Inside the tomb-like stone cavern.
Professor Furnal, who had been crouching beside a square stone block, slowly rose to his feet with both hands braced on his knees.
Watching Professor Furnal stand up, Scholze uncrossed his arms and stepped forward two paces to ask.
"Did you find any clues?"
"Of course... The excavation value of these relics is considerable. It can practically be described as a bumper harvest." With an excited expression, Professor Furnal looked at Scholze and suddenly asked, "Have you heard the legend of mummies?"
Faced with this sudden question, Scholze froze slightly, his face gradually filling with confusion.
"I've heard a little... What about it?"
"The ancient Egyptians believed that the soul did not perish after death. As long as the body remained intact, one day it could rise from the earth again. Thus, to prevent corpses from decaying, pharaohs would instruct their servants to remove their internal organs after their deaths, dry the bodies, and wrap them in salt, spices, ointment, honey, and linen, turning them into mummies that would not rot for thousands of years."
Scholze's Adam's apple bobbed as he looked at those square stone blocks and said with an odd expression, "You mean... these 'stone coffins' existed to prevent the bodies from decaying?"
"Of course not." Professor Furnal smiled and continued, "If preservation were the goal, using metal containers that oxidize easily to store corpses would clearly be the most foolish choice. Let us assume that Mars had oxygen resources billions of years ago that were no less abundant than Earth's—perhaps even more abundant. Since the civilization here possessed the technology to carve such a massive project several kilometers beneath the seabed, it was impossible for them not to understand such basic chemical principles."
"Then what do you think this place was?"
"Obviously,