Chapter 1055: Shocking Scene
Beyond recalling Azima and Rother immediately, Roland laid out the follow-up in a second letter.
Mining uranium safely was a long process under any circumstances — careful operational protocols, monitoring stations, workers who understood what they were handling and why the procedures mattered. In the face of an approaching war, he had no patience for normal protocols.
The North Slope Mine had established the template.
He would buy condemned prisoners from the Quinn family — men already sentenced to death, who could choose between the noose and a decade of labor underground. Those who chose labor would have no holidays, no additional compensation beyond survival, no need for the full protective measures required for trained workers. He believed they would make the right choice. And the local lords would be happy enough to exchange the lives of criminals for a steady income.
The hundred-man escort Sean had brought would shift from exploration to supervision and security. Demands on the garrison would be much lighter, and the operation could run lean.
Sean was, without question, the right man to run it.
At the end of the letter Roland added a final instruction: find the whereabouts of whatever the explorers carried out of the ruin a century ago.
The question nagged at him.
This civilization — unknown to history, older than the underground civilization, older possibly than anything in the witches’ records — had built their temple not just near the uranium but from it. Brick ore in the walls. Ore in the floor. The element in every surface of the murals. Those glowing green figures Azima had seen through the coin — bones bright with accumulated radiation, stuffed into iron cages — implied that some prisoners had been fed the ore before being imprisoned.
The worship of radioactive material was strange. It was not, in itself, physically catastrophic. A man could live in a uranium mine for years and accumulate little more than a modest statistical increase in cancer risk. The decay efficiency of natural nuclides was genuinely very low.
But the villagers in the century-old rumor hadn’t died of cancer. They had died of something acute — skin rotting, flesh exposed — and they had died within a human lifetime of the exposure.
That didn’t fit passive contact.
For the kind of acute radiation effect described, you needed criticality — a mass of fissile material dense enough to sustain a chain reaction, generating a sudden high-intensity flux of neutron radiation and hard gamma rays. No natural deposit could do that on its own. The geometry was wrong; the purity was wrong.
Which meant the “treasures” that the knight and his men had carried out were not ordinary ore.
They were something refined. Something shaped. Something that, under the right conditions, could concentrate the decay into a burst rather than a trickle.
Roland did not rule out that the century of retelling had warped the original facts beyond recovery. But the scale of the deaths — an entire group of survivors, across ten years — pointed toward something specific. A mechanism. Not a curse.
It’s a pity Summer’s retrospection doesn’t reach back a century. The truth was probably retrievable in outline but not in detail. Sean would do what he could.
He sealed the letter and set it with the first.
Honey arrived, took both letters, and left.
Roland crossed to where the mural copies were spread across the floor and crouched down to examine them properly.
They were strange objects to be kneeling beside — rough ink copies of alien art, made by soldiers with no training in draftsmanship, in an underground room lit by torchfire, working through filtered masks. And yet even through all of that, the images carried something. A compositional logic. A consistent grammar.
The large central figures: the rulers. Rendered with the kind of care and detail a civilization reserves for images of itself. Every appendage precise. Every proportion intentional.
The small surrounding figures: the objects. Scattered in the corners, in the background, in the cages. Their postures expressed in a few lines — but those few lines communicated fear and pain without ambiguity.
The universal nature of intelligent life. We are always the protagonist of our own records.
Most scrolls were execution scenes. But not all.
Several showed combat. The matchstick figures could inflate their bodies and drift on wind currents — they used elevation aggressively, dropping behind enemy lines and pressing from both directions at once. Against this, no defensive fortification helped. The walls were useless. Cities fell. The small figures routed toward the sea.
Roland turned to a later scroll in the sequence.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he looked again.
“What is it?” Nightingale was beside him, her voice careful.
“The landscape in this panel.” He kept his voice neutral. “Look at the coastline.”
She looked. “More ink than the others. Darker.”
“Do you recognize the shape?”
A pause. “It’s just a drawing.”
“I need the maps again.” He spread the aerial surveys of the Endless Cape beside the scroll, matching sections, tracing the boundary between land and sea with one finger.
The silence in the room stretched.
The outlines matched. The Endless Cape — the Southernmost Region, where the Sand Nation people built their cities in black water and yellow sand, where Lightning and Maggie had mapped a featureless desert at the edge of the world — it appeared in a mural painted by a civilization that had fought its wars before the underground civilization existed.
Before the witches’ earliest records.
Before the Battle of Divine Will.
He unrolled the penultimate scroll.
And stopped.
The high platform. The circle of matchstick figures, gathered and deliberate. The thing floating at the center of the circle: an irregular polyhedron dense with tentacles, each one branching and writhing.
Roland had seen that shape before. Described in the accounts of every Taquila survivor who had encountered one. Depicted in the murals of the Witch Union’s underground archives. Associated in every record with the word divine.
Sean hadn’t known what the mural showed. He had dutifully copied it and sent it along with the rest.
But Roland knew exactly what it was.
It was a relic of the gods.
And the civilization that had built the Cursed Temple — that had worshipped radioactive ore and used it to execute their enemies and their own — had been gathered around one, more than fourteen hundred years ago, as if showing it what they had done.
Chapter 1055: Shocking Scene Translator: TransN Editor: TransN
In addition to recalling Azima and Rother, Roland also wrote down the follow-up arrangements.
It was a time-consuming and laborious task to mine uranium mines safely. Not only was it necessary to formulate a detailed operational procedure and set up monitoring nodes, workers also needed to have a certain understanding of the work they were engaged in. They would then have to act meticulously according to the rules.
In the face of imminent war threats, he naturally did not intend to follow the normal protocols.
The North Slope mine was a good example.
He bought the prisoners on death penalty directly from the Duke of Quinn. He then threw them into the ruins without compensation and holidays, and he did not need to prepare protective measures for them. They would be released after working for a decade. He believed that those people would make the right choice if they had to choose between the gallows or a chance of survival.
Furthermore, local lords would probably be quite happy to use the lives of these scums in exchange for an additional income.
In this way, the 100 soldiers of the exploration team only needed to be responsible for supervision and security work, thus greatly reducing the requirements of defense.
Sean was undoubtedly the best candidate to be in charge of management.
Finally, at the end of the confidential letter, Roland also made sure to order the guards to look for the whereabouts of the “treasures” that the people had
brought out of the ruins a century ago.
After all, there were a few doubts about the rumor that bothered him a little.
This clan, which had not been recorded by history, seemed to have an inexplicable sense of worship for radioactive elements. It used brick ore to build a temple for sacrifices and even used it to torture the enemy. Some were even made to swallow the ore. Those bodies that were filled with green fluorescence, as seen through Azima’s eyes, were proof that it happened. Although it was unclear whether their demise had a direct connection with this kind of worship, it was appropriate to call them a radioactive clan.
Since the world was so big, it was not surprising that all kinds of civilization could exist. What was truly strange was that no matter how deep you went into the mining area or took ore to make bricks, it would not be possible to cause “flesh rotting” effects. Even if you lived in mines, the long-term internal and external exposure to various types of decay radiation would only result in a mere increase in the probability of getting cancer. If you were meant to live to the age of 80, you might have lived to the age of 66 only.
After all, natural nuclides’ release efficiency is really too low.
Several unlucky people that died in the rumor did not seem to have died from cancer or mutation complications. They seemed to have been affected by strong radiation.
In order to satisfy the latter condition, only the high-purity nuclear material could reach criticality, and a large number of neutron fluxes and hard γ-rays have to be generated in an instant. However, this situation did not seem to be something that the radioactive clan could achieve.
Roland did not rule out the possibility that the rumor itself had distorted the facts. However, the villagers’ misery at that time should have been known by more than one person. If it was true, the problem would most likely be those “treasures”.
Only in this way would the ruin take over the function of the altar of execution—Otherwise, every detainee would live for dozens of years before dying. If this altar was not built into a high-rise apartment building, it would not be able to hold so many people.
It was a pity that a century exceeded Summer’s retrospective period. It was almost impossible to completely understand what was happening at that time and Sean could only try his best.
He felt that the truth behind the rumors might not be so simple.
…
After Honey took the letter, Roland walked to the desk and examined the paintings that were spread out.
Although the distorted ink images were filled with strange and absurd things, he could still recognize the general subject and object—The subject was mostly located in the center of the scrolls. The outline was large and delicate, representing the ruler of the ruins; the object was much smaller. They were in all of the corners, and from their hideous expressions, you could feel their pain and fear.
This was probably the universal nature of all intelligent life—Always make yourself the protagonist in historical records.
Just like Sean said, neither the subject nor the object was related to the known civilizations such as the demons, the demonic beasts, or the undersea civilization. Their shapes were quite weird, some were like matchsticks with limbs that were indistinguishable from head and tail; while the others were like crawling protozoa with all of their organs located in the brain.
The contents of the murals were not all related to the execution. There were some that depicted the scenes in which the subject and the object were fighting. They seemed to be able to fly by inflating the body and following the direction of the wind. They seemed to take advantage of the high-altitude to maneuver and land behind the enemy and successfully attack from both sides.
The towering defense line was not of any use. The city was a sea of fire and the object was defeated.
As long as the roles were clearly identified, it would also be possible to roughly understand the events described in these seemingly crazy records.
“Huh?” Roland’s glance suddenly settled on a picture.
“What’s wrong?” Nightingale quickly noticed his strange look.
“Do you feel like you’ve seen these scenes depicted in the murals before?” He walked to the scroll and bent down to look at a mural describing exactly the last part of the war: countless matchsticks were united as if they were trying to fight to their last breath, but they were still knocked to the ground by the subject. The blood flowed and gathered into huge lakes. The surviving enemies fled to the sea. They were chased by the subject and killed. Their corpses even formed a small bag of a mountain in the sea.
“Oh…” Nightingale observed him for a long time and said, “In addition to using more ink, it doesn’t seem to be different from other drawings.”
“Well, combat ability and artistic appreciation are inherently opposite.” Roland held his forehead and said, “Help me get a map of the Southernmost Region.”
“Yes, I will.” The latter did it quickly and placed a thick stack of maps in front of Roland. At the same time, she also handed him some dried fish.
Roland bit the dried fish while his hands kept moving. He soon found a partial bird’s-eye view of the Endless Cape
At that time, in order to determine the location of Festive Harbor, he asked Lightning and Maggie to make detailed maps of it, so he still had a deep impression. When the two were put together, he suddenly felt a layer of goose bumps on his back. His body felt like a current had run through him and his fingers were numb.
“The outlines of the two maps overlapped!”
“Although the details were different, the boundary between the mainland and the Swirling Sea was basically the same, and similarity was above 80%!”
“Was this… a coincidence?”
“Hey, is this the Southernmost Region on the map?” Nightingale also realized that something was wrong and asked, “Isn’t that where the Sand Nation people live?”
Roland did not answer but quickly scanned the remaining painting scrolls.
When he saw the penultimate one, all the blood in his body seemed to freeze.
He saw only a dozen of the subjects gathered on a high platform, forming a large circle. An irregular polyhedron floated in the circle. There were countless strange tentacles on its surface. It was like the snake demon Medusa’s hair.
Sean did not see this scene with his own eyes, so he naturally did not know what was shown in the painting.
However, Roland knew very well what it was.
That was clearly “the relic of gods”.