77: Chapter 77 Giant Object

Early on the morning of July 1st of the 35th Year, Jiang Lin woke up in his tent.

Last night, the temperature dropped to near zero degrees.

By noon today, under direct sunlight, the temperature would soar again to over ten degrees or even twenty degrees.

For a young body in its twenties or thirties, this drastic diurnal temperature difference was merely an environmental parameter that required drinking a little more water.

If it were over a decade ago, the very first thing Jiang Lin did upon waking up would be to crawl right out of his sleeping bag, stuff everything into his backpack within three minutes, and then hit the road immediately.

The muscles and bones back then were like precision gears coated with lubricant, ready to engage and exert force at any moment.

Not anymore.

A fifty-three-year-old body needed a warm-up.

Just like a transmission system that had been running for a long time, starting it directly at full load would only force the weakest bearings to fail first.

Jiang Lin first tried rotating his left ankle, hearing a muffled click from the joint, followed by his right ankle.

Then he slowly bent both knees, allowing the synovial fluid to re-coat the dry meniscus.

Finally came his lower back and spine; he had to lie flat and wait for the stiffness caused by sleeping on the hard ground all night to gradually dissipate piece by piece.

If he didn't do these, even an inconspicuous gravel pit on the first kilometer of the road—if he twisted his ankle even slightly—would immediately issue him a notice for a half-month-long bedridden recovery period.

But Jiang Lin did not entertain any thoughts of backing out because of this. Instead, looking at the dusty plastic sheet above his head, he began to ponder why he had walked out of the Stone House like a reckless novice yesterday.

It was for Lemma 0.2.

For the secondary flake thickness whose lower bound could not be found no matter what.

For that missing Physics picture.

This trip out was indeed a rule-breaking operation, lacking a clear scientific research goal, a detailed sampling list, or even a preset round-trip route map.

This was unprecedented in his over a century of life in the Wasteland.

But people are just like that; it is inevitable to have moments of sudden impulse.

With the warm-up finished and his thoughts settled, he finally got up.

Packing his luggage, eating and drinking his fill, he gripped his trekking poles and set off once more.

At the end of his vision, the horizon remained an undulating rock contour, carrying the desolation and fragmentation unique to the Wasteland.

Just like that, he walked casually toward the northwest.

July 2nd of the 35th Year.

3:00 PM.

Straight ahead, above the northwest horizon, right at the boundary that should have been a chaotic mix of gray sky and brownish-red earth, a contour abruptly rose upright.

That was a vertical, non-natural contour that could absolutely never have been naturally generated by geological movements.

Relying on his years of distance-sensing calculation, Jiang Lin estimated it to be five to six kilometers away.

Slowly sitting cross-legged on the gravel-filled ground, he took off his backpack and pulled out the small brass-cased magnetic compass from it.

Opening the lid, he waited for the needle in the dial to sway and stabilize.

Reading: North by west, approximately twenty-eight degrees.

Step two, the occlusion observation method.

He closed one eye, extended his left hand wearing a tactical glove, blocked two-thirds of the field of view on the left side of the horizon with his palm, and forced his vision to focus solely on that prominent vertical contour.

If this were an afterimage produced on the retina due to long-distance trekking, or a columnar mirage illusion caused by long-distance light scattering in the hot air, altering the visual focus through partial occlusion would usually make it disappear or distort.

The edges of the contour remained as clear as if cut by a knife, and one could even discern the boundary of light and shadow on its surface.

It was not an illusion.

Step three, parallax verification.

Supported by his trekking poles, Jiang Lin stood up, moved parallel horizontally to the left by about a hundred meters, and then turned his head to look back over.

That contour was still standing right there.

However, due to the change in the observation angle, its originally two-dimensional silhouette underwent an extremely slight morphological change, exposing a bit of depth information.

This meant that it possessed a real three-dimensional Physics volume and occupied real space.

It was an object in the sense of Physics.

Having confirmed these three things, Jiang Lin lowered his head to look at the water bottle hanging at his waist and weighed it in his hand.

Then he quickly reviewed his current physical fitness parameters in his mind.

Gritting his teeth, it was possible to walk to its base today.

However, according to the signals sent by his swollen right knee, his safety window for today had at most about four kilometers left.

And that target, conservatively estimated, was over five kilometers away, or even six kilometers.

Jiang Lin resolutely made a decision.

He would make camp right here tonight and not walk any further.

Tomorrow morning, he would go to see it with the clearest mind and the most ample physical strength.

Absolutely never approach a creation that might conceal countless structural hazards when his physical fitness was on the edge of the red line.

At a place about five kilometers away from that contour, he found a wind-sheltered spot sandwiched between two boulders and pitched his camp for the third night.

That evening, the sun set very slowly.

Jiang Lin brewed a cup of steaming hot Moss tea, sat outside the tent, held his thermos cup, and watched the massive silhouette in the northwest direction motionlessly.

The sun slowly descended from his left rear, scorching the sky into a tragic blood-red.

In the final minute of sunset, the last ray of nearly horizontal light pierced through the twilight mists of the Wasteland like a sharp sword, striking that distant contour.

Jiang Lin narrowed his eyes.

That contour was reflecting light.

That was not the dazzlingly sharp specular reflection like brand-new stainless steel or a glass curtain wall.

Rather, it was a soft, diffusely scattered reflection.

This indicated that its surface had been oxidized and polished by the Wasteland's wind and sand for countless days and nights, becoming incomparably rough, yet its material itself still retained a certain capacity to reflect photons.

It was metallic.

Jiang Lin stared at that speck of dark golden reflection jumping on the edge of darkness for a very long time, until the sun completely sank below the horizon and the dark night flooded the entire Wasteland like a tide.

July 3rd of the 35th Year.

At 4:30 AM, when the Wasteland's night was still at its deepest, Jiang Lin opened his eyes.

After waking up, he couldn't fall back asleep at all.

He simply sat up, boiled some hot water in the dark, and ate a piece of Pumpkin Cake with the water.

At 5:30 AM, when the eastern horizon had just begun to flush with a faint red, Jiang Lin set off with his carrying frame on his back.

The advancing speed on the third day was even slower than the first two days combined.

The soreness in his thighs and calves no longer floated on the surface, but had seeped deep into his bone marrow.

The swelling sensation in his right knee became even more pronounced; every step he took felt like a needle poking into his knee pit.

His pace had dropped to an outrageous degree.

Every two hundred meters he walked, he had to stop, lean against his trekking poles, pant heavily for dozens of seconds, and wait for that wave of acute pain to pass.

But his eyes were exceptionally bright.

When only one kilometer remained, the contour of the giant had become incomparably colossal.

Jiang Lin finally saw its overall form clearly.

That was a large metal framework bearing a hint of brutalist aesthetics.

Its base was exceptionally wide, resembling a sturdy fortress; as the height climbed, the overall structure began to narrow slightly inward.

The diameter at the base was about forty meters, and roughly estimated, the total height was between fifty and sixty meters.

At the very top of this framework sat a huge circular structure.

Across a distance of one kilometer, coupled with the dust floating in the air, he could not see the specific details on the surface of that circular structure.

But he could clearly distinguish the geometric symmetry embodied by that ring.

That was definitely not some randomly piled-up ruin, nor was it a coincidence formed by distortion after an explosion.

Rather, it was industrial geometry that had been meticulously calculated and possessed clear Physics intentions.

11:10 AM.

Dragging his heavy legs, Jiang Lin finished walking the last stretch of the gentle slope covered with weathered gravel and finally arrived right in front of it.

This giant—Jiang Lin silently assigned it a temporary code name in his heart—standing at its feet, the oppressive feeling rushing straight at him was a hundred times stronger than visually estimating it from five kilometers away.

It was not because of how towering into the clouds it was, but because its entire body exuded an unnatural aura.

On a Wasteland where there was only weathering and erosion, any structure that retained a strong geometric will and artificial traces would appear like an ancient command that had not yet completely expired.

Total height, approximately sixty meters.

Base diameter, approximately forty meters.

The main body was entirely constructed of stout metal frames.

Metal components thicker than a person's thigh crossed obliquely in space at specific angles, forming an extremely sturdy multi-directional load-bearing truss structure.

At the joints of the components, Jiang Lin could clearly see the blackened huge weld seams, as well as densely arranged large riveting and bolted connection points.

Years had left indelible marks on this giant.

The metal surface layer on many windward sides had been polished by the violent wind containing tiny quartz sand until it lost its luster, presenting mottled rust stains of varying shades, with flaking peeling appearing in some places.

However, the core framework serving as the load-bearing main body still stood proudly upright, without the slightest sign of bending or collapse.

Its base was a set of astonishingly massive concrete foundations, embedded dead into the hard rock stratum of the Wasteland like a monster's claws.

After a millennium of weathering, the surface layer of part of the concrete had peeled off, revealing the frighteningly stout rusted rebar skeleton inside.

But even so, the geometric shape of the entire base still maintained an astonishing integrity, presenting a regular octagonal foundation.

Jiang Lin's gaze climbed all the way up along the metal frame, crossed the complex diagonal braces in the middle section, and finally landed on the circular structure at the top.

The diameter of that ring was visually estimated to be around thirty meters.

There were sixteen stout metal spokes radiating outward from the central hub of the ring like a bicycle wheel, connecting to the outer ring belt.

In his rough observation from afar, Jiang Lin had once thought these spokes were equiangularly distributed.

After standing at its feet, he immediately overturned his previous judgment.

Many large-scale engineering structures looked symmetrical from a distance, but as long as one walked close, as long as one established a coordinate system in their mind, they would expose the asymmetric deviation angles designed for a specific function.

Besides the main framework, at a height of about thirty meters in the middle, there was also a protruding circular platform.

Sparsely scattered on the platform were some small additional structures, looking like the wreckage of a rusted parabolic antenna, or some kind of sensor array, or perhaps the base of a signal receiving unit.

Most had fallen off over time, smashing into pieces in the pile of rubble below.

Taken as a whole, it looked very much like a super-large communication antenna tower.

But Jiang Lin shook his head, denying this intuition.

An ordinary antenna tower, even a super long-wave antenna used for intercontinental communication, absolutely did not need to be poured with such a heavy concrete foundation, nor did it need to design such a complex additional load-bearing platform in the middle.

It was more like a special engineering device specially designed to resist some extreme Physics environment, or used to monitor some space/geophysical phenomenon highly valued by the civilization at that time.

Jiang Lin stood about twenty meters in front of the giant, gazed up at it with a sense of awe for about ten minutes, and then began to work.

Item one: Position and orientation confirmation.

There was no GPS signal here.

What Jiang Lin used was a local coordinate system that he had spent thirty years building bit by bit, taking the Stone House Outpost as the origin.

This coordinate system relied on the long-term calibrated far-field magnetic North Pole, the sun-shadow azimuth angle on a specific date, his own precisely calibrated pace measurement, and the known landmark baselines left by previous expeditions.

He turned around and retreated about fifty meters back.

At this distance, the near-field magnetic anomalies that might be generated by the giant's massive metal body would be attenuated to a relatively safe range.

He took out an anti-glare writing board and a magnetic compass from his bag and squatted on the ground.

First, he used the magnetic compass to conduct a far-field rough measurement and recorded the magnetic north direction.

Then, he found a flat stone, erected a pencil, and using the shadow angle cast by the sun at this moment, combined with his pace calculation and the contours of two mountains at the end of his vision that he had once named observation benchmark mountains, began to reconstruct the giant's relative orientation on paper.

After about twenty minutes of calculation, he derived his current position.

Northwest of the Outpost, with a straight-line distance of about twenty-one kilometers.

Next, he needed to determine the orientation of the device itself.

He found that although the entire building looked cylindrical, the arrangement of certain core components inside clearly had a central axis.

He walked along the periphery of the giant, and using the line-of-sight alignment method, roughly determined the direction of this central axis.

Result: North by west, approximately twelve degrees.

He successively changed to three different observation points and measured this cumbersome process three times. The deviations of all three results were within three degrees, which fell within the acceptable error range of this simple measurement method.

But in his notes on the writing board, he drew a key symbol with double lines and wrote a rigorous annotation beside it.

[Warning: There is obvious near-field magnetic anomaly interference nearby. Magnetic compass readings must never be used as the final directional benchmark. The central axis orientation (approximately 12 degrees north by west) is only an external rough measurement based on sun shadows and far-field baselines, and systematic errors may exist. It must be rechecked with an optical theodolite on the next expedition.]

Item 2: Magnetic Field Scanning.

Jiang Lin stuffed the writing board back into his bag and took out a three-axis magnetometer.

This gadget certainly could not compare to a superconducting quantum interference device, but it was more than enough for identifying a structural, macroscopic, and holistic magnetic deviation in the field.

He stood fifty meters away from the colossal object, turned it on, and waited for the self-test to complete.

The readings on the screen jumped for a moment before stabilizing at a certain value.

This was the background magnetic field of the area, and everything was normal.

Holding the magnetometer, he walked slowly toward the colossal object step by step, like a mine-clearing sapper.

Thirty meters away.

The readings of the magnetometer began to show faint fluctuations, and one of the components among the three axes showed a slight directional deviation.

Ten meters away.

The deviation became very obvious, and the values began to jump.

Five meters away.

The magnetic anomaly was already so pronounced that there was no need to look at the data; just by looking at the violently fluctuating red curve on the screen, one could know that a strong residual magnetic field existed here.

But what surprised Jiang Lin was that this magnetic field deviation did not present a single polarity direction like a giant bar magnet.

Holding the magnetometer, he walked extremely slowly for a full circle around the colossal object, hugging a circumference five meters away from the base.

Keeping his eyes fixed on the constantly changing three-axis components on the screen, his brain roughly reconstructed the directional changes of these magnetic field vectors in three-dimensional space.

After walking a full circle, the readings presented a very obvious annular trend.

The magnetic field lines were like invisible coils wrapped circle after circle around this colossal object.

This characteristic was too familiar.

Deep inside Jiang Lin's brain, a photograph flashed instantly.

That was the remanent magnetism distribution map measured from around those melted giant reactor coils when he was conducting an inspection many years ago at the abandoned giant substation site codenamed RECON-VC-01.

An extremely similar annular topology.

Jiang Lin stood in place, his breathing somewhat heavy, but he immediately and forcefully suppressed the excitement welling up inside him and the impulse to directly draw an equivalence between the two.

An isolated substation sample could not prove anything.

Now with this second colossal object sample, the things that could be proven were still very limited.

But it was undeniable that these two ancient ruins, separated by dozens of kilometers and with completely different functions, pointed to the same physical pattern worth tracking in terms of their residual magnetic fingerprints.

Multi-circuit collective response.

Some unknown physical process that once acted on multiple large closed conductive structures, causing countless closed loops of different designs to simultaneously generate huge induced currents and ultimately leave behind this characteristic remanent magnetism.

He lowered his head and wrote extremely restrainedly on the writing board.

[External rough scan result: Presents an annular remanent magnetism trend. In topological structure, it is compatible with the data of some large-loop samples in RECON-VC-01.]

Item 3: Proximity and Observation.

Having finished the rough magnetic field measurement, Jiang Lin hung the magnetometer in front of his chest and slowly walked toward the regular octagonal base.

He stopped at a place only about an arm's length away.

The huge concrete base blocked the way like a tall wall.

The details on the surface were clear at a glance.

Having experienced the long passage of years, the color of the concrete had faded from the initial industrial cement gray to a vicissitude-filled dark yellow.

The surface was covered with dense, tiny weathering cracks like a spider web.

Jiang Lin took off his gloves, extended his right hand, and gently touched the edge of the base with his fingertips.

The touch was icy and extremely rough, like stroking a cold and hard sandstone.

But with a slight press of force, he could feel the reassuring solidity emanating from inside the base.

It showed no slightest sign of being crumbly or on the verge of collapse.

This was definitely the highest quality engineering special concrete.

When pouring it, its designers had formulated the grade with the goal of resisting once-in-a-century disasters and achieving extremely long-term durability.

He walked slowly around the huge octagonal base for a circle.

Measuring this regular octagon with his gaze and stride length, Jiang Lin found that the lengths of the eight sides were visually almost identical, and the angles of the eight interior angles were surprisingly uniform.

Achieving such precision on such a huge volume was definitely not a hastily cobbled-together emergency project; this was a product relying on a huge, precise, and standardized construction system.

When he finished walking a full circle and returned to the vicinity of his initial position, his gaze was attracted by a structure on the lower-level framework.

That was a metal hatch.

The hatch was embedded between the thick frames of the lower level, and its bottom was about two meters high from the ground.

This was a typical industrial waterproof and pressure-proof hatch, with heavy locking hinges surrounding it.

But now, the entire door had been completely welded to the door frame by rust, presenting a dark red state of death.

Jiang Lin's line of sight shifted to a metal main load-bearing component on the right side of the door frame.

A rectangular metal nameplate was embedded there.

The material of the nameplate seemed a bit better than the surrounding steel frame, possibly some kind of alloy.

But even so, the baking paint and coating on the surface had been polished away by wind and sand until almost nothing was left, and the handwriting on it was blurry, almost merging with the base color of the metal.

Jiang Lin leaned closer and squinted his eyes, trying to recognize it.

After looking for less than half a minute, he felt a wave of soreness in his eyes, and his vision began to blur.

At fifty-three years old, the elasticity of his eyes' crystalline lenses had significantly declined.

Under the high-contrast lighting environment of the Wasteland, making him frequently switch focus between the blurry nameplate nearby, the annular structure in the distance, and the recording board in his hand, his ciliary muscles reacted significantly a beat slower, and it even induced slight dizziness.

He decisively gave up the intention of forcing a look with his naked eyes.

Taking out a digital camera from his bag and adjusting it to macro mode, he began to frantically press the shutter facing that nameplate like an untiring machine.

Eyes would betray you due to fatigue, but photosensitive elements and pixels would not.

After taking the photos, Jiang Lin found a shady stone to sit down, turned on the camera's playback function, adjusted the screen brightness to maximum, and then used his finger to zoom in on the photo just taken bit by bit on the screen.

By comparing photos under different light and shadow conditions and piecing together those tiny shadows and reflections, several incomplete Chinese characters emerged like ghosts from the dust of a millennium of time.

[...Tidal Wave Monitoring...]

No prefix, no suffix.

It was impossible to confirm the complete official name of this device, nor could its full functionality be finalized directly through these four characters.

He could only confirm one thing: this behemoth standing on the northwest Wasteland was, at least at the beginning of its design, closely related to the monitoring work of a physical phenomenon called tidal waves.

What kind of physical connection was hidden behind the word tidal wave?

He did not know.

But he knew one thing: a brilliant civilization once existed on this Wasteland.

One that possessed an extremely developed global power network, was capable of formulating rigorous standardized engineering design specifications, could perform precise large-volume concrete construction, and could establish a huge engineering system spanning multiple observation points and operating collaboratively across the vast earth.

Unfortunately, this civilization was now dead.

Its former pride, its efforts to resist or record the disaster, had all turned into the rust and concrete ruins before its eyes, scattered across the boundless Wasteland.

It was like a torn book, waiting for Jiang Lin, a lone traveler from another world, to brave the wind and sand, pick up these mud-stained pages piece by piece, and try to piece together the truth of the world's destruction.

Jiang Lin took a deep breath of dry and cold air, forcefully suppressed the churning thoughts in his heart, raised his camera again, and continued comprehensive recording.

This tedious photography work took a full hour.

It was not until one-forty in the afternoon that he stopped to eat.

The wind blew from the north-northwest direction, passing through the intricate metal framework of the colossal object, making a low and distant mournful sound like a Xun.

As a Physics worker at the Outpost, he had long been accustomed to using parameters, boundary conditions, and tensors to define the world before him.

But in this setting, Su Shi's sigh written a millennium ago, aided by the wind shuttling through the metal trusses at this moment, abruptly crashed into this dead Wasteland.

"To lodge a mayfly between heaven and earth, a lone grain in the vast sea. Mourning the brevity of our lives, envying the inexhaustible Yangtze."

Unknowingly how many years ago, those unacquainted builders had also stood here looking up at the deep sky, trying to capture the ripples of tidal waves.

A millennium later, the world had been destroyed, and he sat alone at the foot of the tombs of these great minds, looking up at the metal residual bones they left behind.

Physics cruelly told him that what lay before him was merely a pile of alloys that had lost energy supply and weathered silicates.

But Jiang Lin, hidden beneath that cold and hard shell, knew that he was right in the middle of a moment full of divinity and a sense of destiny.

On the ruins of time, he was having a silent drink with time itself.

The sound of the wind gradually subsided.

Jiang Lin raised his head, drank the last sip of hot water at the bottom of the cup, and locked those churning poems back deep into his memory.

At two-twenty in the afternoon, the first stage of external macroscopic recording was declared complete.

Next was the second step: finding a way to enter the interior of the colossal object.

Although the hatch itself could no longer be opened with bare hands, on the metal load-bearing pillar beside the hatch, Jiang Lin observed a row of horizontal metal ribs similar to a climbing ladder.

As long as he climbed up two meters high along those metal ribs, he might be able to see the internal structure through the maintenance port beside the hatch or along the gaps.

If he was lucky, there might be ruins of the control room inside, data terminals not completely destroyed by wind and sand, and even well-preserved nameplates.

That alluring unknown information was calling to him like the songs of sirens.

He stood half a meter away from the framework, looking up at that two-meter height.

The load-bearing capacity of the metal ribs was unknown. Once during the climb, a rust-pierced sheet iron suddenly broke, causing his fingers to slip.

Or when jumping down, his ankle twisted slightly and abnormally on the gravel-covered ground.

Or again, his knees failed to cushion properly upon landing, resulting in even a one-millimeter misalignment...

In the remote wilderness twenty-one kilometers away from the Outpost, any seemingly insignificant bone or joint injury would instantly turn this originally controllable excursion into a countdown to death.

Jiang Lin would not hand over the stability of critical systems to luck.

His body was trapped in a fifty-three-year-old shell, but next time, when this round of Wasteland cycle ended and the next restart began, he would return to that energetic, muscular eighteen-year-old body.

That eighteen-year-old young body could climb this sixty-meter-high metal tower like a monkey.

Could come here carrying complete engineering equipment weighing up to thirty kilograms.

Could bring high-strength Kevlar ropes, pulley blocks, portable oxy-fuel cutters, large sampling insulation boxes, extremely high-precision superconducting magnetometers, and could even set up optical measurement stands to measure every single pore of this colossal object clearly.

But the current him, this fifty-three-year-old body, did not need to play the hero.

His only task at this moment was to be an eye.

Discover it, record its external features, and confirm its coordinates.

Then, bring back this basic yet true information alive to the Outpost.

Dispense a corner of the fog of war on the map, so that his next self would not have to waste time searching like a headless fly on this Wasteland.

Jiang Lin made this rational choice in his heart.

Only do external, non-contact observation and recording.

[GIANT-NW-01 Archive: July 3, Year 35, initial discovery.]

[Tentative Codename: Northwest Colossal Object. Based on nameplate fragments, suspected to be a large-scale engineering device related to tidal wave monitoring.]

[Geographical Location: Outpost local coordinate system, northwest direction, straight-line distance of about 21 kilometers.]

[Rough Bearing: Relative to the Outpost observation benchmark, approximately 28 degrees north-northwest.]

[Overall Physical Form: Ultra-large metal truss structure tower, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top. Laser rough measurement total height is about 58.4 meters, maximum chassis diameter is about 41.2 meters.]

[Basic Structure: Regular octagonal high-strength concrete foundation.]

[Top Features: Giant annular load-bearing/antenna structure, diameter about 30.7 meters, internally containing 16 radially connected metal spokes.]

[Middle Features: Additional working platforms and unknown equipment installation position ruins exist at about 30 meters above the ground.]

[Key Nameplate: Incomplete metal nameplate found on the right side of the lower-level door frame, content reads ...Tidal Wave Monitoring... Complete system name unknown, core functions not directly verified.]

[Magnetic Field Fingerprint: External portable instrument rough scan result, presenting a clear annular remanent magnetism topological trend. This characteristic has physical mechanism compatibility with the damaged samples of some large loops in RECON-VC-01 (substation ruins).]

[Structural Central Axis Bearing: Estimated based on external shadow baseline, approximately 12 degrees north-northwest. Due to the presence of strong magnetic anomaly interference in the near field, this data is highly likely to have deviations and is listed as an item pending re-verification.]

["External Physics entry: One heavy metal bulkhead door discovered at the base, about two meters from the base floor. Currently in a severely rusted-shut state, impossible to open by hand."]

After finishing this long string of descriptions as rigorous as an autopsy report, he flipped to the next page of his notebook.

["To-Do List for the Next Wasteland (Youthful State) Must-Complete Items"]

["I. Carry heavy demolition tools and a rope system, enter through the entrance hatch via climbing or setting up temporary scaffolding, and conduct detailed internal structure mapping and video recording."]

["II. Inside, prioritize searching for the main control room, data storage compartment, or any area with display terminals."]

["III. Search for more complete equipment nameplates in areas with better weathering resistance inside, and confirm the complete official name and construction unit of the device."]

["IV. Use a pulley system to reach the summit, and conduct close-range optical measurements and material sampling on the 30-meter-diameter annular structure at the top."]

["V. Carry a high-precision optical theodolite to accurately measure the absolute orientation, horizontal deflection angle, and elevation angle relative to the horizontal plane of the 16 metal spokes."]

["VI. Follow the pipeline layout to find the independent power system of the behemoth (reactor or large battery pack) and the potentially existing physical data transmission interface."]

["VII. Exhaust all efforts to find any form of solid-state recording media (such as radiation-resistant hard drives, tape arrays, etc.)."]

["VIII. Use a cutting machine to collect the main metal frame, high-strength concrete core samples, and chemical samples of the surface coating, and bring them back to the laboratory for spectrum analysis and dating."]

["IX. Conduct deep coupling analysis of the remanent magnetic field data of this device with the damage model of RECON-VC-01 (substation)."]

["X. Utilize multi-point LiDAR data to perform millimeter-level overall 3D geometric reconstruction of it in the workstation."]

["XI. Use astronomical observation data to accurately calibrate the Physics central axis pointing of the behemoth, and discuss its potential geometric correlation with the azimuth distribution in the SKY-RED (Aurora Red Band) dataset."]

This list felt like an extremely detailed battle plan issued to his future self.

And it would also be one of his next tasks.

At three in the afternoon, after a brief rest, Jiang Lin continued the second phase of external measurement work.

The content of this stage did not look like much on the list, but to minimize errors, Jiang Lin had to be extremely meticulous.

I. Redundant rough measurement of overall geometric dimensions.

II. Recording of the deflection angle between the top annular structure and the 16 mysterious spokes.

III. Actual tape measure measurement of the side length of the regular octagonal base.

IV. Around the periphery of the behemoth, establish a high-density magnetic field vector peripheral network with acquisition points every 5 meters.

He picked up the simple laser rangefinder, retreated to benchmark points at different distances, lay on the ground, and fixed the rangefinder with stones to reduce errors caused by hand trembling.

Time and again, he shot out red laser beams, recorded the time difference data of the reflection, and then used trigonometric functions to reverse-calculate.

Overall height correction value: Approximately 58.4 meters.

Bottom maximum diameter correction value: Approximately 41.2 meters.

Top ring diameter estimated value: Approximately 30.7 meters.

In terms of professional surveying and mapping, the errors in these numbers were still shockingly large.

But for Jiang Lin, who didn't even have a blank sheet of paper right now, these data were already enough to support him in returning to the Outpost to write the first scientifically valuable "Anomaly Discovery Report".

Among them, what gave Jiang Lin the most headache and consumed the most time was the measurement of the 16 spokes at the top.

Just as he had judged before, the strong near-field magnetic anomaly around the behemoth completely turned the small magnetic compass in his hand into scrap metal.

The pointer spun wildly in different positions and simply could not point to the true north.

He could only rely on the most primitive yet least interfered optical and geometric methods.

Carrying his instruments on his back, he painstakingly retreated to different orientations a hundred meters away from the behemoth.

Utilizing the line-of-sight intersection method, using the observation reference mountain he established and the movement trajectory of the sun's shadow as an absolute reference system, combined with multi-point distances measured by the laser rangefinder, he forcibly constructed a huge virtual three-dimensional coordinate system in his mind, and then reverse-calculated the true orientation of those spokes in space.

This was a process that extremely consumed brainpower and physical strength.

When he finished measuring the 8th spoke, due to tilting his head back for a long time, his cervical spine emitted a protesting soreness, and he even experienced a brief vision blackout before his eyes.

The measurement results startled him greatly.

Those 16 metal spokes connecting the outer ring and the central hub were definitely not strictly equiangular distributions designed for uniform force distribution.

This deviation was so large that it could not be explained as random errors during construction or structural deformation caused by long-term weathering.

This felt more like a specific directional design aimed at gain or focusing toward a particular direction.

Just like a group of sunflowers, although their roots grew in different positions, their flower disks were all striving to tilt toward the same direction.

Jiang Lin input the measured rough angle data into the engineering calculator and performed a simple vector synthesis.

The results showed that the spatial orientations of these 16 spokes statistically formed a pointing cloud.

And the center of this cloud was eerie and concentrated near a specific azimuth:

North by west, approximately 12 degrees direction.

At the same time, through rough long-distance estimation of the inclination angle of the spoke cross-sections, they were not looking horizontally at the horizon, but carried a noticeable elevation angle, pointing toward the mid-to-high altitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere's sky.

Jiang Lin sat on a stone, looking at the numbers on the calculator screen, and cautiously wrote in his notebook—

["Observation record: Spoke pointing cloud analysis, suspected to be highly concentrated near azimuth north by west 12 degrees. Elevation angle is only a rough estimate due to optical condition limitations (pointing to mid-high sky areas), must wait for the next time carrying high-magnification optical measurement instruments for precise re-verification."]

At five-forty in the afternoon, the long and torturous spoke recording finally ended.

Jiang Lin felt that his legs no longer belonged to him, and he collapsed heavily next to the huge concrete base, panting heavily.

After resting for ten minutes, he forced himself to stand up and began executing the final task.

Peripheral magnetic field sampling.

Holding the magnetometer and dragging his heavy steps, he walked around the massive periphery of the behemoth.

A full 26 sampling points, squatting down every 5 meters, recording the three-axis vector data.

After completing the sampling, he entered these 26 sets of data into the engineering calculator in his hand.

The calculator's pitiful computing power could not run complex partial differential equations, but doing some basic statistical filtering and vector plotting was still not a problem.

An extremely crude vector diagram appeared on the screen.

The data showed that the magnetic field vectors indeed presented a perfect annular organizational morphology.

Moreover, the geometric center of this annular magnetic field surprisingly coincided with the Physics axis of symmetry of the behemoth itself (that central axis of north by west 12 degrees).

This result further corroborated its similarity in Physics mechanism with the substation sample.

But when Jiang Lin reached this conclusion, he did not write the four characters current direction in the conclusion.

There was a hidden and complex entangled relationship between magnetic fields and current.

Relying solely on this fragmented external magnetic field scanning, it was completely impossible to determine in what historical stage this magnetization mechanism occurred.

This strong remanent magnetism could be that when this device was working normally back then, the huge working current flowing inside slowly magnetized the surrounding metal components during long-term operation.

It was also possible that at the moment the world-destroying disaster descended, some terrifying electromagnetic pulse erupted between heaven and earth, causing this massive metal tower to passively induce an extremely terrifying transient current like a huge antenna, thereby magnetizing itself in an instant.

Even, it might be the superposition of these two situations, mixed with the later influence of the geomagnetic field changes in the Wasteland environment for an unknown duration.

If this were an ordinary passive receiving antenna, it would be absolutely impossible for it to retain such a strong magnetic field.

If these remanent magnetisms truly originated from its past working current, it meant that when this device was operating, it once swallowed and discharged a jaw-droppingly huge amount of power.

Then, the question came.

Was it a weapon or beacon actively emitting some huge energy into the sky?

Or was it to actively monitor some tidal wave phenomenon carrying huge energy?

Or perhaps, it was simply an unlucky lightning rod that, at the moment the disaster descended, passively endured an induced current like divine punishment?

The fragmented evidence that could be collected at the scene was simply insufficient to support him in deducing any definite conclusion.

July 3rd of the 35th year, 6:40 in the evening.

As the last streak of sunlight dissipated at the end of the Wasteland, Jiang Lin finally completed all planned external recording work.

He leaned against the huge concrete base and sat down on the cold ground.

The sun had completely set.

The last remaining twilight of dusk, like a very thin layer of gold foil, clung to the rusty metal framework of the behemoth.

This desolate and beautiful golden color lasted for less than five minutes.

Afterwards, the light was completely swallowed by the Wasteland, and in the boundless darkness, the behemoth was left with only a giant, awe-inspiring silhouette.

The base was as wide as a fortress.

It gradually narrowed upwards, exuding an upward yearning.

The annular structure at the top looked like a crown of thorns belonging to a lost civilization in the night sky.

And the spokes on the crown, like a hand pointing toward the sky, firmly pointed toward the direction that the engineers of an ancient civilization deemed worthy of long-term human gaze.

Jiang Lin tilted his head back, looking in that direction.

A set of data from the Outpost's computer flashed through his mind without warning.

That set of observation datasets named SKY-RED-V2 by him, concerning the northern low-altitude aurora red band.

That eerie red band always repeatedly appeared in the northern low altitude, and then disappeared like a ghost.

Then, after an uncertain period of time, it appeared again.

Jiang Lin's heart beat violently once, and he quickly unzipped, pulling out the small notebook in the dark.

Turning on the flashlight, next to the rough map drawing the behemoth's pointing cloud, he forcefully added a line of text.

["Important correlation hypothesis: The spatial azimuth of the top spoke pointing cloud of GIANT-NW-01 (north by west 12 degrees) may statistically have partially overlapping regions with the azimuth of the northern low-altitude red band recorded in the SKY-RED-V2 dataset!"]

After finishing this sentence, reason took the upper hand again.

He added a calm annotation in the next line.

["Warning: The elevation geometric relationship between the two is currently completely uncalibrated. Before obtaining precise measurement data from optical instruments, conducting any form of Physics-meaning interpretation or excessive association regarding this is strictly prohibited."]

Jiang Lin closed his notebook, channeled a burst of youthful wildness for once, cheered toward the northwest like a madman for a while, and only hastily ate something and went to sleep when he was exhausted.

That night, waking up from dreams at midnight, he climbed up and blindly wrote down this day's diary in the small notebook.

["July 3rd of the 35th year."]

["Discovered GIANT-NW-01."]

["External Physics feature recording basically completed."]

["For safety, the internal exploration task is abandoned, leaving it for the next Wasteland cycle."]

["Start the return journey tomorrow."]

["Today, I saw with my own eyes the huge corpse left behind by a civilization."]

["They have been extinct for I don't know how many years."]

["However, the device they built still stubbornly points toward the sky to this day."]

["What on earth were they waiting for back then?"]

["Were they waiting for redemption? Or were they waiting for the advent of destruction?"]

["I do not know."]

["But I swear, I will definitely figure it out."]

Early the next day, Jiang Lin embarked on the return journey.

Before rounding a mountain col, he turned back one last time and looked at the behemoth in the distance.

In the lifeless gray sky light of dawn, its massive metal body was left with only a blurry black silhouette.

That silhouette appeared incomparably lonely.

But it would always be there, silently waiting for him to return next time with more advanced equipment.