The music box, half the size of a palm, fell to the gray-white cement floor, and the little figure on the steps fell to one side. The moving rod behind it was still rotating with a click.
There is a Canon playing in the music box.
Pure music, like the gurgling sound of a spring, flowed briskly through the swirling mist. From the moment a human finger pressed it, the machine began to work endlessly. Its energy came from the blowing wind, the falling rain, the lightning and thunder in the clouds. It seemed that as long as there was still someone in this world willing to listen, it would not relinquish its broken, old body to the trash can.
After an unknown amount of time, a hand that looked like the same material as the cheap mannequins displayed in shopping malls picked up the music box, carefully brushed off the dust on it, and placed it on its shoulder.
Then it limped and staggered towards the depths of the fog with its lifeless companion.
**
Igor found himself falling into the sea.
This made no sense; just a moment ago, they were driving along the wide, artificial streets. The development of tourist attractions around Keminting Town had been ongoing for decades, and no one was foolish enough to risk their lives to visit the anomalous phenomenon.
Before this, it took the Federation several years to dare to conclude that there would be no unexpected phenomena that could not be explained by science within one kilometer of the white fog. Only then did it gradually fight with various civil human rights organizations and bring the decision of selling expensive tickets to fill the financial expenditure of the Kemingting Town Government into the legal scope.
But this situation is obviously not ordinary.
The car was still slowly sinking in the sea. The windows were well sealed and hadn't leaked yet. The engine was off, and the doors were difficult to open due to the pressure of the water.
What is even more alarming than the current situation is that there is no one in the car except Igor. Azathoth in the passenger seat and Hugo and Erica in the back seat are all gone.
This made Igor feel that the ocean surging around the vehicle was more like an illusion or a dream than a real scene.
But he still took out a survival hammer from the storage cabinet under the seat and smashed it hard on the intact car window!
The moment the seawater poured back in, Igor held his breath to avoid the broken glass. After the water pressure dropped enough to open the car door, he swam towards a position above the water level where he could see light.
The young man didn't even feel any fear or helplessness because of this sudden and unexpected situation.
As always, he quickly adapted to the adverse situation and was prepared to face life-and-death challenges alone. This ability came from the many dangerous situations he had encountered in his less than thirty years of life.
However, the oxygen stored in the lungs is decreasing bit by bit, and the sea level still seems out of reach. Fortunately, the bionic prosthesis produced by the Federal High-Tech Weapons Research and Development Department is not only waterproof, but also more flexible than normal limbs in this environment.
The human's flesh and blood body soon lost consciousness due to the extremely cold water temperature, but thanks to the mecha technology - not only did his left leg work well, the flipper conversion function that seemed useless also showed that the researchers were particularly prepared for it.
May God bless you.
Igor, like all humans with faith in their hearts, chanted the name of God when another wave of lack of oxygen caused his vision to go black and the long distance made his attempt to survive seem futile and ridiculous.
This wasn't a habit he'd developed over the past few decades; humans should learn to redeem themselves. But the arrival of Azathoth had changed things. Although the young man didn't really expect the other party to descend from the sky to save him, as a believer after all—
Igor's idea was that he would never want to cause trouble to Azathoth because of his own predicament. Praying to the gods in his heart was another matter. It should be a kind of trust and a vision of the hope that still existed.
In other words, as long as people chant the name of God, they will have the courage and strength to struggle again.
But he actually got one thing wrong.
Other gods certainly didn't have the time to care about the food and drink of their millions of followers, and sometimes they might even be in trouble. However, the god of Igor's family was not only idle, but also willing to devote all his energy to paying attention to only one follower.
Azathoth has always respected Igor's choices and would never forcibly interfere with the other's life trajectory just because his power is stronger than his.
To him, everything in the world seemed more fragile than a glass ball, and Igor was the most precious of them all. The god had a lot of experience in protecting his treasures, one of which was that overprotection could be harmful.
What he wants is a living, intelligent, emotional, and free human being, not a beautiful and useful room decoration.
So when Igor didn't ask him for help, the god just watched him silently, ready to pull him up if he accidentally stepped into the swamp, throw him into the bathroom to wash off the mud and heal his wounds.
——Then fall into a sweet dream in a warm place.
And Igor never let him down.
As the human youth uttered the name intermittently, a violent undercurrent suddenly surged in the deep sea.
The deep darkness was completely silent, devoid of fish and seaweed. So when the hurricane cleared the waves and air suddenly rushed into the water more than ten meters below, Igor was left alone, coughing and covered in the salty, fishy water. Before he could react, a tentacle dropped from the sky, lifted him up, and shoved him to the shore.
"……gentlemen?"
Igor was stunned for a few seconds before a rare tinge of embarrassment rose in his heart. A gray-haired young man sat on the misty beach, his half-long hair still dripping wet. His coat had been taken off and thrown into the car, his shirt and trousers clinging to his skin, outlining a graceful and powerful curve.
"I'm sorry." He lowered his head, water droplets dripping from his eyelashes onto his cheeks. His face was pale from the cold, but the tips of his ears were red. He pursed his purple lips, looking even more pitiful. "I'm sorry to trouble you."
Azathoth had no doubt that Igor was the kind of man who would rather die in a deserted corner than drag his companions down with him. The trust shown by the man who spoke his name without hesitation in that critical moment gave the god a strange tenderness. "It's okay. I was not far from you."
Judging from the fog around them, they should still be on the outskirts of Kemingting Town.
But Azathoth looked around and said to Igor: "I think the terrain here looks a little familiar."
Igor's shirt was wrinkled after being wrung out, but no one present cared about such a trivial matter. Compared to the highway designated as a tourist attraction, where visibility was less than ten meters and the speed limit was fifteen miles per hour, the fog here was actually slightly thinner.
You can even see the round orange-red stars in the sky and the broken-down skyscrapers not far away through the mist above your head.
It's as if someone once lived here.
Igor initially thought that these were the remains left over from the Federation's development of the planet before the thick fog appeared in this area.
But he soon discovered something was wrong.
At this moment, from an unknown distance came a burst of light, pleasant and continuous music that seemed to have been echoing for a long time.
Intelligent life's appreciation of beautiful things may be regardless of race. Zerg, like humans, can indulge in superb art and great literature. Even Azathoth admits that he sometimes gets lost in tunes that praise all things in the world, and thus understands some of the human emotions that are sometimes stingy and sometimes as surging as the sea.
The music that now comes on the breeze is a kind of enduring civilization.
It transcends the limitations of time and space. Whenever it is played on this land, it is like a jar of fine wine with the lid opened, emitting its fragrance again.
——People are willing to call it a classic.
The earth gradually began to shake, and the broken sand on the ground was lifted up and jumped higher and higher, until a huge monster as tall as a hill took a step and passed through the tall and short buildings.
If Hugo were here, he might think that this creature was like the faceless man in Spirited Away magnified hundreds of times.
To the eyes of the people, it was as if a moving, pitch-black mountain, hundreds of meters high, suddenly appeared beneath the sun, casting a long shadow in the thick white fog. Its footsteps kicked up dust more than ten meters high. When it reached a building, it suddenly stopped, and a large, bright red eye suddenly opened, roughly at the level of its head.
Igor's hair stood on end and he became alert because he found that the eye rolled around and fell in the direction of him and Azathoth.
It found them.
However, the mountain-like monster only looked at them for a moment, then set off again, walking away into the distance amid the trembling of the earth.
"...What is that?" Igor asked softly amid the fluttering, invisible ribbon-like music.
Azathoth watched it leave thoughtfully without answering Igor's question.
"Let's find Hugo first," he said. "Don't worry, he should be able to explain your question."
"Until then, you can try to guess where the longitude and latitude coordinates on the invitation correspond to."
**
There was another scene around the android.
Azathoth took Igor through the ruined city as he knew it, and when they arrived at a plain full of ruins, they found themselves in a gray-green tent that looked like a wandering circus, isolating them from the huge monsters outside and the never-dissipating fog.
Hugo pulled Erica to sit in the audience, followed by Nixon and Mike, and in front of them was a small, brand new music box.
At this time, the music coming from somewhere had stopped.
"What on earth is going on?"
Nixon gripped the chair and grumbled his doubts through gritted teeth. He looked extremely uneasy. Although he was still able to maintain his rationality, he was inevitably panicked by the sudden and unexpected situation.
"You finally found it!" Hugo turned around and cheered, waving to Azathoth and Igor. "I thought we would have to wait a long time before you would remember where this place is, Aza."
"So where is this?" Nixon's colleague Mike asked curiously, "Have you been here before?"
Azathoth said: "I am more familiar with that ocean."
Hugo smiled, showing his canine teeth. "I see...you were asking what this place was?"
When saying the second half of the sentence, Hugo turned around and knelt on the chair, leaning on the backrest to face Nixon and Mike. He seemed quite happy - because the android actually responded to the stranger's questions.
It replied irrelevantly: "I don't know if you've heard of this, but there used to be a collection of celestial bodies in the Milky Way that some people called the 'Solar System'."
"There is a planet in the solar system that once gave birth to countless lives."
"The distance between it and the star it relies on is less than 0.0001 light-years, and our current location is approximately 300 light-years away from the solar system. Although this distance is insignificant compared to the entire Milky Way, under normal circumstances, it is impossible to reach the other side of the universe without the help of a wormhole."
As it spoke, it snapped its fingers, and the conical roof of the tent suddenly opened, revealing the gray sky above.
"Do you see that star hanging in the sky?"
The android said, "That's not the sun we see inside Keminting Town."
"It's fake... or rather, we are actually inside a projection of a planet that once had life."
"The light from the solar system's star takes less than 0.0001 years to reach a planet. The light reflected from that planet travels through the universe for three hundred years before reaching Ke Mingting's planet."
"So, apart from the fog and the monsters born from it, the scene you see now is the true appearance of the remains of a civilization abandoned by humans over three hundred years ago."
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
