Chapter 71: Did you hear that?
Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations
Editor: Karai
The snowy peaks were deserted, and once again the unmanned probes were deployed to scan the mountains for buildings left behind by humans.
The probe did not find anything on the surface, and the overly thick mountains blocked the waves from penetrating deep enough to confirm that there might be space inside the mountain, but it was impossible to determine whether it was a natural hollow or a trace of human technology.
Lin Xu stared at the three-dimensional projection of the mountain peaks drawn by the probe on the light screen and thought about where he would choose the entrance to the base if it were him.
The outdoor environment of Earth 3,000 years ago was filled with strong radiation after a nuclear war, and hiding the base in the mountain was a smart and economical solution, but they had to dig deep and make sure the ground was in a stable state and would not collapse. Suitable water and ventilation conditions were also needed.
On top of the snowy peaks, life signs are scarce, but mutant plants and animals that would actively attack humans and zombies would not be deterred by the cold wind, and the entrance to the base must be easy to defend and difficult to attack.
The entrance to the base had to be easy to defend, and close to the route where the monolith was brought down by ice erosion.
Lin Xu used the scan map to circle a few directions, sent out the drone probe again, and found the entrance to the base covered by the ice fall in one of them. Lin Xu decided to go in.
Heinrich didn’t ask Lin Xu for a reason, but had Arnold send up more weapons and equipment, and the two of them flew the craft around the steep, towering rocks and landed in the clearing next to the base entrance.
Here there was a thick layer of ancient ice, enough to support the weight of the craft on the ground.
The entrance to the new base was built very close to the top of the snowy peak, but a short walk to the west was a pass that allowed the base’s personnel to quickly pass to the sides of the ridge.
However, that was the story from 3,000 years ago, and now the monument bearing the new base’s name had been carried down the mountain by snow and ice, and the dark gray entrance was covered by a frozen waterfall of ice that had built up layer by layer, forming vertical frosted lines.
Lin Xu checked the snow conditions above and below the icefall and confirmed that opening the icefall would not cause an avalanche, and then worked with Heinrich to cut through the ice with the power of a powered exoskeleton to enhance its functionality.
The gate was revealed in its entirety, and the perennial ice seal made it extremely well preserved, using some kind of dark gray alloy with a rough surface.
Heinrich watched as Lin Xu’s hand brushed over the door, just as he had brushed over the monolith, “Shall we pry it open?”
“No.”
Embedded in the left door was an electronic screen with external buttons, something that was almost unheard of in the interstellar era, with only a few remnants from backwater planets on the fringes of the Dionysus region.
The low temperature on the snowy peaks exhausted the battery of the electronic screen long ago making it inoperable. Lin Xu turned around and fumbled around the steel corners on either side of the gate.
The apocalypse base also used electronic systems to control access control, but energy was always a huge headache for the people in charge of the base. In order to avoid the disruption of the access control system caused by the loss of energy supply, it was generally equipped with a mechanical system.
Click – Lin Xu touched a gap, gently pushed in, a round iron cover from the wall popped up, revealing the numbered buttons below. Hopefully, the code he used back then would still work.
Heinrich stood behind Lin Xu, watching him find the button almost intuitively and enter a long series of complex numbers before the alloy door opened with a bang before their eyes, shaken by the ice and snow rustling down.
The wind swirled into the expanding darkness as the doors opened. A long, dark tunnel waited ahead. “You’ve been here before?”
“No.” Lin Xu answered and then pursed his lips and added, “I… I’ve been to the old base that was buried under the lake many years ago. Go inside, be careful, I don’t know how things are on this side.”
What do you mean by many years ago? Heinrich had so many questions about Lin Xu, but at the moment they were all pushed into his chest. He found that Lin Xu’s voice was low but had a sense of suspension, and Lin Xu himself had endless questions that he wanted to find answers to.
Because they could not confirm the air circulation inside the tunnel, the two men put on oxygen masks and went forward with flashlights and light energy guns at the same time.
Lin Xu held the flashlight with his left hand down, the gun with his right hand resting lightly on his left wrist to mitigate possible recoil, his knees slightly bent, and his center of gravity lowered cautiously. Heinrich was almost certain that Lin Xu had received professional training.
Previously he had only known that Lin Xu had extensive combat experience through the fighting skills and combat awareness he had demonstrated in Star Ocean, but that experience may or may not have come from individual summaries.
But Lin Xu currently utilized a gun position that had been widely adopted by the Marine Corps and field law enforcement and was taught as part of the standard curriculum. It wasn’t a specific rule that could be learned by crawling around in a gunfight. Who did he train under?
The alloy doors were open, being filled with a gale of wind. The interior of the tunnel had been warmer than the outside world, and water stains remained on the rough floor, now frozen by the low temperatures brought in by the cold wind, all of which had turned into ice slag.
The door outlined the light into a square, and now, the light of the square gradually faded away from the two, flashlights shooting strong light pierced the thick, cold darkness ahead.
The floor and walls of the tunnel were all unadorned stone walls, and every other section would have metal braces propping up the mountain walls as reinforcement, wearing heavy exoskeletons, and the sound of the two men’s falling footsteps echoed extremely clearly in the long, narrow space. Other than that, there was no other sound, even the sound of wind was small.
Lin Xu smelled a cold, rusty odor. The oxidized layer of the alloy bracket was rusted, a layer of purplish-red rust wrapped around the edges.
The tunnel was like a long snake’s esophagus, narrow and dark, with no end in sight, and the end of the flashlight’s light was as submerged as it was in the darkness that could devour a person.
In fact, the flashlight light in the exploration was shining to the stone wall on both sides of the lamp post, but they could not find the switch, and did not confirm whether the human mountain base still had energy to light the wall lamp.
Just as Lin Xu felt the mechanics of walking through this tunnel almost made one forget the passage of time, a breeze greeted him and the flowing air indicated a new space ahead.
He and Heinrich looked at each other and, in silence, quickened their pace and moved forward into the wind.
The column of light from the flashlight suddenly broke off and dissipated into the air –
The bright light came to the surface, making the two people who emerged from the darkness blurred vision for a moment, and after gradually recovering, what came into view was a huge ring-shaped space.
Through visual rough estimates, the ring space covered an area the size of a standard stadium, and the height of the interior from top to bottom approaching 100 meters, like an enlarged version of the ancient Roman Colosseum, the tunnel could lead to a ring belt corridor located in the middle of the space. The cold stone and steel were silent in the daylight, and the tiny dust floated and fell in the light and silence.
Lin Xu’s expression almost went blank as he walked to the balustrade of the circular corridor and looked down. A three-tiered lectern was visible on one side of the central circular space, with a smooth stone wall behind it stretching diagonally upward, its pale gray expanse seeming to carry the weight of the speaker, ready to topple over and crush him.
But there was a giant flag hanging from the uppermost part of the stone wall to slow down this oppressive feeling, a dark red faded flag on the tattered flag poll, with a vaguely visible diamond-shaped logo of the East Region base. The empty space under the lectern is filled with water stains, and the metal floor slowly grew a purplish rust at low temperatures, making it even more sparse.
It was a work delivered by the last industrial and technological forces of Earth humanity, accompanied by an eerie combination of unadorned grit, oppression and cohesion. It had been abandoned for years. Nature and time were invading, but had not yet managed to destroy it completely.
But there were no bodies, no signs of battle in the huge space, even the rows of seats under the lectern were placed in neat horizontal and vertical lines, only tranquility, chill and metal flowing through.
If the layout and construction habits of the old base were followed, the personnel living area would be on the upper level of the building.
“This way.” Lin Xu called out to Heinrich and went forward to follow the circular corridor to find stairs all the way up, and after three floors, entered a closed circular corridor with rooms lined up face to face on both sides of the corridor. Each room had a metal card nameplate in the center of the door, marking the room’s owner.
Lin Xu stood in front of the door of the nearest room, marked with six names on the nameplate, the door lock opened with an ordinary key lock, he raised his light energy gun to the lock hole and shot.
After a dull gunshot, the lock was completely destroyed, Lin Xu pushed open the door and was confronted with an ordinary, small room with three bunk beds and six desks.
There were no bedding or personal items in sight, but the low temperatures and lack of oxygen and microbial conditions in the snowy mountain base made the beds, desks and chairs fairly well preserved in appearance.
Heinrich received Lin Xu’s gaze, also using the light energy gun to destroy the door lock and push open the door. The same layout, the same emptiness. Where have all the humans who once lived in this base gone? Did they join the Ark fleet and leave?
But what Lin Xu could confirm was that Imperial’s cultural lineage was so different from that of the Eastern Region that even the official Imperial language had obvious traces of the Romance language family. There were few traces of the Eastern Region in the Empire.
Lin Xu gestured toward Heinrich and the two pushed open three more rooms, confirming that the layout of all six rooms was similar, before climbing up a few floors to find the location of the single room.
Lin Xu’s pace quickened as he checked the names on the nameplates one by one, trying to see if any of them were familiar to him.
Suddenly, he stopped in front of a door, and looking at the name on the nameplate, Lin Xu’s eyes widened slightly, even reaching out his fingers to press the nameplate, proving once again that his eyes were right.
–Yan Yuan.
When the chief physician was in charge of Lin Xu’s psychic transformation, Yan Yuan was the assistant physician beside the chief physician, born during the war years, very young, yet smart enough to be a part of the transformation program at a young age. Lin Xu remembered Yan Yuan as a good kid who loved to laugh and was a bit timid.
“Want to open this door?” Heinrich noticed that Lin Xu was almost frozen in place.
“Hmm.” Lin Xu nodded very lightly, and Heinrich stepped forward and sharply lifted his gun to destroy the lock, pushing open the alloy door for Lin Xu.
The flashlight light fell into the room, illuminating the blank single bed panel and the desk with some paper products on it. Heinrich touched Lin Xu’s arm to remind him that he could go in.
Several notebooks were neatly folded in the top left corner of the desk, so it was clear that the owner of the room had packed everything up before leaving, and was not in a hurry.
Lin Xu pulled out the one with the most pages and flipped it open gently so as not to break the crisp, yellowed pages. The ink was fading as time passed, but Lin Xu could already confirm that this was the handwriting of the Yan Yuan he knew.
Yan Yuan had learned the doctor’s handwriting from the chief physician, and the scribbles flew so fast that Lin Xu needed to bring his eyes close to the page for a long time before he could read it.
“Zizi hiss-“
The sudden sound made Lin Xu look up at Heinrich, who was standing in front of two tin safes in the corner, laser knife in hand, and he directly used the laser to burn open the safes and take out the file folders inside.
Heinrich met Lin Xu’s gaze with a cold, solemn expression, his shoulders and back muscles tense, as if he was examining something. Lin Xu’s eyelashes trembled.
“Zi…hiss…” The red glowing laser blade was put away, and nothing was cut further.
Heinrich and Lin Xu faced each other, no longer engaging in any conversation or movement.
“Ho… Ho hiss…” But the strange sound was still coming from the dark and dreary corridor.
“Did you hear that?” In the cold light of the flashlight, Lin Xu made an oral gesture toward Heinrich.
