Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
The lost ancient city was desolate. The only sounds came from the wind and the footsteps of a team of explorers. On the streets covered by dust, Hao Ren and his team were moving cautiously ahead.
The MDT hovered in front of the group, scanning their surroundings for any suspicious objects and anything that might reveal the mystery of the city. The collapsed sculptures and tablets were among the most valuable things there. On some of the tablets and mud board fragments, the MDT found the cuneiform text that Hessiana had mentioned.
However, sandstorms had smoothed down most of the text. No more than five symbols were recognizable on an item. Even with the MDT’s translation system, it was difficult to decipher the fragmented symbols.
“These symbols really look like the cuneiform commonly found in the plains of Mesopotamia,” Vivian said, looking at the text patterns that the MDT collected. The patterns were suspended in front of her. “They are standard cuneiform. The cuneiform writing on the tablets is a modified variant for ease of engraving, but it is not difficult to switch between the two fonts.”
“Can you translate them?” Hao Ren asked, looking at the ancient writing with curiosity.
“I can’t,” Vivian said, shaking her head. “They are indeed cuneiform in form, but they are not a system of cuneiforms that humans have unearthed in modern times. There is no way to interpret these writings in my memory.”
“Battie, do you really not remember this city?” Lily asked, still harping on this question. “It could be the place where you have massacred with your crimson moon. How could you not remember it?”
“I really cannot remember anything,” Vivian said, feeling helpless. “And what did you just say? Massacre? That is not me, okay? Even when I was disoriented back then, I had tried to stay away from any human settlements before I completely lost my mind.”
“Leave this historical question for later,” Hao Ren said, shaking his head. He then looked at the street covered in yellow sand in front. “There is another building that looks like a temple ahead. There may be more complete text in it. We may probably figure out the origin of this city.”
Lily replied with an ‘Oh’ and followed closely behind. “Temples occupy most of the land in the city. The ancients wasted their productivity in such places,” she said.
As Lily said, temples were the most prominent structure in this lost ancient city. They were hard to miss. The temples were tall and similar to the combination of pyramids and cubes. There were all kinds of sculptures on and in front of the entrances. These sculptures were unique; they were the hybrid of humans and beasts, which might reflect the religious beliefs of this mysterious city. In the barbaric era, such savage religious image was everywhere.
These temples occupied almost one-third of the entire city’s area, far beyond the typical needs of a regular town. It would require a large number of ancillary villages and human slaves to support the religious system of this scale.
Now, Hao Ren and his team stood in front of such a temple.
It was not the massive temple in the center of the city, but a smaller one in the vicinity of the central temple. To go to the central temple, people must pass through the avenue near the building. This so-called smaller temple was by no means small. It consisted of a massive pyramid-shaped main building and two rectangular annexes. The two annexes were placed in front of the pyramid like the forelimbs of a lion. In the square directly in front of the pyramid were two neat rows of stone statues overlooking the passage to the temple as if they were temple guards.
Before going to the central temple, Hao Ren felt like searching in the ancillary temples around the central area to avoid missing important clues. The collapse of the alien dimension continued, but it was still a few days before the complete disintegration happened. So he still had plenty of time.
Y’lisabet rode on the shoulders of Y’zaks, and her eyes darted around curiously at the magnificent buildings and stone statues. Like the religious stone statues in other parts of the city, these several meters tall sculptures were also composed of human torso and beast limbs. They had the heads of lions, jackals, and crocodiles, and their bodies were twisted into a hideous posture as if they were ready to fight. The little demon observed for a long time and finally made her conclusion. “Yuck, that is really ugly.”
Despite having been used to Y’zaks’ ugly face, the little girl still saw those stone statues as ‘really ugly’ spoke volume of their level of ugliness.
Meanwhile, Vivian still played the role of a history commentator. “In the first religious worship, the powerful beast always appeared as the guard of God and even the image of God itself. There are two reasons for this. On the one hand, ancient humans were afraid of those mighty beasts, they regarded the most powerful beast as having the same special power as God. On the other hand, a large number of the otherworldlings that dominated the earth at the earliest era were using various beasts and magical beasts to tame the humans, and there were even many otherworldlings looked no better than the beasts. But at least in human aesthetic perspective, these ancient gods were beasts.”
Lorissa listened on. Suddenly, she frowned and looked in a particular direction. “Who is it?”
“What happened?” Hao Ren asked, immediately clenching his weapon.
Lorissa stared dead at the swirling sand at the end of the street behind them. Her eyes slowly turned into the silver-white flames, but after a while, they returned to normal. “It could be an illusion. For a moment, I felt like someone was watching me.”
“I did not feel a thing,” Lily said with her ears flicked. “I could not even sense it with my sensitive senses, you must be having an illusion.”
“Probably,” Lorissa said and frowned. She slowly moved her gaze away from the swirling sand.
The gates of the temple were made of heavy iron and wood, wrapped in a copper sheet, which was the most solid door at that time. But after thousands of years of sandblasting, the door had been severely damaged. The remaining broken door panels were dangling in front of the entrance. Lily stepped forward and tossed the two half-ton door panels to one side, revealing the dark passage inside.
The blazing flame of Flamejoy illuminated the way ahead as the group stepped into the ancient ruin.
Not long after, the group saw a row of enormous stone statues on both sides of the hallway.
It was still the same strange stone sculptures of the human torso and beast head, and the ready-to-fight posture. The stone statues in the temple were much smaller than those on the outside but having the same height of five meters. They looked fearsome.
“That is strange. Why are there so many stone statues?” Vivian’s brows knit together.
“Is it not normal that temples have sculptures?” Hao Ren asked back, perplexed by Vivian’s question.
“It is normal to have this kind of sculptures, but the number is not normal; it far exceeds the ornamentation need,” Vivian said, shaking her head. “It is weird.”
At this time, the MDT suddenly yelled, “Buddy! Buddy! The reliefs here are decipherable!”
Hao Ren rushed over and saw the MDT was scanning the reliefs on the stone wall with blue light. The reliefs were also severely mottled and eroded. It was almost impossible to perceive with naked eyes their original appearance. Even an experienced archaeologist would need complicated techniques to restore them. But compared with the smoothed down and fragmented tablets at the periphery of the city, most part of these reliefs could be restored.
With the mighty computing power of the MDT, it was able to restore the reliefs, together with the text below them, very quickly. The MDT then presented the restored reliefs with holograms—as if they were perfectly preserved.
On the first relief, Hao Ren saw a strangely abstract scene. It was a gigantic creature walking, or instead floating on the earth. Like a beetle with many slender legs, the creature’s body and the thin legs formed a stark contrast; they were utterly disproportionate. It should be an exaggerated depiction by the ancients, but still enough to arouse a horrible feeling in people toward this beetle-like creature. It was amazing how such a large body could walk on the ground by relying on a few pairs of long slender legs. It was either floating in the air with a large number of air bubbles in its body or merely having a gravity-defying ability.
The first relief spent almost all of the space to showcase the details of the enormous creature. There was only one word under the relief. The MDT transliterated it as Ertos, which was presumed to be the name of the creature.
The second relief showed the destructive power of the creature. Thunder and lightning surrounded the creature, and fire and stars fell out of the sky. The giant beetle even swallowed the sun and the moon. Under the slender legs of the beetle were the collapsed city wall and the dead. It perhaps meant that this creature possessed the supernatural power to summon lightning and fire, and most likely had appeared during a solar or lunar eclipse, destroying the human city, but humans could do nothing about it. Among the corpses were some humanoid creatures. They were exceptionally tall and had interracial features. Those humanoid creatures had halo-like patterns around them. The MDT translated the text under the relief as “old gods.”
The creature named Ertos had destroyed a mythical city-state ruled by the otherworldlings.
Just as Hao Ren’s eyes fell on the third relief, Lily suddenly got to her feet next to him.
“Did you hear anything?”
The husky maiden’s ears turned in all directions continuously, and her golden eyes glowed in the dim environment.
