Chapter 1282: Chapter 1281: Ballad

The storage core, inlaid with numerous crystals and high-purity gems, was taken out, and the Explorer Golem awakened from its maintenance state along with it. The round, rotund mechanical device moved its long mechanical limbs and circled the group once, then stopped in front of Kamel. Its optical probe swung back and forth above its body, as if watching with a hint of curiosity the storage core that had just been removed from inside it.

Kamel checked the operating state of the core, and after confirming that it could be directly read, he began injecting Magic Power into it. Accompanied by a faint hum, complex magic runes rapidly surfaced on the palm-sized cube, and then, under Kamel’s deliberate control, a large amount of visual records and data were released, forming a series of rapidly refreshing holographic projections in mid-air.

"Our time is limited. We can put those environmental monitoring data aside for now and let the technical experts analyze them slowly after we return," Gawain said. "Let’s first look at the visual records left by the Explorer—mainly the interior of the ship. We need to find a route."

"Yes, King." Kamel gave a slight nod, and part of the images within the holographic projections immediately adjusted. Large quantities of dizzying data and filtered imaging views were shut off, while the footage the Explorer had recorded with its Memory Crystals was enlarged before everyone’s eyes. "I’ve already located the recording from when the Explorer entered the interior of this ship—from here on, you can see it moving along a corridor..."

In the holographic projection, a first-person perspective lower than the height of an ordinary human being was advancing forward. At the edges of the frame, long mechanical limbs could be seen stepping in a regular rhythm. Ahead of the viewpoint stretched a wide and deep corridor. In the empty scene, the Explorer’s moving limbs were the only active objects, and in the sounds beyond the image, one could hear only the faint humming coming from the Explorer’s own chassis, along with the occasional mechanical vibration from somewhere deep within the ship, transmitted from afar.

Gawain watched intently, then said in a low voice after a moment, "Fast-forward a bit, mark down the next fork."

The recorded footage in the storage core began to accelerate. The Explorer Golem rapidly traversed the corridor, heading toward the fork at its end. The low humming in the background audio became somewhat sharp and strange due to the acceleration of the image—then the picture returned to normal, and as it entered the next connecting passage, it began to speed up again...

Gawain and the others stood off to the side, carefully watching those visual records left by the Explorer Golem—this ship was so enormous that even its shallow-layer connecting passages possessed a staggering scale. The distance from one facility to another was enough to make this little magical machine walk for a long time. In the recordings left by the golem, more than half of the content was essentially just "on the way."

Of course, in the course of that journey it also captured a large number of details regarding the ship’s internal structure—only those details... would have to be sorted and analyzed slowly later when time allowed.

Suddenly, just as the footage began to accelerate again, a very faint anomalous sound slipped into Gawain’s ears.

The sound was so weak and elusive that it almost merged into the humming that served as background noise, yet Gawain still sharply perceived its existence. He immediately waved his hand, and Modir at his side spoke in unison with him: "Stop!"

"You heard it too?" Kamel quickly paused the playback. Gawain, somewhat surprised, glanced at the Great Adventurer beside him, whose face was solemn. "You heard it too?"

"So you heard it as well," Modir looked at Gawain in astonishment, then quickly nodded. "Yes, just now there seemed to be a strange sound... mixed into the background noise. It was very abrupt, and it didn’t sound like any of the sounds we’ve heard before."

"Rewind," Gawain looked at Kamel. "Right around when the Explorer had just entered that corridor with green light markings—turn the sound up a bit."

Kamel accepted the order without hesitation. The recorded footage extracted from the storage core began to rewind under his precise control and was positioned at the segment where both Gawain and Modir had heard the "static." Then the image resumed normal playback, and this time, everyone present perked up their ears, listening closely to every subtle sound the golem had recorded.

Within the low humming, a very blurred noisy segment appeared—it truly existed, and it absolutely did not sound like the golem’s own movements, nor did it resemble the mechanical sounds produced when this ship was in operation.

"Can’t quite make it out... but it feels like the rise and fall is very uncanny, almost like... some sort of melody?" Amber’s pointed long ears twitched in the air. A cautious, earnest expression—tinged with a hint of fear—appeared on her face. "I don’t know if I misheard it, but I think I heard someone singing... it’s... it’s creepy as hell..."

Gawain’s gaze fell upon Amber’s pointed ears. He frowned slightly, then looked at Kamel with a very serious expression. "Can you clarify the sound any further? Try to process the noise out of it."

"...I will do my best," Kamel hesitated for a moment, then placed both hands on the precise storage core, carefully adjusting the Magic Power flow within it as he said with some reserve, "The effect may be very limited—the Explorer Golem’s ’ears’ aren’t very sensitive, and that faint sound is completely mixed into the background hum... I’ll make it as clear as I can."

Under Kamel’s control, the image once again returned to the beginning of that segment, then started playing anew. After processing, the audio did indeed sound a bit clearer than before, yet that anomalous sound was still muddled in the low humming, indistinct and hard to separate. Just as Gawain was about to speak and ask Kamel to run another round of processing, Amber suddenly turned her head to the side, adopting an extremely focused listening posture while gesturing to the people around her.

Her pointed long ears twitched sensitively. Though she herself did not actually possess any elf blood, as the crystallization of the most advanced biotechnology of the Gondor era, as "Artificial Human No. 36," her senses when she focused her attention were in no way inferior to those of an elf.

Everyone around fell silent. In the air, only the Explorer Golem’s recorded hoarse, indistinct humming echoed, and mixed into that humming was a faint noise that sounded like a chant. Amber listened with her head tilted for a long time, then suddenly spoke softly—singing a broken, uneven fragment of song whose pitch wasn’t exactly accurate:

"...Hollow winds... birds no longer fly across the sky... a sentinel went mad... a sentinel went mad..."

Amber’s soft chanting echoed along the corridor that had been dead and silent for one million eight hundred thousand years. It was a little off-key—and deeply chilling.

Victoria’s eyes widened at once. "Amber, what are you singing?"

"That ’static’ mixed in the humming—it’s a voice singing, constantly repeating these lyrics," Amber’s ears twitched once as she lifted her gaze. "There are a few more lines, but I can only vaguely make out this small part."

"I’ve heard this song before... from Queen Belsetia," Gawain suddenly said. His expression was so grave that Daniel and Melita Ponia were both startled. "It’s an ancient nursery rhyme of the silver elves, telling the story of sentinel towers far from home during the age of expansion, who fall into madness amid their endless wait and gradually slide into hallucinations! But... why would it appear here..."

"A silver elves’ nursery rhyme?" Melita Ponia widened her eyes instinctively. "Are those elves’ nursery rhymes all that hardcore?"

"...That’s not the key point," Gawain said in a low voice. "The key is the sentinel towers, and why the Explorer Golem would have recorded this melody aboard this ancient Voyager Ship! Kamel, where exactly did the golem record this song? Can you deduce it from the footage?"

"I actually started the deduction just now," Kamel said quickly. At the same time, he held the storage core in one hand and spread out the other. A large-scale Magic Illusion unfurled in front of him. On the illusion, pale blue light traced corridors and forks, as well as structural diagrams of compartments. This was the internal passage layout he had outlined based on the golem’s playback of the footage. On one particular segment of corridor, a conspicuous red block marked the area where the golem had ’heard’ the chant. "Right here."

Gawain immediately waved his hand. "Let’s move."

The group promptly followed in the footsteps of Gawain and Kamel, fanning out through the ancient Voyager Ship at speed. They rushed through those deep, endless corridors and connecting bulkheads, racing along the safe route mapped out by the Explorer Golem. In the ancient vessel that had slumbered for a million years, the footsteps of these uninvited guests echoed sharply—and in hardly any time, they arrived at the connecting passage Kamel had marked.

The spacious, brightly lit corridor of the ship was utterly silent, the ancient lighting devices casting a soft glow. A low mechanical hum came at intervals from behind the alloy bulkheads; aside from that, Gawain and the others heard nothing at all.

Even Amber perked up her ears, but after a few seconds she lightly shook her head. "Nope. I don’t hear a thing."

Everyone looked at one another. In this empty, uninhabited ship, nearly every person felt a vague chill slowly spreading from the tips of their limbs. Mary, who hadn’t said much along the way, muttered under her breath, "Maybe that singing isn’t continuous..."

"There’s another possibility: what the alchemical golem heard wasn’t actually ’sound,’" Kamel said in his low, resonant voice. "A golem’s recording unit isn’t a real ’ear.’ Sometimes it will log energy fluctuations of a particular frequency as ’audio signals’—that’s where most of the mysterious interference comes from when many magical devices record images or sound."

"So it might not really be ’sound’..." Gawain frowned and quietly activated his Magi-sight. Yet in this empty corridor, he saw no abnormal Dark Wave at all.

Just then, something stirred in his heart, as if the silent, hollow systems of the ship had suddenly emitted a signal, and it made him look instinctively toward a side passage at the end of the corridor.

"What’s over there?" he asked, turning to Kamel.

"No idea," Kamel shook his head. "The Explorer Golem never made it that far—the area we’re in now is already deep within the ship. After it finished scouting this corridor, the golem returned."

Gawain fixed his gaze in that direction for a few seconds, then spoke in a low, steady tone: "Maybe we should go take a look."

A moment later, the group had passed through the corridor and the side passage at its end, and a tightly sealed alloy gate appeared before all of them.

Gawain stared at the tightly closed gate, his brow furrowed deep.

On the way here, they’d already passed through more bulkheads and connecting passages than they could count, and every door along the route had stood open, as if whoever controlled this ship had deliberately lifted all the access restrictions before leaving. Yet here—only here—they’d run into a door that was locked tight.

There had to be something special behind this door.

"So what do we do? It’s locked," Amber glanced at Gawain, then at the alloy gate in front of them, a troubled look on her face. "Honestly, this is kinda beyond my professional skill set... This thing is way out of my league."

"Even if your lockpicking was level ten, you still wouldn’t be cracking a star-age permission lock," Gawain shook his head slightly. "Can you get in with shadow travel?"

"Already tried—no dice," Amber said regretfully, shaking her head. "Gods only know how the Voyagers’ tech manages it... This door isn’t just closed in the real world; it even forms a matching great barrier in the shadow realm, like it exists simultaneously in all ’layers’ of this world—I’m half convinced that even elemental creatures wouldn’t be able to seep through it."

Gawain said nothing. He stepped forward in silence and tentatively placed his hand on a blank, silver-white technological panel beside the gate, which bore no markings at all.

This was experience he’d accumulated in the Tower of the Inversion Tide.

The blank silver panel lit up, and icons for buttons and an interactive interface quickly surfaced upon it. Yet the ship’s main system remained silent, completely unresponsive to the Voyager identification signal Gawain carried. The alloy gate did not show the slightest sign of opening; on the panel’s interface, only one line of text kept scrolling: Fatal system error. Main control room sealed.

Aside from Gawain, no one could read the characters appearing on the panel. Kamel and the others had never even seen anything like the phenomena that had appeared in the Tower of the Inversion Tide. Seeing the panel light up, Daniel instinctively asked from the side, "Did it open?"

"No. There’s a fatal error in the system. This door can’t be opened anymore," Gawain said, helplessly shaking his head, his tone edged with regret. "Maybe we should look for another entrance."

"What if we bang on it a bit?" Amber couldn’t help offering bad ideas from the side. "Like, give it a punch—sometimes when a Magic Web Terminal glitches, a couple of good thumps will fix it. Works six or seven times out of ten..."

"Cut it out. Since when did we start using the forty-five-degree-angle-repair method?" Gawain shot a look at the half-elf whose head was always full of wild ideas. "This is not some simple Magic Web Terminal. This thing is star-age cutting-edge tech..."

"Just try a couple of taps..." Amber muttered quietly, then casually patted that silver-white alloy panel twice with her hand. "I mean, it’s already..."

Watching this foolhardy move, Gawain was just about to speak—but in the very next second, the tightly closed alloy gate suddenly gave a faint "click," then silently slid open to both sides.

Every gaze instantly locked onto Amber—including Gawain’s—and every single one of those looks was filled with astonishment.

"D-don’t look at me!" Amber immediately shrank her neck and yelled. "I’ve got no idea what happened! I just slapped it twice!"

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