Chapter 353 — What the Hell Is This, a Poem?
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Gao Yang, safely within the borders of the Cecil Territory, had no idea what that Miss ylittlepony had gotten up to after she left. At this moment, his entire attention was fixed on the Eternal Slate before him—or rather, on a certain ancient information-storage medium.
Amber stood beside him, eyes wide with curiosity as she stared at the metal plate in Gao Yang's hand. "It's really a different shape from the last one!" she muttered.
Then she muttered something else. "But come to think of it, you traded that hunk of metal scrap to someone for an Eternal Slate... is that really okay?"
"Value depends on human need. To us it's metal scrap, because we happen to be sitting on a whole pile of the same stuff—we even have sample gods on hand. But to anyone outside our circle, it's a transcendent artifact on par with the Eternal Slate," Gao Yang said without so much as a flicker of expression.
Amber pursed her lips. "Your talent for spouting nonsense off the top of your head beats even Pi Yun's."
Gao Yang merely smiled and said nothing, though he felt every word he'd said was true. Were divine flesh and blood precious? Toss even a tiny scrap of the stuff to the great churches and every denomination would be beating each other's brains out over it. But Tyr didn't see it that way—those deep-sea harmony gods could polish off several dozen tons of divine corpses at a single party...
He waved a hand and told Amber to keep watch beside him. "I'm going to try communicating with this Eternal Slate. You stand guard."
"Hey, now that you mention it, I've noticed I'm forever standing guard for you every other day," Amber said, agreeing readily enough. Then she perked up. "And knowing you crawled up out of a grave, I get this feeling of keeping vigil over a corpse every single time..."
This one never failed to add plenty of useless chatter to every job.
Gao Yang paid no attention to Amber's grumbling beside him. By now he had already begun releasing his spiritual power, and the Eternal Slate in his hand produced a resonance in the very next instant that was intimately familiar to him.
Along with the illusion that the slate was warming slightly, Gao Yang felt his spirit peel away from his body once more. A kind of transcendent perception descended upon him, and in that drifting, indescribable state, he suddenly sensed some brief fragments of information surfacing in his mind...
He focused his mind to listen to the content of that information, but when it emerged, he was left utterly dumbfounded:
"...Do not lose yourselves in this illusory, tranquil long night... the curtain of night will be broken in the end...
"...Do not wallow in your warm cradle... the cradle will one day overturn...
"...Do not slumber in the sanctuary of the mind... the mind's sanctuary will in time become unbreakable shackles...
"Set forth, before the stars begin to twinkle; set forth, before the long night ends...
"Set forth soon, or daylight will fall upon you..."
After this information—which resembled nothing so much as a little poem—came a long stretch of background noise, and an unbearable sense of spiritual emptiness.
In this state of spiritual transcendence, with no up or down and no perception of any kind, Gao Yang's thoughts were still turning. He felt a jolt of astonishment: that was it?
The second Eternal Slate recorded nothing but a poem?
What did this poem mean? Who had left it behind? Those Celestial Fleet ships that had routed the gods in ages past? What was the meaning of their leaving behind this poem?
Could it also be a little incidental display of the artistic talent of super-advanced aliens...