Chapter 22 What’s Left of a Civilization

Hao Ren knew these ancient lost souls hadn't contacted him just for a chat, and as an inspector, he had a duty to properly handle these remnants of an extinct civilization. So, he proactively offered, "Is there anything I can help with?"

"Stranger, we have no other choice but to seek help from any traveler passing this way," the Tana soul aggregate hummed. "In the three sanctuaries, we have storage repositories of our civilization, containing all our culture, history, technology, and knowledge. Please take them away, to a place where someone can understand and read them. During their lifetime, the Tana people failed to explore the secrets between the stars. Now that our civilization is extinct, we hope that at least someone will know that a civilization called 'Tana' once existed, even if only a symbol remains. This is the last wish of the Tana's consciousness aggregate before losing itself, and this memory bank hopes it can be fulfilled."

"I've seen it in my work manual. Eighty percent of extinct civilizations have similar wishes before their demise. 'Leaving behind their information' is a kind of instinct for intelligent beings," Hao Ren sighed. "Alright, tell me the location of the storage repository, the Alamanda repository."

The phantom informed Hao Ren of the situation of the Alamanda storage repository in detail, and then expressed its gratitude. But just before the mental connection was about to be severed, Hao Ren suddenly remembered that he still had some questions—questions that had been bothering him all day, and now it seemed he had finally found someone who understood.

"I found two strange devices, two keys," Hao Ren tried his best to describe the two keystones he got from Igor and August, "...that's it, one triangular, one circular. Why do they have an effect called the 'Seven-Day Curse'? Why can't you get rid of them once you're entangled? Why do the keys return to the person within seven days, or the person dies if they leave the keys for more than seven days?"

The soul aggregate pondered for a moment, "You should be talking about the 'resonance stones' we used to control the devices around us. The triangular one is a 'beacon,' and the circular one is called an 'echo stone.' We don't know where the fatal accident went wrong, but the property of the 'echo stone' inevitably returning within seven days is actually normal..."

Hao Ren was stunned, "Huh? Such a scary function is normal? What's the use of that?"

"It's an anti-theft feature."

Hao Ren: "..."

"Newer models of resonance stones have an identity binding system. After leaving the owner beyond a certain distance and after a certain period of time, the homing function will be activated. You can cancel this return setting by entering the device serial number and password, or you can put it in a strong magnetic field or other energy field to process it, but this will clear the memory—of course, you probably don't need that memory, it usually records music and photos."

Hao Ren: "..."

The curse that had tormented Old August for three centuries was actually a damn anti-theft system! Hao Ren decided that he would never tell that unlucky old man the truth in his life—anal fissure was bad enough, so he should leave the old man with some spiritual comfort.

"Do you have any other questions?" the soul aggregate asked patiently, but Hao Ren really didn't want to say anything at this time. "No, thank you... I'll go back and fix my worldview."

That chaotic mental world receded like a tide, and Hao Ren was dazed back to the real world. He heard the data terminal shouting that it had discovered an ancient storage device that could be read—although he felt that he had been immersed in the Tana's memories for several hours, only a few seconds seemed to have passed in the real world.

Lili was keenly aware, and she was the first to sense that something was wrong with Hao Ren. Her ears twitched, and she turned her head vigilantly, "Landlord? What's wrong with you?"

"I saw the memory bank left by the Tana people," Hao Ren rubbed his forehead, the mental fatigue quickly fading. "Their memory fragments are still floating on this planet, and they have been transformed into something intangible... hiss, it's really dizzying."

"You 'again' saw the memories of other creatures?" Vivian looked at Hao Ren in surprise, "This time it's the Tana people? What did they say?"

"We have to return to Alamanda and take something from the city hall," Hao Ren nodded. "But this can be discussed later. What did you guys find?"

"A storage device, over ten thousand years old," Nangong Wuyue said, taking out a pentagonal crystal board from some kind of device beside her. "Zhongzhuan said that this can still be read—but it's seriously damaged, and it needs to be repaired with the equipment on the Petrified Tortoise."

The data terminal let out a sharp whistle, "It's Zhongzhuan! Can you guys stop learning from that idiot one by one!"

Everyone silently looked at the flying coaster, who was stunned before realizing what it had said, "...Damn, what did this machine just say..."

"Let's go, I promised to help take that thing away," Hao Ren shook his head and walked out first. "Just treat it as a thank you for their gold—although in this place, gold nuggets are not much different from bricks."

The group left the ancient observatory, and Vivian looked at the direction of the golden ruined city of Alamanda with some worry, "The wraiths near the city might still be there. Will we run into trouble?"

"The wraiths won't bother us anymore," Hao Ren shook his head. He looked at the distant sky. After concentrating his mind, his vision began to change. The original empty and monotonous sky gradually showed countless floating colors and lines—magnetic fields, soul fragments, memory bodies, and the ripples left by the wraiths across the sky. That was another world that could only be seen from a spiritual perspective. That ancient memory brought him unexpected gains. Soul vision might be useful in the future. "I am now considered half a member of 'them'—the wraiths still have this ability to distinguish between friend and foe."

Guided by the ancient memories, Hao Ren led everyone back to Alamanda. He could feel the wraiths hovering around him. Even without opening his soul vision, he could feel countless mysterious energies watching him in the sky. Those Tana people who had lost their self-awareness seemed to still retain some instincts of intelligent beings. They blindly circled over the city, staring at a group of strangers entering their city, and suppressed their attacking instincts under some inexplicable sense of identity.

In the city center, there was a dome building that had almost completely collapsed. This was the former city hall of Alamanda. Hao Ren released several autonomous robots from his dimensional storage to clean up the metal debris piled on the ground, and then cut open four layers of thick armor plates, revealing a small secret room buried deep underground and wrapped in layers of super-strength alloy.

What was finally taken out was just a metal cylinder more than half a meter high, shimmering with a faint purple light. This was the storage repository.

All the achievements of the entire civilization, all the data of the Tana people, including all the information they could collect since they began recording history on stone tablets, were here. Their writing, art, history, philosophy, and thoughts on the universe and themselves were all condensed together. There were countless film and television materials and precious painting copies, as well as formulas and knowledge of the world summarized by countless generations of scientists, and the last words recorded by the last group of Tana people to be handed over to future generations. The entire civilization was compressed here.

Sixty-two centimeters, seventeen kilograms.

"This is everything." Hao Ren sighed, and solemnly put the cylinder into a metal storage box. This metal storage box was a special container equipped for inspectors, specifically used to store those collections with special significance, such as the remnants of a civilization.

He closed the lid of the storage box and typed a line of annotation on it: Tanagus Civilization, all data, to be encoded.

"I wonder if the remaining data after the extinction of mankind one day can fill this box." Hao Ren muttered.

"Oh, that depends on when the extinction occurs. If humans can't develop more advanced storage technology by then, perhaps the volume of this data will be very large, so large that it fills the entire cabin. You have to compress it with a translation device," the data terminal replied. "Stop sighing, this is the end of most civilizations—no matter how brilliant they once were, how many civilizational achievements they had, how many artists, philosophers, leaders, heroes, dictators, politicians... all these things are ultimately just a few bytes. Many things will eventually disappear. For the inspectors, it makes no difference whether these civilizations are destroyed by sudden disasters or slow civilizational depletion, just like patients dying in a hospital bed."

Hao Ren nodded, "Alright, let's go."