Chapter 238 — The Last Survivors
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
As more and more clues came to light, the secrets hidden within this ancient facility seemed to be gradually drawing back their veil, and for a man of Gao Yang's wide experience, piecing together the truth of what had once happened here from those clues did not seem difficult.
It was obvious that this ancient ruin, built in the late Spark Era, was not as simple as he had first guessed. It was no frontier outpost, and not merely a forbidden research institute for studying the secrets of the gods. The hidden facility before him, situated within some kind of alternate space, revealed its true purpose: it was a kind of "fortress," built to withstand the calamity and preserve human civilization.
Whether it was the "divine abomination research" conducted in the mountain ruins, the sealed flesh of a god, or these dried corpses before him and the last communication from within the Empire's borders, all of it was evidence of a struggle against the calamity.
That calamity was most likely the "Demon Tide" that had destroyed the Kingdom of Gondor seven hundred years ago.
His earlier conjecture was confirmed: as early as the Spark Era, the archmages of Gondor had already recognized the existence of the Demon Tide and made preparations for it three hundred years in advance. Given the scale this ruin displayed, the whole undertaking must have had the backing of the Gondorian royal house of that time. Yet many things still baffled him:
If the people of the Spark Era had already recognized the Demon Tide, why had that intelligence not survived? Why was it that when the Demon Tide truly erupted seven hundred years ago, the human empires were caught completely off guard and collapsed across the board with scarcely any resistance?
If the information stored in the communication device had been sent from within the Empire's borders after the Demon Tide erupted, then plainly the imperial royal house of that time still knew of this frontier fortress's existence—and they should therefore have known long before that the Demon Tide was coming. So why had they never taken action?
Or was it... that the Gondorian royal house had in fact taken action, but no evidence or word of it had ever come down to posterity?
That was not impossible, for the Demon Tide had erupted with the imperial capital at its center, destroying the entire kingdom's communication network in the very first instant. After that, no one had come out of the Empire's heartland alive. Even if the Gondorian emperor of that time had done something, likely no one would ever know...
But in any case—a disaster that scholars had predicted a thousand years earlier, whose imperial rulers had then carried out privately a "preservation project" on such a massive scale, and yet in the end no intelligence whatsoever had been preserved, so that when the disaster truly broke out seven hundred years ago the whole Empire was utterly bewildered—this was truly hard to comprehend.
Even reasoning along the lines of "they suppressed the news to prevent panic," Gao Yang found it too fantastic to credit.
Beyond that, he was also curious about the "survivors" in this facility. The mountain ruins had been sealed a thousand years ago, and the Demon Tide had formally erupted three hundred years after that. Across those full three centuries in between, had the survivors in the facility simply kept on living?
That utterly exceeded the limit of human lifespan. Even mighty transcendent professionals could use magic to extend their lives, but only by two or three hundred years; yet judging by the content of that communication, the people in this facility had not only lived past three hundred years, but had continued living on after that?
Though in fact, they had all died...