Chapter 890 — Records

That sudden gleam of light appearing at the corner of his vision snapped Gao Yang instantly to attention.

He immediately roused himself to the utmost, fixing his eyes on that abruptly appearing light; under his intense concentration the playback speed of the image slowed several times over, and every detail on the frame was rendered with crystalline clarity. His first instinct was to confirm the source of that light, and then he found it came not from the surface but from somewhere near the top of the planet's atmosphere—it seemed to have appeared there out of nowhere, without warning, without trajectory, like an invisible door opening at the top of the atmosphere, and then an entity of astonishing speed came hurtling toward the orbital facility!

Then, in Gao Yang's field of view, the flying object grew larger and larger, and out of the hazy radiance a clear silhouette gradually emerged.

If his body were here right now, Gao Yang felt certain his eyes would have gone as wide as they could.

A sacred giant deer wreathed in a pale white radiance surfaced within the light and shadow, trailing wisps of the thin atmosphere it had dragged up from the top of the atmosphere, a ray-like wake of high-energy reactions streaming behind it as it crossed the cold, dead darkness of space, driving straight toward the direction of the surveillance viewpoint—with an unstoppable momentum, with a certain heart-stopping resolve.

At one moment, when the giant deer was close enough, Gao Yang could even make out its eyes through the image—eyes that did not belong to a mortal, yet seemed to hold something like human emotion within them; Gao Yang felt he could read in them a complex mingling of a readiness to die and a desperate, all-or-nothing gamble.

Yet that gaze flashed by and was gone.

The next instant, the giant deer and the radiance it bore had already burst into a vast, dazzling "flame" across the frame; a powerful blast wave erupted from one corner of the image, and countless fragments, sparks, and gas venting from the station's hull filled the entire surveillance view.

The image began to shake violently, all manner of alarms poured into his mind, and continuous terrible booms echoed through the hull structure of the space station (if it was a space station); in the rapidly distorting, darkening frame, Gao Yang saw the giant deer, battered and wounded, fall from geosynchronous orbit, while some kind of golden-glowing flying device came racing in from outside the frame—perhaps a guardian of the station, awakened and beginning to carry out its task of destroying the intruder.

In the firelight and explosions that followed, the footage ended.

In the darkness, the system's voice came from deep within Gao Yang's "mind": "Historical log playback complete—the above is the final surveillance record from Sector C-16."

After a brief silence and reflection, Gao Yang steadied his violently churning emotions and asked in his mind: "So... the God of Nature struck this facility, causing all subsystems to go offline?"

The system's voice gave no reply, answering only with silence.

But Gao Yang no longer needed an answer, for the facts were plain enough—the giant deer's form was so distinctive that one glance was enough to recognize it; it still lay quietly in the deepest recesses of the Fortress of Defiance, imprisoned in the Shadow Realm by a heap of ancient wreckage and debris, and the God of Nature that the cultists of the Church of the End of All Things had once created using the divine-sin factor... was nothing but a crude imitation compared to that true, sacred figure.

"Dealing with the things the Godslayer Fleet left behind really takes a strong heart..." Gao Yang muttered to himself with a bitter smile in his consciousness. "What the hell did I just watch... a bull-headed god charging up into geosynchronous orbit to crash into a space station and kill itself?"

Every word of that sentence was a point to mock, yet the biggest point was this: the sentence was, from beginning to end, entirely true!

Afterward, Gao Yang tried using that impact as a key to search for more records, but apart from the brief surveillance footage he had already seen, he found nothing else of value in the facility's database.

After a while longer, Gao Yang gave up on that line of attempt and turned to using this connection to dig out more of the facility's secrets—considering that he had established the link with this facility by means of a piece of stellar legacy, he was not sure whether the connection could be maintained stably; if this was his only chance to connect, then he could not afford to sever it lightly.

After a great many failed or unanswered attempts, he finally obtained a worthwhile name from the intermittent feedback of the facility's master control system:

Firmament Station—that was the name of the orbital facility he was currently connected to.

At this moment he could finally be certain that what he was connected to was a massive space station, not some small surveillance satellite.

"Firmament Station..." Gao Yang repeated the name in his mind, then asked without much hope, "What is the purpose of Firmament Station? What mission does it have, remaining in orbit?"

"Error. Query permission not held, or the upper-level database is not open. Please check the data link. If doubts remain, report this fault to the Supreme Technical Committee."

A reply within expectations... The master system of Firmament Station was clearly malfunctioning; faced with most questions it either gave no response or something similar.

Gao Yang was quite curious what that so-called "Supreme Technical Committee" was, but his questions on that front received no response at all—though it hardly mattered; that "Supreme Technical Committee" had likely vanished into the long river of history by now.

"How many orbital facilities are still operational now? What condition are they in?" he asked again.

This time, the master control system finally gave a somewhat useful answer: "Querying connected units... List of orbital facilities provided."

The next second, a three-dimensional panoramic map of space facilities appeared "before" Gao Yang—he instantly recalled having seen a similar panorama before, the overview of orbital facilities he had seen last time by means of the fragment of the "Eternal Slate"; but soon he realized that the image he saw this time was different from the last—

What he had seen last time was a far more simplified schematic, severely lacking in information, in which the space facilities were represented only by points of light that revealed no detail whatsoever; but this time, perhaps because he had obtained higher privileges, or perhaps because of the peculiar nature of Firmament Station itself, what he saw was a miniature model, and all the space facilities around the planet were rendered as pale blue translucent holograms—a mode of display that carried an astonishing amount of information.

Among them, the most jaw-dropping was a ring-shaped facility of unimaginable scale.

That facility was located above the planet's equator, and it encircled the entire planet!

Merely from the comparison between it and the planet, Gao Yang could infer what scale this ring-shaped facility possessed; he stared in astonishment at the hologram "before" him, at the position that ring-shaped facility occupied in space, and finally realized that this thing was the very facility he was currently connected to—the space station called "Firmament"!

He had imagined that this thing was large in scale, but he had never imagined it could be large to this degree! In the schematic he had seen last time through the Eternal Slate, this "Firmament" had clearly been nothing but a point of light orbiting the equator!

The difference between the schematic and the miniature model was simply worlds apart!