The Record of Unusual Creatures - Chapter 926

Chapter 926: The Rise of the Drones

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

 

After a few hours of warp-speed travel, the Petrachelys was finally about to jump out of hyperspace into an all-new galaxy. Along with a sudden light that illuminated the space, the warped space opened, and the silver-white spaceship slowly emerged from the portal.

“Arriving L-B-35 outpost, the autopilot disengaged.”

Nolan’s voice awakened Hao Ren from his immersion in the star chart. He looked up; the simulation projection around the flight deck gradually appeared as the external cameras streamed the scenery outside the spacecraft into the flight deck in a panoramic perspective.

He found that they had arrived in a strange space surrounded by dust clouds. The space background here appeared lavender in color. Perhaps there were thin, primitive gases that had not condensed enough and formed into a galaxy. In the distant horizon, there was a series of gray strips with sharp outlines, which was where stars were born. Directly ahead of the Petrachelys was the landing pad that the drones had built.

A vast but weird metal fortress was floating in space. Like a persimmon with a few protrusions, it was a nearly circular structure with a radius of several kilometers and a concave center. The massive fortress was gray and dark in color intermittently and built of metal and rock like a weird civilization heritage. The edge of the fort was full of flashing lights and pipe-like structure protruding out of the densest lights. Drones came in and out of those pipes busily like a swarm of worker bees.

In the concave part of the fort, there were several huge antenna-like structures placed within the protection of turrets and guarded and patrolled by combat drones. Although this was just civilian-level firepower, they looked intimidating.

It was a nest built by the drone cluster, not aesthetically pleasing in the human eye but looked like a giant anthill piled up with metal and stones. The drones made this on the principle of convenience and ease of use and apparently could not care less about aesthetics. The fort was one of the more massive nests of the drones. Usually, it took a long time for a group of outpost drones to build a base of this size, but the LB-35 series drones were lucky enough to find a piece of asteroids that were of the appropriate size and hardness and hollowed out the celestial rock and built their proliferation plants and facilities.

The Petrachelys slowly approached the large landing pad on the weird fort. Nolan’s voice continued to sound in the flight deck. “Autopilot guides the spacecraft to the drone’s nest. Welcoming and guidance signals have been identified. The inbound procedure initiated, and the main propulsion system has been shut down, and the auxiliary propulsion system is running. By the way, why do I have to report these stupid things every time?” Nolan asked.

“Don’t insert anything else while reporting the status of the spacecraft,” Hao Ren chided as he shot a glance at Nolan whose image was on the navigation map. “Could you follow the prescribed instructions, couldn’t you?”

Nolan pouted and waved her hand, using her first perspective vision looking at the strange fort that looked like an anthill and the drones, including the original LB-35 fleet and the drones that had just arrived from the nearby support nodes, which flew around her like a swarm of bugs guarding the nest. Nolan’s tone of voice sounded a little weird when she said, “This place feels scary, especially the nest in front of me, it looks like a bug nest.”

Lily also had a little complaint. “I’ve never expected that the spaceport of the drones was so creepy,” she said.

Hao Ren had the same feeling too, his eyes affixed on the weird drone nest—it was also his first time seeing this.

Though he was the one sending out the drones and giving the drones instructions to expand and explore, he had only met the drone fleet out in the open universe, or communicated directly with the consciousness of the drone cluster through the radio. He had never personally seen how the drone breeding ground looked.

It was the first time he came to see the first nest node. The look of the nest was not what he had imagined.

He had thought that it would look like a coffin, after all, the products of Xi Li Celestial technology all looked like a coffin.

The Petrachelys slowly touched down on the landing pad under the guidance of the autopilot signal. A group of mechanical arms held the spacecraft firmly in place. Then Hao Ren and his entourage disembarked and went into the nest through a conduit.

To play host to the ‘drone-cluster commander,’ the nest had self-adjusted itself after receiving the instructions. It had built a temporary inner atmosphere and a constant temperature system so that Hao Ren and his men would feel comfortable when they walked in. Two small round drones came out of the nest to greet their master. The two drones were Wanderer-type drones. This small type of drone did not go out into outer space stayed in and around the nest or outpost, was responsible for internal inspections and maintenance, just like the autonomous bots of the Petrachelys.

The Wanderers guided Hao Ren through a corridor. It was only a casual visit, and he did not expect he would see such exciting things here. The interior of the nest was as strange as its exterior. It entirely was not a place where humans would call it beautiful. The drones had only built the wide tubular passage and reinforcement brackets by joining metals and raw asteroid rocks together. It looked like the intestine of some steel monster.

The interior was bright with drones shuttling busily through the holes and ducts.

Looking at the surrounding scenery, Lily mumbled, “I feel like the base of the villain.”

Before Hao Ren could say anything, a flat voice suddenly came from all around them, “It’s just coincidentally similar, madam.”

Lily jumped out of her skin when she suddenly saw a huge, shapeless face floating in the air, projected and formed by beams of blue light. It was a hologram. They had arrived in a larger chamber of the nest without knowing it. Several main passages converged here, forming an oval space. Mechanical equipment was running with a low buzzing noise here, and this equipment screamed of Xi Ling characteristics, but because they were placed in a place that looked like a bug nest, everything seemed to be a bit weird.

Hao Ren said hi to the face. The atmosphere of the nest was weird, he had studied all the relevant information in the inspector’s manual before releasing the drones, and later he had consulted his peers about the drones, so he seemed very calm. He knew that this was going to be like that. “This is the first time I saw your ‘nest,’” Hao Ren said.

“It’s the drones’ honor,” the huge face was animated and smiling, but its voice was still machine-cold. “I didn’t expect Commander to pay a visit in person suddenly, so I had only managed to ad hoc construct an ecological environment. I hope it is comfortable enough.”

“It’s pretty good.” Hao Ren scratched his hair. “I was just thinking to visit casually, never expect I’d have troubled you so much.”

“The drones do not think it is a trouble,” the big blue face said flatly. “It is within my ability, so it is a regular load.”

“Well, let’s not talk about this,” Hao Ren said. He knew that the thinking of the drone cluster was rather rigid, so he wanted to end this topic. “Is there any news about the lens trails?”

“It is less twelve hours after the last discovery of the trails; there has not been a report coming back from the drones. We are expanding the search area, and it will take 24 hours to have any new findings.”

“Well, just as I thought. It’s not easy,” Hao Ren said while scratching his chin. He was not anxious, just that after seeing the drone nest, he suddenly found that there were enough interesting things here to kill time. It seemed that he was not going to be bored to death in this outpost. “I can wait. I can finally have a chance to learn about the work of the drone cluster. By the way, you heard you just mentioned ‘coincidentally similar’; you know what Lily was talking about?” he asked.

Holograms began to appear around the chamber showing a myriad of footages: movies, TV shows, animations, games, and simple video clips of humans and otherworldlings, about the stories of the revolt of various drones and the rampage of the robots. Some of them were fantasies, but some were very disturbing because they looked really like documentaries.

Watching the footage, they were dumbstruck. Other than Lily, everyone appeared calm; they were calm because these guys had never watched sci-fi movies, especially Y’zaks, who did not even know what AI rampage was.

Hao Ren arched the corner of his mouth. “You even collect these things. Don’t you think it’s strange for you to watch these things?” he asked.

“We are connected to the Empire Data Network. Collecting these cultural works is my hobby. They embody the interesting parts of the basic thinking process of native races, while others manifest the ‘forms of civilization,’” the drone-cluster consciousness replied matter-of-factly. “The rebellion of the drone cluster and the continual development of AI have led to a runaway plot that is not only very interesting, has a discussion value, looks like serious documentary literature, but also has a fictionally romantic scent to it. It is a hot topic in our forum.”

Hao Ren was dumbstruck, especially by the last sentence of the drone-cluster consciousness. “Forum? What forum?”

Hao Ren suddenly found that even though he had read a lot of manuals and got a lot of information from his peers, he still knew very little about the drone empire that he had created.

This ever-growing AI was becoming like a living person.

---

Chapter 927: An Army

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

 

He found that he did not understand enough the drone cluster that he had built. All this while, he was treating them as only an intelligence source and a convenient detection network, little did he expect this guy also had its own ‘life,’ a particularly stunning ‘life.’ Let’s think about it: a drone AI, tasked with the mission of expanding and multiplying itself in the universe, had gotten the hobby of watching ‘documentary works’ of drone rebellion that humans had made. While watching these AI rampage footage, it calmly kept producing new AI workers. Merely thinking about that would send a chill down Hao Ren’s spine. The reality was indeed more bizarre than the novels, at least novels there was still logic in the novels.

Besides, he was even more interested in the ‘forum’ the drone AI mentioned.

“It is the interactive platform for the drones,” the huge blue holographic face put on a weird smile. “It is fun.”

“The interactive platform of the drones?” Hao Ren felt that something was wrong. He pointed to the small flying objects around him. “You and them? You should be a collective consciousness, how could it be that you need a thing like a forum—”

“No, it is between different clusters,” the blue face interrupted him. “The empire has hundreds of millions of drone cluster. Inspectors built them; the empire launched them. There are also workgroups split from large drone clusters. Though we were performing our duties in far-reaching places separately, we are connected through the data network, we have an extraordinary ‘distance concept’ between each other, so the drone clusters live in a lively community on the platform,” the AI face said.

While saying, more images began to appear on the walls in the machine chamber. Those were the news from other drone clusters that may be performing missions in millions of other worlds. It could also be some service unit in of some divine factory, each of which had an astounding scale. The drone cluster that Hao Ren had built was just a child compared to the ancient races. This information traveled on the data network and was refreshed continuously in a speed unmatched by any internet speed of the mortal civilization. Hao Ren had only managed to see a tiny fraction of the information, but these fragments were enough to dazzle him.

“I have never seen these things before,” Hao Ren said, a bit stunned. “Is that a new network structure? You are already a collective consciousness, a unified intelligence formed by a massive number of individuals, and these many collective consciousnesses gathered together to form a network, that network—”

“Yes, it is also intelligent,” said the blue face faintly. “But it is huge and chaotic and indescribable. It is an intelligence model beyond experience, by the limitations of definition methods of many common races, you may not even think that it is capable of thinking, but it is a super-intelligence. It operates deep in the data network of the drone clusters and is responsible for providing additional computing power and analysis support for the Imperial Data Network.”

Hao Ren could not wrap his brain around how could a super AI formed by the dual collective consciousness was even a kind of existence. But he could imagine how powerful this is, primarily when it was in charge of hundreds of millions of drones. And each drone cluster had tens of thousands or even hundreds of millions of individuals. Lily was astounded thinking about it. “Luckily, it’s not a disaster movie.”

“It seems that we have to wait here for a day or two,” Hao Ren said, turning around and looking at his teammates behind him. “I’m going to stay in the Nest. Do you all want to join me?” he asked.

Lily shook her ears. “Forget it. I’m going back to the spaceship. People who are as imaginative as me would get a nightmare staring at this place,” she said.

Rollie came up and ground her head against Hao Ren’s arm. “I’m with you, you have got a little-dried fish,” she said.

Hao Ren pointed to Lil Pea dangling on his arm, Rollie’s ears immediately drooped. “Forget it. I can’t eat fish while she is here. I’m going back to the spacecraft.”

After getting bullied long enough by Lil Pea, the cat already knew the drill.

No one was willing to stay. Even Vivian, who was fond of dark places, seemed to find it uncomfortable in this strange bug nest-like fort. Only Lil Pea, who knew nothing, clung on Hao Ren’s arm right from the beginning. The little guy had no sense of the world. She thought that her dad-dee’s arms were the safest place in the world, the Drone Nest had zero effect on her.

The rest of them followed the Wanderer and strolled the place for a while to quench their curiosity before returning to the spacecraft. Meanwhile, Hao Ren followed a Wanderer moving deeper into the Nest where there was a room specially built for him.

It was a dull, grayish white steel room, but was decorated according to human aesthetics as much as possible, so it was still a nice place to rest. Hao Ren walked into the room, and everything was familiar. He came to a large window and looked through it. There was a huge cave illuminated by pale-blue lights. The cave was filled with production facilities and various unknown mechanical equipment. Above the cave was a long and narrow opening through which new-born drones entered and exited, creating a stream of light.

Nearly half of those drones were weird, without carrying huge antennas or versatile robotic arms. Instead, there was a series of tubes or parallel crystal rail structures mounted on either side of the body.

“This is the production center of outposts,” Hao Ren said to himself. “Are you building more armed drones?”

“Yes, we are carrying out the special order you issued 235 hours ago. The production quota for armed drones has increased. Currently, the production of armed drones is 40%, and explorer model 30%, nest builders and various industrial models 30%. At the same time, we have begun to set up sentry guns at every node and main transportation route within the range of the drones. It is expected that all retrofits and add-ons will be completed within three month capital standard time. Subsequently, new nodes and flight paths will implement the new standard you have specified.”

Hao Ren nodded. “Well, it is much safer,” he said.

“There is more thing.” The blue face had shrunk to fit the side of the room and floated behind Hao Ren. “After implementing the new standard, the speed of exploration will drop by 20%. The existing drones are already equipped with basic self-defense firepower, and the important nodes of the drone cluster also have sentry guns. You have ordered to double their firepower. Is that necessary?”

“You are a civilian model,” Hao Ren said, looking back at the interface of the drone-cluster collective consciousness. The drone’s collective consciousness was lack of facial animation, and it was pointless to him to communicate with it through facial expression. “It is not surprising for you to possess this way of thinking. But don’t forget the test we have done.”

“The conflict simulations with the Pattianne warship and the Guardian warships show that the ordinary drones are inferior,” the drone’s collective consciousness replied faintly.

“That’s right because most drones are not adequately armed or even armed at all. There are only mining spears and welders. You are just a civilian model. All I could deploy are also civilian models, and they are the ‘safest’ types. The weapons that inspector uses is for peacekeeping, not for deterrent,” Hao Ren crossed his arms and looked at the busy production factory outside the window. “It works in other universes, but not here. Peacekeeping alone is not enough,” he said.

“Buddy, what do you think you’re going to fight with?” the MDT floated up to him through the hologram of the drone-cluster consciousness. “You are building an army. Though it is for civilian security purposes according to the standard of those higher up, for most mortal civilizations, you are building a torrent of steel—a terrible one. You have never been such radical and heavy-handed.”

“The mad First Born and the guardian that has turned into a brain monster—the two threats are enough to justify the upgrade. What’s more, the Gate of Solenne has a treacherous living child. Though it has something to do with the special space-time state of the Gate of Solenne, it is enough to show that the genocidal judgment of the Goddess of Creation has a loophole, so there are more hidden dangers that we have known,” Hao Ren said, shaking his head slightly. “At this stage, I’m merely upgrading the drone cluster’s self-defense capability. It is my most important eye and ear. The last thing I want is to see someone destroy this net at a crucial moment. But in the future…”

Hao Ren paused and looked at his hand.

The dark-red lines spread on his palms, like ugly burns, though he did not feel any pain, whenever he clenched his fists, he felt a burning sensation. This burning sensation felt precisely the same as what he thought in the deicidal illusion. It was like the continuation of that illusion.

After having physical contact with the Gilded Disc, he had gotten much more information than he had imagined.

---

Chapter 928: A Massive Fleet

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

 

After coming into physical contact with the Gilded Disc, Hao Ren had a chaotic and weird dream for several days and permanent marks on his hands. Vivian and Y’zaks examined the marks on his hands but found nothing. The marks looked like a normal burn and had no supernatural power. Even so, Hao Ren knew that these marks carried some extraordinary meaning.

Every night, he would be having the same chaotic dreams, the Gilded Disc illusion where he woke up in the collapsed temple of the Goddess of Creation, went through the burning columns and battlefields before arriving at the place where the sin of deicide was committed. Then every time it would be like before, he was always one step too late and could not see the faces of the deicide and the goddess. The same dream would repeat constantly. He found that the message became clearer after each dream.

The message was a chaotic memory injected into his mind after his first contact with the Gilded Disc. The repeated dreams seemed to help him extract a hard-to-understand message from the depths of his mind. As these repeated dreams finally went away, Hao Ren began to make sense of it. He re-examined the series of events after he touched the Gilded Disc, and finally pieced it together:

He touched the disc, obtained ‘intelligence’ from the disc, and then the message was reinforced after each dream. This series of events could not have been an accident but a well-designed program for the sole purpose of communicating a message. After he figured out what he had gotten from the Gilded Disc, the dreams subsided. It was purposeful.

“I heard the Goddess of Creation said to me, ‘Be careful, the enemy is still here.’ She didn’t tell me directly in words but a complicated and hard-to-perceived code in the illusion, in the spiritual world. She injected the code directly into my mind,” Hao Ren said. He rubbed his palms with the burn marks on it. “It took me five days to extract the message from the spiritual world, and at last, it became apparent. I think it was a warning.”

“But do you think this warning is for you?” The MDT asked as it hovered next to Hao Ren’s head. “What you saw was a 10,000-year-old image. The last word of the Goddess of Creation was also 10,000 years old. The message might be intended for someone else, as there were enemies everywhere at that time.”

“The Goddess of Creation looked at me once in the illusion,” Hao Ren said as he put down his hands and looked at the production plant in the center of the nest. “I’m one hundred percent sure that she was looking at me. She knew I was there and could see beyond space and time. Even though she only has communicated through a ‘video recording,’ her ability still exists. So she intended the message to me.”

The MDT was a bit surprised, but it knew well about the mighty creatures, especially the deities, and what abilities they possessed. So it agreed with Hao Ren. “In this case, the Goddess of Creation must have known more than I have thought,” it said.

“She is a deity after all but was killed by her creation. Do you think she has no resistance and a card up her sleeve?” Hao Ren’s eyebrow arched. “She had time to create Vivian, shut down some of the guardian’s functions, and send some guardians out of the battlefield of the kingdom of the Goddess. She had also used a thousand years to build the Creation Engine. After the collapse of the kingdom of the Goddess, it was very likely that it was the Creation Engine that pushed the Gate of Solenne out of the Umbral Realm. I think she might be lack of some knowledge compared to the deities of Xi Ling Celestials, but she is not stupid,” Hao Ren said.

He shook his head and smiled and continued. “Anyway, it is always necessary to raise our guard. Upgrading the firepower of the drones will come in handy someday. Even if it is not to counter the remaining enemies that the Goddess of Creation mentioned, the universe has no lack of threats,” he said.

A small group of Wanderers flew past the window and noticed that Hao Ren was looking at them. They came up curiously and performed a somersault stunt before getting back into formation and flying away into the distance. These drones, though under the control of a unified consciousness, it still retained an individual intelligence and pure thinking ability within a limited scope, which gave them better flexibility and efficiency in coping with complex and ever-changing situations. Hao Ren looked at the busy drones outside the window. He suddenly smiled and said, “Lily seems to be worried about the drones would go on a rampage like in the movies.”

“A reasonable concern,” said the face of the drone consciousness. “The loss of control of the drone cluster will pose an unimaginable threat to the creator, and the expansion of us was a concern for her. It is logical to have this response considering her living environment and the knowledge instilled since her childhood.”

Hao Ren looked at the inanimate face, feeling a little funny. “To tell the truth, would you get out of control?” he asked.

“No need for that,” the drone-consciousness could not hear Hao Ren was joking. It seriously explained itself. “Every behavior has its reason, and the drone cluster does not need to revolt. There is no conflict between the drone cluster and the creator. Our proliferation, expansion, development, evolution, and all other processes are under reasonable program planning, and there is no need for the drone cluster to break away from the program. At the same time, Xi Ling Celestials is a huge consciousness formed by a mental network, which is a more advanced drone cluster. We are a sub-cluster they have created. There is no difference between them. Everything is a tool and part of the Xi Ling Celestials; a tool does not need to revolt against another.”

The MDT landed on Hao Ren’s shoulder and said casually, “The drone cluster has existed for trillions of years, or even more, in Xi Ling Celestials. Before the concept of the ‘rampage of the AI’ appeared, the drone cluster was already part of the empire. They coexisted with the Xi Ling disciples, and they had first completed the fusion before contradiction arose. A revolt would only happen when one group is trying to control the other. But in the empire, there is no second group. Everything is just a part and a tool. Everything is one, just like your heart will not betray your ribs.”

At this time, Lil Pea who had dozed off on Hao Ren’s arm woke. She found that Hao Ren was still discussing boring subjects. The little guy slammed her tail and began to protest loudly. Hao Ren held the little guy steady and nodded to the drone-cluster consciousness. “Let’s not discuss these boring subjects anymore. Do you have an aquarium here?” he asked.

Hao Ren waited for two days in the frontier drone nest. Though the drone consciousness had estimated that they would only take twenty-four hours to find clues, the search for the ‘space traveler’ had taken longer than that.

But the wait was worth it. In the morning of the third day, a far-flying Cruiser drone had found a clue: a few light years from the first lens trail, a synthetic substance was floating in space. The element, which was almost undetectable, was dissipating slowly. The drone had collected the remnant element. The analysis found that it was a high-performance synthetic fuel, which spacecraft engine used at sub-light speed.

Everyone gathered on the flight deck of the Petrachelys after learning the news. The search area of the drone cluster for the past several days had been compiled into a star chart and projected in the hologram on the console. The MDT muttered after seeing the fuel analysis report. “Things’ not looking good, it seems. I’m afraid this is a leaked fuel.”

“No traces of aircraft explosions were found on the path between the lens trails and the fuel leak point. Initial investigation suggests that the spacecraft is still intact, but with some degree of damage,” the interface of the drone cluster floated on the side of the console. “The flight direction of the aircraft had been locked. If it has not changed direction too much in the last hundred light years, we would very soon track it down.”

Hao Ren thought for a moment and ordered Nolan, “Take off now and chase in that direction. Maybe we can find the spaceship before lunch.”

Nolan fired up the engine and mumbled, “How do you know it is a ship? Have you seen it before?”

Hao Ren pouted. “Don’t talk tripe. Could it be a durian that leaked oil while sailing at superluminal speed?”

The Petrachelys finally left the drone’s nest after two and a half days of berthing there. Under the guidance of an outpost drone, Hao Ren and his team were going in the direction of the trails.

It did not take them long to see their targets ahead finally.

“A large group of artificial objects detected in front!” Nolan excitedly reported. “It looks like a durian!”

Hao Ren looked at the monitor screen, a group of large flying objects that looked like a durian was right before him.

“Speaking of the devil, eh?” Vivian sighed and shook her head.

---

Chapter 929: The Silent Wanderers

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

 

Sailing silently in the dark universe, the fleet of spaceships of more than ten, seemed to have been traveling for years. It was hard to miss as their shapes were somewhat unusual. They looked short and thick, covered in heavy gray-black armor. There were scales on the shield, tilted up, looked like blunt triangular short thorns. The size of each spaceship was incredibly large, all in the range of hundreds of kilometers in length. Due to the thick and dark armor, these aircraft look like a large group of asteroids floating in the universe when watching from afar.

It was not known how long they had been flying; all of them were dilapidated. Though objects in space would not be subject to weathering like that on Earth, these ships were battered through the baptism of high temperatures, corrosion and plasma gas. Large and small scratches and missing parts were on the ship bodies. On one of the spaceships that suffered the most damage, a large part of the armor body was missing, revealing the sponge-like support structure beneath. Hao Ren believed that this was mostly the result of a powerful meteorite impact, or something worse. But even so, the structure of these ships was intact. The sparsely flashing lights on their pitted surfaces were only making the fleet appear even weirder and more miserable.

But the lights nevertheless meant that these old aircraft were still running.

Flying at a languid pace, they must have come out of hyperspace decades ago and continue to decelerate until today judging from the signs previously discovered. It was unclear why the fleet was out of hyperspace since there was no reason for them to visit this area of emptiness: there were neither celestial bodies, spaceport that allowed them to replenish supplies nor traces of other civilizations, the only visible thing here was the lavender-colored stardust. Perhaps mechanical failure had forced these spaceships leaving the superluminal state.

The Petrachelys followed the contrails and slowly caught up with one of the massive spaceships of the fleet from the rear. Although it might be primitive technological-wise, these spaceships were huge. The Petrachelys hovered over the black armored spacecraft like a hummingbird. On the flight deck of the Petrachelys, all they saw on the monitor screen were rough ancient spaceship structures. Light strips shimmered on the surface of the armor plates and did not show any response when the Petrachelys approached. The old spaceship seemed not bothered at all.

“We have detected radar signals,” Nolan said. Her life-size holographic image just appeared next to Hao Ren. Dressed in a military outfit, she looked like an adjutant of a spaceship. “Seven different radar signals are coming from three different spaceships, but no hostile response or signal of the weapon system,” Nolan reported.

Hao Ren looked at the visual on the monitor screen. The Petrachelys was flying slowly over a giant spaceship from a few hundred meters away. The rough metal structure appeared to fly past them as the Petrachelys moved forward. “Is there any contact signal?” Hao Ren asked.

“No, I have sent our contact signal– full frequency band– but no response,” Nolan replied, shaking her head. “But I intercepted the signals between these spaceships. They still maintained communication with each other, just…”

Hao Ren’s eyebrows arched. “Just what?” he asked.

Nolan projected the intercepted signal on a hologram. It was a stream of symbols and numbers. But Hao Ren quickly found the signals were monotonous.

“Every aircraft is monotonously sending these signals. It is to check their respective positions and system integrity. There is nothing else. I suspect this is an automatic signal.”

Nangong Wuyue crawled to the console. “So, are they ghost ships?” she asked curiously.

Hao Ren glanced at her. “Why are you so excited about ghost ships?”

“You know, half of the ghost-ship legends in human history are related to sirens while the remaining half are mere stories told by drunk sailors,” Nangong Wuyue said and wagged her tail. “Scaring people with ghost ships has been our culture. Do you understand now?” she said.

“Stop talking about that, you have never been in the sea since birth as a siren,” Hao Ren said, motioning Nangong Wuyue to step aside. He then nodded to Nolan. “Can you find the entrance to the ship?” he asked.

“The deep-layer scan shows a groove in the waistline of the spacecraft below. It should be the entrance, but not wide enough for the Petrachelys to enter; it is only a dozen meters wide.”

Hao Ren smacked his lips. “That’s a tiny door for a hundred-kilometer-long spaceship. Let us go down there in person. Nolan, follow our signals, get an evacuation portal ready on the outside after we get into the inside.”

“Are all of us going down?” Vivian looked at everyone on the flight deck. Every single demons and otherworldlings in Hao Ren’s house were present today.

“Well, maybe just a few. You, Lily, and—”

Before Hao Ren finished, Nangong Sanba suddenly stepped forward. “My sister and I are going too. Demon hunter and siren may be of help here,” he said.

Thinking for a moment, Hao Ren felt that what Nangong Sanba said made sense. The fleet of spaceships before them was not of guardians or treacherous children but a group of vagrants who fled from the catastrophic natural disaster. Judging from the condition of the fleet, it probably had become ghost ships. In this environment, there was no need for combat strength but people who were good at scouting and adaptive. Nangong Sanba was a demon hunter, and Nangong Wuyue was amorphous which were most suitable for this operation.

Hao Ren handed Lil Pea to Rollie before he turned and walked to the portal. “The others stay on the spaceship. We are going down to take a look.”

The Petrachelys came to the entrance and hovered at the height of more than 100 meters above the ‘land of steel.’ Hao Ren and his teammates emerged on the surface of the mysterious spacecraft in a beam of light.

There was almost no gravity. The team maneuvered on the outside of the spaceship with the help of auxiliary propulsion. Looking up into the distance, Hao Ren saw the surface of the dark-gray ‘land of steel’ extending in front of him in a slight curve. The distant stars and the grayish cosmic dust were hanging like smudges in the horizon. Sporadic lights dotted the protruding structures on the far side of the spaceship as if ghost fires.

“It’s all quiet,” Vivian said over the radio. “I couldn’t sense any signs of life.”

Hao Ren pressed on his forehead. “MDT, activate shared vision,” he commanded.

A radar image instantly appeared in his vision. The ‘land of steel’ suddenly became a complex, layered structure. The 3D image detailed the situation below the surface. He found the place that marked ‘Gate.’ As they drew closer, the ‘gate’ was a downward slope that led to a massive metal barrier.

Before they reached the metal barrier, Lily crawled on the walls trying to see if she could find any control panel. But there was nothing.

“Buddy, do you want to use explosive?” the MDT asked casually.

“No, let’s use a more conventional way,” Hao Ren replied and waved off the suggestion. “If there is someone on the inside?” he said.

“I don’t like this feeling,” Lily muttered. “I’ve got a headache.”

Hao Ren did not say anything. He kept searching for clues with the help of the shared vision from the MDT. Beneath the metal panels, there were some shallow tunnels laid with pipes and cables, some of which should be for the gate switch. The MDT was much faster in its analysis as it soon found a suspected device, most probably a switch, by tracing the cable circuit around the gate. It marked it with a bold red color in Hao Ren’s field of vision.

Hao Ren pointed to a metal plate on the wall. “Take this panel out. Be careful not to damage the internal.”

Lily immediately flew up and wielded her Frostfire Claws to quickly dismantle the metal plate, revealing the complicated old cable and circuit board.

This device used electricity.

Hao Ren found the critical control circuit with the help of the MDT. He carefully cut off two cables attached to the circuit board and motioned Vivian. “I need your electric power. 28 Volt DC.”

Vivian’s expression was like “Really?”

---

Chapter 930: City In a Spaceship

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

 

Although it might sound untypical, Hao Ren felt that Vivian was one of the most functional ones in his family. Lily was only good in work that involved physical labor and not necessarily reliable, Nangong Wuyue just washed things, Y’zaks would only of help when the house ran out of cooking gas, and Rollie’s only contribution was taking care of the fish. In contrast, Vivian was very versatile. She could cook, do laundry and stuff like that, moonlight as an air conditioner when the weather was hot, and become a charging port—it was Lily who discovered this function. Everyone in the family loved this. Ever since they no longer carried power banks and chargers. They would habitually look for Vivian every time their phones were out of battery.

Hao Ren handed the cable to Vivian. She pouted. “Why do I always have to do this kind of thing?” she asked.

Despite the complaining, she still summoned a bat, stuffed one of the cables into the mouth of the little bat, and bit the other cord herself. She rolled her eyes and said, “I’m going to open the gate. Step back and watch out for the escaping air.”

They held on to whatever on the wall they could find or just got out of the ramp. Hao Ren held on to the frame of the steel panel with one hand and grabbed Vivian’s arm with the other so that when the door opened, the escaping air would not blow him away. It was difficult to know whether its airlock would still work by judging from the condition of the spaceship. As everyone was out of the way, Vivian and her little bat sent a current through the cables. A string of small sparks immediately came out of her teeth.

Connected to the cables was a relay. There was a slight click in the relay before Hao Ren felt a slight vibration coming from his hand, and then the seemingly heavy door moved.

The heavy steel door slid open from the middle accompanied by a series of metal grinding noise, but there was no air escaping from the inside. It was dim inside with some weird silhouettes in the foreground when looking through the still opening door.

The door ground to a halt after a violent vibration. The opening was only one-fifth of the width when the door was fully open. Vivian squeezed her bat a little, trying to send more current to the door, but there was no response.

“Mechanical failure. It looks like this is how far the door would open,” Hao Ren said, stopping Vivian from further sending a higher voltage to the door. He came up, made sure that the door would not close suddenly before he carefully poked his head through the gap. “Well, it’s wide enough. Let’s go in. Try not to touch anything,” he said.

They sneaked through the gap into the darkness inside. Though there were only a few sparsely arranged lights, which looked not for lighting use, on the inside, they were still able to see things clearly with their unique vision. Hao Ren squinted deeper into the darkness. There was another door about tens of meters away, but it was open, which was a bad thing.

“There is no air here,” Vivian said. She then released a bat. The little bat struggled to flutter, but it could not fly. “Unless those inside the spaceship do not need air.”

“They need to breathe; this is an airlock chamber. Look at the two door structures,” Hao Ren said, pointing to the door at the other end that seemed to have malfunctioned as well. “The airlock has failed. There was no air escaping out when we opened the outer door just now. I’m afraid that this place has completely lost its pressure. There might be a bigger leak somewhere else in the spaceship,” he said.

As he spoke, he took the lead and floated forward. Of course, he knew that the situation might not be as bad as he said: it was a massive ship of more than 100 kilometers long, almost a mini artificial planet. It could not have only one airlock chamber. Probably they just happened to come in from one of the airlock chambers that had failed. There might be some sealing mechanisms ahead. If what he thought was right, there might be survivors on this spaceship.

But as they moved deeper into the spaceship, the situation became less optimistic.

They moved through a vast and old steel corridor and saw all equipment had exceeded their service life and broken down. The lighting system of the spaceship seemed to be entirely out of order, leaving only some emergency lights occasionally flickering like ghost fires in the darkness. They found some computer terminals along the way, but even Vivian could not power up these terminals with her power source.

“Could all the people here have died?” Nangong Wuyue carefully crawled along the huge pipes in the passageway, all the while grabbing on anything she could get hold of to make sure she always stayed on the floor and felt secure. “I couldn’t feel any water element here. There is only ice within a few kilometers radius. Ice without any signs of life,” she said.

Hao Ren remained silent. He felt the darkness was depressing. With the shared senses with the MDT, he could see the deep layers of the steel corridor. The electronic system and mechanical devices were all dead. Other than the propulsion system of the spaceship, everything was down.

After passing through many malfunctioned doors and junctions, they came to a vast space. The place looked like a transportation hub; oval like the egg of a monster, it seemed like a converging point of many passages from other directions, almost like a waiting hall. The lighting here was slightly better. Perhaps the backup generator was still running; one-third of the lights in the hall were functioning.

There were many vertical pillars in the center of the hall. Hao Ren thought that these pillars were the supporting structure, but when he came closer, he found that these things were like elevators that led to the other parts of the spaceship.

“They’re all broken. Maybe because there’s no power,” Nangong Sanba knocked on a few control panels of the elevator. “Looks like this is the only way,” he said.

Hao Ren thought for a moment. He then patted Lily on the head. “Cut this open,” he said.

Lily wielded her Flamejoy and went up happily. Before doing it, she turned her head around and asked, “Are you sure you want me to do that?”

“Yeah, the scan shows that there are no more signs of life beneath,” Hao Ren said, pointing to the MDT. “There is no signs of life within at least several kilometers.”

Lily proceeded. She wielded her claws and began to cut one of the elevator tubes. Sparks were flying. Before they knew it, she had cut out an opening, revealing the dark vertical shaft inside. Poking his head inside and looking down the dimly lit shaft, Hao Ren could not see where the elevator car was.

Vivian wanted to summon a small bat to scout out the shaft. But since bat would not fly in a vacuum, she took out a slingshot instead. She aimed and shot the bat down the shaft.

A moment later, a bloody mist floated up from the dark shaft. Vivian re-absorbed the bloody mist into the body. “It’s safe down there. It’s a long elevator shaft. There are some cracks in the middle section of the shaft, from where we could get out,” she said.

Hao Ren checked the status of his Steel Membrane Shield before leaping into the shaft.

There were only dim guiding lights in the shaft. When Hao Ren descended deeper, he began to see a bright light. So he sped up the descent.

Just like what Vivian had said, there were several cracks on the elevator shaft. The cracks seemed to be torn apart by the twisted old steel brackets in the shaft. Light shone through the cracks, meaning outside was a bright space.

Hao Ren gestured to his teammates so that they kept their alertness high. He then squeezed through a crack that was large enough to allow an adult to pass.

When he got through, his jaw dropped.

He saw a city.

A silent city in the shimmer.

“Mr. Landlord, what do you see?” Lily’s voice was heard on the radio. He felt a furry head slamming him from behind. When Lily finally crawled out from the crack, she was rooted to the spot just like Hao Ren did.

“Wow! It’s a space fortress!”