Yuan recounted everything he had gone through lately beside the gravestone, including those dark days at the mine. It was as if he were complaining to a parent.
"Ah, what a pity that token is gone. I wasn't even close to that guy. I don't even know where his family lives, so how am I supposed to pass it on?"
Yuan helplessly touched the token that had long since disappeared from his person. It had been the last possession of that pitiful boy who had died before his eyes.
"It's getting late, Grandma. I should head back. I think I've come into contact with a different kind of world, one even more magical than the storybooks you used to tell."
As he spoke, he looked at the words inscribed on the gravestone and bared his teeth with difficulty. "Eighty-two years old. In this shitty world, I suppose you still had a peaceful end."
As soon as the words fell, his heart stirred slightly. The armored helmet on his head covered his entire face. Then he said:
"I want to write a few words on this gravestone. Is there any way you can help me?"
"System ZS-9462 at your service. You may directly control the armor's plasma etching beam to carve it. The power level must be considered. The system may operate it on your behalf."
"You do it. I don't know how."
"Command received. Scanning target information. Ordinary sandstone slab, primarily composed of quartz with numerous impurities. Adjusting beam power."
Immediately afterward, Yuan's right hand slowly rose under the system's control. With a sharp hiss, a red beam carved Yuan's name onto the gravestone.
"Unfilial Grandson: Yuan"
As the final stroke landed, Yuan's right hand lowered again. Looking at the neat, upright characters on the gravestone, he nodded in satisfaction.
"It's time to go."
With that, he turned and walked back the way he had come.
"Yuan!"
"Hm?"
Yuan spun around sharply, but there was no one in sight.
"Grandma? Is that you, Grandma?" Yuan shouted anxiously, unable to describe the excitement in his heart.
"Yuan, be careful, be careful. Remember, believe in miracles. Believe in hope. Life always finds a way."
"Grandma! Grandma!" A familiar figure seemed to appear before Yuan, but no matter how hard he looked, he could not see her.
There were only faint, blurry traces of dust. Even after he activated the combat visor on his head at maximum power, it was the same.
Yuan paid no heed to anything else as tears streamed from his eyes. At that moment, the bitterness in his tightly wound heart could no longer be contained.
"You really are... still worrying about me even after you're gone?"
Elsewhere, the Gluttons' investigation encountered some trouble.
Cole's fingers left afterimages as they tapped across the holographic console. The radiation data constantly refreshing across his tactical visor made even the warship's central processing core run hot.
The warship's former medical bay had once again been radically converted into a detection command center. Twelve multi-band radiation detectors formed a ring around the chamber, their ghostly blue scanning beams projecting a model of the entire planet's atmosphere in the center.
"Sir, gamma-ray intensity has reached a radiation dose rate of 20 μSv/h, and the cumulative dose has exceeded 2 sieverts." The Science Officer's voice carried electronic static. "That is equivalent to exposing the cores of thirty nuclear reactors directly on the surface."
Cole stared at the spreading red regions in the three-dimensional projection. The ripples representing excessive radiation were spreading outward from the village.
"Activate geological resonance scanning." He pressed the orange button on the console. "I want to know how many meters underground the radiation source is."
"It's— it's on the surface!"
"What?"
"Sir, the radiation across the entire planet is on the surface. Those Divine River Bodies thought they had found a way to block radiation, but they didn't realize that, given their manufacturing methods, the impurities in those metal shielding containers far exceeded acceptable levels.
"That is how this happened."
"Forget it. Inform Your Excellency. These Divine River Bodies brought this upon themselves, which saves us the trouble."
Following Cole's command, a small probe flew toward the graves in the back mountain.
"Your Excellency, Your Excellency, I think you need to come and see this." Hearing the familiar voice, Yuan wiped away the tears in his eyes and looked up at the unidentified object falling from the sky.
"What is this?"
"This is one of our detection instruments. We are still at the foot of the mountain. The warship's detection equipment has found some problems. I believe you will be interested. Just follow it over."
Yuan could not explain the situation he was currently facing, so he could only keep it in his heart. He looked back at the gravestone, waved to her, and gave her one last farewell.
Then he followed the probe down the mountain.
"Actually, even if I came over, I wouldn't understand any of it. A lot of your things go beyond everything I've learned in my more than ten years of life."
"That is only temporary. We believe that in a very short time, you will master and surpass our knowledge."
"Then I'll take that as a good omen. Go ahead and explain it. I can't understand it anyway."
"Of course, Your Excellency. Look here." As he spoke, he enlarged the holographic projection, and the entire planet once again appeared before Yuan.
The observation window was divided into one hundred and twenty thousand honeycomb-like scanning matrices, with different data flashing in every cell:
- Infrared thermal imaging showed an absolute-zero zone three kilometers in diameter along the continent's central axis.
- Gamma-ray spectroscopy detected excessive californium-254 isotopes at 37.2 degrees north latitude.
"The radiation kill radius meets the extinction standard for pre-nuclear civilizations." The Science Officer projected the data stream onto the bulkhead. "The central intelligence cannot analyze the deeper data. My apologies, Your Excellency, but life on your planet can be determined to have gone extinct."
"What caused it? Although I don't understand this corrupt kingdom, a country with no great ambitions shouldn't have been stupid enough to destroy itself like this, should it?"
Countless pieces of information flickered across the screen before him, but Yuan could not understand any of it. Still, from Baron Harris, he could tell that the kingdom's people might have been cruel and greedy, but they could not all have been fools.
"No, it wasn't that they had no ambitions. It was that they had too many." Cole shook his head, and the holographic projection before them changed.
"Look. This is the ore you collected in that so-called mine. It is made up of many highly pure radioactive minerals. In the terms of your civilization, it is extremely poisonous.
"It is invisible and odorless. Hiding inside a castle would be useless. It can be called a battlefield weapon."
"When they discovered that a certain metal could block this ore, a brilliant idea emerged."
At that point, Cole turned to Yuan. "As long as people scattered a large amount of ore at designated locations, they could unify the world without shedding a drop of blood. Unfortunately, the corroded lead-antimony alloy casings were covered in honeycomb-like corrosion holes."
"How stupid!" Yuan silently sighed after hearing that.
"Yes, stupid. Perhaps they thought that no matter how potent a poison was, wouldn't it have completely dissipated after a hundred years? But they did not know that this thing not only had an extremely wide radiation range, it could also maintain high-energy radiation even after thousands or tens of thousands of years."
"Did anyone survive?"
"When we first saw you, the numbers were already dropping sharply. By now, there should be no one left."
Yuan's reaction was unexpectedly calm. He merely nodded faintly and said, "If they're gone, they're gone. Sometimes, living is a kind of pain too."
Whether it was the planet or the kingdom, it no longer mattered. Grandma was gone, and the village was gone. It had nothing to do with him whether anyone else lived or died. Perhaps leaving this painful world was not a bad thing for them.
"Alright, we're here. It's time to talk." Upon hearing this, Cole looked excited and was just about to say something when a faint blue light returned to Yuan's eyes.
Yuan moved his hands slightly, and a huge table and several chairs appeared before them.
"Micro... worm... wormhole transport?"
(Please support the book. It's slow to develop, and I want to write more. I hope you will read it patiently. Thank you for your support, many thanks!)
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