Chapter 1 The Discovery

The Pioneers discovered the strange group of stone statues far from Kuangxi Island, over three thousand kilometers away, but supersonic fighters covered the distance in less than an hour.

The fighter jets didn't land because the statues were found on a small, muddy beach. As the Fourth Destruction Era approached, global temperatures had risen above 0 degrees Celsius. The ocean was no longer frozen, and the beach was no longer solid, turning into a large swamp of thin mud.

The fighter jets and large equipment had no wide, stable ground to land on.

From above, one could see fewer than fifty Pioneers standing on the corners of the beach nearest to solid ground, with steep peaks behind them and the vast sea in front.

Recently, with the reduced threat from sea beasts, Pioneer legions tended to operate in smaller, more dispersed groups without heavy equipment and weapons. Each team had around fifty people, allowing them to complete sea patrols more quickly and search for more survivors.

This beach belonged to an unnamed deserted island, devoid of any modern technological civilization and purely desolate.

The Pioneers' helicopters were parked on the other side of the mountain. Looking down from an altitude of one thousand meters, one could vaguely see a dozen giant statues half-submerged in the soft, muddy beach, with only their upper bodies exposed.

In the distant sea, a large number of Beast Kings were still fighting, their severed limbs and wreckage being washed onto the island and the beach by the rolling waves.

Li Tianran guessed that these stone statues might also have come from the sea and been brought here by various wave impacts.

*Pa!*

He pressed the ejection button. The fighter jet's hatch opened, and Li Tianran shot into the sky like a cannonball, then rapidly descended. Just as he neared the ground, his gravity disappeared, and he hovered in the air two meters above the ground like a hydrogen balloon.

"Boss!" Lu Chi walked over. The new generation Tyrannosaurus single-soldier mecha's combat boots could be adjusted to resemble duckwebs, allowing them to walk through the swamp without sinking.

Li Tianran nodded. He looked at the beach in the distance. A rough count revealed seventeen statues in total, each with a different form.

Some were humanoid, and some were bestial.

The tallest of them was over fifty meters high, while the smallest was over ten meters, all colossal beings.

As Li Tianran looked at them, a chilling sense of oppression washed over him.

"These damn things…" Li Tianran muttered softly as he strode forward, his gravity domain gradually expanding with his steps.

He had observed many similar statues, but he hadn't made any real discoveries. All he could do was copy down the mysterious characters on the statues' bases and ask scholars in strongholds to decipher them.

However, modern scholars couldn't interpret these characters, which seemed to belong to a previous civilization.

Humans weren't very skilled at deciphering ancient civilizations. They hadn't even fully deciphered their own ancient oracle bone script, let alone these ancient characters.

But even so, Li Tianran hadn't stopped copying and seeking help from scholars of ancient civilizations.

Perhaps it was a way of seeking psychological comfort. Active exploration was better than doing nothing, and what if someone understood these characters?

As for Han Han…

Since the disappearance of her Eye of Good and Evil ability after that strange dream, Li Tianran had tried moving into her room, hoping to enter her dream through her intellectual brainpower and find out what happened. But for more than ten days, that dream hadn't happened again, and she seemed no different from before.

She also said that she didn't recognize these characters at all…

Li Tianran was helpless, but he couldn't do anything about it.

Enduring the great pressure and discomfort, Li Tianran came to the first statue. It was smaller than the others, shaped like a three-headed giant snake. Everything below its neck was deeply embedded in the beach's mud and sand. Its six gray-white stone eyes seemed to stare into people's souls, making them feel numb.

Li Tianran reached out and pressed the top of the statue.

His gravity domain was released instantly.

"Weightlessness!"

Li Tianran spoke softly. A strange fluctuation filled the statue's body, and then the statue, weighing nearly ten tons, became as light as a feather. With Li Tianran gently lifting it with one finger, the statue slowly broke free from the mud and rose into the air, revealing its full appearance!

He expected the three-headed snake to have a ferocious, winding snake body, but Li Tianran didn't expect to see a human body below the snake heads.

It was a statue with a human body and snake heads, somewhat like a deity from ancient Egypt.

After washing away the mud with seawater, Li Tianran saw the mysterious characters on the base.

He took out a camera and photographed the statue.

Li Tianran took a deep breath. He could clearly feel that his evolutionary abilities were suppressed when he approached these statues. He needed to expend more stamina and strength to move them.

The more statues there were, the stronger the suppression became. As Li Tianran walked forward, standing among the statues, he felt like he was carrying a mountain on his back.

From this, one could see how difficult it was for Xiao Hei and Bai Mao to wake up Han Han when they were pulled into her dream, facing the pressure of countless statues around them, and how hard they had to roar.

"Aooo!"

A deafening roar suddenly came from the distant sea, the sound of a large beast tide fighting each other. Massive Beast Kings were tearing apart the bodies of smaller Beast Kings.

Blood splattered across the sea!

"Recently, these fights between beast tides have become more frequent. Maybe the Sea Demon is really dead, and the Beast Kings want to divide up territory or choose a new king through these battles," Lu Chi said softly, watching the sea.

The Beast King clans had indeed been fighting intensely recently, with the corpses of sea beasts and bloody battlefields almost everywhere.

Within a hundred kilometers of this deserted island, one could see no fewer than seven groups of beasts fighting each other.

The Pioneers watched the beast groups with smiles on their faces, chatting quietly as if they were watching a good show.

Of course, it was a good thing for humans that the sea beasts were killing each other.

……

At this time, Li Tianran was already standing among the stone statues, sweat dripping from his forehead.

"I didn't think it was so outrageous when I faced one statue before, but now that I'm facing more than a dozen statues at the same time, I have to expend at least three times as much stamina to maintain my abilities." Four giant stone statues floated beside Li Tianran. He felt his stamina rapidly depleting, and his brain made the most accurate assessment of his current state.

Li Tianran suddenly smiled and said to Lu Chi in the distance, "Even if we can't ultimately crack the secret of the statues, if we collect them and lure some of the more difficult evolvers to the statue group, let them bear the huge pressure and have their abilities restricted, it will be very easy to kill them!"