Chapter 1147: A Picture Underneath the Sand
Trantor: Transn Editor: Transn
When Rnd strolled out of his bedroom the next morning and entered the castle hall, the Taqu witches all raised their arms in a kind of salute to pay their highest respects to the king.
"Good morning, Your Majesty. Thank you for your hospitality."
"I would say it was the greatest experience I’ve had in the past hundred years."
"I’ll be looking forward to my next visit to the Dream World when the timees."
"... What happenedst night?" Anna asked curiously as she looked at the God’s Punishment Witches who apparently had yet toe out of their blissful reveries.
"A sumptuous party," Rnd answered smilingly. Dido and Dawnen had almost ravaged half of the table and crammed the invisible bag with tons of delicacies. Fortunately, nobody had really cared about the food they had taken. Had this been an ordinary buffet, they probably would have been thrown out of the party outright by angry waiters.
"That makes me hungry too," Anna said as her stomach protested mildly. "When can I have that kind of food?"
While staring into Anna’s expectant blue eyes, Rnd stroked her graceful head gently and said, "In a few years. I promise."
Ingredients were the key to essing luxurious food. Fast transportation enabled people in the modern society to obtain food from all parts of the world. If they wanted to eat fresh sea urchin from the Port of Clearwater, the boats on the inner river should at least travel two to three faster than they currently did.
Of course, an alternative way was to drive the demons out of the Fertile ins and fly around Graycastle on the "Seagull" to try out different food if the former method was not an option.
Rnd had his usual breakfast that consisted of an egg, bread, and a ss of Chaos Drink, which was really not a satisfactory breakfastpared to what he used to have in his original world. However, considering that the Taqu witches were still relying on tasteless, high-calorie rations to sustain themselves, Rnd emptied his te.
After breakfast, Anna bade Rnd a quick farewell and left for theboratory on the North Slope. Like most of the members of the Witch Union, she now hardly had any leisure time in Neverwinter or at the front. Rnd returned to his office and strode over to the French window. He saw a few witches pass through the front yard below. They had nowpletely blended in with themunity and were working together strenuously withmon people for the future of the human race.
Just then, Nightingale pushed open the door and entered.
"Mail from the garrison at Festive Harbor," she said as she dropped a thick paper bag on Rnd’s desk. "I met Sean downstairs. He wanted to give you this."
"Quite heavy, isn’t it?" Rnd said as he picked up a pair of scissors.
"They probably shipped the package here by sea," Nightingale said as she walked past Rnd and drew out a bag of pickled dried fish from a drawer. "I checked it. It’s safe to open."
Rnd unwrapped the package and dumped the contents on his desk. Apart from a letter and a stack of drawings, there were also some "stones" sealed in a few bags. They looked pretty simr to the samples provided by Rex the other day.
Rnd’s brows furrows as he skimmed through the letter. The report by the First Army startled him. The so-called ancient ruin was not just confined to the underwater cave but it actually infiltrated the entire Endless Cape!
Under Rnd’s order, the garrison at Festive Harbor immediately followed Simbady into the ruin and sted the entire cave. Infuriated, the Giant Armored Scorpion came out of hiding and waster bombarded by the machine gun squad and the mortar unit before it couldunch an attack on the soldiers.
This result was by no means surprising. What surprised him, however, was the subsequent exploration to the cave.
The engineering team noticed that the ground within a radius of several hundred meters sank to various degrees as a result of the explosion. From the enclosed drawings, Rnd saw the beach slope downward as though the ground had caved in.
Shortly afterwards, the First Army conducted a few more explosions and excavated the ground before they found 16 simr ruins in the vicinity of Festive Harbor. The area covered by these ruins was asrge as seven or eight ports put together.
Due to the limited manpower, the people of the Sand Nation had only cleaned up three ruins. The findings at the three locations were amazingly simr. Tablet walls five to ten meters’ thick were found at each ruin underneath the desert, whereas the area uncovered by the walls was carpeted with leafy grass.
Rnd fell silent after he saw the drawings.
First of all, he had to admit that this was great news.
With so many tablets, they could now produce as many tracers as possible.
In addition to manufacturing tracers, Rnd also thought of many other potential applications of these unique electric silicides, such as pressure gauges, lighters, quartz clocks, etc.
Also, Celine would now be able to replicate the Magic Cube with the tablets discovered in this exploration.
However, the implications behind these findings sent a chill down Rnd’s spine.
How many tablets in total were there at the Endless Cape if there were already so many at Festive Harbor? If these tablets were really the bodies of some ancient silicon-based creatures, what kind of massacre ured?
The fact that the geological features of the three ruins were almost identical indicated that they had been formed at around the same time.
Rnd used his imagination to see how these ruins hade into being.
The desertification was probably not caused by the evaporation of water. Perhaps, the Silver Stream used to be a fertilend rather than an underground river.
Everything had, however, changed when a massive war had broken out.
The tablet men had been ughtered by the radiation people, whose bodies littered the entire continent. ording to the murals in the Temple of the Cursed, the radiation people had won the God’s relic and obtained the final victory.
What concerned Rnd most was the aftermath of this huge Battle of Divine Will.
As those bodies were silicon-based, they did not decay like those of carbon-based animals. These bodies had thus formed towering walls, which had subsequently blocked rivers and crushed trees. This rendered the wholend uninhabitable for all vegitation, except for some vines that struggled to live in the cracks of rocks.
The Southernmost Region had been, hence, destroyed.
Nevertheless, mother nature was kind.
Whether organic or not, everything would eventually be a part of this world.
Hundreds of yearster, the bodies were reduced to sand after years of exposure to wind, and that was how the desertification had begun. The vines living in the cracks of rocks had gradually died out over the years. nts were obliterated except those who were not covered by bodies. The nts that survived strived and thrived in the desert and turned sand back into earth.
The whole process had taken thousands of years.
During those thousands of years, the bodies on the top turned into the desert they saw today. The lower ones, however, piled up and formed the bank. Since the sand on the top constantly moved about, the pressure applied to the tablets below were subject to constant change. As such, those tablets illuminated and extinguished alternatively, which made it really hard for nts down there to grow. Nheless, some species did survive the harsh environment. As for thend uncovered by the tablets, they had eventually be the Silver Stream Oasis where the Ironsand people of the Mojin n had settled down and prospered.
In other words, both Iron Sand City and Festive Harbor were sitting on the top of weathered corpses.
Rnd shuddered at this hypothesis.
He really hoped that he was wrong.
If the Battle of Divine Will would never end, how many people would have to die?
Down in the earth and in the depths of the ocean...
There was probably not a single acre ofnd that hadn’t been soaked in blood.