<h4>Chapter 187: Full of Mysteries</h4>


    Licks of vibrant mes shot out of the ship’s main gun. The antimatter chargesnded on the building one after another, filling the air with the sounds of explosion.


    The Tomahawk was only equipped with two medium-size sters. Its main method of offence was not through cannonfire but rather the countless drones it had on board. Once released, they would be akin to arge swarm of venomous wasps, out to destroy their enemies.


    However, for fear that the dust in the supergravity zone might damage these valuable drones, Xia Fei chose not to use them, only attacking with the ship’s two sters.


    “What are you trying to do?” questioned Phantom.


    He could not fathom why Xia Fei was bombarding these ancient cubic structures. One antimatter charge cost thirty thousand star coins, and both sters shot 180 charges in a minutebined; this meant that it would cost five million per minute just in the charges. Xia Fei had always been thrifty, and doing this was no different from being wasteful.


    Xia Fei had his eyebrows knitted tightly, with no intentions of stopping the fire. “I suspect that these things aren’t even buildings.”


    “Not buildings? Then, what are they?”


    Xia Fei, who usually thought with logic, had initially agreed with Phantom that these rectangr objects were buildings. It was impossible for such precise cubic structures in a natural environment, except if they were man made, but his thoughts changed when he actually touched one of them. They did not have doors or windows, and Xia Fei could not understand why anyone would make such weird buildings. He started doubting if these buildings were just solid concrete mass rather than buildings.


    Because the depth sensors were not usable at the time being due to the interference from the environment, Xia Fei decided to use the most direct and effective method, sting aparts these huge rocks in search of the truth.


    If they were buildings, they would obviously break apart; if they were not, it meant that they were artificial pieces of concrete.


    It was not an easy task to make buildings that were over a thousand meters tall and wide, so why would they leave them in a deserted? Xia Fei could not imagine it and decided to make sense of the structures before moving onto the next step.


    “Stop.” After two minutes of constant bombardment, Xia Fiemanded theputer to cease fire.


    Phantom and Xia Fei looked out of the window. When the dust settled, the two of them had their breaths taken away.


    The rectangr bolder was cut in half, revealing countless pieces of concrete, faintly visible was the metal structure.


    These huge cuboids were actually solid and not buildings at all.


    Who would have thought? What sort of person would drop off four massive pieces of concrete here, and what were their purpose?


    Lighting a cigarette, Xia Fei returned to his chair, frowning, as he fell into deep thought.


    Phantom asked a few momentster, “Turns out they’re actually pure rocks. Could it be that someone had wanted to use them in constructing a certain building but, for some reason, didn’t get to do so, and that’s why they were dumped here?”


    Phantomughed right as he finished his question. Each rock b was over a thousand meters tall and wide. Setting possibilities aside, even if someone did manage to use these as building material, how big would the final building be?


    A skyscraper hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of meters in height? What for? To y golf?


    At least, for the tiny humans, a building that size would not make sense. Unless there existed a massive intelligent race in the universe, it was hard to imagine who would require such an enormous building.


    Humans would also design super-massive bases from time to time. The design idea was usually to hollow out a smaller and surround it with defense mechanisms such as cannons.


    The issue was that these rocks looked just like bricks. It was much more difficult to build buildings this way than hollowing out a. Moreover, the building created from these would not be sturdy, so it would be even more ridiculous if it was for civilian residences. It would not make sense to stuff hundreds of millions of people into one building.


    The Tomahawk continued to circle around the red. Xia Fei was still thinking about the use of the rock bs; therefore, he had not issued anothermand.


    Looking through the window, the arrangements of these rocks were not even. Some were tightly packed, others had some distance between them. But if all of them were neatly ced facing the dark sky, far from being just thrown down... This was one of the reasons Xia Fei had thought that they were buildings.


    “They aren’t evenly spaced, but each b is ced neatly?” muttered Xia Fei.


    All of a sudden, he realized something.


    “Increase altitude to one hundred and fifty thousand meters,”manded Xia Fei.


    The Tomahawk turned around and started flying in another direction. A few momentster, Xia Fei, who was looking out the window, noticed that the rocks were connected horizontally and vertically as though some sort of unknown script.


    “Look!” Xia Fei eximed. “Do the rocks look like words?”


    “Words?” Phantom was shocked. “They do look to be a form of script. These structures are scattered yet orderly, but who knows what these words even mean?”


    Xia Fei smiled. He gently tapped on the projected screen to log down this writing.


    Because of the curvature of the, Xia Fei and Phantom had not noticed at first that these rocks were arranged like writing. If it was ttened out, the rocks would quite obviously look structured.


    The trantion microchip in the brain was working hard yet was unable to decipher the meaning of the text. Xia Fei shook his head; if such an advanced trantion microchip was unable to decipher what had been written, it surely meant that the structure of the words were tooplex and rare.


    Although there was no way to know who left these massive rocks or what the rocks wanted to say, Xia Fei still breathed a sigh of relief as he found Old Porter’s tracks and understood the point to these rocks.


    “At least, it’s a good start. Old Porter got here then left, meaning that he’s at least alive,” said Phantom.


    Xia Fei nodded,manding in a deep voice, “Start recharging the warp engine; head toward the second destination.”


    ...


    The second purple location was not far from where he was, only requiring one warp to arrive. Because there was not a huge difference in the gravity, the warp this time around was not as insufferable as the previous one.


    From the starmap, this was beyond the ck Abyss Star Region and into undiscovered territory. Moreover, this area wasrger. There was an asteroid belt around its perimeter and fours within each, all of them requiring investigation.


    The signal from the radar was still jumbled, so all Xia Fei could do was rely on visual inspection and the unclear video signals to look for traces of Old Porter.


    First was investigating each of theses. They werergely simr to the smallers that were a dime a dozen in the universe and had nothing special to them. Xia Fei pouted, before steering Tomahawk into the asteroid belt.


    Since there was nothing on theses, naturally Xia Fei did not have much hope for the asteroid belt, either, but with a hopeful attitude, the Tomahawk slowly moved through the countless rubble in the asteroid belt.


    “This asteroid belt is incredibly long; it’s probably going to take a few months to look through everything,” Phantom said as he looked far at the endless asteroids.


    Xia Fei knitted his eyebrows,manding in a deep voice, “Start the metal detector at full capacity and scan the asteroid belt in all directions.”


    Even without the strong gravity, it was an incredibly difficult task to search through an expansive asteroid belt, for therge numbers of rubble strongly disrupted any signal transmission. this was the supergravity zone no less—a difficulty that was so immense it was hard to imagine.


    “Use fuzzy scanning; only scan objects close to orrger than the frigate.”


    The metal detector was operating at full capacity. These rubbles had varying quantities of metal, so it was necessary to filter out the smaller ones or ones that did not contain enough metal.


    Xia Fei did not have much hope for the metal detector. Because of the disruptions that the supergravity zone provided, almost none of the electronics worked, but what was most surprising was that the metal detector actually detected a strong signal.


    The signal was tens of thousands of kilometers away from the Tomahawk. Judging from the signal strength, it was arge object, exceedinglyrge even.


    There were no words that could describe Xia Fei’s shock. ording to the signal, this metal object was at least 1.5 billion cubic meters.


    What even was that?


    It was basically a metal city, enough to amodate tens of thousands of people.


    Such arge amount of metal, with the purity beyond high-strength metal, what could it be?


    “Full speed ahead,” Xia Feimanded in a deep voice.


    The Tomahawk suddenly elerated towards the destination.


    “Why is there such a huge metal object here? Could it be a small madepletely of metal?” asked Phantom.


    Xia Fei shook his head. “Impossible, the metal detector showed that its purity is beyond high-strength metal. That means it’s a man-made object.”


    Most metals in space existed in ores. Although there were many different types and were inrge quantities, they were not pure at all. ording to the metal detector, the huge object was made of many different types of purified metals, so it was impossible for that to just be pieces of ore drifting in space.


    “It’s even weirder that it’s man-made. The capital ships in the Alliance are around five hundred million cubic meters in volume. That’s the limit of the ship building capabilities of humans, and norger warship has ever existed, yet its volume is thrice the size of a supercarrier; how is that possible?” Phantom waspletely stunned, his voice even turning hoarse.


    “Is it possible that the detector made a mistake from the disruptions?” Phantom questioned. A massive 1.5-billion-cubic-meter, man-made object had greatly surpassed Phantom’s imagination, which was why he was so confused.


    Xia Fei said in a deep voice, “There is a possibility. It’s true that gravity can affect the signal, but there’s an even greater possibility that this thing is bigger than 1.5 billion cubic meters.”