"Does this single character have no meaning?" the hound asked unwillingly.
"Yes, but it has thousands of meanings... Moreover, this is not a single character, but a divisible phrase consisting of three characters."
"What the hell..."
"In addition to the special arrangement of the stone chamber, I also discovered a problem." Ke Lan continued.
"What's the problem?"
"Six people are in a stone chamber with only one stone door on the outside, and three people are in the stone chamber in the middle that is connected to each other. These three people happen to be the three who are trapped the deepest in the dream: Cao Feng, Ivan, and Asano Akira... I don't know if this is a coincidence..."
