Hessiana did not know about Vivian’s “imaginary voices”, so she asked, “What do you mean?”
“Recently, Vivian’s been hearing people call her name, but they’re all imaginary voices,” said Hao Ren, turning to Vivian. “Haven’t you gotten better?”
“This time it’s clearer than before,” Vivian said gravely. “I’m almost sure it came from that direction…”
She stared down the dark end of the alley. Beyond the flickering gleam of Flamejoy, deep darkness lay 10 m away, and the end of the alley seemed to be enveloped in a chilly, impenetrable veil of eternal malice.
Hao Ren felt that Vivian’s “imaginary voices” were not as simple as initially imagined. Thinking about it now, he found that Vivian’s “imaginary voices” only appeared after they discovered the strange space.
If there was a connection, what secrets were buried in the ancient city?
At the end of the passage was a large, empty hall. Nothing unusual.
Passing through the stone archway of the corridor, Hao Ren looked at the empty place before him and asked, “Are you sure the voice is coming from here?”
Vivian looked around. It was a square, palace-like place. Judging from its location, it should be close to the center of the great pyramid. Like the rest of the temple, it was completely empty except for the huge stone pillars and reliefs at the center of the hall, which could not be removed.
“The voice is gone again”—she tapped her forehead—”but it has to be coming from this direction.”
Since the statues outside would not enter the grand temple, the MDT had now returned to Hao Ren. It flew around the empty hall and finally stopped at the square granite pillar in the center. “The patterns on the pillar seem to contain some clues!”
That granite pillar was the most striking thing in the hall. Each side was several meters wide and covered with delicate embossed patterns, which had remained fairly intact despite thousands of years of weathering. The MDT quickly restored a few of the reliefs with its restoration techniques and found that the images on the stone pillars were a follow-up to those in the outside temple.
Hao Ren saw the mask on the stone pillar at first glance: it’s been used by the inhabitants of Ertos to represent their great “ruler”.
“It shows what happened after the death of Ertos, after the new city was built around the head of Ertos,” the MDT said, pointing out different locations on the relief with different beams of light. “Here, and here, it’s continuous.”
“The ‘great ruler’ didn’t leave after killing Ertos but settled down on the plains. The great ruler neither accepted the sacrifice of mortals nor left the place, but quietly watched the establishment of the new city…” Lily slowly read, pointing at the cuneiform letters below the relief. “It took 22 years, under the leadership of the surviving Beasthead Avatars, to build Ertos and four more cities on the fertile land around it.”
“On the day of the city’s completion, the sky over Ertos was wreathed in clouds. Believing this to be a great omen, the god of wolves led the other Beasthead Avatars to the cave on the plain and asked the great ruler to come and protect the city. They offered barley, chickpeas, honey, and spiced meat to the great ruler, who at last, agreed and became the god of Ertos.
Hao Ren asked Vivian, “Is there anything particular about these ‘offerings’?”
“There wasn’t much attention paid to the content of the offering, because at that time, there was no unified ritual. But the ‘offering’ itself had a special meaning,” Vivian explained. “The Mythological Age was a difficult time. Not every otherworldling could be the supreme ruler of mortals for a very long time. Sometimes catastrophes or wars would bring down the weaker ‘gods’, and they would worship others who were superior to them. This resulted in them being annexed by other ‘gods’, or even losing their ‘god’ status altogether, but at least they could survive. It looks like the situation around Ertos was bad at that time. The Beasthead Avatars felt that they couldn’t keep their territory, so they worshiped the great ruler.”
Hao Ren nodded and continued to read the relief, “…The new god lived in the grand temple at the center of Ertos. Day and night, the god was worshiped by mortals. Under the protection of the powerful god, Ertos became a country that no one dared to offend…
“The Beasthead Avatars chose to submit to the new god, and they became the priests of Ertos, living in the grand temple and smaller temples around it.
“In order to protect the city, the Beasthead Avatars collected the bones that had fallen from the body of Ertos. They forged and burned the bones, injected them with fire and the power of the earth, turning them into great warriors…
“These warriors were made in the image of the Beasthead Avatars. They were powerful, rock-solid and never tired…”
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“The shape of the Beasthead Avatars… Extremely large stone statues… Never tired.” Lily blinked. “That’s those colossi we met.”
“No doubt.” Hao Ren nodded. “I didn’t realize that the bodies of the statues were actually made from the remains of Ertos. No wonder they’re so strong and don’t look like they’re composed of any known metal or mineral from Earth.”
Y’zaks pointed at a relief depicting the arrival of the new god in the city and asked, “So this great ruler lived in the temple at the center of the city—right where we are?”
Hao Ren stood up straight and looked around with increasing doubt in his eyes.
The temple had been emptied, or you could say, looted. If the “great ruler” had really been the supreme ruler of Ertos, if he had really been the supreme authority there, why did it end up in such a state?
Given that the smaller temples around it were intact, the larger one was more likely to have been abandoned before the city’s demise. Did the “supreme ruler” who ruled the place back then moved away?
There was no record in the reliefs of how the grand temple was abandoned, but thinking about it, since people chose to abandon the place, there was no need to leave a construction note in the demolished ruins.
Vivian stood in front of the stone pillar and looked at it for a long time, as though she was trying to recall the city that had been destroyed by her moonlight. But, it was hard to get her fragmented memory back. After a long period of reflection and silence, she placed her hand on the mask representing the ruler on the stone pillar and said, “To be honest, this mask is really ugly…”
All of a sudden, the pillar changed unexpectedly!
The lines in the relief began to twist. Solid hard stone began to flow and deform like ooze at that very moment. The cuneiform words and ancient patterns of civilization on the stone pillar were quickly swallowed up by the surface, which was wriggling like soft mud. All the relief carvings on the stone pillar were dissolved in a few breaths before the gaping stares of the crowd!
Then, twisted text emerged, line after line.
“Don’t wake it up! Don’t wake it up! Don’t wake it up!”
The line of words on the stone pillar kept appearing as if it was refreshing crazily. Then it quickly dissolved into the oozy surface. The scene was eerie and terrifying, but it was just the beginning: as the stone pillar changed, a deep voice suddenly echoed throughout the great pyramid.
The sound was hard to describe. It was like thunder rolling endlessly in the clouds, mixed with the sounds of people crying and screaming, on top of the crackling and shrill whistling of the wind. Rollie, who was sleeping on Hao Ren’s back, was awakened by the sound right away. She scrambled off Hao Ren’s back and fell on her hands and knees, her eyes constantly looking in all directions. Her tail stood up like a hairy stick, and her back was highly arched. “Meow, meow, meow.”
“Spatial distortion detected, I repeat, spatial distortion detected…” Simultaneously, the MDT warned them and shot an indicating beam forward. At the end of the beam, Hao Ren saw a stone wall at the hall suddenly “expand”.
It was difficult for the human brain to understand the phenomenon directly. The square, stone hall suddenly shook violently, and the stone wall grew wider and wider amid the shaking. In the blink of an eye, the hall had doubled in size, and in the new part of the hall, Hao Ren saw a tall, stone platform. It stood there, surrounded by a ring of firepots—they burned automatically the moment they appeared.
Atop the stone altar, a heavy coffin made of gold was slowly opening up.
Hao Ren immediately felt his hair stand on end.
“One of the basics of grave digging,” Lily said crossly next to Vivian, “don’t touch anything you don’t know.”
Vivian stared at the golden coffin on the stone platform and said, “Sleeping in a golden coffin… So rich…”
Everybody was clueless.
“What the hell is that?” As soon as the golden coffin was halfway open, Hao Ren threw a gravitational bomb directly into it.
The moment it exploded, he took out his inspector’s gun and fired three times.