304: Chapter 305 Core Area of ​​the Ruins

"Brothers, no nonsense, let's get straight to the good stuff."

"After one hundred days of rotational exploration by our exploration team, we have finally reached the edge of the core area of this ancient battlefield ruin!"

"It is worth noting that not only are there fatal spatial rifts in the battlefield core area, but a brand-new crystallized mob has also appeared. Killing it yields the small crystals on its body."

"In appearance, it looks like a reptilian creature covered in crystal formations. All four limbs on the ground, its size is not large, roughly comparable to a civilian hovercar. Most ridiculously, these guys can actually walk around in an absolute zero vacuum without any protection!"

"We temporarily don't know their living habits, nor do we know what they eat. But we sent people up to test them, and the monster's aggro determination range is very wide. As long as a player approaches within a certain distance, it will actively initiate an attack."

"There is also a very dangerous mechanic (OP highlights this): once a player's body touches the crystals on them, even through thick Power Armor armor plates, a strange whispering sound will instantly appear in their head. Listening to it for too long continuously drains SAN, judged as mental corruption."

"We are trying out more crystal samples and will bring them back for you guys to research in a few days. Old rules, one unknown crystal for one hundred points, no credit allowed, haha!"

Lin Li read the main text word by word, his brain spinning rapidly to extract the key information from it.

"Crystals? Reptile-like creatures that can survive in a vacuum? Whispers with mental corruption traits, could they be related to Warp demons?"

Lin Li touched his chin, falling into deep thought.

What on earth was hidden in these ancient battlefield ruins?

The initial intelligence about this ruin was learned from Iron Man U-999.

It belonged to the ruins of the War in Heaven tens of thousands of years ago.

At that time, after evaluating the risks, Lin Li packaged this news into a quest and published it.

Not long after, Nobi Dahniao took the lead, heavily recruiting a few players to pilot a modified shuttle to explore.

But the exploration progress fed back was infuriatingly slow.

The environment of those ruins was far too perilous.

There was no atmosphere, and the gravitational field was completely chaotic.

Even more terrifyingly, the space there seemed to have undergone a permanent physical fault due to some terrifying weapon strike in ancient times.

The dead void was filled with spatial rifts imperceptible to the naked eye.

Step wrongly, and a player's body would be instantly sliced into hundreds of pieces of broken meat by invisible spatial blades, or directly squeezed into a pool of plasma by folded space.

Because of this unreasonable instant-death mechanic, early map exploration was entirely filled by throwing human lives into it.

For a long time, aside from bringing back some giantized, crystal-featured debris of ancient Orks corpses, the exploration team gained almost nothing.

Those ancient Orks were called Krork, the ancient ancestors of those Orks in the universe today, possessing massive sizes and extremely advanced technology.

But even such formidable creatures died on that battlefield, and their corpses underwent bizarre crystallization.

According to what Iron Man U-999 said at the time, the core area of this battlefield definitely hid some important item.

Either some lost cutting-edge technology or the ultimate weapon left behind from ancient times.

"I wonder what these fearless guys can dig out of that ghost place." Lin Li whispered to himself.

He continued to scroll down the page, looking at the comment section below.

Hardcore exploration post; a batch of players paying attention to the plot progress quickly gathered below.

Floor 1 Player [Nicotine Truth]: 666, big shot is awesome, breaking through the wall in a hundred days, I admire this perseverance.

Floor 2 Player [Elbow-Strike Helicopter]: Big Brother Bird! Our group fully pre-ordered the crystals you guys brought back! Get as many as you can! Points are plenty, absolutely don't sell them to other guilds!

Floor 3 Player [Do Not Give Years to Civilization]: Vacuum reptiles? Is this a tech tree that carbon-based lifeforms can unlock? Could it be some kind of silicon-based lifeform? Waiting for the firsthand dissection video.

Lin Li quickly scanned through the comments.

After a short while, he saw an in-game screenshot additionally sent by the poster Nobi Dahniao around the dozens of floors in the comment section.

Lin Li clicked on the picture.

The picture on the screen instantly enlarged.

The high-resolution image clearly displayed the tragic scene deep within the ruins.

The moment he saw the picture, Lin Li abruptly gasped, his pupils suddenly contracting.

"Good heavens..."

This was an ultra-wide static screenshot taken from a first-person perspective.

The background of the image was the deep, boundless deep space without a trace of starlight.

Huge meteorite chunks and broken ancient metal blocks quietly floated in the vacuum.

But in the foreground area on the surface of the ruins, occupying most of the frame, were not ancient technological creations.

But corpses.

Dense, stacked-layer player corpses.

Most of these corpses wore cheap off-white protective suits produced by the Shelter, or simple Power Armor with primary bulletproof cermet mounted on the outer layer.

Their states of death were bizarre and varied.

Some were cut in half at the waist, the blood at the break instantly freezing into dark red ice crystals under the vacuum's low temperature, with smooth, mirror-like cut surfaces.

Some were twisted like crullers, person and armor together twisted into a strange spiral shape.

And others were directly crushed into a flat meat patty by invisible spatial gravity, firmly stuck to the surface of a meteorite.

These were all traces of being instantly killed by twisted spatial rifts.

But the detail that made one's scalp tingle the most was not here.

The vast majority of these hundreds and thousands of mountain-piled, miserably dead corpses actually belonged to the same person.

That was the countless physical remains left behind at this specific coordinate point by the same player during the endless cycle of dying, resurrecting, rushing over again, and dying once more.

And between the gaps of these mountain-like remains.

A slender line sprayed with high-light fluorescent green paint, like a glowing snake in the dark, tortuously wound through the pile of corpses, avoiding one invisible death trap after another, and pointing straight into the deepest part of the ruins.

That was a safe route.

An absolutely safe physical navigation line.

Whenever a player stepped wrong and was instantly shredded by a spatial rift,

latecomers would tread on the predecessor's corpse, spray fluorescent paint next to that death coordinate, and mark out the blind spot.

Then use their own flesh to probe the direction of the next step.

A death every step.

A pile of corpses every ten steps.

This was the only reason Nobi Dahniao's team achieved substantive progress during their hundred-day exploration.

They did not carry any high-tech Warp exploration equipment.

Nor did they master any psychic spell's safety perception.

This was the problem-solving method of The Fourth Calamity.

They forcefully paved a broad avenue leading to the core area in this forbidden zone of death where even Space Marines dared not easily tread.

Lin Li looked at the fluorescent green road on the screen.

At this moment, facing this visually impactful scene head-on, his inner heart still felt an indescribable shock.

This player squad really had perseverance.

Under the condition of having almost no actual discoveries for several months in the early stage, with only endless deaths and boring corpse-running, they gritted their teeth and persisted in exploring this long by throwing lives at it.

Such a group that erupted with extreme madness and resilience for the sake of finding out the truth and for the so-called game progress,

was a completely incomprehensible nightmare to any indigenous force in this universe that cared about logic and morale.

Lin Li's fingers moved slightly,

pulling this post directly up, setting it as [Global Highlighted Essence], and mobilizing permissions to grant the poster an official reward of one thousand contribution points.

...

Space had no gravity and no air.

Three figures wearing Power Armor were stepping on a huge piece of debris, cautiously moving forward.

Beneath their feet was a tortuous trail sprayed with fluorescent green paint.

On both sides of the trail, one could occasionally see their own previously left frozen corpses shredded by spatial rifts.

Nobi Dahniao walked in the middle, his voice sounding in the team channel.

"Gold drop, we must get a gold drop today." His tone carried a hint of gritting teeth.

Dragon Strike walking at the very end sighed:

"Damn it, Brother Kun and his gang's points usury is too vicious. Borrowed 10,000 points from them last month, and in just one month, the interest rolled up to 50,000! Is this something a human would do?"

Nobi Dahniao deeply empathized:

"Yeah, fortunately we found this core area and can recover some losses by selling these monsters' crystals. Otherwise, even our underwear would be lost."

The three of them were complaining.

Da Heibi, who was scouting at the very front, suddenly stopped his steps.

He raised his armored arm, clenched his fist, and made a tactical gesture to halt advancement.

"Brothers, there's a change ahead!" Da Heibi lowered his voice.

The three immediately raised the weapons in their hands, looking along the direction of Da Heibi's finger.

The terrain ahead was completely covered by a layer of translucent crystals.

And at the end of that crystallized plain, multiple tall black shadows stood impressively.

Those shadows, like ancient giants, quietly stood in the vacuum.

"Creep over."

Nobi Dahniao made a gesture.

The three turned off the external searchlights of their Power Armor, and with the cover of meteorite debris, groped forward little by little.

After getting closer, the three of them breathed a sigh of relief.

That wasn't a living thing.

Those were several pieces of war debris as huge as small mountains.

Their shapes varied, and their surfaces had completely crystallized.

Over the long years, the internal structures of these debris had long been corroded by time, turning into hollow shells.

Nobi Dahniao approached a piece of debris with sharp arthropods and a metal spine, looking it over carefully.

"This shape..." Nobi Dahniao touched his chin, "Does it look a bit like a behemoth unit of the Necrons?"

Da Heibi dismissively tapped the edge of the debris with his rifle stock.

"Crack."

A piece of crystal shattered and peeled off, turning into a puff of powder that completely dissipated in the vacuum.

"Seems so, but I'm not familiar with this background lore." Da Heibi shrugged, "However awesome it was, what of it? Millions of years have passed, and now isn't it just a lump of dirt that shatters at a touch?"