Shrouded Seascape

Chapter 827: Information

Aliya's beautiful brows furrowed upon hearing Charles' response. Her expression turned to that of reluctance as she muttered, "But—"

Before she could finish, however, Charles stood up and walked toward the elevator shaft in the distance.

"Sparkle, I'll go down and take a look. You keep an eye on the things up here. If anything happens, contact me through the diary," Charles said.

Clad in a white dress, Sparkle nodded gently and landed next to Aliya.

When Sparkle saw the lavish spread of food before her, her eyes lit up. She opened her mouth and devoured the food, including the plates and even the bones.

The members of the engineering team offered a headlight to Charles, but he declined the offer and went straight to the elevator shaft.

Charles looked down and saw a rope ladder that led all the way to the bottom of the shaft, but instead of using the ladder, he kicked off of the ground lightly and jumped straight down.

The hoistway doors on each floor had been forced open, and Charles could see dim light down the corridors. The lights were from the exploration teams that had gone down earlier.

They were all busy searching for Charles' skull and scalp. Everyone was focused on the task at hand. It couldn't be helped, as Charles had offered tempting rewards that no one could resist.

A freefall was always faster than a controlled descent, so Charles quickly caught up to the exploration teams that had gone ahead of him. He could already hear explosions nearby. Those explosions were made by the engineering team in their attempts to break through the ice.

The air became colder and colder the deeper he went, and when Charles finally arrived at the furthest hoistway door that the engineering team had cleared, the temperatures had gotten so low that every debris in the corridor was frozen solid.

Charles was in one of the Foundation sites, but he felt like he was in a glacial cavern somewhere in Antarctica. The solid ice was both a bad and a good thing.

If the other places in SITE 6 were frozen solid like this as well, then it'd be safe to assume that there weren't any enemies throughout SITE 6. It was only a matter of time before Charles' skull was found.

The explorers in the distance approached Charles. "Governor."

"What's going on? No issues so far, right?" Charles asked.

"No issues so far. If there's an issue, then it has to be this ice. It's too tough, and there is so much ice that it's taking us quite a while just to clear a path."

Charles willed, and his invincible tentacles sprang up. They moved around quickly and avoided the explorers as they slammed into the ice. The tough ice seemed weak before Charles' tentacles as he peeled them off the walls and ceiling.

Charles stumbled upon a table in the distance and walked up to it. He took out the rough map of SITE 6 and took out a pen from his chest pocket before drawing a circle on the map.

Charles then turned to the explorers behind him and said, "Leave this place to me. Go and tell the people blasting in the shaft that they should prioritize the floor that I marked on this map."

The marked floor was the floor where Charles was dissected, so there was a high chance that his skull and scalp were on that floor.

"Understood."

The explorers left the floor, leaving Charles by himself.

Once the explorers were out of sight, Charles turned and walked toward the big table in the distance. It wasn't his first time seeing the table. It looked just like an ordinary table, but it was actually a computer.

The only reason it looked like a table was that there was no power throughout the site. Fortunately, Charles had plenty of electricity at his disposal. He groped around the table and soon found the charging cable.

He cut open the charging cable with a chainsaw and a tentacle with a steady stream of electricity coursing through it wrapped around the charging cable. In just a few seconds, the computer came to life.

A hologram popped up, and it was a hologram of a familiar logo featuring three arrows pointing inward. The logo rotated a few times before a three-dimensional user interface was projected above the table.

Charles' fingers danced across the table, and it took him no time to access the Foundation's database. The content displayed on the screen was still the same content on the day of the Foundation's demise. The sight made Charles feel like the Foundation's destruction happened a lifetime ago.

Charles pondered briefly over what he ought to type in.

Eventually, he typed in the word "god" using the Subterranean Sea's language.

"Gods are the real threat to mankind. We can stop or even make use of other existences, but gods are different. Gods are mysterious unobservable beings, and we don't know much about them even now. At the moment, all we know is that the gods harbor a powerful energy within them.

"Sadly, we cannot observe them properly nor conduct any experiments on them, and it is all because gods cannot be contained and are extremely dangerous. Most importantly, every time we attempt to observe them, we are brought under their influence through those special whisperings.

(Link to the analysis and attempts to decipher the language of the gods: ████████████)

"If no attempts to isolate oneself from the source of the whispers are made, the whispers will slowly affect your mind; you'll become irritable, suspicious, paranoid, depressed, and finally, you will go crazy.

"On the contrary, the day you've become resilient enough to face a god, or as soon as you begin to comprehend their words, then it means that you're in a more dangerous situation. It means that they have influenced you completely.

"We are unaware of how they are doing it, but we've confirmed that they are using a method that cannot be perceived by human beings.

"Moreover, each god has their own unique abilities, and it is simply impossible for us to know the connections between them or if some of them are related by blood.

"Our knowledge about them is a confused assortment of pieces of information in no particular order. In conclusion, we know very little about gods, and the saddest thing is that we can't observe them for an extended period of time.

"It is highly likely that the more we know about them, the more they know about us as well. There is an extremely serious consequence to that, and this isn't a mere assumption. The DS-level scenario caused by Dr. ███ must serve as a lesson."

Charles stared at the information before him for a long time. Then, he fell into deep contemplation and emerged from it moments later. His fingers danced lightly across the projected keyboard, adding the words "becoming a" to the search bar.

"Becoming a god? What a brazen idea you have there, my friend. I don't know who you are, but I wanted to know the answer to that question as well. Unfortunately, it is definitely impossible.

"The previous generation's Experiment Dawn and Dr. Pede's sacrifice has told us that becoming a god isn't the easiest way for humans to attain eternal life. In fact, it is not even a feasible method.

"Becoming a god or borrowing the power of a god… none of them are a good choice. Doing either of those two means abandoning one's humanity. You will no longer be human by then.

"Your perception, your consciousness, and every aspect of you will cease to become human. If a human being becomes a god, do they still count as a human being?

"To put it simply, can the meager brain cells of human beings truly control so much power? Pour a bowl of wine into the sea, and the sea will still be the sea. Do it the other way around, and the wine is no longer considered wine.

"By then, are you truly controlling that boundless energy, or is the boundless energy controlling you? In the end, we know too little about them; we know too little about the gods.