Soon, under the guidance of Byron, Gwen and Byron arrived at the frontier of the Gloom Mountains.
This was the result of several days of hard work by the exploration team led by Byron. It was connected to the upper zone by a large staircase. There was a wider space and a higher roof. It was not easy to build such a spacious space in the mountain. Since the builder had chosen such a scale, it could only mean that the area required such a large space.
All the corridors were elevated, so were all the doors and rooms.
Gwen picked up a map and looked at the route on the map with the help of the magic stone held by Heti. Byron and Knight had done their best to complete the mapping of the area along the way. There were many straight corridors and rooms on the map. Some of the rooms and corridors were marked with special marks to indicate that there were unknown objects or suspicious forks in the corridors. Clearly, even after several days of exploration, Knight Byron's party still couldn't figure out the scale of this astonishingly huge ruin.
How crazy was the scale of this thing?
Now, Gwen, Heti, Amber, Byron and a large group of soldiers had come to the special room. Byron pointed to the door and control mechanism that had been cleared out in front of them. "My lord, we found it purely by luck. This door was originally sealed, but probably because of years of disrepair, there was a gap. That's why we found the airflow. The control mechanism next to it should be broken. Its identification function has been disabled. Anyone can activate it. "
"The creation of the Kingdom of Gondor can't withstand a thousand years …" Gwen sighed softly. "Show me."
Byron nodded. He took off his gloves and stepped forward. He put his hand on the metal device. A distorted voice came from the device. "Test … sample tester … stability period … permission granted. Opening isolation door … "
In the creaking sound of the mechanical operation, the ancient isolation door inlaid in the wall slowly opened.
"As long as you do this, the door will open. Then, no matter if someone comes in or out, the door will close by itself within five minutes. Or, if you hit the pillar twice in a row, the door will close. There is a similar device on the other side of the passage, "Byron explained in detail.
Then two more soldiers stepped forward. The device sounded the same and said that the isolation door had been opened.
It seemed that it would identify anyone who touched the device as the so-called stable sample tester. Identity verification was useless.
But Gwen could not help but frown. He had a deep thought about the words "sample tester" in the device.
"This thing can actually talk!" Amber, on the other hand, was intrigued by the device itself. She ran over to the top of the metal pillar and imitated Lucien's example. "I've heard that the elves and wizards can also create a magic puppet that can talk, but I've never seen one before …"
"Test … Warning. Ineligible. Unidentifiable target. Channel closed. Alarm activated."
Along with the cold voice, the isolation door quickly closed again in a loud noise, leaving Amber standing next to the device. "Hey … I didn't do anything?"
Gwen put his hand on the hilt of the Pathfinder's Sword the moment the alarm sounded. But after waiting for half a minute, he did not hear anything else. He was a little relieved. It seemed that most of the functions in the device had been shut down. The door in front of him probably operated on its own. It would not really send out an alarm.
Byron, Heidi, and the rest of the team were also startled by this sudden change. They all pulled out their weapons and got ready. It was not until they confirmed that no ancient mechanism or trap had been activated that Heidi let out a sigh of relief and looked at the metal device in astonishment. "What's going on? Why didn't it work when Amber touched it? "
"Let's not worry about that first." Gwen pulled Amber aside and put his hand on the metal pillar. "Let's see if this thing works."
However, in the next second, the old access control device once again emitted the sound of identity verification, and the isolation door creaked open again.
"… This door is so shameless!" Amber jumped up and down. "Why is it fine when anyone touches it? Why did it close when I touched it?"
"I think I know what's going on …" Gwen frowned. From the few reactions of the access control device, he boldly inferred something. "I'm afraid this verification device is not broken."
Amber was in disbelief. "It's not broken? If it's not broken, then why can anyone open it? "
"The security settings of this door may not be as high as I thought at first. Its function is to ensure that those who pass through the door are 'normal' people," Gwen said with a frown. "Remember what Nicholas said? This facility had once conducted research on suspected human subjects, so the 'sample tester' mentioned by the security guard was most likely a living person, and the so-called 'stable period' … most likely meant that there was no mutation or uncontrollable situation. In other words, as long as you are a normal person, you can pass through this door. "
"Then why can't I?" Amber stared. "I'm quite normal!"
Gwen looked at the guy from head to toe. "Are you a normal human? Don't say that. Are you even human? "
Amber's pointed ears twitched. "… Well, that makes sense."
The others also nodded thoughtfully. It seemed that Gawain's explanation had gained everyone's approval. However, Gawain himself was deeply puzzled after he finished speaking.
Is the situation really that simple? Is this door just to prevent the test subjects from running out of control? Does it have any other filtering mechanism?
For some reason, when he heard the stiff and cold voice of the access control system, he could not help but feel a very weak but real sense of disgust and resistance. But when he searched his memory, he could not find the source of this negative emotion at all.
But no matter what was behind the door, he had to go in.
After confirming that Amber was just unable to use the verification device at the door, and that she would not trigger any alarm if she entered the door behind the others, Gwen led the team into the space behind the door.
They passed through a corridor made of an unknown metal material. The metal pillars on both sides of the corridor reminded Gwen of sterilization or electrostatic devices. At the end of the corridor was another open isolation door. Opposite the isolation door was a circular hall.
The hall was built of man-made materials. Although the white wall paint was dusty and peeling, it still reminded people of how bright and spacious the whole space was in the past. Around the hall, there were a large number of ancient magical devices lined along the walls, connected by pipes or metal pillars. And the pipes that extended from these devices converged in the center of the hall, where a dozen strange objects stood.
They had a metal base, and on the base was a transparent tubular structure like a biological culture tank. At the top of the tubular structure, one could see a heavy lid. The lid was engraved with runes and arrays, but all the runes had been extinguished.
The scene in front of Gawain, who could not tell if it was a fantasy or science fiction scene, left him in a trance for a moment. But the scenes of the glorious days of the Gondor Empire in Gawain Cecil's memory quickly weakened the sense of dissonance in his heart.
Looking at the neatly arranged devices, Gwen could almost imagine the scene when these containers were filled with biomass solvents and soaked in test subjects. Around these containers, imperial mages were busy recording the various parameters of the samples in the containers, and from time to time, they would use magic to stimulate the samples in the containers, and treat the 'test subjects' of the same race in the containers with an almost inhuman attitude.
Human experiments were not rare in the Kingdom of Gondor, and it was even more common in the Ansu Kingdom of today.
"It's incredible …" Heti looked at the mysterious ancient magical devices with an almost intoxicated expression. The neatly arranged runes and the delicate metal structure amazed her. "Such a complicated combination of runes … such a tight assembly … such neat parts … how did they do it?"
"These runes were created by the endless energy of the Deep Blue Well, and the experimental data without regard for consumption. And these parts …" Gwen looked at the magical devices that had a prototype of certain industrial products and sighed softly. "They require thousands of skilled craftsmen, more than twenty basic workshops, a complete set of complex production processes, thousands of standard parameters, and the technical system supported by the entire empire."
Heti was a little absent-minded for a moment. "… We actually lost such advanced technology … Can't we preserve it back then?"
Gwen sighed. "The first generation of pioneers in Ansu tried to restore these things in their lifetime, but the data we rescued was not even enough to restore half of it. The industrial chain was broken, and a group of semi-literate people from the borderlands studied the drawings for ten years, but they could not make up even one part of it. What's more, the conditions at that time did not allow anyone to go out of work to do research. The first generation of people had to put ninety percent of their energy into production to ensure that the number of people who starved to death did not exceed the number of people who were born …"
At this point, he shook his head. "But compared to these, the more important reason was that we lost the Deep Blue Well. The huge amount of pure energy provided by the Deep Blue Well greatly reduced the operating requirements of many magical devices, and the same device may not work at all if placed in another magic environment. The most basic and simple things are still okay, but the more complex and advanced the device is, the more it will be completely useless after leaving the Deep Blue Well. "
Hearing Gwen's words, Amber suddenly felt a little touched. "So you value generality and applicability so much?"
"The industrialization of magical devices supported by the Deep Blue Well is not a real industrialization," Gwen said casually, and then looked around with a smile. "Compared to this, let's see how many surprises this ancient experimental site has left for us."
His gaze swept across the millennia-old culture containers, control consoles, magitech bases, and sensors. Finally, his eyes fell on a nearby wall. He couldn't help but narrow his eyes.
There was a huge line of words written in the ancient human language:
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