Volume 5: Bottomless Sinkhole Chapter 284 Underground Plaza
However, just in case, Ke Lan still made a second-hand preparation - he folded the winter clothes into a ball and tied it around his ankles with a rope - although he couldn't wear the heavy winter clothes in the narrow cave in front of him, if the passage behind him suddenly became wider, this winter clothes dragging behind his feet would come in handy.
"Be careful. If anything goes wrong, come back quickly." Layton said worriedly, "I always feel that—"
"Stop!" Hearing that Layton was about to speak again, Ke Lan quickly stopped him, "Just wait for me here. If I don't come back within fifteen minutes, it means that I have made a special discovery in there... If I don't come back within two hours, don't wait for me."
After saying that, Ke Lan put the flashlight in his mouth, lay down, and crawled into the cave using his hands and feet.
The inner wall of the cave was very smooth, as if it had been polished with polishing paste, which made it quite difficult for Ke Lan to crawl. His elbows that were supporting himself on the ground would slip from time to time. In one minute, he only crawled less than ten meters.
The only thing to be thankful for is that the air quality in the cave is pretty good, the oxygen content is not low, no toxic or harmful gases are detected, and there is no particularly unpleasant odor . There is only a faint earthy smell.
"Could this cave be the nest of that thing?" Ke Lan thought to himself, but at this time, he had completely lost any trace of the pink meat paste - fortunately, there was only one passage in this cave and no branches, so there was no need to worry about losing it.
There was a constant noisy sound of electricity coming from the headphones. Ke Lan tried to call the team channel twice using the short-range radio, but received no response... Obviously, there was a strong interference field in this cave. Even if they brought a survey robot, they could not control it remotely using the radio.
After crawling for nearly a hundred meters, the interior of the cave actually became wider. The diameter of the cave instantly increased from less than half a meter to more than two meters, and the cave wall was no longer as smooth as before, but became rough sand and gravel.
Although it was still narrow and cramped, at least Ke Lan could put on her cold-proof clothing and stand up. The risk of hypothermia was instantly eliminated. Moreover, the physical energy consumption of walking was much less than crawling.
Ke Lan turned his head to look at the small cave. He noticed that there was a circle of sandstone around the cave entrance that had a glass-like texture. He originally thought that the inner wall of the cave became so smooth because the "Meat Monster" often crawled in it, but now it seems that this is not the reason.
The rock layers on the inner side of the front cave have undergone a vitrification transition, which means that this cave did not exist originally and was later "burned" by something with extremely high temperature.
To vitrify rock, the temperature must be at least around two thousand degrees. With the level of human technology, it is not difficult to achieve this temperature. The difficulty lies in how to accurately control such a high-temperature object so that it can drill a hole more than a hundred meters deep and with almost the same diameter from front to back inside the rock without destroying the structure of the rock itself. As far as Ke Lan knows, apart from the research institute, there are definitely no more than five engineering companies on the Ark that can do this.
However, if it were the Alpha civilization, this kind of thing would not be worth making a fuss about.
At this moment, a loud burst of gunfire suddenly echoed in the cave!
Ke Lan's first reaction was to lie down on the ground immediately, but he soon realized that the gunshots were not real - just like the sounds he heard in the abyss of the sea , they were all illusions in his mind.
"Gunshots? Why are there gunshots here?"
Ke Lan got up from the ground with some confusion. Over the years, the relic hunters on the Ark had indeed discovered individual weapons of the Alpha ...but the problem was that most of the individual weapons of the Alpha civilization were energy weapons, and the few that used solid ammunition were kinetic weapons...and the gunshots were clearly made by firearms that used gunpowder. Ke Lan could even distinguish the unique gunshots of the "Type 01" assault rifle and some older models of guns.
This was not the first time he had heard of this kind of "hallucination", but in the past, when this kind of "hallucination" appeared, it was always some information related to the Alpha civilization, and there had never been any content related to humans as an "alien species".
This is the first time.
"Strange... If we are still in the dream world, this kind of thing is not difficult to understand..." Ke Lan said to himself, "And why can we hear gunshots here? Is it because some special 'trigger conditions' are met? Or... is it that the gunshots of the mercenaries before were preserved in this 'cave' for some reason?"
Ke Lan had read a story online that in a certain valley on Earth, whenever there was thunder and rain, the sound of war horses neighing and weapons clashing would echo in the valley, as if there were two ghost armies fighting in the valley. The residents living near the valley were terrified by this, and they called this phenomenon "ghost soldiers passing through." The rumor became more and more bizarre, and even attracted many experts and researchers to this place.
After surveys and investigations by experts, the source of the sound was basically determined: first, because there are a large number of weathered rocks in the valley, the whistling sound of high-speed airflow passing through the pores of the rocks was mistakenly heard as the neighing of war horses; second, the rock structure in the valley is mainly quartz and magnetite, coupled with the static electricity generated during thunderstorms, which turns this valley into a huge "tape recorder" that records all kinds of noisy sounds.
The effect of recording using minerals and lightning is naturally not comparable to that of a real recorder. There will be serious distortion, and the distorted sound will sound even more weird, which is in line with people's imagination of ancient battlefields and undead armies.
Could it be that this cave also has a similar recording function?
As for the source of the sound, the mercenary also mentioned that when they faced the meat paste that suddenly emerged from the deep ditch, they poured a large amount of ammunition, and the deafening gunshots continued to echo in the cave... It must have been at that time that they were "recorded" by this cave.
Ke Lan continued to walk into the cave. Not long after he walked, there was a right-angle turn of almost ninety degrees in the cave. After turning this corner, an empty underground square came into Ke Lan's sight!
