Licks of vibrant flames shot out of the ship’s main gun. The antimatter charges landed on the building one after another, filling the air with the sounds of explosion.
The Tomahawk was only equipped with two medium-size blasters. Its main method of offence was not through cannonfire but rather the countless drones it had on board. Once released, they would be akin to a large swarm of venomous wasps, out to destroy their enemies.
However, for fear that the dust in the supergravity zone might damage these valuable drones, Xia Fei chose not to use them, only attacking with the ship’s two blasters.
“What are you trying to do?” questioned Phantom.
He could not fathom why Xia Fei was bombarding these ancient cubic structures. One antimatter charge cost thirty thousand star coins, and both blasters shot 180 charges in a minute combined; this meant that it would cost five million per minute just in the charges. Xia Fei had always been thrifty, and doing this was no different from being wasteful.
Xia Fei had his eyebrows knitted tightly, with no intentions of stopping the fire. “I suspect that these things aren’t even buildings.”
“Not buildings? Then, what are they?”
Xia Fei, who usually thought with logic, had initially agreed with Phantom that these rectangular objects were buildings. It was impossible for such precise cubic structures in a natural environment, except if they were man made, but his thoughts changed when he actually touched one of them. They did not have doors or windows, and Xia Fei could not understand why anyone would make such weird buildings. He started doubting if these buildings were just solid concrete mass rather than buildings.
Because the depth sensors were not usable at the time being due to the interference from the environment, Xia Fei decided to use the most direct and effective method, blasting aparts these huge rocks in search of the truth.
If they were buildings, they would obviously break apart; if they were not, it meant that they were artificial pieces of concrete.
It was not an easy task to make buildings that were over a thousand meters tall and wide, so why would they leave them in a deserted planet? Xia Fei could not imagine it and decided to make sense of the structures before moving onto the next step.
“Stop.” After two minutes of constant bombardment, Xia Fie commanded the computer to cease fire.
Phantom and Xia Fei looked out of the window. When the dust settled, the two of them had their breaths taken away.
The rectangular bolder was cut in half, revealing countless pieces of concrete, faintly visible was the metal structure.
These huge cuboids were actually solid and not buildings at all.
Who would have thought? What sort of person would drop off four massive pieces of concrete here, and what were their purpose?
Lighting a cigarette, Xia Fei returned to his chair, frowning, as he fell into deep thought.
Phantom asked a few moments later, “Turns out they’re actually pure rocks. Could it be that someone had wanted to use them in constructing a certain building but, for some reason, didn’t get to do so, and that’s why they were dumped here?”
Phantom laughed right as he finished his question. Each rock slab was over a thousand meters tall and wide. Setting possibilities aside, even if someone did manage to use these as building material, how big would the final building be?
A skyscraper hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of meters in height? What for? To play golf?
At least, for the tiny humans, a building that size would not make sense. Unless there existed a massive intelligent race in the universe, it was hard to imagine who would require such an enormous building.
Humans would also design super-massive bases from time to time. The design idea was usually to hollow out a smaller planet and surround it with defense mechanisms such as cannons.
The issue was that these rocks looked just like bricks. It was much more difficult to build buildings this way than hollowing out a planet. Moreover, the building created from these would not be sturdy, so it would be even more ridiculous if it was for civilian residences. It would not make sense to stuff hundreds of millions of people into one building.
The Tomahawk continued to circle around the red planet. Xia Fei was still thinking about the use of the rock slabs; therefore, he had not issued another command.
Looking through the window, the arrangements of these rocks were not even. Some were tightly packed, others had some distance between them. But if all of them were neatly placed facing the dark sky, far from being just thrown down… This was one of the reasons Xia Fei had thought that they were buildings.
“They aren’t evenly spaced, but each slab is placed neatly?” muttered Xia Fei.
All of a sudden, he realized something.
“Increase altitude to one hundred and fifty thousand meters,” commanded Xia Fei.
The Tomahawk turned around and started flying in another direction. A few moments later, Xia Fei, who was looking out the window, noticed that the rocks were connected horizontally and vertically as though some sort of unknown script.
“Look!” Xia Fei exclaimed. “Do the rocks look like words?”
“Words?” Phantom was shocked. “They do look to be a form of script. These structures are scattered yet orderly, but who knows what these words even mean?”
Xia Fei smiled. He gently tapped on the projected screen to log down this writing.
Because of the curvature of the planet, Xia Fei and Phantom had not noticed at first that these rocks were arranged like writing. If it was flattened out, the rocks would quite obviously look structured.
The translation microchip in the brain was working hard yet was unable to decipher the meaning of the text. Xia Fei shook his head; if such an advanced translation microchip was unable to decipher what had been written, it surely meant that the structure of the words were too complex and rare.
Although there was no way to know who left these massive rocks or what the rocks wanted to say, Xia Fei still breathed a sigh of relief as he found Old Porter’s tracks and understood the point to these rocks.
“At least, it’s a good start. Old Porter got here then left, meaning that he’s at least alive,” said Phantom.
Xia Fei nodded, commanding in a deep voice, “Start recharging the warp engine; head toward the second destination.”
…
The second purple location was not far from where he was, only requiring one warp to arrive. Because there was not a huge difference in the gravity, the warp this time around was not as insufferable as the previous one.
From the starmap, this was beyond the Black Abyss Star Region and into undiscovered territory. Moreover, this area was larger. There was an asteroid belt around its perimeter and four planets within each, all of them requiring investigation.
The signal from the radar was still jumbled, so all Xia Fei could do was rely on visual inspection and the unclear video signals to look for traces of Old Porter.
First was investigating each of these planets. They were largely similar to the smaller planets that were a dime a dozen in the universe and had nothing special to them. Xia Fei pouted, before steering Tomahawk into the asteroid belt.
Since there was nothing on these planets, naturally Xia Fei did not have much hope for the asteroid belt, either, but with a hopeful attitude, the Tomahawk slowly moved through the countless rubble in the asteroid belt.
“This asteroid belt is incredibly long; it’s probably going to take a few months to look through everything,” Phantom said as he looked far at the endless asteroids.
Xia Fei knitted his eyebrows, commanding in a deep voice, “Start the metal detector at full capacity and scan the asteroid belt in all directions.”
Even without the strong gravity, it was an incredibly difficult task to search through an expansive asteroid belt, for the large numbers of rubble strongly disrupted any signal transmission. this was the supergravity zone no less—a difficulty that was so immense it was hard to imagine.
“Use fuzzy scanning; only scan objects close to or larger than the frigate.”
The metal detector was operating at full capacity. These rubbles had varying quantities of metal, so it was necessary to filter out the smaller ones or ones that did not contain enough metal.
Xia Fei did not have much hope for the metal detector. Because of the disruptions that the supergravity zone provided, almost none of the electronics worked, but what was most surprising was that the metal detector actually detected a strong signal.
The signal was tens of thousands of kilometers away from the Tomahawk. Judging from the signal strength, it was a large object, exceedingly large even.
There were no words that could describe Xia Fei’s shock. According to the signal, this metal object was at least 1.5 billion cubic meters.
What even was that?
It was basically a metal city, enough to accommodate tens of thousands of people.
Such a large amount of metal, with the purity beyond high-strength metal, what could it be?
“Full speed ahead,” Xia Fei commanded in a deep voice.
The Tomahawk suddenly accelerated towards the destination.
“Why is there such a huge metal object here? Could it be a small planet made completely of metal?” asked Phantom.
Xia Fei shook his head. “Impossible, the metal detector showed that its purity is beyond high-strength metal. That means it’s a man-made object.”
Most metals in space existed in ores. Although there were many different types and were in large quantities, they were not pure at all. According to the metal detector, the huge object was made of many different types of purified metals, so it was impossible for that to just be pieces of ore drifting in space.
“It’s even weirder that it’s man-made. The capital ships in the Alliance are around five hundred million cubic meters in volume. That’s the limit of the ship building capabilities of humans, and no larger warship has ever existed, yet its volume is thrice the size of a supercarrier; how is that possible?” Phantom was completely stunned, his voice even turning hoarse.
“Is it possible that the detector made a mistake from the disruptions?” Phantom questioned. A massive 1.5-billion-cubic-meter, man-made object had greatly surpassed Phantom’s imagination, which was why he was so confused.
Xia Fei said in a deep voice, “There is a possibility. It’s true that gravity can affect the signal, but there’s an even greater possibility that this thing is bigger than 1.5 billion cubic meters.”