Then, while Yu Lian busied himself with developing New Jade Gate as a "foothold" and pondered all the arrangements for the Original Treatise, April arrived. After he sent the long letter addressed to Mr. Qi aboard the mail ship, he also received the latest good news.
More than a thousand professional engineers and tens of thousands of Sandfolk laborers had spent nearly a month toiling with the counterintuitive construction tools of the space age. At last, they had cleared away hundreds of millions of tons of collapsed rock and sand, bringing the Enlightener ruins buried beneath the Qiqiluo Mountains back to light.
They had even dug up the corpses of the troll warlord and the Sandfolk rebel leader.
Under normal circumstances, being buried beneath collapsed sand for more than a month in New Jade Gate's dry climate should have left the bodies desiccated and misshapen. But according to Feifei's report, they had been preserved remarkably well, as if they had died only two or three hours ago.
"That's not so strange. When the Alliance opened Ruin D004 two years ago, they dug up the remains of an archaeological team that had perished there a hundred years earlier. I heard they were also perfectly intact. It might be some kind of protective mechanism the Enlighteners built in. But the instruments at the site haven't detected anything unusual. My camera even runs more smoothly than it does outside in the sandstorms, and it's recorded everything at the site. The two young ladies did sense a faint flow of energy, though."
"What about the facilities inside the ruins? And the obelisk?" Yu Lian asked.
"The obelisk shattered. But the interesting thing is, every fragment is still glowing. It looks like radioactive material, but we haven't detected any radiation."
"If each fragment is a