owlsbooks Chapter 2592 Unreachable 2
Chapter 2592 Unreachable 2
"That sounds reasonable."
Zhang Yi nodded, but his face showed a helpless smile.
"But there is a problem."
"Ok?"
How do we get through the main entrance?
Zhang Yi opened his mask and rubbed his temples vigorously.
"We're exploring an entire world!"
"It's not that kind of primitive civilization, which we can understand roughly by scanning it with technological means."
"This is still an advanced civilization; we can't understand many of their technologies."
Zhang Yi felt a headache starting to ache.
He felt as if he were standing in front of a mountain of gold, but all around him was a vast, boundless desert. He had no tools and could only gaze at the gold without being able to dig it out.
It truly feels like being torn apart by a hundred claws.
Lu Keran comforted him, saying, "Brother, let our engineering troops explore here slowly! It will take several decades, and we will eventually make a breakthrough."
"Thank you, you're so good at comforting people!"
Zhang Yi's eye twitched involuntarily.
However, he also knew that Lu Keran was right; excavating advanced civilizations was not so easy.
They might need to make breakthroughs at the technical level for a very long time at any given juncture.
Zhang Yi turned to Ling again, "Ling-chan, as the masterpiece of the most advanced civilization in the universe, you must have a way, right?"
Ling countered, "If you can operate a mobile phone skillfully, then do you know how to make money?"
Zhang Yi: "..."
Ling continued, "There must be a way to open the spatial barrier. If we can't force it open with more powerful spatial forces, then we must find the key."
"However, nobody knows where the key is."
For a moment, Zhang Yi and his team were at a stalemate.
Zhang Yi was still figuring out how to challenge this Tower of Babel when a soft melody suddenly drifted into his ears.
The piece was classical and gentle, yet it didn't sound like a pure piano; the tone had a hint of metallic resonance, as if someone were tapping glass strings with brass knuckles.
Zhang Yi and the others immediately showed expressions of astonishment.
Because the melody was very familiar, I don't know if the musical scales of all races are the same, but this music is clearly in the style of humans!
"How could Earthling music be playing here?"
The sound came at just the right time, as if an old friend was waiting for their arrival.
Zhang Yi immediately instructed the intelligent system to locate the source of the sound, and then cautiously activated the spatial teleportation to rush in that direction.
The sound came from a cluster of collapsed high-rise buildings.
It was a city skeleton flattened by time, the walls as if they had been peeled off, leaving only steel bars and inner ribs, appearing pale and alienated in the constant white light of this other world.
The sound came from the highest beam, echoing slightly, and spread over the ruins towards the sea.
When Zhang Yi arrived here, he could hear the sound with his ears alone, without the aid of smart devices.
Zhou Ke'er listened for a few seconds, her eyes lit up, and the corners of her mouth turned up.
"This is Schubert's Serenade."
As she said this, she couldn't help but hum along softly, looking at Zhang Yi as if showing off her ability to read music.
"I never thought that someone in this godforsaken place would understand romance."
Zhang Yi smiled, a hint of surprise in his eyes.
"The Martian Serenade has quite a unique flavor. But I can confirm that our human pioneers didn't come away empty-handed!"
The image of Elon Freeman flashed through his mind.
Their advance team had indeed reached the depths of the Martian world.
When Zhang Yi arrived at the ruins, he saw a humanoid creature sitting on a huge steel beam.
Saying he was sitting was a bit of a stretch; it was more like he was sitting cross-legged.
He wore an outrageously large hat with a brim so wide it almost covered half his face, and a piece of fabric on top that had collapsed, swaying gently in the wind of the Martian world.
His body wasn't the streamlined, tall machine of the Cangyuan Clan, but rather had a touch of old-fashioned industrial aesthetics: rivets, exposed joints, and rough-lined chest armor, as if an old-fashioned piano and a piece of engineering machinery had been forcibly pieced together to form a humanoid figure.
The strangest thing was his face.
To be precise, it was the area that should have been the face, but the material was a black, slightly worn square display screen.
At that moment, a person's face was lit up on that screen.
It was the face of a middle-aged human male, with the angular features still intact, but his temples were much whiter, his eye sockets were a bit deep, and the wrinkles at the corners of his mouth indicated that this person used to love to laugh, but now his laughter carried a slight neurotic quality.
Zhang Yi glanced at him and immediately recognized who he was.
Elon Freeman.
He called out softly.
The face on the screen seemed to freeze for a moment, then switched back to live feed with a "ding," and when its gaze met Zhang Yi's, a genuine look of surprise appeared on its face.
"Oh my God, look what I've discovered! Damn it, is this just my imagination?"
The person on the electronic screen laughed, even their voice had a slight hissing noise like an old videotape.
"Finally! Finally, we see aliens! And they even have modern accents!"
He stood up abruptly, but his movements were not fluid like a human's; they were mechanical folds.
The limbs first retracted, then sprang back, making a few soft "click-click" sounds as the joints locked in place, and the hat also shook twice.
He was still in the same "playing" motion with his hands.
That's not a piano.
He disassembled each joint of his fingers into retractable metal flute holes, then used the joints as a row of keys. By pinching his ten fingers together and twisting them, he could play chords.
“You’ve come at just the right time; I’ve been waiting here for many years.”
The mechanical version of Freeman smiles broadly, with fake wrinkles appearing at the corners of his eyes on screen, as if afraid others wouldn't notice his "great happiness."
Zhang Yi landed not far from him, and the steel beam beneath his feet sank slightly.
He looked around and raised an eyebrow.
"Your outfit is quite trendy."
He pointed to the excessively large hat and said, "Is it that your own sense of aesthetics is flawed, or is this the only type left on this assembly line of civilization?"
Freeman laughed heartily, his laughter carrying a metallic, electronically synthesized echo.
"Martian wind, my friend."
He patted the hat, looking quite pleased with himself.
"There is indeed a lot of wind and sand here, but we must not lose our elegance."
"Besides... I don't sweat anymore, so I don't have to worry about heat dissipation when wearing a hat."
After saying that, he laughed for a while, as if he thought his lame joke was quite successful.
Upon seeing Freeman, Yang Xinxin and the others couldn't help but emerge from the shadows.
Zhou Ke'er, standing beside Zhang Yi, wrinkled her nose and glanced at him.
"You're the leader of that pioneer team that went to Mars twenty years ago?"
She looked at Elon Freeman, quite surprised by his mechanical body.
"So you didn't die, but you did replace your body with a machine!"