The lost ancient city is filled with a desolate and lonely atmosphere. The only thing you can hear is the wind blowing past your ears from time to time and the footsteps of other people around you. On the ancient streets covered in dust, Hao Ren and his party are still cautiously exploring .
The data terminal floats at the front of the team, and the scanning beam projected from the surface of the terminal continuously scans every object that looks suspicious or may have the mysteries of the ancient city’s history. The collapsed sculptures and scattered stone slabs are the most valuable among them. , on some of the slabs and clay tablet fragments, the data terminal found the kind of cuneiform writing that Heatherana mentioned.
It's just that most of the text has been almost smoothed by the wind and sand, and often there are no more than three or five recognizable symbols on an item. In the case that there are no words or sentences at all, even the translation system of the data terminal is difficult to understand. deal with.
"These symbols are indeed very similar to the cuneiform characters that were used on the Mesopotamian plains back then," Vivienne looked at the text patterns that the data terminal had collected so far, and these patterns were floating in front of her, "The clay board the standard cuneiform on the slate, and some variant on the slate for ease of engraving, but it's not difficult to convert between the two. . . ”
Hao Ren looked at these ancient characters curiously: "Can you translate them?"
"No," Vivian shook her head, "Although they are indeed cuneiform in form, they are completely different from the cuneiform unearthed by humans in modern times, and I don't have a way to interpret these things in my memory. "
"Bat, do you really not remember this city?" Lily still couldn't forget this question, "Maybe this place is where you slaughtered the city in one crimson moon, why don't you remember?"
"I really don't remember it," Vivienne said with a helpless face, "And the massacre...isn't it in line with my personality? Even when I was insane, I should try to stay away from human settlements before I completely lost control .”
"Let's talk about this kind of historical legacy later." Hao Ren shook his head, looking at the yellow and sandy street ahead, "There is another building that looks like a temple in front of it, and there may be a relatively complete text in it. , we can probably figure out the origin of this city.”
Lily snorted and muttered as she walked up: "Speaking of which, the largest area in this city is the temple. The ancients really wasted all their productivity on this kind of place..."
As Lily said, almost all the buildings with the largest area in this lost ancient city are temples, and they can be recognized at a glance from the appearance: the temple is tall, and its shape is similar to a combination of pyramids and cubes. There are all kinds of mighty sculptures on the upper floor and in front of the main entrance, and these sculptures are also unique. They are images composed of human torso and various beast features, which may reflect the form of religious belief in this mysterious city at that time. In the primitive barbaric age, such brutal and terrifying religious images can be seen everywhere.
These temples occupy almost one-third of the entire city's area—far exceeding normal needs. I really don't know how many subsidiary villages and human servants were needed to support a religious system of this scale.
Now, Hao Ren and his party stood in front of such a temple.
It is not the huge temple in the center of the city, but a smaller temple near the central temple. To get to the central temple, you must pass through the avenue near this building. This "smaller" temple also has a shocking scale. It consists of a huge pyramid-shaped main body and two rectangular subsidiary palaces. The two palaces are arranged in front of the pyramid, like a prostrate lion protruding forward. On the square directly in front of the pyramid, there are two rows of stone statues neatly arranged, guarding the passage leading to the depths of the temple like guards.
Before going to the city's central temple, Hao Ren felt that he should search the subsidiary temples around the central area first, so as not to miss important clues. Although the collapse of the different space is still going on, it will be at least a few days before the complete collapse, and he still has enough time now.
Elizabeth rode on the shoulders of Yzaks, looking around at the magnificent buildings and stone statues, just like the religious stone statues in other parts of the city, these several-meter-high sculptures are also composed of human torsos and beast limbs They have the heads of lions, jackals, and crocodiles, and their bodies are twisted into hideous postures, as if they are ready to fight at any time. After observing for a long time, the little devil came to a conclusion: "Hey—it's ugly."
The little girl who is used to seeing Yzaks' face can say the word "really ugly", which shows that these stone statues are really ugly.
Vivienne still plays the role of historical narrator: "In primitive religious worship, powerful beasts always appear as guards of gods or even as images of gods themselves. There are two reasons for this. On the one hand, ancient humans feared those beasts The power of beasts, they regard the most powerful beasts as beings with special powers like gods, on the other hand, because a large number of the "heterogeneous" who ruled the earth in the earliest days were driven by various beasts and beasts. Warcraft came to subdue humans, and there are even many aliens who are not much better-looking than wild beasts—at least in human aesthetics, these 'primitive gods' are beast gods."
Lolisa listened to Vivienne's explanation without saying a word, and suddenly frowned and looked in a certain direction: "Who?!"
Hao Ren immediately had a weapon in hand: "What's wrong?"
Lolisa stared at the cloud of sand at the end of the street behind her, her eyes slowly turned silvery white like holy flames, but after a while her eyes returned to normal: "It may be an illusion—just now I felt as if someone It's like staring at yourself."
"I don't feel it," Lily shook her ears, "I have keen senses, if I don't feel it, then you must be delusional."
"Probably." Lolisa frowned, and slowly looked away.
The gate of the temple is made of heavy iron wood wrapped with copper skin. It should be the most indestructible gate at that time. However, after thousands of years of wind and sand in different spaces, this gate is still severely decayed. , the remaining tattered door panels crookedly blocked in front of the entrance. Lily stepped forward and threw aside the two door panels weighing half a ton, only to reveal the dark passage inside.
Huozhi was very happy to light up the raging fire, and a group of people stepped into this ancient ruins amidst the flickering fire.
Not long after advancing, they saw huge guard stone statues also appearing on both sides of the corridor.
It is still the weird stone sculpture made of a combination of human body and beast head, still showing a ready-to-go posture. The stone statues inside the temple are a circle smaller than those outside, but they are also more than five meters high. , looks extremely mighty.
"Strange...why are there so many stone statues..." Vivian muttered, frowning.
Hao Ren didn't understand, so he said, "Isn't it normal to have such sculptures in the temple?"
"It's normal to have this kind of sculpture, but this amount is not normal. This has exceeded the scale required for decoration," Vivienne shook her head, "It's really weird and wicked."
At this time, the data terminal flying in front suddenly shouted: "Partner! Partner! The murals here are recognizable!"
Hao Ren hurried over and saw the blue light beam projected by the data terminal sweeping across a colorful relief on the stone wall—the relief was also mottled and eroded so badly that it was almost impossible to see the original appearance with human eyes. Even if experienced archaeologists come here, I am afraid that they will need quite complicated technical means as an aid to restore it. However, compared with the stone and clay tablets that are almost completely polished and fragmented outside the city, this mural is still Many identifiable areas remain.
With the support of the super computing power of the data terminal, these murals were quickly restored, and the text below the murals was slowly pieced together and reorganized, and presented on the stone wall through holographic projection—just like when they were intact.
In the first picture, Hao Ren saw an abstract and strange scene: he saw a very huge creature walking on the ground, or "floating", it was like a beetle with many slender and pointed feet , Extending from the layered body that looks like a stack of bone plates are several pairs of thin and long legs that are completely disproportionate to the body. The pointed feet of this creature step on the ground, but the body is shoulder to shoulder with the sun and the moon —This should be an exaggerated description by the ancients, but it is enough to make people guess how terrifying this beetle-like creature has, and it has such a terrifying body shape, but it can walk on the ground with a few pairs of long, pointed feet , This is enough to show that its body is probably "floating" in mid-air. It either has a large number of floating airbag structures in its body, or it simply has the ability to manipulate gravity.
The first screen used almost all the pages to show the details of this huge creature, and there was only one word under the screen, which was transliterated by the data terminal. Its name was Etos. If nothing unexpected, it should be the name of the huge creature.
The second picture shows the destructive power of this creature: it is surrounded by thunder and lightning, as well as fire meteors falling from the sky, and even the sun and moon are swallowed by this giant beetle, and the beetle's slender pointed Under the feet, there are collapsed city walls and dead humans, which means that this creature has the supernatural power to summon lightning and fire, and it is very likely that it appeared during a solar or lunar eclipse, which destroyed human cities , but humans are powerless against it. Among the corpses, you can even see some extraordinarily tall humanoid creatures with alien features. Those humanoid creatures have patterns like light circles around them. After translating the text under the screen, the data terminal said that those are "old God's corpse.
A creature named Ethos destroyed a "mythical city-state" ruled by aliens.
And when Hao Ren's eyes fell on the third picture, Lily beside him suddenly stood up.
"Did you hear anything?"
The husky girl's ears kept turning in all directions, and her golden eyes shone brightly in the dim environment.