Chapter 312 Building bones and building soul
The ship came ashore with a shuddering tremor.
The lake was constantly rising and falling, and they stepped into it. After fixing the boat in a safe position with ropes and spikes to ensure that it would not be taken away by an unexpected wave, they carefully set foot on the "island".
Under the huge pillar with obvious pressure when it is dumped, it gives people the feeling like the dirt gathered around the tall aquatic plants. It is floating, unstable and may be washed away and disintegrated at any time.
Several incomplete stone ridges extending into the water indicate that this may have been a small dock, but with the depth even a flat-bottomed boat would have to stumble to get in, it is difficult to imagine what it was originally used for mooring.
Those buildings of unknown style adhered to the stone foundation in a barnacle-like shape and were half-tilted.
They do not belong to any known style, or can be called "Dunling Ruins Style". Their characteristic is that they have no distinctive and unique details, but they have extraordinary craftsmanship, which allows them to be preserved under extremely harsh conditions.
Locally sourced and polished stones were tightly spliced together to form walls and vaults that were not too tall but strong enough. They were exactly the same as sewers, showing the builder's superb spatial geometry.
It's the kind of thing that appears in some monotonous and repetitive strange dreams. When it becomes regular to a certain extent, it actually causes discomfort.
There was no expression of life or art, not even a hint of culture, nothing that could be called "human". These things are just pure buildings, with no other meaning attached except function.
If a regional community is personified, then architecture is its face and the source of its first impression.
And when visitors try to look at the ancestors through the ruins, they only see blank faces with no features. The traces of people have been erased from it, leaving only something extremely pure as its only remaining background.
These buildings are more likely to arouse fear than the creatures lurking underwater, suggesting that the people who once lived here were some kind of alien group that were transformed from their own kind but can no longer understand each other.
But they can't stop. The purpose of putting on such a big show is not to visit the periphery of the historical sites.
Green originally wanted to leave someone to guard the ship, but considering that the light of the fire was more likely to attract creatures wandering on the shore, and if an accident happened, there was nothing that two people could do, so he finally gave up on the useless move.
With unspeakable feelings, the team began to move towards the inner circle, looking for possible information.
The observed traces indicate that the changes in this place were quite complex.
A lot of sediment has been filled in the gaps and corners, and most of it has solidified into a half-mud, half-stone shape, smoothing out part of the outline. The colors are layered and uneven, and they are formed by different ingredients at different times.
On the surface of the stone, there are some gray or white round or irregular small protrusions, which may come from shellfish such as barnacles and oysters that can be adsorbed on hard surfaces; while the filmy and flocculent coverings are from shallow water reefs. Frequent visitors are mostly related to algae and aquatic plants.
All signs point to more than one submersion here.
Moreover, there was no shortage of organisms in the lake at that time, and it was even considered rich. At least it was not as barren as filtered lime water.
They poked torches into several relatively well-preserved buildings. The original things inside could no longer be seen in their original appearance. They had collapsed and disintegrated under the erosion of weathered water. Only the rough outlines of the parts wrapped in sediments remained, and nothing could be seen. human remains.
It is difficult to say whether the residents left voluntarily or were destroyed by some disaster. How they survive here is also a question. Maybe when the lake is not so clean, they can meet their needs by fishing and collecting edible aquatic plants.
But even without mentioning the technical feasibility of doing so, it would be difficult for the biological resources in freshwater areas to meet the food supply for urban-level settlements.
Buildings that lack characteristics are piled up repeatedly. Although they seem chaotic, they have a certain order, which often gives the team the illusion of "have they been here before" as they move forward in twists and turns. When the depth reaches a certain level, something difficult to judge the use begins to appear. They are stone pillars pulled up from the ground. The special landform here greatly facilitates production. You only need to randomly select one and slightly modify it, and you can carve it into a standard hexagonal prism shape and add various patterns on it.
They were firmly fixed into large blocks of foundation, or simply carved out of solid rocks and integrated with the ground, and most of them still stand today.
The decorative patterns are in two completely different styles, one is a flowing, serpentine intertwining curve, and the other is a straight line falling vertically downwards from six sides.
Because of their excellent geometric level, they are well drawn, extremely symmetrical and even, with an irresistible strange and harmonious beauty. They are so eye-catching among the monotonous buildings, like temple mirages appearing on the horizon of the spiritual wasteland.
Designers have a special obsession with heights. Regardless of their thickness, the stone pillars are far above the top of the head, nearly one and a half times the height of most door openings. It seems to be based on a similar psychology to the high-spire design of the church, and is the most intuitive expression of "height".
This also means that you need to step on the surrounding ruins to see the top of the stone pillar. Unsurprisingly, they found bisected rings, broken circles, and twisted lines that were difficult to distinguish from head to tail.
The further inward, the denser and larger these pillars become, even reaching the thickness of a person's arms, forming a dazzling forest of pillars.
There are some intimidating materials among them, with a very familiar pale white color or an extremely deep light-absorbing black, which will make the hearts of those who have seen similar things jump.
But upon closer inspection of the touch, Craft discovered that they were not the two substances he thought they were.
Although it looks basically the same, it lacks some intuitive things and becomes an ordinary substance that looks rather special. It has a mixed texture between chitin shell, limestone, and bone, with a somewhat rough and grainy feel.
【They are dead】
This intuition is very strange, but it can be compared to the new storage in the morgue and the sleeping person. In fact, the composition is basically the same, but the essence is completely different.
He felt a pang of regret, like seeing a patient who had died on the eve of the new treatment, something he had never felt before. It seems that a part of me recognizes these things as living things, or even the same kind, and has developed a tendency to harm others.
Shaking off the inexplicable emotions, as the team passed through the pillar forest, an open space appeared in front of them.
In the center of the open space are several hexagonal potholes the size of wellheads, which have been almost filled with sand and gravel. Based on what they saw along the way, it is speculated that these should be the bases of several particularly huge prisms.
The religious totem that once stood here disappeared and was uprooted by the incredible strength of thousands of people.
The forest of pillars was pushed down like straw, clearing a wide passage and extending towards the periphery. Along the way, buildings were smashed and the road was plowed up and rolled up, pointing straight to the shore and submerged in the clear water waves.
"That makes sense"
This was the kind of being they had encountered in the royal tomb, or perhaps the Chaos army was an imitation of this behavior.
【Aggregation, proliferation】
If an army is still not enough, what about an entire ethnic group? Has an entire ethnic group that once lived on various islands in this underground lake, the Tower of Babel built with bodies and souls, undergone a qualitative change, getting closer to the highest place on the other side?
Or maybe the road to heaven, the living temple that truly unites them as one, is still one step away, cruising in the lake waiting for the last few bricks.