7: Chapter 7 The Mystery of the Underground Ruins

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The clouds on the distant ridge were stained a rusty iron color by the last rays of the setting sun, resembling a piece of scorched sheet metal.

The way time passed on this planet was different from Earth. No phone reminded him of meetings, and no calendar told him what day of the week it was. There was only sunrise and sunset, combat and calm, life and death. He used vertical lines in a notebook to record the days, crossing every four with a horizontal fifth. This primitive counting method made him feel grounded—at least he knew which day he was on.

Old Tom led the way, moving faster than Lin Mo had imagined. This hunchbacked old man, who couldn't even straighten his waist, moved through the shrubs of the North Mountain Hills like an old snake. The pickaxe in his hand served as both a tool and a cane; every time it struck a rock, it let out a crisp crack and sent Mars flying.

"We're almost there," he said.

Lin Mo glanced back. Locke followed behind, carrying an entrenching shovel. His chest wound hadn't fully healed, and he unconsciously held his ribs as he walked.

They stopped in front of an abandoned mine pit halfway up the mountain. The pit wasn't large, about three or four meters deep, with the bottom filled with rubble and withered branches. Old Tom jumped down and used his pickaxe to clear away a pile of moss-covered rocks—revealing a gray, smooth surface that didn't look natural.

"This is it."

When Lin Mo jumped into the pit, his foot slipped on a loose stone. He reached out to brace himself against the nearby rock wall to avoid falling, but his fingertips touched a corner of that metal wall—it was ice-cold, unnaturally so. In this planet's warm and humid climate, no natural substance should have been that cold.

He crouched in front of the metal wall and ran his hand across it. The texture was strange—unlike iron, steel, or any metal he was familiar with. It felt more like a composite of ceramic and metal, with an extremely smooth surface and a temperature several degrees lower than the surrounding rocks.

An extremely faint vibration traveled through his fingertips. It wasn't a mechanical vibration—it was more like... a high-frequency resonance, like a plucked harp string that could only be felt by the person touching it.

He studied the wall's surface closely: it was covered in engravings, but they weren't Imperial script, nor any writing he had seen in the information fragments of the mirror of the emperor. It looked more like a structural schematic—streamlined lines, geometric nodes, and branching patterns as dense as blood vessels.

He stood up and took two steps back. He consciously allowed the golden light to manifest at the edge of his vision—not by actively triggering it, but by relaxing his mind and letting it appear naturally.

The golden light flickered.

Immediately after, a segment of information surfaced in his mind. Unlike the previous instances of "just naturally knowing," this time it was more like a line of small text annotated next to his existing knowledge:

—Material Composition: Unknown alloy. No matching records in current Imperial databases.

—Estimated Era: Approximately M10-M12, human Golden Age.

—Structural Scan: Hollow space exists behind the wall. Volume: Immense.

—Interface Status: Three cipher interfaces detected. Current Status: All locked.

—Evaluation Conclusion: Unauthorized personnel cannot open.

The Golden Age.

Lin Mo's breath hitched. The Golden Age was the pinnacle of human technology—the era when Warp travel technology had just matured, and human footprints spanned half the galaxy. If what lay behind this wall was truly a Golden Age ruin...

"Fill it back in," he said.

Locke froze for a moment: "What?"

"Fill it back in. Now is not the time to open it."

He quickly ran through the consequences of this decision in his head—best-case scenario, worst-case scenario, and the most likely scenario. The most likely scenario was usually a compromise between the best and worst, but on this planet, he hadn't yet verified if that rule held true.

Lin Mo picked up a shovel and was the first to start throwing dirt back into the pit. He worked quickly, not because he didn't value the discovery, but because he knew a door that couldn't be opened was more dangerous than one that could. If someone—or something else—knew there was a Golden Age ruin here, while Blackstone Village couldn't even scrape together fifty working guns, then this door was better left hidden under the dirt.

Old Tom said nothing and joined in. Locke looked around—he could feel something watching from the shadows—cursed under his breath, and picked up a shovel as well.

It took them nearly an hour to restore the mine pit to its original state. Lin Mo spread a layer of withered branches and fallen leaves over it until it looked no different from the surrounding barren slopes before putting down his tools.

"Don't you want to know what's inside?" Locke wiped away sweat.

"I do," Lin Mo said, "but I don't have the key to open it. Besides, we're struggling just to hold a village right now, let alone a Golden Age ruin."

He added a silent thought in his heart: Some things are better left unknown until you are strong enough to protect them.

On the way back, Locke walked at the front. He was in a foul mood—anyone would be frustrated after working so hard to climb up here just to take one look and then bury it again. As they passed a rock face, he vented his frustration by slamming his pickaxe hard against the wall.

A muffled thud rang out.

The rock face cracked open, revealing a translucent white crystalline layer inside. In the fading light of the sunset, the crystals refracted a light so clean it was blinding.

Locke was stunned. He used his hands to clear the rubble around the crack, revealing an even larger patch of crystals.

"Lin Mo! Come look at this!"

Lin Mo walked over, broke off a small piece of the crystal, and examined it in his palm. It was remarkably pure—much purer than the saltpeter he had found on the ridge north of the village. He put the crystal in his mouth and tasted it; it was bitter with a hint of coolness.

High-purity saltpeter.

And the reserves—he looked at the exposed section of the rock wall—were not small.

He had nearly two hundred people waiting to be fed, and—according to current expansion plans—dozens of flintlock rifles waiting for ammunition production. He needed vast amounts of saltpeter.

Today, they had found a Golden Age metal wall they couldn't open.

But they had also found a saltpeter mine that would last for months.

Perhaps this was the trade-off. Perhaps this was the way this world worked: finding one thing meant temporarily losing another. He was separated from the underground Golden Age ruins by a wall with three cipher interfaces. But the ground beneath his feet hid a mineral vein that could fill a gunpowder magazine.

Lin Mo tucked away the white crystal and glanced at the star about to sink below the horizon.

Standing there, taking it all in, he suddenly had a very strange feeling—if someone had told him a month ago that he would be on a planet an unknown number of light-years from Earth, using high school chemistry to make gunpowder, college club experience to build guns, and product manager logic to plan a village's defense system, he would have thought they were insane. But here he was, and every bit of it was real.

Chaos attention remained unchanged. Chaos wasn't watching this place—at least not yet. But he knew that metal wall was underground, emitting a faint glow, as if waiting for that key.

And that key was likely in some place he didn't yet know the name of, waiting for someone to find it.

He crouched on the hillside for a long time, watching the distant horizon. The star had completely set, but a dark orange band of light remained in the sky, like the planet's eye slowly closing. The lights of Blackstone Village flickered on in the distance—sparse and weak, but definitely there. They were proof that he was still alive, and that the village was still alive.

Locke passed by Lin Mo's wooden hut during his late-night patrol and saw the light of an oil lamp still burning in the window. He didn't knock, but simply stood outside for a brief moment—confirming Lin Mo was still alive before continuing his patrol. He had been the Village Defense Captain of Blackstone Village for ten years and had seen many outsiders—some stayed for a few days and left, others died in their first battle. Lin Mo felt different from all of them. It wasn't because Lin Mo could fight—it was because Lin Mo was calculating. He calculated the odds of every battle, the distribution of every grain of food, and the weaknesses of every defensive line.

Locke didn't know if he could trust a man who calculated with his brain—but he knew he trusted a man who counted the bodies of his comrades after a battle.

He returned to his own room and drew a second mark on the wall.

End of Chapter 007

Another day had ended. The number of days he had spent on this planet was slowly becoming a figure he didn't dare think too much about. But he was still alive every day—and that was enough.

*[In golden armor, they fight a hundred battles in the desert sands; they will not return until Loulan is conquered.]*

*—Wang Changling, 'Song of the Army'. Memory fragment from the mirror of the emperor*