Chapter 1377: The Universe Is an Onion?

The roar of Exodus’s engine gradually quieted down.

As the air pressure valve opened with a hiss, a group of people clad in protective suits walked out of the spaceship one after another, gripping the handles on the outer wall as they slowly adapted to this new gravity environment.

The location where the enormous ring lay prostrate was a desolate reddish-brown land with an absolutely dark and deep horizon. The vast expanse of sandy terrain was interspersed with elongated pale sand dunes, resembling traces left by an ink brush. There was no life, no brilliance, but it possessed a barren and silent beauty.

Lin Sanjiu found it hard to believe she was currently standing on the Queen Mother, who once resided in Shambhala.

According to Silvan, the Queen Mother and its nerves were buried deep in the Earth’s core. As this celestial body grew larger day by day, the Queen Mother would also mature. As someone who had experienced Shambhala alongside him, Lin Sanjiu could not forget the scene inside the underground chamber. In her imagination, the core brain of the earth was surrounded by numerous white nerves, tightly molding the dust and stones into a celestial body.

The Queen Mother could grow larger, and the celestial body was its flesh and blood. It could actively capture various substances in the universe and add them to its flesh and blood. Therefore, it didn’t need to go through the long cosmic timescale like a real planet to grow step by step. By planetary standards, its size was still small; its mass and gravity weren’t significant. Everyone wasn’t entirely used to this gravity environment yet. Ji Shanqing fell flat on his face not long after walking.

Lin Sanjiu blew air through her nose, which the grand prize heard from the protective suit’s internal communication system.

“I’m going back!” he threatened.

It was really pitiful. Although he was part of the Veda and could travel through space as long as he abandoned this body, the grand prize was still clumsy and awkward when performing physical work in this heavy, bulky protective suit. Lin Sanjiu beckoned to him, and immediately, the grand prize forgot about going back and clumsily tried to catch up but ended up falling again.

Nu Yue, Han Suiping, and the other two posthumans struggled to keep up with Ji Shanqing. When they finally arrived, Silvan had been waiting for a while. He was standing under Exodus with a large pile of steel cables at his feet. If you looked from a distance, Exodus now looked like a donut with eight small feet standing on the ground. The distance between its belly and the ground was just enough for a person to stand.

“Everyone, prepare the steel cables,” Silvan instructed through the communication system. “Find a foot of the spaceship, and secure one end of the steel cable on it.”

The task itself wasn’t worth mentioning, but Lin Sanjiu didn’t expect that the grand prize, a dignified Veda, would be so clumsy and adorable while performing the job in a heavy and oversized protective suit. After finishing her work, she glanced at him and couldn’t help but do his job as well.

Next, Silvan took out a long stick-like object. Lin Sanjiu noticed that after wearing a white protective suit, Silvan, who usually had a terrifying appearance, looked a bit silly. When he stuck that stick into the ground especially, he looked like a fat white mosquito preparing to dine.

Unaware of his appearance, Silvan came over after pulling out the object and handing it to Lin Sanjiu, saying, “Do as I just did. Poke it into the ground and slightly probe downward, and it will naturally create a tunnel in the soil.”

“To be honest, I still don’t understand what we’re doing,” Han Suiping grumbled.

After leaving the modern world, his spirit gradually recovered. However, unlike Nu Yue, he never mentioned the modern world. Even when others mentioned Wan Qingge, who chose to stay behind, he usually remained silent, as if intending to completely sever ties with that world.

“You’ll find out soon,” Silvan said patiently. “After everyone digs out a tunnel underground, insert the steel cables inside… yes, like that, all the way to the end.”

Lin Sanjiu pushed the steel cables into the small circular holes in the ground, letting them slide along the tunnels underground. Now, one end of the steel cable was fixed on the spaceship, and the other end dropped into the tunnel beneath the soil.

“I’ll notify her to grab onto these steel cables,” Silvan said gently as if the Queen Mother were a little girl.

“Huh? Who?” someone asked.

Coming, Lin Sanjiu held one end of the steel cable and took a deep breath. Unlike the other posthumans present, she had seen the Queen Mother before, so she guessed what Silvan was planning to do.

Silvan, wearing the protective suit, turned away, facing away from the others. The communication system in his helmet fell silent. But after a moment, Lin Sanjiu felt the ground beneath her feet trembling slightly—not the shaking sensation of an earthquake, but more like something was moving deep underground.

Beside Lin Sanjiu, the steel cables lying softly on the ground suddenly straightened as if pulled by an underground force. They stretched tightly between the spaceship and the ground, even tilting Exodus slightly, emitting a muffled creaking sound. The steel cables seemed to have come alive and jumped up in the air, becoming straight. As everyone was bewildered, Silvan’s voice came through the communicator: “Mission accomplished. The Queen Mother’s nervous system underground has coiled around the steel cables.”

With the Queen Mother holding onto the cables underground, Exodus was firmly anchored to the ground. This celestial body’s gravitational force was not significant; Exodus weighed only a few tons here, less than the weight of a truck on Earth. So, on Silvan and Ji Shanqing’s way there, that was how they had secured the ship before the Queen Mother completed the next leg of the journey.

In her confusion, Lin Sanjiu couldn’t help but feel a bit alarmed. Fixing the spaceship in place was obviously to prevent it from being thrown away… but what force could throw the spaceship off a celestial body in the vacuum of space without wind or waves?

Moreover, the Queen Mother didn’t have propulsion engines, so how could it move forward?

After everyone returned to Exodus, Lin Sanjiu, the grand prize, and Silvan returned to the control room together. The half-faced room’s wall still displayed the scene ahead in real-time: the reddish-brown land, the sandy dunes stretching all the way to the horizon, and the distant starlight in the dark space.

“When I received your signal that day, I found that you were not far from us,” Ji Shanqing said softly, curling up in a chair and resting his head on Lin Sanjiu’s shoulder. “I rushed over with Silvan, following the signal source… but when we arrived, there was nothing but emptiness in that area of the universe.”

“Did you go to the wrong place?” Lin Sanjiu thought of this possibility first.

“We didn’t go to the wrong place. All analytical methods at the time could prove that the signal came from that empty void… However, within a range of nearly ten thousand kilometers, apart from the direction we came from, there wasn’t even a floating meteorite,” Ji Shanqing said, involuntarily trembling slightly. Just thinking about that moment was terrifying for him.

“How did you find me, then?”

“It’s a long story. At that time, the Queen Mother happened to be nearby.”

Sitting in another chair in front, Silvan turned his head and added, “Its volume and mass were still relatively small. In case it was attracted by the gravity of a planet and became a satellite, it usually avoided getting too close to a planet. When I landed Exodus, it stayed in the far reaches of space.”

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