Chapter 262: The Lost Ancient Civilization
The expedition team advanced for another half hour, everyone moving in total silence and keeping a cautious watch on their surroundings.
The cavern was dark and deathly quiet. It appeared desolate, save for patches of strange, tenacious fungi and geothermal flora, though their density was far lower than what they had seen back in Cavern B11.
If the last remnants of geothermal heat vanished in a few centuries, this vegetation would wither and die as well. There were barely any traces of animal life, either. Occasionally, a few bizarrely shaped creatures would dart out from the shadows—likely the "monsters" the lizardmen had warned them about. They acted highly aggressive but were clearly malnourished and weak, posing absolutely zero threat to the heavily armored Federation Marines.
"We are currently 120 meters below the surface. The ambient temperature is 4 degrees Celsius," a Senior Scientist reported, his eyes glued to his scanner. His tone grew deadly serious. "The ambient nuclear radiation here is spiking well beyond safe human limits. Without our sealed armor, acute radiation sickness would set in within hours."
He paused, piecing the puzzle together. "I suspect the ’monsters’ the reptilian natives mentioned are actually just local fauna heavily mutated by the radiation. And their ’curse’ is just acute radiation poisoning. That perfectly explains the sudden illness and sterility..."
Jason nodded slowly. Primitive societies always attributed things they couldn’t comprehend to demons or supernatural curses. But modern humanity didn’t rely on superstition; they used science to uncover the truth.
The radiation poisoning theory fit perfectly...
But where in the world was this extreme nuclear radiation coming from?
Had a nuclear war taken place in these caverns? Did an advanced civilization live here, or... was this sector an ancient interstellar battlefield?
A whirlwind of theories flashed through Jason’s mind. The pieces of the puzzle were completely scattered.
"Captain, over here!"
Marcus, who was covering the rear flank, suddenly called out, his voice buzzing with excitement.
He crouched down, carefully dug a rusted, twisted metal rod out of the dirt, and handed it to Jason.
Jason frowned, taking the heavy metal bar and examining it closely.
This iron rod... it looked exactly like industrial steel rebar used in concrete construction! Yes, that was undeniably what it was—a standard piece of structural rebar. Something like this could never form naturally.
However, it was so severely oxidized that flakes of rust crumbled off at the slightest touch, making it difficult to determine its original grade.
Jason was shocked, his heart pounding against his ribs. He turned to the science team. "Can you run a metallurgical scan to determine its composition and age?"
A Senior Scientist took the rebar, scanned it, and shook his head in frustration. "The oxidation layer is too thick. It’s practically mineralized into the surrounding dirt, making a field scan impossible..."
"But once we get it back to the labs on The Ark, our mainframes can definitively carbon-date it."
A wave of agitated excitement swept through the team. The discovery of the rebar proved they were in the right place! If there was one piece of structural steel, there had to be more!
It was impossible for a single piece of rebar to exist in a vacuum...
Jason remained completely silent, raising a fist to signal the team to hold their positions.
He crouched down, sweeping his tactical light over the ground. At first glance, it was just ordinary dirt and gravel.
He reached out and ran his armored gauntlet over the damp soil, a sudden, powerful intuition taking hold of him.
"Everyone, form up! Start digging right here!"
Without a word, over a dozen team members immediately dropped to their knees and began excavating the dirt. The remaining Marines maintained a tight defensive perimeter, their Gauss rifles raised and ready.
Their powered armor was forged from high-grade military alloys, giving them incredible mechanical strength for manual excavation. Because the soil in this sector was relatively loose and free of massive boulders, they dug at a blistering pace. Barely ten minutes later, they hit something massive.
It was a... house!
A partially collapsed, reinforced concrete structure! The rusted steel rebar embedded within the shattered walls was still faintly visible.
God only knew how many centuries it had been buried down here. Everything organic inside had long since rotted to dust, but the unmistakable layout of a building remained...
The foundational walls... and fossilized remnants of furniture!
"No, this can’t be the wreckage of some advanced interstellar empire! This is just a normal house. An ordinary residential building..." a Senior Scientist suddenly stammered. His voice trembled violently, choked with a chaotic mix of excitement, primal fear, and academic fanaticism.
"This means there used to be a city here! This is just one suburban home!"
But where was the rest of the civilization? Where did the city go?
How did an entire industrialized society just vanish?
Were the primitive lizardmen the devolved descendants of this lost civilization? Why would they regress so drastically into the Stone Age?
That was scientifically impossible!
Could a civilization truly devolve?
Fueled by pure shock, the team furiously expanded their excavation trench. They soon unearthed even more impossible artifacts.
Digging down another meter, they uncovered a flat, hardened surface that closely resembled an asphalt or cement road. However, the relentless march of time had degraded it into a crumbling mess of rubble, blending it so perfectly into the surrounding geology that it was barely recognizable.
But it was undeniably a paved road!
Which meant this ruined structure was just an ordinary house sitting by the side of a street.
So much time had passed... Time, the ultimate destroyer, had almost completely erased every footprint of this society!
In the face of the vast, eternal universe, a civilization was nothing more than a fleeting drop in the ocean.
Jason felt a growing sense of alarm. It wasn’t just the adrenaline of the discovery; a heavy, suffocating weight pressed down on his chest. It was a dark, existential dread that made it difficult to breathe.
"...Captain, look at this!" A researcher pulled another rotted, unrecognizable lump of metal from the dirt.
"Wait, is this... a circuit board? My god, it’s a printed circuit board!" another scientist screamed frantically, wiping the dirt away from a flat rock. Of course, the delicate electronics hadn’t survived intact. The silicon and metals had completely mineralized, fusing into the stone like an ancient fossil. But the intricate, geometric pathways of the circuitry were still perfectly etched into the rock’s surface!
Jason gasped sharply.
If they manufactured printed circuit boards, this civilization had clearly mastered electricity and computing. Even if their overall technology lagged behind the Federation’s, it couldn’t be by a massive margin.
It strongly implied that personal computers and advanced electronics were commonplace in this lost society!
And the terrifying reality was... they were highly likely excavating the ruins of a random, ordinary house! Jason refused to believe they were so astronomically lucky that their first shovel hit a specialized military base or high-tech research facility. No, this was civilian tech.
"Can you determine their exact technological era from this?" Jason asked, carefully examining the fossilized circuitry.
"Not definitively, sir," the head of the science team replied with heavy regret. "The degradation is too severe; we need to run it through the electron microscopes back at base. However, judging purely by the scale and density of the circuit integration, I am absolutely certain their technology surpassed old Earth’s early 21st century... These are the ruins of a highly industrialized civilization!"
Suddenly, a wild realization hit the expert. His face flushed bright red, and his eyes burned with fanatical zeal. "Captain, even if their tech is inferior to ours, this is still a goldmine! The Federation’s technology tree was forced to evolve too rapidly during our exodus. Because of our small population and limited storage capacity, there are massive gaps in our industrial knowledge!"
"We lost countless common, foundational technologies when Earth fell! The lunar archives simply couldn’t back up the entirety of human industrial history!"
"Scavenging these ruins could perfectly fill the blind spots in our own foundational tech tree... And if their technology turns out to be more advanced than ours? That would catapult us centuries forward!"
Based on the current, fragmented artifacts, it was impossible to declare whether this lost civilization or the Federation was technologically superior.
However, one chilling fact remained absolute: whatever this civilization was, they had gone completely extinct in the depths of Nyx!
