According to the operation plan, the exploration team was divided into two squads. The first squad would explore the space zone near 'Gu Shisan' first. The squad had gathered the elites with the highest combat ability. Li Yao and Ding Ling Dong were naturally among them. They were the vanguards without hesitation.
The closer they were to the thirteenth satellite of the ancient giant, the higher the density of the dust in the space, and the larger the average diameter and mass of the dust. Gradually, the dust changed from the size of a grain to the size of a fingernail, a fist, and even a skull.
In the end, the dozens of starships of the First Squad were surrounded by enormous meteoroids ranging from ten meters to hundreds of meters in diameter. Also, the meteoroids were flying at an extremely high speed and in an irregular direction. They were almost like thousands of headless flies crashing into each other randomly.
"There must be an unknown celestial body of a very high mass nearby. That's why the meteoroids are flying so disorderly under the pull of gravity."
Li Yao mumbled to himself.
He was more or less an expert in space cruising, especially in the stone belts. He had been through too many similar adventures in the past, but he had barely seen such a perilous meteoroid belt. Other than the meteoroids, countless tiny dust and ripples of spiritual energy that were invisible to the naked eye were spreading in the space, too, which caused great interference to the cells and even the soul of a human body. In Li Yao's perception, it was like an enormous swirl that was colorful and thick.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
BOOM! BOOM! The meteoroids hit the spiritual shield of the starships brutally and were shattered into pieces. The colorful exhaust flames were gone in the blink of an eye, like the faces of hideous ghosts.
'Gu Shisan' must've contained tremendous elements that were highly radiating and disruptive. They had been ejected in the collision of the two satellites and scattered in the vacuum, making the trainers who came in contact with them feel that their blood was boiling, and their spiritual energy was circulating in an extremely weird way.
In the jargon of the ancient Cultivators, this place was a typical 'land of perils'. The vitality field of human beings was interfered with and suppressed to the minimum. It was absolutely not suitable for fighting. They had to stay in the meditative state with high concentration and leave as soon as possible.
Li Yao wanted to leave the vicinity of 'Gu Shisan' as soon as possible, too, but —
BAM!
As it turned out, an extremely dense, solid meteoroid had broken through the spiritual shield of the starship he was in and hit the shell of the starship.
In the picture captured by the surveillance cameras, the 'meteorite' had hands and feet and was in the shape of a human being!
"Someone's outside!"
Li Yao's pupils suddenly contracted, and all the hair on his body stood up like javelins.
In such a perilous place as "Gu Shisan", among the rushing meteoroids and cosmic dust, a person was floating and crashing into their starship?
Li Yao jumped up. Before his feet left the ground, the Crystal Suit covered his toes.
The other few starships crashed into or detected human-shaped objects too. For a moment, earsplitting alarms echoed throughout the exploration fleet.
However, those human-shaped objects did not take any further action. After they were knocked away by the starship, they simply drifted to the distance. Some of them were even shattered by the strengthened plate armor and spiritual shields, but they did not show any aggression at all.
Li Yao was quick enough to grab one of the human-shaped objects with the artificial limbs on the shell of the starship before the objects were blown away.
He went to the 'disinfection recovery cabin' in person to examine the mysterious human-shaped object.
"Chi —"
The atomized disinfectant spurted out after more than ten times the pressure, washing away any viruses and bacteria that the mysterious human-shaped object might have carried.
Li Yao approached carefully and released his telepathic thoughts and a few remote puppets to investigate first, only to discover that it was a Crystal Suit. However, the person inside the Crystal Suit was long dead.
The Crystal Suit was made of super high-intensity alloys and special ceramics. Its density and hardness were much higher than that of common meteoroids. Naturally, it was not something that the spiritual shield could mince easily, nor could it be broken by a meteoroid easily.
However, however hard the Crystal Suit was, and however malleable and absorbent the mustard-seed combat suit was, it was impossible for it to completely absorb the blast of a meteoroid.
If a meteorite weighing dozens of tons hit a crystal suit brutally, even if the crystal suit was not broken into pieces but merely deformed, the tremendous blast would still shatter the bones of the Exo inside the crystal suit, and his internal organs would be turned into puddles of pus and blood.
That was exactly what happened to the Exo.
Li Yao dissected the Crystal Suit from the Exo carefully. The Exo collapsed like a snail that had lost its shell.
After making sure that the Exo was as dead as he could be, Li Yao invited a professional doctor to perform an autopsy. It was confirmed that his brain and internal organs had been completely shattered. After the spiritual shield of the Crystal Suit was destroyed, he had suffered the corrosion of lethal radiation. That was the cause of death.
According to the analysis of the decay of the body and the speed of the withering of the cells, the time of death was about seven to ten days ago.
Judging from the style of the Crystal Suit and the armbands and emblems on the mustard-seed combat suit, the identity of the Exo who had died in space uncannily was obvious. He was a "soldier bee" from the old Holy League and a warship soldier from the five Supreme Fortresses. In other words, he was Lu Qingchen's subordinate.
There were more than one such body. The starships that Li Linghai, Boss Bai, and Long Yangjun were on had retrieved a lot of bodies, too. The autopsy results were similar. They were all warship soldiers from the five Supreme Fortresses who had perished in this place seven to ten days ago.
It meant that Lu Qingchen had arrived in this place with the five Supreme Fortresses seven to ten days ago and had located the entrance of the Supreme Emperor's mausoleum precisely.
However, he seemed to have encountered an accident and suffered a great loss.
The deeper they sailed into "Gu Shisan", the more corpses of the soldiers from the five supreme fortresses they encountered. Not only were there intact corpses covered in crystal suits, there were also corpses that had been frozen into ice when they were only wearing mustard-seed combat suits or even regular uniforms before they had the time to put on their crystal suits. The latter kind of corpses were extremely vulnerable and often shattered into smithereens after being hit by the spiritual shield. Li Yao could not help but feel sorry for them. He could not help but sigh.
Other than the bodies, there were also a lot of debris of space shuttles and escape capsules. Some of them were even enormous pieces more than a hundred meters in diameter. According to Xiaoming and Wenwen's identification, they were the most important components of the five Supreme Fortresses. The more and more pieces they saw, the more shocking it was.
"We are approaching our destination. Lu Qingchen's team may show up at any moment. Be prepared for a level-one battle!"
Li Linghai did not dare to be careless and gave the order.
Right then, almost all the starships detected a lot of metal reactions in the dense meteoroids up ahead. It was very likely that one or several artificial celestial bodies were there.
The spiritual shields of all the starships were immediately brightened to a higher level. The ancillary working medium power units protruded out of the hollows around the shells of the starships. A lot of space shuttles, Crystal Suit, and even Colossi jumped out of the hangars. The main guns were all filled with the maximal spiritual energy, ready to launch thunderous attacks at any moment. The people who had just been through a tug of war with the ancient giant were unprecedentedly united and determined to fight.
Under the cover of almost a hundred main guns, Li Yao and Ding Ling Dong led more than ten Colossi forward to investigate.
Deep inside the broken meteoroid belt, the space fortress gradually revealed its hideous appearance. It looked like a gargantuan head that was a combination of the features of human beings and the primeval species. There was no telling whether it was a human being, a deity, or a devil. It was indeed the "Thick Earth Fortress", one of the five Supreme Fortresses!
However, the Thick Earth Fortress at this moment had lost the infinite dominance that it had when it attacked the capital planet. It could not release any brilliance and brutality anymore. It was like a dry skull.
Li Yao and Ding Ling Dong looked at each other in the video and saw the shock in each other's eyes.
It was unlikely to be Lu Qingchen's trick, because they did not detect the slightest spiritual waves from the Thick Earth Fortress, which meant that one of the toughest space fortresses in the history of mankind had been completely paralyzed if not wasted.
It would take at least three to five days for such a super fortress to be restarted and for all the preparations to be completed.
Flying around the Thick Earth Fortress, they soon found the "cause of death" of the space fortress.
On the side of the Thick Earth Fortress that was facing "Gu Shisan", there was a gap more than several kilometers long. Countless cracks that protruded out of the gap had directly "dissected" the fortress. Almost all the materials, including the fuel and the crew members, had been spurted out of the gap. Serial explosions might've happened during the process, too, burning the interior of the Thick Earth Fortress into a dark, empty shell.
"There seems to be an enormous meteorite deeply embedded inside the Thick Earth Fortress. Maybe there is more than one."
Li Yao released his telepathic thoughts and snuck into the fortress. After a rough scan, he came to a conclusion. "It must've been the meteorite that broke through the spiritual shield and the shell of the Thick Earth Fortress and cut into the power furnace at the core as if it were tofu, triggering an irreversible explosion."
Corpses, wreckage, and scrap metal with burn marks floating in the surrounding space also quietly told of the tragic situation at that time.
But it was far from the end.
Very soon, they found the debris of a second space fortress nearby.
This time, it was the Burning Fire Fortress.
The Burning Fortress that had been burning like a star could not release the slightest light and heat anymore. It did not even have an intact body like the Thick Earth Fortress did. Instead, it had been completely ripped into more than a hundred enormous pieces and was shaking helplessly under the pull of the gravitational force between Gu Thirteen and the entrance of the Supreme Emperor's mausoleum. Most of the crew members on it were either vaporized the moment of the explosion or ejected to an unknown place, falling into the endless hell in the form of ice.
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