Chapter 1212 The Whereabouts of Home

After resolving the incident in the Disaster Corridor, everyone returned to the surface. Since many of the ground facilities had been severely damaged in the accident a month ago, the Tanagurs who had just been rescued from the cryogenic devices were temporarily housed in a nearby power plant. The once-prosperous Ankatelo family had been virtually wiped out overnight by this disaster, with only a few hundred members surviving out of thousands.

These survivors, still shaken, rested near the thermal reactors, relying on the factory's heat pipes to recover their strength. Wayne led a small team of demon hunters to a nearby supply depot, unearthing some well-preserved refrigerated food to distribute to everyone. The survivors were shrouded in silence and oppression. Some ate silently, others stared blankly at the factory's reactor towers, while still others simply lay down, unable to sleep with their eyes open. There was little conversation. Only the occasional brief inquiry or call could be heard as people checked on the well-being of those around them, then lapsed back into silence.

The oppressive atmosphere made even Lily quiet and docile. She knelt in front of a Tanagur child, trying to distract the child with her collection of rare stones. Hao Ren rarely saw the girl so gentle—although the Tanagur child didn't seem interested in the brick.

"I deeply sympathize with your experiences," Hasse and Vogus stood together, watching the survivors and said softly, "Even though I'm a demon hunter."

"Things will get better. We've been through tougher times than this," Vogus said slowly, his pale-gold face devoid of much expression. "The Ankatelo family has never been defeated by any difficulty. From the day we took over the seal, we were prepared to face anything."

Then he turned to look at Hao Ren: "What did you want to say to me earlier?"

Hao Ren had been standing next to Vogus the whole time, but he'd been preoccupied with something else, something that troubled him like a tangled ball of yarn: what do you do when you, as a coroner, have declared someone dead and even sent the report to your superiors, and then that person suddenly pops back to life?

You can't exactly shoot them again…

The Tanagus civilization was already registered in the database as an extinct civilization. This was a report that had been finalized two years ago, and Hao Ren himself had made that judgment. He had even extracted a database from the Tanagus planet, but at that time, he never expected that there would be a wave of surviving Tanagurs on Earth—not turned into wrathful spirits, nor exterminated by demon hunters and other supernatural creatures, but alive and well from ancient times to the modern era. So he was now in a rather difficult position. In this case, the status of the Tanagus civilization would probably have to be changed. Of course, changing the status of a civilization was not the biggest problem. The biggest problem was…

He had casually sublet the Tanagus planet to someone else—at this moment, Zhuom and Mulu were leading sixteen billion aliens on the Tanagus planet, cutting down trees, building houses, and engaging in wilderness survival. What would he say when the original landlord suddenly discovered they were still alive?

The more Hao Ren thought about it, the more tangled he became. Hearing Vogus finally ask, he even considered converting to religion for some peace of mind, but then he remembered that he was the highest-ranking religious leader on this planet, so he could only bite the bullet and reply: "I just wanted to tell you something. Do you know where your Ankatelo family comes from?"

"What do you mean?" Vogus's voice was hesitant. The phrase "where from" was itself an eternal philosophical proposition, especially when asked in this situation. The questioner certainly wasn't looking for an answer like "I'm from Hebei Province"—the old patriarch vaguely realized that the question was pointing to ten thousand years ago, "The original origin?"

"Let's be clear," Hao Ren nodded. "Do you know that you once had another name, called 'Tanagurs'? This name comes from your homeland. You once lived in a place called Tanagus."

Vogus's alien face, which rarely showed much expression, finally displayed a clear emotion. His eyes widened: "How do you know this?"

Elizabeth was standing not far from them at this time. The little devil looked up at Hao Ren, then at Vogus, muttering, "Uncle Ren didn't actually need to say it. No one would have known if you'd kept it a secret."

"My sense of responsibility won't allow it," Hao Ren waved his hand. "I'm somewhat of a Pope. I'm a good guy, you know? I have to live up to my persona! Vogus, how much do you know about Tanagus?"

Countless guesses and associations arose in the old patriarch's mind. Hao Ren's attitude when he mentioned the name and what the little devil next to him said made him think of too many things: "I… in fact, we can only learn about this from the information left by our predecessors, and we have never made it public. We know that our homeland is a place called Tanagus, but a great disaster occurred there, so our ancestors fled from their homeland to this planet. As for the content of the disaster… the ancient data disks say it was an ecological disaster."

"Yeah, as expected. You guys have a better foundation than other supernatural creatures, at least you roughly know that you came from somewhere else," Hao Ren's previous guess was confirmed again: different races were affected differently when they were contaminated by the "God-Slaying Sin" brought by the Golden Disks. Even if they were all creations of the Goddess, there were great differences. The supernatural creatures from Holleta had almost completely lost their memories of their homeland, but the Tanagurs vaguely knew where they came from, but they didn't know the true process of their crossing here. "Then do you know exactly where Tanagus is?"

"The Ankatelo family's long-cherished wish for thousands of years has been to find our homeland," Vogus shook his head slightly. "But we are powerless. This planet is not suitable for our survival. We modified our genes as much as possible to adapt to the water and air here, but we couldn't rebuild most of the other industries and technologies. The underground hibernation facility you saw earlier was the last attempt made by the family leader more than two thousand years ago: we wanted to build a large spaceship to find clues in space, but later the plan was shelved. There were too many difficulties, so we had to give up."

Hao Ren had guessed that the cryogenic hibernation pod underground was part of a spaceship, but he originally thought that it was like the Siren City, brought with them when the Tanagurs crossed over. He didn't expect that it was built later: "Two thousand years ago? You planned to go to space? This plan is much grander than other supernatural families… but you don't know the coordinates of Tanagus, so wouldn't flying out recklessly be just blindly crashing around?"

"At that time, the Mythological Era was collapsing, and many people had lost hope for the future. We felt that there was nothing worth defending on this planet, and some scholars at the time believed that there might be clues to our home world on Mars or its satellites, so our ancestors built the spaceship," Vogus explained. "Of course, it ultimately came to nothing."

Hao Ren thought to himself that it was fortunate that these highly motivated Tanagurs had given up on this idea back then. The home they were looking for couldn't be reached by spaceship… on the contrary, if they looked back, they could find a small door back home in Siberia.

However, many things don't have an "if." The Ankatelo family even built half a spaceship, but they still didn't think that the secret path home was on this planet.

Hao Ren sighed: "Actually, I've been to your house. No one has lived there for a long time, and it's all gone back to the wild…"

He slowly told the old patriarch about Tanagus and some irrelevant things from his work. Lily saw this scene from afar and grabbed Vivian, who was passing by: "What's the landlord doing?"

Vivian thought for a moment: "The second-hand housing agent accidentally entered the wrong room number and rented someone else's house to migrant workers, and is now explaining the situation to the landlord."

Lily scribbled formulas on the ground for a long time, then looked up with wide eyes: "Huh?"

In fact, as the little devil said, it was very simple for Hao Ren to avoid trouble: he could just keep it a secret. No matter how long he could hide it, Vogus and the other Tanagur survivors would have no chance to find out the whereabouts of their homeland themselves. And if it really came down to it, he could make up a lie to cover up the matter of the Tanagus planet—for example, that the planet had exploded, completely cutting off the Tanagurs' hope of returning home.

But that wasn't Hao Ren's style.

He usually looked listless and uninspiring, but he was still a big deal when it came to important issues. And he also knew that even if he acted selfishly, it wouldn't work: there was still a Goddess 12345 above him. That Goddess on the Jili was unreliable at other times, but she would really be impartial in official matters… so the smartest thing to do at this time was to face the problem head-on, lay everything out, and that also fit Hao Ren's style.

Anyway, that's how it is, screw it—that's his style.