Sometimes, unraveling a mystery didn't mean seeing the light. In this f * cked up reality, most mysteries were followed by even more confusing things. I felt that trying to unravel the truth of the past was like crossing mountains and rivers. When you finally crossed a large river, you would see the South Pacific Ocean when you looked up …
Regarding the soldier who got lost and came to Earth, we have the following clues: he came to Earth at least in the early Uruk period, that is, more than five thousand years ago (this is the earliest evidence we have). According to the tomb found in the Taklamakan Desert, he died more than a thousand years ago, with a gap of three thousand five hundred to four thousand years.
According to the Sumerian clay tablets, we know that the soldier traveled the primitive planet after arriving on Earth. Based on his series of actions — teaching the natives how to recognize stars, teaching the natives about astronomy and geology, and trying to change the native language — we can deduce that he was trying to leave some kind of mark in the native civilization of Earth as a kind of "beacon" in the future.
Of course, you can also guess that he just wanted to be a good samaritan and improve the quality of life and technology of the natives on Earth. But this guess is obviously a little too unreliable, and it does not match with Sandora's understanding of her own soldier. So we have long discarded this guess.
In any case, it is not wrong that he wanted to leave a "mark," but with the power of a Shiring Apostles, he did a terrible job.
If a primitive civilization was systematically guided, three thousand years was enough for the latter to master the technology of space travel. There is a related specialized subject called "Reconstruction of Civilization System." This subject originally studied a situation: when a civilization with advanced technology collapses, how to reconstruct its technology tree in the shortest possible time while ensuring the healthy development of the civilization. This subject is open to all students as a basic course in the Imperial Army War College. It is one of the sub-courses of "Civilization Preservation and Salvation." According to the classic cases in the textbook, this kind of civilization reconstruction can be completed in five to ten generations under extremely harsh conditions (to put it bluntly, the local natives are not intelligent enough). The situation on Earth is not quite the same, but we can still apply some of the analysis methods taught in this course. Therefore, Sandora deduced that "it took three thousand years to master the technology of colonization in the solar system."
As a Xi Ling apostle, of course, the soldier should also know about this. However, his guidance to the primitive people of Earth at that time was messy, and he did not stick to it even once. He did not use the ready-made rules that should have been in the memory core. Therefore, Sandora concluded that the soldier's logic system may have been affected by something and could not continue.
If he wanted to leave a message that "a higher civilization has been here before," the soldier had another way, which was to directly "carve a mark" on Earth. Although ordinary soldiers do not have the ability to build the facilities of the Empire, he should be able to make a hole in Earth, right? Pandora put forward her opinion: if she wanted to use the power of an ordinary Empire soldier to leave a lasting mark on a planet, then she would dive into the Mariana Trench and bury a dozen unstable psionic crystals. Although this will cause the extinction of half of the species on Earth, it will permanently change the planet's landscape, leaving a trace of crustal curl that is not naturally formed. The radiation produced by the psionic crystals can last for a long time on the planet, creating a large group of alien creatures. These are "marks" that can be preserved for a long time, and it is many times more effective than teaching the natives the stars and writing cuneiform.
But the soldier did not do so, so Sandora deduced that most of his equipment was locked, and he could only use "light weapons" such as his gun and small floating cannons.
In any case, all we could do was guess, guess after guess, but there was too little evidence and not enough information. What Xiaoxue could see was not much more detailed than what was recorded on the clay tablet, and all these guesses interweaved into a huge ball of string, confusing everyone.
But just as everyone was trying to figure out what happened to the soldier, I suddenly thought of something else. "Sandora, do you remember when we first met, you and your army were trapped on a planet contaminated by the abyss …"
"Ah, of course, I remember. That was the first time we met." Sandora was stunned for a moment, but she immediately replied briskly. That was the worst period of her life: the most frustrating battle of Princess Zhange's life, but now that she recalled it, she had already treated it as her own precious memory: because it was the anniversary of her and I first met.
Of course, I wasn't bringing up this topic to reminisce about the past with Shadora. It was because I had a question that I couldn't understand for many years. "Back then, you were trapped on a primitive planet … I can understand that it was difficult to jump out of the universe with limited equipment and without the support of the Empire's coordinate network, but you couldn't even leave that planet, could you? I now have a little understanding of the Empire's weapons and tactics of war. If you could leave the planet and set up railguns in space to bombard the planet below, wouldn't the battle be over in an instant? "
Sandora was slightly stunned when she heard that, as if she had connected the dots. "Yes, you are right. If we could build space facilities, or take out spaceships, the battle would be easily resolved. In fact, I have all kinds of small and medium-sized spaceships in my personal space for emergency replenishment. These spaceships are not very useful on a large battlefield, but they are more than enough to deal with a primitive planet."
I knew this. Every Shiring Apostle would have their own spaceships in their personal space. Ordinary soldiers would have individual spaceships, commanders and apostles above the rank of commander would have regular spaceships, and leader apostles like Sandora or Pandora would even stuff an entire fleet into their personal space. When Sandora was trapped on a primitive planet, didn't she have a spaceship in her personal space? Logically speaking, she and her soldiers could have left the battlefield on the spot and simply blown up the entire planet. After all, the planet had been deeply polluted, and the native civilization had long been wiped out. But just like the Schilling soldier who got lost on Earth a few thousand years ago, Sandora could not do what she should have easily done.
"It's not just the spaceships. Even without spaceships, we could still enter space. The Shiring Apostles could conquer the universe with their own individual strength," Sandora spread out her hands. "But all our equipment could not be activated, including most of the components in our bodies. We could not leave the universe, we could not build spaceships, and we could not even take out the large equipment in our personal space. All spaceships were forcibly locked in the atmosphere, and Bubble's construction module was offline for a whole 70,000 years."
I turned to look at Bubble. She was originally Sandora's subordinate. When Sandora was trapped in the other world, she was there. She was an unprecedentedly powerful Schilling Host. She led the construction of everything in the New Empire, including our Kuiper Belt space base and the earliest spaceport. But in the 70,000 years that Shadora had been trapped, she had not been able to build a single space launch tower. At that time, I did not understand these things, so I did not have too many questions. I just thought that it was a simple equipment failure of the Avengers. But now that I think about it, it seemed that there were many unexplainable aspects of Sandora's imprisonment.
"We can think of it this way. Back then, the situation of the Avengers was the same as the Nameless Soldier who was stranded on Earth. All the components of their body were locked, and all the equipment that could be used to escape from their current location could not be used," the elder sister said. "In other words, as long as they were a member of the Avengers, they were locked. Although the Nameless Soldier was accidentally transported to the other world, the locked state on him was also brought over, and it was even more serious."
Sandora pondered. "Locked state … Indeed, if we think about these two things together, some of the questions seem to have some clues. In fact, I have never figured out what was going on with me and the soldiers back then. I once thought that the local environment of the abyss had destroyed our equipment, but now it seems that the Lost Soldier did not break free from the locked state after he left the abyss. This kind of locked state did not come from the outside, but from … "
As she said that, Sandora reached out and pressed her hand on her chest. "From the inside of the Shiring Apostles?"
No one could answer this question. It was a mystery at that time, and because there was no way to solve it, we put it aside until today. It was not that no one had thought of this, but they could not figure it out, so we just put it aside for the time being. But now, a batch of clay tablets from the Mesopotamia had once again put this mystery in front of everyone. And this time, the mystery seemed to have loosened a little. The encounter of the Lost Soldier showed that the reason why the Avengers were trapped in the other world was not the local environment of the abyss, but something inside their bodies. Even if they could leave the world that trapped them, they would continue to be troubled by some kind of abnormal state.
"And that soldier may have been killed by this' internal cause '," Bryndis suddenly interjected. She reached out and pointed to the clay tablet on the coffee table, "Probably after he came to Earth, he also thought of the same thing that we are thinking now, and he found that because he rashly jumped out of the universe that trapped him, the condition of his body rapidly deteriorated, so he began to prepare for death."
In a situation where there was an extreme lack of evidence at hand, it was not easy to make a deduction to this extent. But Sandora was obviously trying to speculate more. "Now we can confirm that when we were trapped on that primitive planet, our soldiers and I were 'locked' by something, but this kind of locking is not easy to discover, and it was easily covered up by the local power of the abyss. If we did not find these clay tablets today, and did not know about the soldier's actions on Earth for more than three thousand years, I'm afraid we would never have guessed that the 'locking' at that time came from the Apostles themselves and not the external environment. "
I frowned. We had basically deduced the various reasons why the Army of Vengeance was trapped in the other world, but even if it came from the internal factors of the Apostles, we still did not know how it came about. The one who made the 'locking' plan was obviously not Sandora herself, so other than her, who else could do this?
She trapped Emperor Schilling and the emperor's most elite soldiers on a barren planet, locked all of their equipment, and even the various functions of their own bodies. And under this premise, she did not harm them at all. The powerful vitality of the Shiring Apostles was still there, and Sandora did not even realize that there was something wrong with her body back then!
Even until just now, she had just guessed that her body had once been locked by the 'internal cause' from the information revealed by the clay tablets.
"This feeling is terrible," Sandora suddenly said in annoyance. She rubbed her forehead forcefully, as though she was trying to rub out the thing that was troubling her. "I feel like there is something wrong with my body, but I don't know what the cause is … Do I have to go for a full body checkup? If I do not find out what it was that 'locked' on me and those soldiers, I'm afraid I won't be able to eat in peace. "
In fact, I wanted to say that it had been a few years since then. Maybe the "thing" that caused the Avengers to be locked down had already disappeared. But after thinking about it, I realized that I couldn't use such a reason to comfort myself. No matter what, Shadora and her soldiers had suffered from an internal "malfunction" in the past. Even if it seemed to have "recovered" now, as long as I didn't understand what was going on, I wouldn't be able to feel at ease …
"Maybe we can change the direction," the elder sister suddenly said. "Let's not talk about how this' locking 'came about, let's think about its use first. Sandora, what do you think would have happened if the Army of Vengeance had not been 'locked' in that world? "
"Of course, we would have dealt with the local abyssal contamination and left that godforsaken place," Sandora said matter-of-factly. "Even if the Old Empire collapsed and we lost the support of our home planet, with the army I had at the time, it would have been enough to destroy the abyssal contamination of that scale. Besides, I had Bubble by my side. In a very short time, she could build a World Gate from scratch …"
"And then?" The elder sister suddenly interrupted Sandora and asked solemnly.
Sandora did not say anything for a moment. After a while, she said in a low voice, "… I would have returned to the Old Empire as soon as I could to find out what had happened."
"And then the Army of Vengeance would have been completely destroyed in the remnants of the Old Empire's abyssal environment." Icetis took a deep breath. This female rogue who had always been fearless had now realized the chilling possibility. "The abyssal environment that covered more than a hundred skies and was almost boundless … When the Old Empire had just collapsed, the abyssal contamination was even larger than it is now. I bet that even the trump card of the Protoss Army would not have dared to enter that godforsaken place. Sandora, if you had really led your troops back to the Empire back then, you would not have been able to come back!"
"Could it be that this' locked-on state 'saved my life?" Sandora shook her head in disbelief. "From the results, it seems so, but this guess is a little far-fetched. It is very likely that this' locked-on state 'only inadvertently protected the Army of Vengeance. In theory, it should not have any motive!"
"Indeed, if it was only your experience, my guess would be very difficult to make. But I think there is another very powerful piece of evidence here." The elder sister raised her hand and pointed to the clay tablet on the coffee table. "You see, the soldier who got lost on Earth was obviously more severely 'locked-on' than you. He may have even died in this state in the end. This means that the 'force' that prevents the Army of Vengeance from leaving will change its intensity according to the situation. It prevents you from returning to the Empire and strictly forbids the soldiers who have already left to return. This sounds a little like … "
"A little like the method used to deal with the plague." Icetis snapped her fingers. "First, a safe zone is drawn, and then those who are not infected are protected and prohibited from going out. This kind of confinement can be said to be relatively mild: you are just not allowed to go out. But if someone has successfully escaped, he will face a much harsher measure if he wants to come back: death on the spot. The state of the Army of Vengeance at that time is like being placed in a safe zone. All connections between you and the Old Empire, including the spiritual connection, are cut off. For the abyss, this is the perfect barrier. And the soldier who accidentally left the world is a suspected infected person who is a potential danger to the 'plague protection system.' I believe that 'someone' who created this safe zone must have made a very simple program. It does not have the ability to determine whether the people who are about to pass through the 'blockade zone' are infected or not. It only mechanically prevents everyone from leaving and, more aggressively, prevents anyone from entering. I can only say that the soldier was very unlucky. He accidentally left the barrier, and naturally, this rigid system directly identified him as an infected person. When he tried to return to the main force, the barrier, or the 'locked-on mechanism' that caused the Army of Vengeance to be trapped, made the decision to let the soldier self-destruct. "
This was the final conclusion that Icetis came up with.
Bizarre, bizarre, and inconceivable, but it perfectly matched every piece of information that we currently have, and it also explained why the soldier of the Army of Vengeance who had lost his way to Earth would die.
"Is a soldier who accidentally left the world really that dangerous?" Shallow Shallow scratched her head and said a little indignantly. She probably felt that the 'barrier' was a little too unreasonable — even if the barrier was just a hypothesis from the beginning.
"It can't be helped. In that situation, we can't be too cautious." Sandora sighed. "If a soldier who escaped was not dealt with, there is a high chance that he would try to reconnect to the Old Empire's data network. You all know how corrupted that network is. Even if only one person reconnects to the network, he would be able to bring the plague back to the Army of Vengeance. Perhaps the soldier would not have died in the beginning, but he must have done something that he shouldn't have done to trigger the 'barrier's' execution process. "
As she spoke, Sandora had completely agreed with the hypothesis about the 'safety barrier'.
Then there was only one question left: Who created this barrier?
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