The lost ancient city was full of desolation and loneliness. The only thing that could be heard was the wind blowing in their ears from time to time and the footsteps of others around them. On the dust-covered old street, Hao Ren and his team were still exploring cautiously.
The MDT floated in front of the team. The scanning beam projected from the surface of the MDT constantly scanned every object that looked suspicious or might contain the historical mysteries of the ancient city. The collapsed sculptures and the scattered slate were the most valuable things. On some of the slate and mud, the MDT found the cuneiform script that Hessiana had mentioned.
However, most of the text had almost been smoothed by the wind and sand. Often, there were no more than three to five recognizable symbols on an item. Even the translation system of the MDT could not process the symbols when they were not connected to each other at all.
"These symbols are indeed very similar to the cuneiform script that was commonly used in the plains of Mesopotamia." Vivian looked at the text patterns that the MDT had collected so far. These patterns were floating in front of her. "The clay tablets are standard cuneiform, and the stone tablets are some kind of variant for easier engraving. But it's not difficult to convert between the two fonts …"
Hao Ren looked at these ancient characters curiously. "Can you translate them?"
"No," Vivian shook her head. "Although they are indeed cuneiform, they are completely different from the cuneiform that humans have excavated in modern times. And I don't remember how to interpret these things."
"Battie, you really don't remember this city?" Lily still could not forget this question. "Maybe this place was the place where you, the crimson moon, slaughtered the entire city. Why don't you remember?"
"I really don't remember," Vivian said helplessly. "And slaughtering a city … it's not my character, okay? Even when I was delirious, I should have tried to stay away from human settlements as much as possible before I completely lost control."
"Let's talk about this kind of historical legacy later." Hao Ren shook his head and looked at the sandy street in front of them. "There is a building that looks like a temple in front. Maybe there are more complete texts in it. Maybe we can figure out the origin of this city."
"Oh," Lily said. As she walked, she muttered, "The largest area in this city is the temple. The ancient people really wasted their productivity in this place …"
As Lily said, the largest buildings in this lost ancient city were almost all temples. They could be recognized at a glance: the temples were tall and shaped like a combination of a pyramid and a cube. There were all kinds of mighty sculptures on the upper floors and in front of the main entrance. These sculptures were also unique. They were a combination of human torso and various characteristics of beasts, which perhaps reflected the religious form of this mysterious city in the past. In the primitive and barbaric era, such barbaric and horrible religious images were everywhere.
These temples occupied almost one-third of the entire area of the entire city, which was far beyond the normal needs. It was hard to imagine how many affiliated villages and human slaves were needed to support such a large-scale religious system.
Now, such a temple stood in front of Hao Ren and his team.
It was not the huge temple in the center of the city, but a smaller temple located near the central temple. To get to the central temple, they had to pass through the main road near this building. This "smaller" temple was also of a shocking scale. It consisted of a huge pyramid-shaped main body and two rectangular auxiliary palaces. The two palaces were lined up in front of the pyramid like the forelimbs of a prostrating lion. In the square in front of the pyramid, there were two neat rows of stone statues. They looked like guards guarding the passage to the depths of the temple.
Before going to the central temple of the city, Hao Ren felt that he should first search for such auxiliary temples around the central area to avoid missing important clues. Although the collapse of the otherworldly dimension was still ongoing, it would be at least a few days before the complete collapse. He still had plenty of time.
Y 'lisabet rode on Y' zaks' shoulder, looking around at the magnificent buildings and stone statues. Like the religious stone statues in other parts of the city, these several meters tall sculptures were also a combination of human torso and beast limbs. They had the heads of lions, jackals, and crocodiles, and their bodies were twisted into hideous postures as if they were ready to fight. The little demon observed for a long time and said, "Ugh — so ugly."
For the little girl, who was used to Y 'zaks's face, to say the word "ugly", it showed that these stone statues were really ugly.
Vivian was still playing the role of a historical narrator. "In primitive religious worship, powerful beasts always appeared as the guards of the gods or even the image of the gods themselves. There are two reasons for this. On the one hand, ancient humans were afraid of the power of the beasts. They regarded the most powerful beasts as beings with special powers like the gods. On the other hand, a large number of the otherworldlings who ruled the earth in the early days subdued humans by commanding various beasts and magical beasts. Many of the otherworldlings themselves were not much better looking than the beasts. At least in the human aesthetic, these primitive gods were the beasts."
Lorissa listened to Vivian's explanation. Suddenly, she frowned and looked in a certain direction. "Who is it?"
Hao Ren immediately drew his sword. "What's wrong?"
Lorissa stared at the sandstorm at the end of the street behind her. Her eyes slowly turned silver-white like the sacred flame. But a moment later, her eyes returned to normal. "Maybe it's an illusion. For a moment, I felt like someone was staring at me."
"I didn't feel it." Lily shook her ears. "My six senses are sharp. If I didn't feel it, then you must be imagining it."
"Probably." Lorissa frowned and slowly looked away.
The gate of the temple was made of heavy ironwood wrapped in copper. It should have been the most indestructible gate at that time. However, after thousands of years of sandstorms in the different dimension, the gate was still seriously decayed, and the remaining broken planks blocked the entrance at an askew angle. Lily stepped forward and threw the two half-ton door panels aside, revealing the dark passage inside.
Flamejoy lit up with blazing flames, and as the flames swayed, the party stepped into the ancient ruins.
Not long after, they saw the same huge stone statues on both sides of the corridor.
It was still the strange stone sculpture made from the combination of a human body and a beast's head. It was still in the posture of preparing for battle. The stone statue inside the temple was smaller than the ones outside, but it was also more than five meters tall and looked unusually mighty.
"Strange … Why are there so many stone statues?" Vivian frowned and muttered.
"Isn't it normal to have such statues in the temple?" Hao Ren was puzzled.
"It's normal to have such statues, but the number is abnormal. This is beyond the scale of decoration," Vivian said, shaking her head. "It's really weird."
At this time, the MDT, flying in front, suddenly shouted, "Partner! Partner! The murals here are recognizable! "
Hao Ren hurried over and saw the MDT's blue beam sweeping across a colorful relief on the stone wall. The relief was also mottled and eroded. It was almost impossible to see its original appearance with the naked eye. Even an experienced archaeologist would need quite sophisticated technical assistance to restore it. But compared to the almost completely flattened and fragmented stone and clay slabs on the outskirts of the city, there were still many recognizable areas on this mural.
With the support of the MDT's super computing power, these murals were quickly restored. Even the text below the murals was slowly pieced together and presented on the stone wall by means of holographic projection — just as they were when they were intact.
In the first picture, Hao Ren saw an abstract and strange scene: he saw a very large creature walking, or "floating" on the earth. It looked like a beetle with many slender, pointed legs. From the stacked, bone-like body extended several pairs of thin and long legs that were completely disproportionate to the body. The creature's pointed feet stepped on the earth, but its body was as large as the sun and the moon. This should be an exaggerated depiction of the ancients, but it was enough to make people guess how terrible this beetle-like creature was. And with such a terrible size, it could walk on the earth with only a few pairs of long, pointed legs, which was enough to show that its body was probably "floating" in mid-air. It either had a large number of suspended air sacs in its body, or it simply had the ability to manipulate gravity.
The first picture used almost all of the details of the giant creature. There was only one word below the picture. The MDT transliterated it as Ertos, which should be the name of the giant creature.
The second picture showed the destructive power of the creature: it was surrounded by thunder and lightning, and flaming meteors falling from the sky. Even the sun and the moon were swallowed by the giant beetle. Under the slender, pointed feet of the beetle were collapsed walls and dead humans. This meant that the creature had the supernatural power to summon lightning and fire, and most likely appeared during a solar or lunar eclipse. It destroyed human cities, but humans could do nothing about it. Among the corpses, there were even some extraordinarily tall humanoid creatures with alien characteristics. These humanoid creatures had aperture-like patterns around them. After the MDT translated the text below the picture, it said that those were the bodies of the "old gods."
The creature named Ertos destroyed a "mythical city-state" ruled by the otherworldlings.
Just as Hao Ren's eyes fell on the third picture, Lily suddenly stood up.
"Did you hear anything?"
The husky maiden's ears kept turning in all directions, and her golden eyes sparkled in the dim environment.
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