Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

Chapter 252 Deep into the Desert

The plane landed at an airport in a small town in southern Algeria, 800 kilometers from the heart of the Sahara.

Yang Hong rented two modified desert off-road vehicles locally. The vehicles were covered with fine screech marks from the sand, the tires were specially widened for sand, and the chassis were raised by nearly half a meter. He spread Chen Xinghe's hand-drawn map from seven years ago on the scorching hot hood, and pointed to a spot circled three times with a red pencil.

"It's here. It takes two days to drive in from the nearest highway."

The map wasn't printed; it was a yellowed coordinate sheet with latitude and longitude lines drawn in black ink and three sampling points marked in red pencil. Next to one of them were four characters: "Abnormally Hollow." The handwriting was strong and vigorous, the same handwriting as the notes Chen Xinghe left in the Taklamakan caves.

The convoy set off at five in the morning. The Sahara sun had not yet fully risen, and the desert was a deep blue.

The first day was spent traversing a gravel desert. The ground temperature exceeded sixty degrees Celsius at midday. Even with the air conditioning running at full throttle, the interior temperature could only be kept at forty degrees Celsius, and everyone's clothes were soaked with sweat. Yang Hong drove while recounting Chen Xinghe's story from back then.

"When Mr. Chen was sixty-three, he flew to Algiers alone, hired a local guide, bought two camels, and went into the desert. The guide ran away halfway, saying that the old man was crazy, refusing to take the abandoned exploration road provided by the oil company and insisting on venturing into the heart of the desert. Mr. Chen walked for three days, without any electronic equipment, relying solely on a geological map he had hand-drawn twenty years earlier, to find the precise entrance to the ruins."

Zhao Wenbo sat in the back row, sketchbook in hand, comparing the terrain outside the window. "How did he do that? No GPS, no satellite maps, just hand-drawn maps from twenty years ago."

Yang Hong glanced at him in the rearview mirror. "Old Chen's exact words were: 'When you're close enough to it, you'll feel it calling you. Not a call you hear with your ears, but a call deep within your bones.'"

The car was silent for a few seconds. Only the hum of the air conditioner and the sound of the wheels crunching over gravel could be heard. Zhao Wenbo jotted down the sentence in his sketchbook and drew two lines below it.

Zuo Cheng sat in the passenger seat, a bottle of water in his hand, saying nothing. But his eyes were fixed on due north. Not looking at the direction the desert highway stretched out, but at something unseen by others. His system panel's civilization perception was running at low power, and a faint signal source in the due north direction was emitting pulses every few seconds.

The following evening, the convoy entered a pure sea of ​​sand. The endless dunes, like solidified golden waves, stretched from one horizon to the other. There was no sign of life. No grass, no shrubs, no insects, only sand and sky. As the sun slowly sank behind the dunes, the entire desert turned a color between gold and red, like a piece of iron heated to translucent.

Yu Ying took a picture with her phone and then put it down. She said this kind of scenery didn't need to be recorded; it was already imprinted in her mind. When she turned to look at Zuo Cheng, she noticed that he had his eyes closed.

Zuo Cheng stopped the car. He opened the door and stepped out, his feet sinking into the soft sand. He stood there for about three minutes, eyes closed, motionless. Yu Ying wanted to get out and ask him what was wrong, but Yang Hong stopped her.

"Don't disturb him. He's listening."

Zuo Cheng activated his civilization perception with his eyes closed. The entire Sahara unfolded in his consciousness, like a map of a dark room illuminated. Three kilometers to the north, there was a faint signal. It was exactly the same frequency as the warm yellow light in the Taklamakan caves, but much weaker, as if it were seeping out through a thick layer of sand.

He opened his eyes and got back into the car.

"Keep heading due north. The first thing you'll encounter isn't sand dunes, it's rocks."

Yang Hong didn't ask why. He turned the steering wheel, and the engine roared back to life. Twenty minutes later, in a depression between two sand dunes, the SUV's front wheel struck a bare, black rock. The rock was half-buried in sand, with the exposed portion about the size of a desk. Its surface was so smooth it didn't seem like it had been formed by natural weathering. In the afterglow of the setting sun, the rock's surface reflected a deep, dark gold.

Zhao Wenbo was the first to jump out of the car. He used a portable spectral scanner to make a quick comparison. The material of the stone was exactly the same as the stone at the entrance of the Taklamakan Desert caves. He detected engravings on the stone surface. The arrangement was irregular, but each symbol could be found in the rubbings left by Chen Xinghe in the Taklamakan Desert.

The comparison results show that the symbol matching degree is 100%.

Yang Hong knelt beside the rock. He used his hands to scrape away the sand from the surface, digging little by little. The sand was hot, burning his fingers until they turned red, but he didn't stop. Zuo Cheng's location was so precise it was as if it had been measured with an instrument. Three kilometers to the due north, the first thing he encountered wasn't a sand dune, but a rock. If Old Chen were alive, he would surely laugh at this scene, he thought to himself.

About half a meter below the sand on the side of the rock, a crack appeared. It was one meter wide, sloping downwards, and bottomless in darkness. Yang Hong probed the crack with his portable environmental monitoring device. The readings were: stable airflow below the crack, normal oxygen levels, humidity lower than the surface, and temperature nearly twenty degrees Celsius lower than outside.

Yu Ying took a flashlight out of her bag and shone it on the inner wall of the crack. Her beam stopped at one spot.

On the edge of a crack in the rock, there is a line of characters. They are not ancient symbols, but modern Chinese characters. They were carved with a knife; the strokes are deep, as if the carver used great force, each stroke etched into the stone.

"Chen Xinghe, entered for the second time on November 7, 2019."

Yu Ying removed her fingers from the engraving. Her hands were trembling slightly.

A breeze blew from the depths of the crevice, carrying an indescribable smell. It wasn't sand, it wasn't rock, it wasn't any natural scent. Zhao Wenbo took a deep breath and frowned, saying the smell reminded him of the old electronic equipment in Old Chen's laboratory. It wasn't the smell of burning metal and plastic, but the unique electrical aura emanating from those old instruments that had been running for over a decade.

Zuo Cheng opened the system panel and glanced at it. The Sahara's glowing dots on the civilization perception interface were flashing rapidly, as if detecting someone approaching the entrance. A system notification popped up: Origin Resonance, the current area matches the recorded origin energy characteristics by 98%. Sahara node activity is increasing.

He turned off the panel and was the first to step into the crack. He said something to the person behind him.

"He's waiting for us."