The lake was constantly rising and falling, so they stepped into it, fixed the boat in a safe position with ropes and spikes to ensure that it would not be taken away by an unexpected wave, and then carefully set foot on the "island".
Under the huge pillar with a strong sense of pressure, it gives people the feeling like the soil gathered around tall aquatic plants. It is floating, unstable and may be washed away and disintegrated at any time.
Several incomplete stone ridges extending into the water indicate that this may have been a small pier, but even with a flat-bottomed boat having to stumble to get in, it is difficult to imagine what it was originally used for mooring.
Those buildings of unknown style adhered to the stone foundation in a barnacle-like shape, appearing half-tilted.
They do not belong to any known style, or can be called "Dunling Ruins Style". Their characteristic is that they have no distinctive and unique details, but they have extraordinary craftsmanship, which allows them to be preserved under extremely harsh conditions.
Local materials were used, and the polished stones were tightly spliced together to form walls and vaults that were not too tall but strong enough. They were exactly the same as sewers, showing the builder's superb spatial geometry.
It is the kind of thing that appears in some monotonous and repetitive strange dreams. When it becomes regular to a certain extent, it actually causes discomfort.
There is no life or artistic expression, not even a little bit of cultural flavor, nothing that can be called "human touch". These things are just pure buildings, with no other meaning attached except function.
If a regional community is personified, then the building is its face and the source of its first impression.
And when visitors try to look at the ancestors through the ruins, they only see a blank, a face without facial features. The traces of people have been erased from it, leaving only something extremely pure as its only remaining background.
.
These buildings are more likely to arouse fear than the creatures lurking underwater, suggesting that the people who once lived here were some kind of alien group that were transformed from their own kind but can no longer understand each other.
But they couldn't stop. They didn't put on such a big show just to visit the outskirts of the historical sites.
Green originally wanted to leave someone to guard the ship, but considering that the light of the fire was more likely to attract creatures wandering on the shore, and if an accident really happened, there was nothing that two people could do, so he finally gave up the useless move.
With unspeakable feelings, the team began to move towards the inner circle, looking for possible information.
The observed traces indicate that the changes in this place are quite complex.
A lot of sediment has been filled in the gaps and corners, and most of it has solidified into a half-mud, half-stone shape, smoothing out some of the outlines. The colors are layered and uneven, and they are formed by different ingredients at different times.
On the surface of the stone, there are some gray or white round or irregular small protrusions, which may come from shellfish such as barnacles and oysters that can be adsorbed on hard surfaces; while the filmy and flocculent coverings are from shallow water reefs.
Frequent visitors are mostly related to algae and aquatic plants.
There are various signs that this place has been submerged underwater more than once.
Moreover, the lake water at that time was not lacking in organisms, it was even quite rich, at least it was not as barren as filtered lime water.
They poked torches into several relatively well-preserved buildings. The original features inside could no longer be seen. They had collapsed and disintegrated under the erosion of weathered water. Only the rough outlines of the parts wrapped in sediments remained, and nothing could be seen.
human remains.
It's hard to say whether the residents left voluntarily or were destroyed by some disaster. How they survived here is also a question. Maybe when the lake was not so clean, they could meet their needs by fishing and collecting edible aquatic plants.
But even without mentioning the technical feasibility of doing so, it would be difficult for the biological resources in freshwater areas to meet the food supply for urban-level settlements.
The buildings that lack characteristics are piled up repeatedly. Although they seem chaotic, they have a certain order, which often gives the team the illusion of "have they been here before" as they move forward in twists and turns.
When the depth reaches a certain level, something whose purpose is difficult to judge begins to appear. Those are stone pillars pulled up from the ground. The special landform here greatly facilitates production. You only need to randomly pick one and modify it slightly, and you can carve it.
into a standard hexagonal prism shape, and add various patterns to it.
They were firmly fixed into large blocks of foundation, or simply carved out of whole rocks, blending into the ground, and most of them still stand today.
The decorative patterns are in two completely different styles, one is flowing, serpentine intertwined curves, and the other is straight lines falling vertically downward from six sides.
Because of their excellent geometric level, they are well drawn, extremely symmetrical and even, with an irresistible strange and harmonious beauty. They are so eye-catching among the monotonous buildings, like a temple mirage appearing on the horizon of a spiritual wasteland.
The designer has a special obsession with height. Regardless of the thickness of the stone pillars, they are far above the head, close to one and a half times the height of most door openings. It seems to be based on a similar psychology to the high-spire design of the church, which is the most intuitive perception of "high places"
Express.
This also meant that they needed to step on the surrounding ruins to see the top of the stone pillar. Unsurprisingly, they found bisected rings, broken circles, and twisted lines that were difficult to distinguish from head to tail.
The further inward, the denser and larger these pillars become, even reaching the thickness of a person's arms, forming a dazzling forest of pillars.
There are some intimidating materials among them, with a very familiar pale white color or an extremely deep light-absorbing black, which will make the hearts of those who have seen similar things jump.
But after careful observation and touch, Craft found that they were not the two substances he thought.
Although it looks basically the same, some intuitive things are missing, and it is reduced to a rather special-looking ordinary substance, with a mixed feel between chitin shell, limestone, and bones, with a somewhat rough and grainy feel.
【They are dead】
This intuition is very strange, but it can be compared to the new storage in the morgue and the sleeping person. In fact, the composition is basically the same, but the essence is completely different.
He felt a sense of regret, like seeing patients who died on the eve of the birth of new treatments. This was something he had never felt before. It was as if a part of him recognized these things as living things, or even the same kind, forming a feeling of being hurt by others.
tendency.
Shaking off the inexplicable emotions, as the team passed through the pillar forest, an open space appeared in front of them.
In the center of the open space are several hexagonal holes the size of wellheads, which have almost been filled with sand and gravel. Based on what we saw along the way, we speculate that these should be the bases of several particularly huge prisms.
The religious totem that once stood here disappeared without a trace, and was uprooted by the incredible strength of thousands of people.
The forest of pillars was pushed down like straw, opening up a wide passage that extended toward the outside. The buildings along the way were shattered, and the road was plowed up and rolled up, pointing straight to the shore and submerged in the clear water waves.
"That makes sense..."
This was the kind of existence they had encountered in the royal tomb, or that Chaos army was an imitation of this behavior.
【Aggregation, proliferation】
If an army is still not enough, what about an entire ethnic group? An entire ethnic group that once lived on various islands in this underground lake, has the Tower of Babel built up of body and soul undergone a qualitative change, and is it closer to the supreme being on the other side?
Where?
Or the road to heaven that truly unites them, the living temple, is still one step away, cruising in the lake waiting for the last few bricks.