Chapter 237 — The Doomsday Sanctuary

"Why would these people be left inside?" Tyr had also heard from Gao Yang the origins of this facility, and she was greatly puzzled by the presence of these people. "Could something have gone wrong with the evacuation back then, and these people were forgotten inside?"

"There couldn't have been a blunder that great," Gao Yang said with a frown and a shake of his head. "The evacuation back then was clearly orderly; there was no room for error born of haste. And those warehouses we found earlier are a clue as well... those supplies show that the people stranded here were part of the plan."

Having said this, he began to make his way carefully among the semicircular rows of seats, and after passing through row after row, he came to the front of the semicircular hall.

Gao Yang turned around here, and he saw those rows of seats arrayed neatly before his eyes, nearly a thousand silent corpses seated upon those chairs; because of the arrangement of the seats, the "line of sight" of those remains converged precisely upon the spot where he stood.

This eerie sensation brought a layer of cold sweat to his brow, yet it also drew his attention to the ground beneath his feet: on the floor at his feet was an inconspicuous raised device, and among the runes on its surface, traces of magical radiance still flowed slowly.

He recognized the thing—it was a technology of the ancient Gondor Empire, a magical device used to transmit messages. By means of the vast power of the Deep Blue Well and the magic conduits spread throughout the entire empire, these devices had bound every inch of the empire's land tightly together; but with the explosion of the Deep Blue Well, that communications network had utterly collapsed and could never be rebuilt. The messaging spells and magic transmission towers used by the human nations today were merely the last faint afterglow of that ancient technology.

This device could still work. Though cut off from the "Deep Blue Magic Net," it could no longer send or receive any message, the faint flicker on its surface showed that a trace of residual energy remained within, and the information it had stored was not lost.

Drawing on memories from seven hundred years ago, Gao Yang tried channeling some magical power into the device, and at once this ancient apparatus, silent for a thousand years, "came back to life"; the runes on its surface flashed violently, and a beam of light shot out from the top of the device, striking the wall behind Gao Yang.

Gao Yang turned and stepped aside from the projected beam, and he saw that the ancient device was projecting a message onto the wall, projecting it before the nearly thousand corpses in the hall—a string of words written in the common tongue of ancient Gondor, and it was unbelievably brief:

"You are the last survivors. Live on. Do not come back."

Only this single sentence had been preserved in the communication device. It was plainly the content of the final transmission; the earlier messages had either been deleted by someone or had simply failed to withstand the passage of time.

"The last survivors..." Till saw the message. This siren, who had lived longer than anyone could reckon, actually recognized the ancient Gondor Empire. She arched upward, curiosity in her voice. "What does it mean?"

"...This was the last communication sent from within the Empire to this place when the magic tide erupted," Gao Xi said slowly. "I have already guessed what happened here, but many mysteries remain to be unraveled."