Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Han Sen picked up the tools and headed toward the swimming pool. He didn’t mind working. By doing this, he’d be able to walk around the whole fortress, which might give him the opportunity to find something. Right now, he was quite curious about the nature of the location he had ended up in.
Exquisite and Li Keer were aware of what Han Sen wanted. So, they reluctantly picked up their tools and went with him. But before they exited the immediate area, the small Crocodile God stopped them. It lifted a clawed hand to point at the rubbish scattered across the beach. It wanted them to clean up the beach area first.
Han Sen exited the swimming pool with the toolbox in hand. The Crocodile God didn’t follow him. He wasn’t in a rush to clean, so he took the chance to walk around the fortress while he was able to.
The fortress was in poor condition. Most of the machinery had been destroyed in whatever cataclysmic event had ended the life of this place. Even when he saw a machine that wasn’t broken, Han Sen had no clue what all the gadgets and gizmos were supposed to do, anyway.
Strangely, though, aside from the demon crocodiles in the canisters, he hadn’t seen any other bodies. He couldn’t even find any long-forgotten bones.
“Judging from the way the buildings and equipment is all broken, this place must have come under fire from a hail of meteors. But why can I not see what rained down on the place?”
As Han Sen continued to think about the problem, he went back to the plaza with the crystal canisters. He had settled on investigating that place first.
The demon crocodiles there exhibited no semblance of a lifeforce. Inside those broken canisters, there was nothing. There were no bodies, and whatever liquid they might once have contained had all dried up, not leaving a single drop of the stuff behind.
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“Weird. Does that mean the crystal canisters themselves were empty?” Han Sen frowned and kept walking forward.
Han Sen looked at all the crystal canisters. They all looked the same, and he didn’t think there was anything amiss.
Suddenly, Han Sen stopped before one shattered crystal canister in particular. Beneath that shattered crystal canister, he found something.
Under the shattered crystal, he found a man’s hand. It looked very big, and its skin was rather dark.
The most important thing about it, though, was that it was in perfect shape. It showed no signs of decomposition. Han Sen would have taken it for a living man’s hand if he hadn’t felt that there was no lifeforce coming from it.
Han Sen was so excited about making this discovery. He moved the shattered crystal to reveal more of the hand. Han Sen found that it was actually a whole arm. There was no body attached to it, though. The arm had been severed around the shoulder.
The arm was very muscular. Judging from its length, the person who had that arm had to have been two meters tall. He would have been a very powerful man.
On the side of the arm, near the bicep, there was a tattoo. The art depicted a clown, and it was dark red.
The tattoo clown appeared to be jumping. Its legs were spread as if it had just taken a mighty leap. The clown’s face was facing forward, and there were two horns on its hat. Its eyes were small, and it was smiling.
Han Sen didn’t find the tattoo amusing. The clown was strange, and its smile made Han Sen feel very uncomfortable.
Han Sen set the arm back down and went back to cleaning the shattered bits of crystal. He was hoping to find the body that the arm had come from. He wanted to find out who the man might have been.
The broken chunks of crystal were heavier than steel, but to Han Sen, they were nothing. He quickly managed to brush all the broken crystals aside.
However, oddly enough, he didn’t find any evidence of a body underneath the destroyed crystal canister. In fact, there wasn’t even a blood splatter.
Han Sen used his Purple-Eye Butterfly to check the area out. He didn’t know if the rest of the body had never been there or if it had simply degraded over time, but aside from the arm, there were no leftover substances of anything else.
“Was this arm chopped off elsewhere, then brought here at a later date?” Han Sen glanced around. The fortress was like a big city, so searching through all of it would be a difficult task.
Han Sen planned to widen his search, but when he turned around to pick up the broken arm, he was given a shock.
The broken arm had been perfectly preserved when Han Sen first found it, but after he spent ten minutes cleaning up the broken crystals, it was totally rotten. Only its bones remained.
The dark skin and strong muscles had become a pile of reeking gloop.
Han Sen was used to seeing dead bodies, He wasn’t disgusted by the sight like many people would have been, but he did feel strange. “This arm was fine all these years. Why did it suddenly rot just now?”
Han Sen inspected the rotted arm, staring at it. Only the bones remained now, but he discovered something very special about them.
The clown symbol on the skin hadn’t disappeared. It was still branded onto the bones of the arm. It still had the same creepy little smile, and the clown was still positioned in mid-step.
The dissolving flesh had revealed other markings, as well. The skin had only shown the tattoo of a clown, but the bones were covered in other symbols.
“Crystallizer text?” Han Sen was as shocked as he was happy. He looked at the words, which were written in a tiny, crowded script. Without his Purple-Eye Butterfly, he would probably have needed a high-tech microscope to examine what the text said.
Han Sen had learned the language of the crystallizers from Stay Up Late, so he knew what the words meant. Even as he examined the text, he still thought it was weird that someone had carved words into their bones.
Plus, the arm had been perfect. How had someone carved directly on the bone without harming the surrounding skin and muscles?
Han Sen picked up the bones from the pile of gloop. He cleaned away the mess that had accumulated so that he could get a better look at them. The bones were pale, and he couldn’t detect any semblance of a lifeforce. But he could tell that the clown symbol and the text had been etched in by a machine. It was engraved, not branded.
“What is going on here? How could someone use a machine to write words onto their bones? Did someone write this after the person died?” Han Sen thought to himself, as he tried reading the text.
“M67 test subject had abnormal changes. Test results are unknown. Number 7586 core creation of a god failed…” Han Sen read it out. It seemed like some sort of report log.
Han Sen didn’t know what “M67” meant. Judging from the contents, though, it appeared that the crystallizers had been trying to create a god and something happened to the test subject. Then, the tests concluded.
And there were some numbers Han Sen did not understand the relevance of. They were associated with the data on how M67 had mutated. He didn’t know why all of this was written on the bones of the arm.
“Were these people crazy? This data and information could have been stored on a crystallizer flash drive. Why carve it into bone? There had to be a reason for them doing this.” Han Sen stared at the text on the bone in consternation.
As Han Sen was thinking about this, he heard a low roar from the small Crocodile God. It swung its tail in annoyance as it approached him. It growled again as if it was hurrying him. It didn’t like the fact that Han Sen was sitting there doing nothing.
