Alien Bones

Huo Gu pondered for a while, but from the information it had gathered, it could not find the slightest clue regarding this supermassive underground cavern.

Eight hundred million years, an age in which seas turned to mulberry fields, was enough to reduce anything brilliant to decay.

At present, the only thing Huo Gu could find that still held some value was the Book of Arrays occupying one hundred square kilometers. The problem was that it did not have the ability to decipher the contents of this enormous Book of Arrays, and could only sigh in helpless admiration.

Over the following period of time, the root system successively passed twelve pairs of support pillars and thirty-two seawater pillars formed by the lower layer cracking and sinking, finally covering the entire floor of the underground cavern.

"At last, I'm done."

Commanding the root system had cost Huo Gu quite a bit of energy. After all, the area occupied by this underground cavern had already reached the concept of "hundreds of millions." Monitoring every place and every segment of the root system in real time was extremely draining for Huo Gu.

Freed from its mental labor, Huo Gu shifted its gaze upward.

"As for the top layer..."

"...Forget it. The root system has its own weight too. If it sprawled across the top layer, it might break the stress balance up there, and the consequences would be quite serious."

Once the breach in the top layer grew too large, it might even trigger a chain reaction and cause the entire top layer to collapse on a massive scale. After all, it was already an antique eight hundred million years old.

Did that mean the exploration of the underground cavern was over?

No. Huo Gu instead continued exploring downward and backward. Since both the left and right sides, the top layer, and the front were all metal walls, the boundaries in the other directions were very likely metal walls as well. In other words, a considerable portion of this underground cavern's space was actually buried by rock strata.

This was very likely the result of damage occurring in multiple parts of the cavern early on, causing lava to seep in.

From the current view, this place's builders and this structure did not belong to this planet.

In the early molten state of the planet, although there were also oceans, those were oceans of lava, with an average temperature above 1,500 degrees Celsius, along with all sorts of extreme environments.

In addition, the planet's early stage was not only the early stage of the planet itself, but also the early stage of the planetary system. Wandering meteorites drifting through the planetary system numbered in the tens of millions, so every now and then, a space traffic accident in which a meteorite fell onto the planet would occur.

To describe it more intuitively, it was like detonating a Tsar Bomba somewhere on Earth every few days. In addition, because lava was fluid, the shock wave could easily spread across the entire world. The only difference lay in the concepts of strong and weak.

If hell truly existed in this world, it was probably something like this.

Taking ten thousand steps back, even if intelligent life that lived in lava seas truly existed, and they were a civilization that had developed to a certain stage, they still had no need to construct this sort of building. Judging by the traces currently found inside the cavern, the structure had originally been empty. The lava only existed within this building after it was damaged later.

One had to ask, did a civilization born in a lava sea have any need to construct this kind of building, completely different from their living environment?

If it was said to be for conducting a large-scale scientific experiment, that might be one thing, but judging by the cavern's scale and mass, that speculation was completely unconvincing.

The root system followed its instructions and explored downward. The solid volcanic rock was very easily squeezed apart by the roots like tofu, and soon, some things were discovered.

However, Huo Gu did not feel happy about what it found. The discovered objects were metal plates, the same as the metal plates first discovered.

Amid slight disappointment, Huo Gu continued ordering the roots to explore downward. It firmly believed that it would definitely discover something.

Huo Gu's firm belief was not without reason. Rock strata could often relatively perfectly seal some things away and preserve them for a very long time, such as those dinosaur fossils.

With an artificial cavern as enormous as this, it was absolutely impossible for only one intelligent life-form to have lived here. If the original rupture had been a sudden accident, then beneath the floor of the underground cavern, there was an extremely high possibility that fossilized remains of those builders existed.

After that, another period of time passed, and the root system reached the cavern's boundary. However, it was not the roots exploring downward, but the roots exploring backward.

Because the rock strata served as support, Huo Gu did not need to worry about collapse. The roots spread madly, covering the entire rear area, including the rear top layer. Thus, they discovered the several breaches that existed in the rear metal wall.

Huo Gu's previous conjecture that "lava poured in through holes" was thereby confirmed. It also made it intensify its efforts and search every corner of the underground rock strata even more carefully.

Hard work paid off. Its efforts were not wasted. Fossils that had slept in the rock strata for eight hundred million years were discovered by the roots expanding without restraint, and once they were found, it was a whole swath of them.

After injecting linker proteins to stabilize the fossils' material structure, Huo Gu operated the roots with full concentration to separate the rock strata above the bones, and very carefully lifted one skeletal sample upward.

When the fossilized skeleton was lifted out of the rock strata, Huo Gu finally had the honor of seeing an alien skeleton fossil with its own eyes this time.

The color of this skeleton was different from that of humans, as well as from the alien skeleton fossils that humans had once unearthed on Mars. Its entire body was reddish-brown, and its main component was iron oxide. Huo Gu inferred that these intelligent life-forms used iron rather than calcium as bones to support their bodies. After eight hundred million years, the iron elements within the skeleton gradually combined with oxygen, and so it became this skeleton now made of iron oxide.

Perhaps because the lava had come suddenly, this skeleton was preserved relatively intact. Apart from some cracks, there was basically no major damage.

The skull had a pair of curved horns resembling those of a goat, and behind it was a pair of batlike skeletal wings. It was about three meters tall. Its spine was very similar to a human spine, but differences also existed. The lower end of the spine continued extending outward, forming a spinal tail.

It likewise had four limbs, a pair of hands and a pair of feet. There were six finger bones, and the toe bones were the same.

The inside of the bones had a hollow structure, similar to the bones of birds. In other words, the wings on the backs of these intelligent life-forms did indeed possess the function of flight.

"Why does this creature make me think of the devils defined as evil in Western mythology?"

"Good thing this isn't an excavation by an international organization right now. Otherwise, who knows what kind of terrorist might jump out and blow up this skeleton and this cavern."

Back then, at the International Space Center, religious interference had caused Huo Gu quite a headache. There was no way around it. Proving that aliens existed meant humans were also born from nature. Who would still believe their whole "God created man" thing?

"But speaking of which, why were these intelligent life-forms on this planet?"

"And why did they descend to court death while this planet was still in a molten state?"

A time span of eight hundred million years was simply too great. Huo Gu had no way of recreating the circumstances at the time.

Amid countless thoughts, Huo Gu's mind immediately flashed to that unidentified fellow that had chased it from the seabed into the underground.