Chapter 494: That‘s How It Happened
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
After a long time of destruction, Alamanda, the Desolate City of Gold was no longer glorious. Despite the splendor of the ruins, the entire city was filled with broken walls and debris. There were very little buildings in the city that were still intact. Only those that were most important and strong were preserved.
A key facility called the Tower of Transcendence was one of them.
This was a pentagon tower with a base circumference of a few hundred meters; the scale was enormous. Other than the door at the bottom, there were no other door and windows in the entire tower. There were only a few bumps and a metal bracket like an antenna across the bright and clean pale gold exterior . Anna followed the messy memory in her head and led them to the high tower’s door. The door was broken and torn apart. It seemed that had something burst out of it and left the huge hole.
Hao Ren walked in front of them and he was surprised to find that the inside of this windowless building was very bright. There were a lot of mysterious beams of light coming down from above to illuminate the hall as bright as day. Thin dust fog swirled around the beams of light, looking very ethereal. It was not hard to imagine what a sacred place it used to be.
There was no complex structure on the ground floor of the tower. It was just a magnificent hall. And the most amazing thing was that there were no pillars to support it. Thinking of the height of hundreds of meters of the tower, this ground hall that had no any form of support let them marvel at the advanced construction technology and material science of Tannaean. There was a ring of golden device around the hall. The device was a pillar of a meter or so, the upper surface was tilted, which seemed to be some kind of console panel. Lily patted the pillar curiously but there was no reaction.
“Forget it. These things, even if they’re not damaged, there’s no energy to start them,” said Hao Ren while holding his arms and walking around the hall. Suddenly, he saw some exquisite murals on the walls. “Hey, look at this. Looks like a mural left by the Tannaean.”
Everyone was immediately drawn to it. Hao Ren found the starting point for the murals. He looked at it in amazement: It was not an earth-shattering scene, no hero or mythological image, not an exquisite decorative painting. What was depicted on it was just simple daily things.
The murals depicted the whole civilization of Tannaean.
In the first mural, Tannaean lived in the coastal areas. They were an amphibious creature that gradually moved towards a terrestrial life due to some kind of change in the marine environment. They dressed in waterweeds and animal skins, built houses on the coastline, adapted to drought, hunted animals, and ignited the first bonfire of the civilization.
On the second mural, the scales on Tannaean had faded and the structure of their fingers had evolved. The environment in which they lived had apparently shifted from tidal flats and swamps to drier plains. They built villages on grasslands, rearing livestock in pens, planting and harvesting.
They built the city, developed metal tools, learned how to smelt and made alloys. They understood the power of the ‘electricity’ from the natural phenomena and soon merged it with a certain spiritual ability of their own race. In later murals, they were holding a ritual around a towering metal pillar. Lightning struck the pillar, and in their bodies, there was another magical energy that resonated with it.
They lived, studied, and tempered their spiritual power. Their innate ability to evolve rapidly made it easier for them to gain power from nature. They explored their entire planet, building great information networks and global energy broadcasting systems. They had even developed space technology, yet their greatest strength was still a wondrous skill called ‘The Power of Soul’. This was the result of their evolving spiritual talents. This wonderful skill was also the only hope for the people to save themselves when the catastrophe came.
Yes, a great catastrophe. In the late stage of the mural, everything changed. Some kind of unspeakable catastrophe broke out on the planet. The power of the Tannaean was not worth mentioning in front of this calamity. The magnificent city forged by metal was uprooted, and their war weapons had no effect on the enemy. The murals showed the horror of the slaughter of the Tannaean, the flames of war burning across the planet, but the face of the enemy was just frenzied lines. The man who left these murals seemed to have trouble describing their enemy in a logical way. He could only use a cluster of shadows and curves to show some kind of disaster. And hundreds of millions of Tannaean were wiped out by those frantic lines.
In the end, the remaining survivors retreated to the three cities on the planet. The murals showed the situation of the three cities via exaggerated images: the three cities were molded from metal and enveloped in layers of protective walls and energy shields. Outside the protective layers was boundless chaos and death. Survivors had been living behind the protective walls for years, but the walls had been weakened and eroded by the ravages of disaster, and destruction was inevitable.
Anna gently touched the lines on the murals and said, “This is the ‘Origin Scourge’. The power of mortal could not fight against it. In the end, Tannaean was finally aware of the regular pattern of the disaster. They decided to survive by changing their life forms—”
Anna raised her hands and pointed to the last mural.
The lines on the murals changed to a simple form. The magnificent and complex physical world was hidden away. A man was floating in the air, half of his body had transformed into a misty shadow, which represented the transformation of life form. At the bottom of the scene was a bunch of messy lines, which represented the disaster. This mural seemed to depict the Tannaean who had finally emerged from the disaster after changing his life form.
Anna sighed. The last piece of memory in her head was pieced together. “They left these murals to record the course of their civilization, because the Tannaean were not sure what would happen after they turned into a spirit, and in order to deal with the worst, they left this simple and straightforward record in many buildings to make sure that other intelligent creatures who visit this planet someday will know what kind of races have lived here before.”
“So this is how the Tannaean turned into Vengeful Spirits,” Vivian frowned and shook her head, “But the Vengeful Spirits they turned into is not logical at all. They are even as irrational as natural phenomena, let alone higher intelligence.”
Nangong Sanba scratched his head and asked, “So what’s the catastrophe mention on it?”
Hao Ren gulped. A vague speculation in his mind was gradually formed. He glanced at the scenes depicted on the last few murals, suddenly ran to the exit and yelled, “Follow me!”
They all followed him. Hao Ren led them to the front of a high platform. Anna could not climb such a steep building so Lily put her on her shoulder. They climbed the high platform and came to a position where they could overlook beyond the city walls, and the sight outside of the heavy protective walls of Alamanda became clear.
Outside the city was a primitive and barren land. It was an unusually frightening sight: the ground was covered with huge ravines and craters as if a giant face was full of potholes. On one side of the city, there was an unprecedented mega-crater, the size was so huge that they almost suspected it to have penetrated the core of the planet. And in the countless ravines and potholes, the most shocking thing that froze their blood was the tentacles.
The Firstborn.
“I knew it…” Hao Ren gulped and said, “The same thing that happened in Holletta had also happened here.”
Nangong Wuyue was startled and whispered, “Oh my…”
“The condition of this planet is worse than that of Holletta, the eldest son had apparently completely purged the second son,” said Vivian, frowning, looking back at the ruins of Alamanda and said, “Tannaean were extinct.”
Anna and Nangong Sanba saw this horrible thing for the first time. Nangong Sanba was a demon hunter, he could still take it, but not Anna. Anna was startled and almost fainted. She suffered a double fear, one was the human instinct from her, and another from her memory of the Vengeful Spirit. She was now almost half a Tannaean. She almost fainted when she saw the tentacles that had destroyed the entire civilization.
This was the calamity faced by the Tannaean, the reason why they had to give up their bodies and changed their life forms.
