It was the interior of a deep-sea pyramid covered by permafrost snow.
The lens looks like the compound eye perspective of some creature, with unnatural fisheye distortion.
Ice crystals condense and melt on the canvas, forming trails similar to flowing mucus.
The walls inside the pyramid are covered with spiral reliefs, and those lines wriggle strangely in the video, as if they have independent life.
In the center of the picture, an obsidian box about 30 centimeters long is glowing.
The surface of the box is covered with non-Euclidean geometric patterns. Whenever the lens is focused, the lines will reorganize themselves to form an arrangement similar to the scales of deep-sea fish.
Blue-green mucus oozed from the cracks in the box, and it remained boiling in an environment of dozens of degrees below zero. When the bubbles burst, projections of miniature constellations flashed.
"Is that... the exploration mission of the team I was talking about...?" Bai Di's voice was as dry as sandpaper.
In the picture, a student in exploration uniform was reaching out to take the box.
The moment he touched the box, the video suddenly superimposed an image from another dimension - the student's shadow split into twelve tentacle-like monsters on the ice wall.
But he himself was completely unaware of it.
What's even more bizarre is that when the box leaves the base, the spiral reliefs in the background all turn towards the camera, revealing the densely packed tooth-like structure inside.
The video starts looping for the last three seconds:
The moment the student stuffed the box into his backpack, the entire pyramid suddenly let out an infrasonic groan, and all the snow instantly turned into gray-blue worm-like creatures, rushing madly towards the exit.
Every time this video is replayed, something that was not there originally appears on the screen - on the seventh loop, a translucent claw is placed on the student's shoulder, with webbed fingers between the fingers.
The base's main control AI suddenly issued a warning in twelve languages at the same time, three of which were guttural sounds that had never been recorded by humans.
Pixels on all the screens materialized, blue-green goo seeping from the edges of the monitors and spelling the word "blasphemy" in the deep-sea race's runic language across the consoles.
Ma Tuan's breathing beneath the mask became as rapid as a drowning man's. "What the hell? That's not a mission... That's the cursed reliquary from the sacrificial ritual! They'll die trying to get their hands on that thing! It's useless and it contains—"
His words were interrupted by a violent tremor.
The projection of the cloud scepter suddenly materialized and slammed heavily onto the defensive light curtain.
Along with the sound of shattering glass, everyone at this moment smelled the unique sulfur smell of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, as well as some older, deathly smell like that of a rotting star.
"Use our base's students to eliminate dissidents who disagree with you, use them to bring out the Yingjue-X series of abyssal viruses, and use them to salvage the so-called 'treasures' you deliberately sank for thousands of years—"
A sound as sharp as an ice blade suddenly tore through the oppressive air.
Wherever the sound waves passed, the black clouds made a corroded "hissing" sound, like rotten fish gills exposed to strong acid.
For the first time, muscles on Yunduan's inhuman face showed something like a frown.
Lingfengzi flowers suddenly bloomed from the void.
These translucent crystalline flowers glow with the shimmer of quantum entanglement, with each petal vibrating simultaneously in different dimensions.
The hurricanes they formed were like a surgeon's scalpel, precisely scraping the wriggling eyeballs in the black clouds - the blown-off cloud fluff screamed like a baby crying as it fell, and turned into gray-purple tentacles covered with suction cups before it even hit the ground.
"Now you're rushing over to accuse me?"
The owner of the voice finally showed up, and a figure condensed on the top of the observation tower at the highest point of the academy.
She was a young woman wearing a star-track robe, with galaxy projections flowing through her hair, and in her left hand she was holding a Klein bottle mathematical model that was being decompressed.
"Si, your eating manners are too ugly."
She flicked her fingertips, and a multi-dimensional recording exploded in everyone's mind:
[Deep sea frequency recording begins]
"...let humans fetch the box...they are not bound by the Old Testament..."
"...Sakura Jue X will mutate in the body of the third contact..."
"...just in time to cleanse the traitorous priests of Settra..."
[End of recording]
The black clouds surged violently, and the eyeballs on the scepter exploded one after another.
The existence known as "Sacrifice" emitted a high-frequency hissing sound, and the sound waves shattered the twelve explosion-proof glass panels surrounding the base.
The flying glass fragments suddenly stopped in mid-air, reflecting the tragic deaths of academy students in countless parallel time and space - all of which were causal branches caused by the box-retrieval mission.
Ma Tuan's mask cracked, revealing skin as smooth as pearls underneath. "Dean! The box contains the priests of Settra—"
"I know."
The woman raised her hand to interrupt him, and the roar of an ancient engine starting up came from under the academy.
Behind her, nine nested layers of mandala formations emerged, each layer interpreting a different law of physics: "Isn't this the 'Old God Embryo'?
You deliberately allowed it to be exposed to humans in order to circumvent the Abyssal Pact's breeding ban."
The scepter suddenly twisted into a DNA helix, and seven inverted black pyramids rose from the sea level.
Si's voice finally took on an edge of anger, each syllable causing reality to lag by 0.3 seconds: "Return the embryo, or—"
"Otherwise what?"
The dean sneered. The shadow beneath her feet suddenly stretched out into a network of tentacles that covered half of the base. Each tentacle ended in a nebula eye identical to the one on the sacrificial scepter.
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